Collecting Tesserae

Canvas

If I encountered a medieval Catholic in the rain and he told me we were experiencing a severe judgement from the hand of God, my first instinct would be, without doubt, suspicion. 

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the typical medieval Catholic saw the material world as imbued with great spiritual significance. Certain skin diseases came and went at the command of saints. In fact, any physical remnant of a saint, from his bones to his hair to the last surviving rag of his cloak, could work a miracle or bestow special grace. A storm was the judgment of God—or the spiteful work of the devil. 

I grew up in modern evangelical Protestant circles, which take a different approach to Creation. We suspect the sort of worldview that inflates the storm with too much meaning. The weather of course displays God’s glory and power. But a storm, His direct intervention? Absurd! Still, I sometimes feel jealous of the eye that saw motions of the divine when a lightning bolt crossed the sky. 

We modern Protestants are also deeply suspicious of things which clearly contain no meaning at all, such as abstract art. We are impressed by orderly, realistic designs which obviously required great skill of the artist. To praise anything which lacks this kind of meaning would be to give into relativism. 

When I was in high school, I painted a mural on the narrow section of wall between my closet and the door of my bedroom. I used glossy white paint from a can and mixed my own shades of cream, grey, and olive. I painted blocks of color with smooth curvy outlines, made them overlap, painted little thick brushstrokes on top—interrupted strokes, like patterned rain. One evening my father came into my room and looked at my mural. Half-teasing, half-seriously, he accused me of turning into Jackson Pollock. I took this completely seriously—even though my dad’s aesthetic taste, as far as clothing goes, restricts him to whatever is brown, grey, and plaid. 

Art should have meaning, Dad said, smiling. You should paint some mountains or some flowers or something. He wiggled his fingers at the painted wall before us. This doesn’t have meaning… God is a God of order, you know.

Dad! It’s not like that! 

I agreed with Dad that art should probably have meaning, and I intensely rejected Modern Art as I understood it. Modern Art: random splashes of paint on a white canvas that had inexplicably received a spot in a gallery—no one knew the Good, no one knew Art anymore—Jackson Pollock, the knave—scams by the corrupt—may I never commit such a sin!  

But I would not scrub the mural. As far as I was concerned, it was decoration, and decoration did not need to be important. My dad eventually gave up his side of the discussion. He trudged out of my room. The door closed. I could hear his steps departing—distinctive footsteps, loud, heavy, preceded by the soft sound of his socks dragging on the carpet. 

I stared at my wall. Had I created something meaningless? 

Years later, I stare at an abstract painting, Golden Sea, by Makoto Fujimura. Unlike my decoration, this painting currently resides in a philanthropist’s private collection. Fujimura describes it as “a homage to and a lament for dying traditions, as well as an expression of the sublimity inherent in precious materials,” referring to the technique he used, combining traditional Japanese silk with gold leaf. The result is a canvas covered in blue, green, black, rust, mingling and overlapping, a series of lamina. The uppermost layer is a dark, rich gold, smeared over the surface of the canvas in squares like corroded bathroom tiles. On the left upper side the gold has been spread across the blue so thickly and wildly that the square pattern gets lost; the gold is like butter scraped lavishly over toast—creamy, a little broken here and there. In the center of the painting there lies a dark horizontal seam which crosses the whole canvas. A long gap in the gold opens on the seam, letting the layer behind look through at us: shaggy smears of black ink and lapis lazuli. 

I wonder what our friend, the medieval Catholic, would have made of this painting, just as it is. Certainly the painting differs from the art with which his eye is familiar: the icons on the walls of his church, with gold leaf organized into circles around each head, robes carefully draped, and hands pointing solemnly and deliberately heavenward. Perhaps he would dismiss this canvas like my dad might. But then the medieval Catholic is far more accustomed to visual communication than we are. He doesn’t have our penchant for realistic and accurate detail. Somehow he may find meaning in the gold shaped like bathroom tiles. Perhaps the painting reminds him of his favorite saint. 

Garlic and dust

White light clouded the darkened auditorium. A projector sent an image onto the front wall: an animated strand of DNA, twisting and turning. As the narrator of the documentary explained the sequence, rungs of the DNA ladder broke smoothly apart, into highlighted segments, for our benefit. The segments exchanged places. They flashed red. A mutation. 

This was biology class last spring. We were all very bored, but the video persevered, asking how anyone could fix this disruption. Then it cut to doctors and hospitals and patients with cancers and inherited genetic disorders deriving from that random exchange, all trying to answer the question. It only took so many children in beds with wires in their arms for me to start feeling anxious. Still the images went on: coughing lungs, dulled eyes, dirty carpet. Lumps under the skin, long hoarse breaths. Tweezers, diagrams, needles. They were all the pieces of one great riddle. 

While the riddle is practically an extinct vessel of meaning in twenty-first century America—when was the last time anyone asked you a riddle?—the Anglo-Saxons wrote and preserved many of them. In A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs, Craig Williamson shares with us his translation of Riddle Number 82: 

A weird creature came to a meeting of men,

Hauled itself in to the high commerce

Of the wise. It lurched with one eye,  

Two feet, twelve hundred heads, 

A back and belly—two hands, arms, 

Shoulders—one neck, two sides.

Untwist your mind and say what I mean.

After reading this riddle, I feel immediately the sting of the implicit insult: “Untwist your mind.” Some millennium-old Anglo-Saxon—who thinks himself clever—believes I have a twisted mind. Discord, I think, impulsively; the answer is discord. I picture twelve hundred counselors quarrelling in a high-ceilinged hall. Instead, Williamson provides the answer: “a one-eyed seller of garlic.”

He says it is a “deliberately obscure and confounding riddle.” Scholars only know the answer because we also have a fifth-century version of the riddle written in Latin, whose title contains the solution. The riddle seeks to baffle us. It contains nothing that could suggest the answer unless you knew it already—unless, in fact, you were the Riddler. 

The Anglo-Saxons must have been far more accustomed to riddles than we are. Yet their answers to the riddle of pain and suffering compare laughably to ours. The Anglo-Saxons referred to their doctor as a “leech.” Open Bald’s Leechbook, and you’ll find dozens of ridiculous cures for a myriad of ills, ranging from constipation to a man’s need for new intestines. Bald, who is probably a monk with good intentions, has created a daring mix of superstition lumped together with both actual and probable remedies. Take this recipe for “dry disease”: “Oxa taught this leechdom: take wallwort, and cloffing, and kneeholn, and life everlasting, and cammock, and white hellebore.” Bald takes a deep breath. Already you can hear his gravelly voice groaning through the beard. He has realized he ought to provide us with a careful ratio for these ingredients. He adds, “in the proportion of nine to one” —thank ye, Bald—before continuing: “brownwort, bishopwort, and atterlothe, and red nettle, and red hove, and wormwood, and yarrow, and horehound, and pellitory, and pennyroyal; put all these worts into foreign ale, and then let the man drink for nine days and let blood.” 

Charitably speaking, some of these herbs are probably edible. Possibly, they’ll do something towards clearing out your sinuses. The only real concern might be the bloodletting. But after rattling off this list, Bald seems to stop here and look at us squarely in the face, expectant. Why are you still here and not in the woods searching for wallwort? Do you doubt his remedy? Fear not, it uses the strong brew, that foreign ale—none of that weak domestic stuff for you. Note the symmetry: nine to one, nine days—nine is a wonderful number—be assured of its efficacy. 

Literature of the Anglo-Saxons places Bald’s Leechbook and similar texts in its section titled “Scientific Writing in the Old English Period.” It’s a wonderfully outrageous classification. The Anglo-Saxons, who tended to spice up their Christianity with a little paganism, had an affinity for amulets, chants, charms, and secret groves in the woods. Like the medieval Catholic, they too were a people who read the world, and for whom a red horizon or a constellation signified something important. Perhaps, as the Leechbook would suggest, they even dared to put their faith in a wallwort, or in bishopwort, or in the merits of the number nine. Reading these texts, you sense a mood of courage, both attractive and stupid, to bestow great meaning into even these little fragments of botany. There are no mutations in the world of the Leechbook.

Fossil and bone

Mutations can have negative outcomes, but the process of mutation itself is natural and neutral. Apparently, over billions of years, it can give an animal specific muscles and bones and then cruelly take them away. The whale, for instance. Hips. No hips.

This is no magic trick, however. It is not an instant, positive creation out of nothing. It is the result of generations upon generations, combined with dozens of other factors. There are billions of animals involved, countless mutations, and many deaths. 

For another class last spring, I had to research the evolution of the whale according to the fossil record. I Googled the phrase “whale hips” more times than I ever wanted to read it, and each time I drowned in dense scientific articles that laid out reasonable explanations of the whale’s transition from a land animal to the current whale we all know and love today. I was supposed to find a respectable article by a Christian scientist, but most of the articles I found were over twenty years old. If the article was newer, it was typically about three paragraphs long, with usually more rhetoric than fact. I pulled up half a dozen tabs at a time, deleted them one by one and, numbing myself, typed “whale hips” into the search bar yet again. 

In my Christian high school, we had dismissed theistic evolution as a non-threat, like a straw man stuffed so full that he was already falling over. Now, in college, I felt beset with new data points that wouldn’t get in line: these pictures of four-limbed fossils with a whale’s ear canal, the analysis of the oxygen in a sliver of bone that placed a whale ancestor in a river delta—just as the scientists had hypothesized. I was learning a lot of little irritating facts. It seemed suddenly that there exist rogue parts of the world powerful enough to resist explanation on either side. Truths no one wants to find.

My roommate Kendra and I were taking the same class. I asked her what she thought about evolution and creation, and after an hour-long discussion, we sat together in silence at a loss. Sunlight, mediated by the window, poured through the dorm room in patterns on the rug. Neither of us said anything. We were slowly realizing that everything we knew had been given to us, that most facts we claimed to possess we only possessed secondhand. An authority told us about the similarity of man’s DNA to a chimpanzee’s, and another authority told us that man bore God’s image. Our own powers of sorting seemed futile.

While I researched the whale, I learned that a hippo-like creature had at some point decided to forage underwater, and its descendents decided to stay there. Countless generations and mutations later, the whale’s hips had dwindled considerably, and now we have the whale proper. This is no logical argument, but the pictures available of this transition—or to be more accurate, the artists’ renderings, based on fossil finds—are so ugly that I find them scarcely credible. I like to think I can find a grace, a unity of form, in all created things. Take a bird or a tree or the sky and ask it the same questions a critic poses of a painting or a poem. Assume the proper stance: shift your weight onto your back leg, stroke your curly mustache, smoke your cigarette, click the ballpoint pen and take it to your notebook—how are the branches of this oak composed? Find the quality of the colors on that eagle’s feathers, and the strokes of the hand that made them! I see symmetry! I see rhythm in the whale! 

But then, I probably have to concede the platypus. It looks awkward from most angles.

Glass, tile, and stone

My home in Orange County, California is bordered by a narrow walkway on all sides except for the front with the garage. Moving from the left side of the house to the right, the walkway comprises the front yard, backyard, and a disused alleyway. A neighboring house sits closely on that side, and a generous, fat spray of ivy spills over from our neighbor’s wall to creep onto our dark wooden fence. Among the gravel, broken bits of glass and ceramic tile and stone litter the floor of the alleyway: one thousand confused tessera, the materials for a mosaic but not a mosaic proper.  

I discovered the alleyway when I was fifteen. Or rather, when I was fifteen, it suddenly became significant to me that my family possessed an alleyway. By that time I had simply read too many novels where, in times of distress, the heroine finds solitude and refuge in a cozy natural setting, typically hidden, occasionally magical. I had my head full of big oak trees, tiny cottages, isolated riverbanks, English moors. One day, swept up in this romanticism, I happened to look at our alleyway. The presence of ivy was enough. 

Early in the mornings before school, I sometimes put on a pair of thick flip-flops and picked my way through the silent alleyway, stepping carefully over tender green weeds and the large shards of a terracotta pot. I tried to be very quiet but I could not avoid crunching on the gravel or overturning tiles, which always scraped against each other with a loud hollow groan. Reaching the end of the alleyway, standing because there was no place to sit, I’d gaze over the fence and find the sun, rising quietly in the soft white sky. I would stand there for a few minutes, performing this ritual, like a sun worshipper. And then I would crunch my way back with my flip-flops and go inside to make breakfast and brush my teeth.

I made the alleyway special to myself. Unlike the main character of a novel, I had no intrinsic connection to this alleyway—it was not the setting of a key childhood memory, the hidden portal to another world, or the grave of a deceased parent. But I chose to treat it as mine for a few months, colonizing the land, weaving it into my story, expecting an inciting incident. I suffered from a kind of writer’s paranoia. Surely this alleyway meant something.

My mom and I have two different word-hoards. Mom uses words like: “mood,” “phase,” “it happens,” or “you should get some sleep.” My hoard contains words like “pattern,” “deep-rooted cause,” and “this has been happening for years!” (with bags forming under my eyes as I speak). She tends to see things as temporary and coincidental where I see them as connected, rarely coincidental. I’ve recognized the same division in myself alone: the fight between the scientist and the pagan. I find myself alternating between superstition and suspicion, and struggling to land squarely on plain belief. Some days I am a fifteen year-old girl standing in a disused alleyway, waiting for the broken glass at her feet to rearrange itself into a complete mosaic, waiting for it to mean. 

Chipped ivory

Recently, Kendra and I encountered whales again—this time, not as the focus of a discussion on the theory of evolution but as objects of our own creation. I have always enjoyed origami, the Japanese art of folding paper. During classes in middle school or high school, I would occupy my hands by making birds, flowers, and hearts. Once I made a lot of paper cranes. I ran a needle and thread through their bodies, tied a bead beneath their bellies for a weight, and hung them on my ceiling above my bed, so that they floated overhead, slowly turning with the force of myriad invisible drafts: a flock of angular birds. 

A late Sunday afternoon found both Kendra and myself squinting at my laptop screen in our dorm room, trying to follow the steps of a complex tutorial for a three-dimensional, hollow origami whale. We used white printer paper. When we finished, I placed my whale on my desk, but it clearly needed to be displayed somewhere else—not resting on a shelf, but suspended mid-air. And without a hand holding it, the whale’s convex back, the shell of paper that formed its body, tended to spread wide so that the animal looked fat. We began laughing at the absurdity of the pair of fat whales we had made. Grinning, I scrambled through my desk drawers and found a mini sewing kit. I took out a silver needle and threaded the eye with white thread. 

Then I did what Melville’s Captain Ahab wanted so badly to do; I harpooned the sides of the white whale, ran him through, lassoed him up. I tied a knot across his hollow belly and strung him up for display. He hangs now over my bed like a prized catch. He looms there, rotating slowly from time to time, moving solemnly left or right with the force of an invisible draft. 

In the middle of Moby-Dick, a recently butchered whale hangs off the side of a ship. The head of the whale alone remains intact. Captain Ahab, still in the pursuit of the white whale that stole his leg, stares at the head and begins a philosophical monologue.

“It was a black and hooded head,” writes Melville, “and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab… ‘and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.’” The captain embarks on an interrogation of the whale: can it explain the countless deaths at sea? Can it explain the storms which have destroyed the ships of honest men, the pirates and mutineers betraying their innocent partners, the drowning of navies doing their duty? 

Does the whale believe it was created? Does it shrink at the thought of its own unaccountable hip bones, still existent, buried beneath its blubber?

When I look at the origami whale suspended over my bed, I have to tear out the eye of the medieval Catholic. I have to stifle the superstitious urge within me to turn the whale into some kind of symbol. It’s folded paper—paper I folded. It’s a trick of chance, a series of mutations. And yet my whale flies, an irresistible personality, his head over my head. I have described him like a lassoed Leviathan, but the thread that holds him is so slender that you cannot see it. He casts a shadow on the wall. He is not hanging, but swimming over me. I did not catch him. I set him loose. 

Stained glass

Except for the pain throbbing near my sternum, everything seemed still. The air conditioning and cold lights of the library hummed on, constant and imperturbable. My classmates bent motionless over their laptops. We were working on a group project about whale fossils. I clicked listlessly around on my laptop screen, trying to look intent on my work even though all of my thoughts were focused on that all-compelling pain. 

For no obvious reason, I had spent the last few weeks in deep anxiety about my health, ever since I’d experienced a throat ulcer about a month ago. Muscles all over my body were twitching, the bones in my hands occasionally ached, and sometimes I thought I was having trouble breathing. One evening I worked myself up enough to get a few heart palpitations. I had never thought this much about my health before, and the very fact that I was concerned for my health was worrying me. Both mornings and evenings, I would wake up and get on my phone and toss a series of vague symptoms into a sea of Internet doctors, fishing for security, daily reassurance. 

Now my chest felt tight and stiff, filled with a dull pain. What if, what if, what if…? Stop being unreasonable. What if I believe I’m being unreasonable, and then I wait too long to call for help? What if, what if… Yes, there’s a pattern! I bet I have some terrible disease… Something autoimmune. Or I have anxiety—the kind that needs therapy. No, things happen. You should get some more sleep. 

The pain underlining my sternum pulsed, muted but real. Whatever, I thought to myself, I’ll go to the doctor’s and I’ll finally find out what’s wrong with me, once and for all. Abruptly I left the group meeting—“Something came up,” I said—and got Kendra to drive me to the hospital. 

There a nurse put a needle into the vein in my right arm. “Hold these for me,” she said, handing me a couple of glass vials filled with my blood. They felt cool and solid against my skin. It surprised me how dark, thick, and red the blood looked: the red in a Chartres window. 

The nurse kept drawing blood, not to drain out an evil disease but to analyze these samples and run tests. She was rebelling against the principles of the Leechbook. Bald would have been appalled.

“You’re all good,” the doctor told me when he entered the room. 

“Do you think it’s anxiety?” I asked him.

“No, probably not. I think your body just needs time for the acid reflux to go down.” He prescribed me pills and handed me a packet of paper. I looked at the words at the top: Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). To avoid developing GERD, the packet said, I must keep from lying down after dinner and eat less greasy foods. 

I had wasted everyone’s time, including my own, and now I had a hospital bill to pay as well—all for the sake of some painful heartburn. I had taken a wild guess, and I had gotten it wrong. Make sure you’re getting plenty of rest, I could hear my mom’s voice say. Untwist your mind, taunted the millennium-old Anglo-Saxon. Say what I mean.

Riddle 38 is a poem seventy lines long. Its voice uses paradoxical language, encompassing the extremes of nature: a “creation riddle,” according to Williamson: 

Old is the shaper, eternal the lord

Who rules this earth, the power of world-

Pillars, prince and king, the guardian

Of all, one real and reckoning God

Who moves and holds heaven and earth 

In his circling song. He shaped my power

In the earth’s beginning

…………………………………….

I am heavier than gray stone 

Or a clump of lead, lighter than the bug 

That dry-foots the water, harder than flint

That strikes fire from steel, softer than down

That flutters in the wind, broader than the earth,

Wider than the green, a billowing plain.

I weave round the world a glittering cloak,

A kind embrace.

The answer, Williamson says, is “the divine and discernible spirit infused in all things,” or “creation-bodying-forth.” All parts of creation are included. Stone, lead, steel, soil: all are a piece of the glory of God. And pain, too? I ask the Riddler. What about that?

For Williamson, riddles stress the fact that “reality exists and is at the same time a mosaic of men’s perception.” A riddle uses language to disguise the familiar, to provide fresh mediation for an old reality, to rearrange the small worn tiles of our imagination and so form a new pattern. A riddle, like all metaphors, stains various window panes so that we can see a picture.

Gold leaf

Everything was bright. Above us, the sky screamed with sunlight. The water caught the light and blazed it back upward, the white rim of the boat echoed the glare, and the green bait bucket at my feet glowed yellow. Setting my fishing pole down for a moment, I pushed my sweaty hair beneath my hat with my forearm, trying to avoid touching my hair with the same fingers I had used to grab a wriggling sea worm minutes before. The Japanese captain said something over the boat’s megaphone, deftly handling the rapid syllables of his language. I listened hopelessly. I had been attending language school for weeks, but unfortunately, none of my teachers had felt the need to expand my fishing vocabulary. 

“I think we’re about to go,” I told my dad, who was grinning into the middle distance behind his black rectangular sunglasses. It was my best guess; every twenty minutes or so, the captain brought our boat to a new location in search of fish. We were on a fishing tour, off the coast of Chita in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. A few months had passed since my visit to the hospital. It was summer. 

My favorite fish is the Garibaldi. A passing Garibaldi can be easy to miss. It has no flashing scales, no bulging eyes, no contrasting threads in its fins. It is usually about the size of an outstretched hand. Its most remarkable trait is its bright orange scales, but you only see those for an instant before the fish retreats into the bending seaweed. If you find it wandering beneath the murky surface of the Pacific, the fish makes an underwhelming first impression. 

Still, my dad never fails to point the Garibaldi out to me. As I was growing up, we often went paddleboarding together, at a harbor in Dana Point, Orange County. We would slow down near the wall of rocks which outlined the bay. My dad would search for fish: a far-away, sturdy figure standing upright on his paddleboard, shoulders rounded as he bent his face toward the water. “Look,” he’d call back behind him, his voice distant as it crossed from his paddleboard to mine, “there’s another one.” He would point to a spot in the glassy waves. Usually, by the time I reached the spot in the water, it was nowhere to be seen. 

“I don’t see it.” 

“No, it’s right there, right there!” He would gasp and point again. 

My dad may not understand Modern Art, but he understands the mosaic that is creation. It is a blessing to be curious, to be preoccupied with beauty and brightness, to be absorbed by a single fish. Sometimes I did see the Garibaldi. I would look down and for an instant see the orange, deep in the dark water. How could a shade of orange be so bright and so deep at the same time?  

The Japanese captain muttered into his megaphone. I did not comprehend. He might have said something like The boat will soon depart, the fishing tour is almost over, we’re going to lower our lines one last time. We pulled our fishing lines out of the water. Beneath us, the boat’s engine groaned, and we straightened up in time to watch the waves surge away from our stern. We had caught several tiny fish, all probably species of minnows: fat silver tubes that fit right in the palm of your hand. Twice, between Dad and I, we had caught a slimy variety whose eyes were on stalks, with hard fins and a firm bite. When Dad caught that one, he showed it to me, holding it tightly in his big fist. “Look at his horns!” The others were softer, with silver scales which chafed onto our hands as we pulled the hooks out. The scales had dried on my fingers, gossamer thin. 

After we returned home from Japan, Dad and I took our family kayak into our familiar Dana Point harbor, and we searched for fish. We were silent, watching fronds of seaweed bend as the water sighed. I pointed. “Look.”

After the tenth minute or so of looking at Golden Sea, I realize that the overall shapes of gold reflect each other, bottom to top. As your eye glances up and down the canvas, the shapes of gold respond to each other—and so do, roughly, the blooms of lapis lazuli and patches of rust. That seam in the center is like a strange, dark horizon line. It is like what you see of a sunset on the beach when you turn toward the sea and the sun fills your eye, the instant before you blink it away: blistering light. The gold, broken and apparently eroded as it is, absorbs you. 

 Image Credit: Makoto Fujimura, “Golden Sea” (2011)