The Room and the Balcony Door

There are golden halos and panels of gold. There are crimsons of worship and blues of salvation.

photo by Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton

Two days.  Just two days of being on the island, of being here. She stands in front of the door that opens onto the balcony. She drinks coffee. Sunlight warms her bare feet. She lifts her feet and stretches and drinks more coffee. There is another world outside. Always another world. She stares at the landscape, at the other houses, at the scrubby trees and cactus growing in the ravine across from the house. She tries not to miss the details. Every place belongs to itself. No matter the similarities, the shared particularities between one place and another, a place should be discovered for what it is unto itself. When we first come into a unfamiliar landscape, a new city, a new street, there is often the flicker of some place already experienced, but the place before us is the place before us, even when it hints of somewhere else.

She looks at the sunlight on her feet and wiggles her toes.

She lifts the curtain that had been pushed to one side of the window and checks the hems to see how they have been stitched. It was through this stitching that she could see what care had been given to the curtains, whether a factory had set their machines poorly or with attention, or whether they had been sewn by hand. She could see the difference. She searched for something similar with clothes. Her mother had taught her this. How to look closely at a collar. How to turn a shirt inside out and find the pattern of the stitch, the quality of the material. How to look at weaves and textures, as though some fabrics held an intimacy of touch, a touch that might rival a forearm, a palm, the very tips of warm fingers. There were buttons, of course. Her fondness for buttons was enough that she might have collected them, but she did not. She was not a collector. Her collections, if she could call them that, were assembled in her heart. The memories of long showers and baths. Waterfalls. Ceilings. Every cat she had lived with. Scenes from childhood and a life with her family. She held these memories close. She returned to them, and she returned to them more frequently when she traveled. She liked to remember the weeks spent at church camp when she was a little girl. At the start of camp, she and her cousin, Ally, were given new summer dresses. Most important of all, the cousins were given the freedom to run and swim and to listen to the stories that the old people told. She loved the old people. She loved them firstly because she loved her grandmother, her mother’s mother. Her grandmother had introduced her to the older people in the family. Her grandmother had favored her and had embraced her as her own. Her grandmother had loved her with an affection deeper than blood, though she, Eleanor, was not blood. She was more than blood to her grandmother. She was cherished. And she learned to love the old people for their stories. They talked about the days when fireboxes had been maintained outside of every cabin, or what the old people called “tents” then. The fireboxes were lit every evening, as a sermons ended. All around the camp and just before dark, a tide of tree frogs and shadows eased out from the trees. Then one by one the fireboxes were sparked in front of each tent. The old folks then could take their way. They leaned towards the assurance of the fires and went with their younger relatives standing close or holding onto them, all but for the oldest among them talking. They were given to memories of their own younger days when they, too, had once helped the old people who they themselves had become. They went slowly. The tunes of old Methodist hymns mixed with the thoughts of other camps and fires. Her grandmother and her mother had desired that she be given to this love and that one day she might understand their love was more precious than anything she could find in the world. They believed these things, and she believed them too.  

She looks out of the window. She hears her own voice. She has to work. It would be better to drink wine and sit in the sunlight.   

She takes inventory of the books on the bookshelves. Nearly all of them are in Greek. She looks for Elani in one of the photographs on the bookshelf, guessing, as she stares at the picture, what Elani might have looked like as a child. We can look so different from our childhood selves.  What prayers did she chant? What uncle sang for her as he cleaned an octopus?  

To work now, to work.

She sets the photograph back on the shelf and returns to the table. She sets the coffee mug on the table beside her computer. Her notebook lies on top of the envelope containing the manuscript. She sits down and opens her computer and opens a file of images. Here is a gathering of saints, of prophets, of Mary, of Jesus Christ, of Peter and Paul, and, best of all, of Eljah. The images are of the icons she has photographed. She searches for patterns between them. She waits for something.

photo by Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton

It is not the details that present themselves when she first looks. Rather, she notices colors. There are golden halos and panels of gold. There are crimsons of worship and blues of salvation. There are silvers, browns, and wheat colors and rarely a cast of shadows. There is a gaudiness to them, as well. She must admit this. We can wonder whether too much effort was put into their making.  To see we must look, but we must look with the intention of seeing. We must look with eyes magnified by charity, though the experience of looking at an icon cannot be achieved through a computer screen. She wonders. Can we critique a work of art? Of course. But critique, like all honest seeking, should not begin with judgment. The idea of seeing and not being seen made Elijah her favorite icon. Elijah was loved by God, yet he was driven from cities, from whole kingdoms. He lived in caves and in isolation and in despair. Still God saw him. God sent ravens to feed him. And Eleanor had memorized the passage from 1^st Kings 17:4-6: For he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook. In much of the iconography depicting Elijah, he sits outside a cave with his hand propped against his chin, as he faces a raven that has brought him food. The icons are rare for the expression on Elijah’s face. What to call this expression though? What do we call a look between thankful and perplexed? There are icons of Elijah’s ascension to Heaven. He was lifted by a whirlwind and made separate by a chariot and horses of fire. But it was Elijah outside his cave, staring at a raven that has brought him food that Eleanor loves best. God had nourished his prophet.

She scrolls through more images. She is here, on the island and in the village, to discover what icons are secured within the family chapels. She will not be able to visit all of them. There are over 300 chapels and monasteries on the island. Some of the icons are venerated by the families who protect them. It is likely there are icons of a more local order. Perhaps some of them will be old. Most will not be as ornate as those found in monasteries. Seeing them in person, whether they are familiar or uncommon, will affect her. The scent of oregano and thyme, of honey, of beeswax and myrrh, and even of years will infuse the air, will become the air. What she stored on her computer was a record. What she will see in the family chapels will enter her.

Image after image. She could continue searching, but she wants to feel the room again. She does not want to miss being here.

She closes the computer. She stretches. She hears laughter outside. She stands up and stretches again and walks to the balcony door and looks outside. She sees a group of young people. They tease each other. They wear swimsuits beneath their clothing. One young girl rides bareback on a gray mule, another, perhaps her older sister, holds its rope. They are likely going to the port and afterwards for a swim. She smiles at them, although they cannot see her. She lifts her hand to shield her eyes and looks towards the sun. Sunlight is essential for life. Sunlight and water. Nothing can live without them, her least of all.

photo by Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton

She sits at the table but instead of opening the envelope to read the man’s letter and manuscript again, she flips through the pages of her notebook. Splashes of her own handwriting and lines of scribble flash page after page. Old notes. Old scribbles. She comes to a poem and stops.

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers, 

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and 

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

The e. e. Cummings poem, “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond.” She first read the poem in high school. Maybe it was the first poem she had fallen in love with. She could not remember falling in love with another poem before this one. Her mother had given her an anthology of poems at the beginning of her senior year in high school. “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond” was one of the poems in the anthology.

She reads aloud. She looks at the words. Did my mother read this poem?  Would she have known the devastation of the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses? It would be easy to say no. Why is the passion of our mothers more frightening to us than that of other women? She flips back the pages and reads the first two stanzas of another poem, “When You Are Old.”

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

Another poem she had fallen in love with in her youth. Dream of the soft look/Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep. She felt this. It was this felt passion that kept her from studying literature in university. Passion, which is to say a willingness to suffer, had been forgotten by a majority of professors as a reason to pursue literature. She studied art history instead. Art history and anthropology. But after so many pages of hominid skulls and bone fragments, she quit anthropology. There wasn’t a teacher in the early courses. There was a book and computer quizzes. Even the pretext of instruction had been surrendered.

Another page, another poem:

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;   

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:   

The shapes a bright container can contain!

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

Theodore Roethke. “I Knew a Woman.” This one felt especially close because of the line about birds. She had copied lines from the fourth stanza, as well, that read: “I swear she cast a shadow white as stone, /But who could count eternity in days?”. 

But who could count eternity in days?

Every year or whenever she needed to replace a journal, she copied these poems into the new pages. Words, she believes, lead her to images. Words and phrases from these and other poems stopped her like a lover’s glance. It was not poems that satisfied her so much as “When You Are Old” or “somewhere I have traveled, gladly beyond” and poems whose impetus stayed with her. Poetry is a genre. Poems cannot be measured. Her relationship with icons felt like this. It was not the iconography of Mary the Mother of God, or Christ the Teacher, or the Annunciation that she sought. It was the more remarkable representations that stayed with her, as someone who studied art. Within the details, the patterns, the textures of a cloak, a blush upon Mary’s cheek, averted eyes, eyes searching beyond our own horizons—here was the intention of meaning. It is true, too, that there is an expected, required uniformity to Christian iconography, yet the possibility of seeing or of being seen exists with each icon, with each encounter. When icons are painted in more expressionistic moods, there is a risk of too much individuality. The risk being that we would substitute the representation for an individual or, more heterodox, for God. In this way an icon can become an idol. To worship an image, to worship an icon is not the purpose of iconography, though this was cruelly debated in early church history. Prayers for intervention, for protection, for healing could be made. Veneration could be given. Yet the iconoclast declared all of this—requests for intervention, protection, healing, episodes of veneration, of prayers—as acts of worship and to worship anything other than the invisible God was heresy. For decades, icons were hidden.

She looks up from her journal, from her notes and sketches. She hears the echoes of her reading. She listens. She imagines herself alone in the room and at the table with her work. It is curious how the dead thrive in the living world and how we believe the invisible must harbor secrets. She writes a note in her journal and starts to close the book but turns once more back to the Cumming’s poem. She reads out loud the fourth stanza, listening carefully to the words and how she reads them:

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals 

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

Such good words. Words that compel. Words with death and forever in them. And she believes them, she believes this. Everything is quiet. She listens to the quiet after her reading. A hush like a breath. She closes the journal and sets it back on top of the envelope. She is relieved to see sunlight still in the room. Sunlight on a walls. Yes. She is not the first to recognize this miracle.

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Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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