At the end of a long day in a long month, I read a hiring notice: Professional Cub Snuggler! it says, and I think, this is something. The work is to wrap baby bears in blankets, hold them in a coat while the mother gets a checkup.
Now I can’t stop wishing that this was a model for some other things, the practice of stopping in the work week, no matter the job, for the most important work of the week. Time to hold the babies! everyone would say, and the babies would be held, and there would be enough hands so that the ones who had been caring for more babies than they had hands for could take a break and tend to other things, knowing the babies were okay.
There is a trick the handlers use, for getting the orphaned bears accepted. They cover the bark of a tree with a scented goo, and after the birth babies and the orphan run through it, back to mama, they all smell the same. And there’s something in this model, too.
I found you where we were children, and you found a way to bend a certain recipe toward the collection crowding my pockets, slowing my chase. In surrender, I removed the lot of it in pieces and placed each on the table. Tell me, love, I asked you. What is it?
You took a stamp and sewed it to your shirt, held a button to your reflection, and the shard of a mirror you pressed into an album to save the memory of someone looking back. We chased to catch ourselves back to running from what teased our terrors, tempting catch me! and you can’t!
I feared the years would fell me first, but you did, and from the rest of what is saved if you wait I can still make you a meal and we will raise a glass to the hour of these signs, from this shelter of broken time.
The artist used the scraps of the day to dance angels on his fingers. He wanted his son to have playmates free of history, open to unknowns, without the knowledge that cultivates fear. Here is the glost of a scarecrow, here the electrical spook. Once upon a time this was a napkin, but now it’s Mr. Death, live on a shoebox stage, fielding questions from all sides. The wine cork becomes the old man, the devil is a ringed glove, and the monk wears a luchador’s mask.
Let’s play, he told the child––animals playing comedy; tragic heroes dressed as children playing proud birds. Make the cat a bull for the land where the only constant is that everything is constantly morphing into something else.
Watch the big eared clown, ecstatic with the solemn poet and the absolute fool. Only the fragile are powerful here, arms up to highlight where their hands might be, in display of delight: Look, no hands and nothing to hold! They will dance as soon as they wrestle, these angels, and every blessing is also a wound.
***
Inspired by this article about the hand puppets that Paul Klee (among my favorite artists ever) created for his son.
Speaking of the universes inside us now, of silenced griefs, do you wonder if this new fear has come to meet our weak refusals to acknowledge its magnitude? An inherited idea: us as defenders of the first official bodies of an emerging something––and yet, we couldn’t see it, not all the way. We missed the point, didn’t we, when we called it safe.
They gave it borders and called it done. Who could blame them? Had I known better, I might have done the same with my own form when I could, but even a broken body can learn, when it comes time for offerings, to be one.
You can hear the official mandates all around: ours, ours, no trespassing, but try claiming something from a body whose primary substance is the fluid it sends and receives, through these acres of unknowns, and eventually we challenged them to go ahead, see if they could find a place to plant their flag. This took no words; just as well when these were the first to flee.
***
Inspiration: On March 6, 2022, Krista Tippett, whose excellent On Being Project I have long followed, tweeted: “There is a universe inside each of us now of unarticulated fear and unmarked grief.” As with many of her observations, this one resonated a particular truth of this moment.
And of course, the images we all know by heart now, and in our bones, of mothers in wartime.
What, you mean this? It can help to know that you are already here.
Parents have been sending the children to school with special stickers: names, telephone, blood type––in case, in the event––unmentionable, but. Some schools made these stickers mandatory. They have been practicing. In case of fire, one drill; bomb, another. The idea is not to panic.
How?
It can help to know that––
Not to say too much. We want them to feel normal, say the mothers.
What now?
We pray, says one mother. We pray a lot, she says, for peace.
But how can––
Look. We are already here.
But––
We hold the babies, hold the prayers. We hold on, and the windows are shaking.
Shhh, we say, shh. What else?
***
For the mothers and the babies, the brothers, fathers, the missing, and those holding in solidarity and love.
It was the plague. Everyone was scared. Grief-stricken, too, but there was no time for mourning, what with the bodies piling up. They got angry instead, mean and stingy.
According to the Robert Browning poem narrating the legend of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” the 22nd of July was the day that the children of Hamelin were led away by the Pied Piper, as revenge against the townspeople who refused to pay the sum promised for ridding the town of its rats. As a result, this day is known as Ratcatcher’s Day. Learning this, I had to follow what breadcrumbs I could find.
“And so long after what happened here “On the Twenty-second of July, “Thirteen hundred and Seventy-six:” And the better in memory to fix The place of the Children’s last retreat . . .” – Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
The clothes alone, let me tell you. They must have been made of stripes of six or seven different colors stitched together.
For real?
Someone must have really loved what he did with that pipe.
Well, those people should have paid him.
It was the plague. Everyone was scared. Grief-stricken, too, but there was no time for mourning, what with the bodies piling up. They got angry instead, mean and stingy.
Show us the bodies! They said. But he had none. He had led the rats to the river.
No one paid. So he played for the children next. They followed him and were not seen again.
To where?
Some say a cave.
I heard it was a mountain.
I heard Transylvania.
I heard the river.
Oh no! I heard what happened was that they decided to pay after all, this time triple the amount, in solid gold, and he brought them back.
It’s called the street without drums. To this day, there’s no music or dancing allowed.
Yeah, but where does this story even come from. I mean, really?
There was a stained glass window in The Church of Hamelin. It’s gone now.
The window?
The whole church. Anyway, a record from the late 1300s reads, It is 100 years since our children left.
It could have been disease.
The Pied Piper as the symbol of death, the Danse Macabre.
Could have been a landslide, a sinkhole.
Might they have been recruited or sold to the German empire, to work the land in what is now Poland?
It’s possible. There are legends of those who would lure people away. Children of the town could be, after all, a term that applied to anyone, regardless of age.
What about dancing mania?
A well-documented social phenomenon, a relief from the stresses of poverty.
Ah, St. Vitus’ dance.
Or ergot poisoning from spoiled crops.
St Anthony’s fire.
Could be typhus.
Or an ancient ritual, long forbidden, disguised as illness. Suggestions abound. Answers are few. But what is clear is that there were risks far greater and more mysterious than the more familiar illnesses of the body. There were diseases of spirit, of mind, and while it was common among those who preferred pretend certainty over more fluid depths of understanding, to minimize or dismiss certain risks outright, it is worth considering the costs of these errors, the sudden silence that must have blanketed the town like a stifling and otherworldly heat, when it was discovered that the children were all gone.
