Gospel of the Many Selves: Jessie Van Eerden on Searching for Home and Herself

I planted a wisteria seed he found on the trail yesterday. I put the pot on a tile on the radiator to get morning sun because you never know and I love wisteria vine.

Everything is already present in a seed, they say. Like a womb with all its eggs from birth, like that moment on the river in June when I’d seen about all the rhododendron I could stand, and then some, in all stages at once—the browned petals fallen in the eddies, the pert blooms along the bank, the tight buds still lousy with almost.

Like when we are about to slip sluiceward in the tandem boat, no one watching, and just before we load in, in the right-before-the-rush-of-water, he might kiss my ear, and in that before is everything and always, a moment kernelled with all our possibilities—the looking for a house or pricing building supplies, how many rooms and acres; the windfall kindling in the washtub; cornbread mounding the cast iron; the kids’ confusing science homework; and the aging; and the fittedness of aging together.

The yes is simple even though it’s complicated by our lack of confidence in marriage and the sudden court decision that awards him full custody of his kids two weeks after we meet. As if already always wrote my friend Devon when I wrote her about him. And I told him, the first time we made love, it felt like home. Also the last time, yesterday, as it rained.

But I can only say it feels like home, and home is a place where all your selves come running.

What did I mean? Home, perhaps, for our younger and meaner and more wayward selves, and for the hopeful selves too, the possible future selves with good ideas for supper—I think pork loin and biscuits. Maybe the next years will look wholly different than this, maybe they will not even be shared. But I can only say it feels like home, and home is a place where all your selves come running.

*

Once, in Dublin, I saw the Diego Velázquez painting Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. Clay bowl on clay bowl like music softly filling the National Gallery of Ireland. A maid with hands that seem smooth when wet, her hair wrapped in white rhyming with pitcher, garlic bulb, rag (or is it spice paper?), and the faint corona in the upper left-hand corner. The maid listening, like someone who, as a child, heard clay hit surface like a bell rung, mortar and pestle like chimes, bread rising in susurration.

Some people hear music everywhere. It’s a matter of recognition. One hand on the pitcher, the other at rest. She does not reach for the rag (I think it’s a rag). Maybe she is listening to the bread breaking.

A tiny supper is shared by a tiny resurrected Jesus and two people in the upper left corner, one of them out of the frame but for a wee gesturing hand. The maid and her shadow and worktable fill the foreground.

She was painted in early-seventeenth-century Seville, so possibly an enslaved woman was the model. Another version of the painting, maybe a copy, which hangs in Chicago and is called simply Kitchen Scene, features the maid and her workspace only, no whiff of religious narrative in the corner, though still the attentive tilt of her head, listening, caught in a moment of overhearing everything.

I might prefer that version which leaves what she hears, her attunement, more secret and less scripted. Not even Velázquez hears what she hears, knows what she knows. And maybe she’s not eavesdropping at all but, instead, hearing a thing meant for her.

*

No kitchen maid is mentioned in the Emmaus story of the biblical text. Her wrapped hair goes unnoted. In the Gospel of Luke, right after Jesus is killed and buried, two grievers, Cleopas and an unnamed other, walk the road to Emmaus, west of Jerusalem. A stranger, who is really the newly risen Christ, joins them. He remains anonymous to the men as they walk, even when they tell him their grief and he peels it open, like a fruit.

Or maybe they are not both men; my brother mentioned to me he thinks they are husband and wife since in John’s Gospel, at the foot of the cross, the company of women includes Mary the wife of Clopas, an alternative spelling. It makes sense that it’s a couple because when they want to keep this stranger close they say, Stay, come home with us, to the blanketed pallet. Stay and fill the room with your talk, and here the maid brings you tea with milk.

It’s not until he sits at their table, blesses the bread and breaks it, that they realize who he is. At the point of their recognition, he vanishes. But not before he had his hands on bread again.

Maybe it was raining and he smelled the rain, maybe the tea was minty or sweetened, maybe the kitchen maid knew right when he darkened the door, from the gamy whiff of him. Knew he was someone who had put his head down into the wind, here in this in-between, after rising from the dead, before leaving the world altogether.

*

I’m always drawn to these Gospel scenes from the reputed forty days between resurrection and ascension when Jesus is hard to recognize. Drawn again to the first scene when, mistaken for the gardener, he calls the name of Mary Magdalene outside his tomb and she almost drops her jar of burial spices. Here, in another scene, he cooks breakfast fish upon a driftwood fire. In another, he invites doubtful Thomas to touch the fleshy holes in his palms and between his ribs.

The Jesus in these scenes is in that strange crevice of time when he still wants to hold things and raise up his hands so the breeze can whistle through the punctures, as if someone has made an instrument of him. He still wants to share supper, even if he is on the other side of death, and I can’t blame him for that.

The New Testament writers cited these post-resurrection appearances as proof, so the messianic story could not be denied, but it seems to me that, in these moments, Jesus is only trying to give himself time to gather up all his selves before giving in to invisibility, the stuff of spirit. He lingers in the good taste of bread and the feel of it broken, and here come running all his deathward, dead, and deathless selves.

Here is the self from some time before Time, shaping substances into bleak beautiful sky and sea, demarcating moose from bear from long-haired human. Here his infancy and adolescence, here he’s wiping feet and riding a foal, here his hand at the lathe. And then the executed one, and now some kind of eerie corona shine the Old Masters will always paint in white gypsum.

I don’t think he had a home in this forty-day interstice. Only left hand and right hand wrinkled up, puckered around the wounds, flesh like a soft torn dishrag, holding bread. She saw, surely the maid knew it—he was home right then, in that moment flush with all his million selves, before he was gone.

Didn’t our hearts burn when he was talking with us on the road? she heard the couple say at the table in his shimmery wake when the rain then came in earnest.

*

I think: Let’s make some egg salad sandwiches and make for the trail and swimming hole; I think: Lift my dress. And we do; he does. I love his beard scruff, his kind single-parent-tired eyes, his read-aloud voice. His foraged morels and chantarelles, the salvaged pristine buzzard skull and intact rattler skin and feathers.

Here is the self from some time before Time, shaping substances into bleak beautiful sky and sea, demarcating moose from bear from long-haired human.

Though we had just met, he gave me a heron’s tail feather the first day he saw his children after the long custody battle and brought them home. They wept that day, and so did he, but they settled by his side as he began to tell them stories made from nothing with endings he didn’t know until they revealed themselves.

We fell in like pups, all four on the couch, laptop propped on Tolkien and medicinal plant guides and old Harper’s issues for the next episode of Lost in Space, which always became a few episodes after which they still sleepily asked him for a story. I would sometimes lie down and listen too, his voice like creek water. Then I’d stay or slip home, a twenty-minute drive away, to my hound and my tidy rooms.

I think our composite selves into a shared home, which could very well mean a small farmhouse amid some trees with deep enamel sinks full of paint brushes. My orderly spice drawer and alphabetized books, his unkempt gear room in which he can locate his fastidiously kept trout flies. Lemon balm leaves brewing tea in a jar set in the sun, some child we may have together that will go on and cry its cry and be named Simone or Moe or Gingerbug.

Or home could mean the two of us together building bed frames for his children and all the beautiful laundry hung which matches the size of their preteen bodies, which will spend half the time with us, the other half with their mother, the custody now shared. I’d cut sprigs of sumac and bittersweet for an empty bottle on our table. I would pencil-sketch the bouquet to filigree and sew sequins to the sketch, glue on some beads and all his found feathers as a frame.

Home could mean these things, or it could mean something not at all ours, or mine. It could mean none of these things and still mean everything.

*

Of course they recognized him in the breaking of bread, and the one who baked the bread to be broken indeed knew all along. The maid knows bread better than anyone in its singsong crypt. She knows the yeast, the rye or spelt, she knows that the crust is meant to be broken.

She grinds the grain on the saddle quern with the handstone, the clay bowl a tomb for flour water oil herb, the leaven rising with plainest miracle in the dark dust under a towel. Her small daily resurrections in the fired oven. These are gestures she can make in her sleep, the music of clay things scoring her dreams.

And Jesus was talking to her, too, wasn’t he? Right up until he disappeared and left Clopas and Mary dazed. The maid doesn’t pick up the rag in the painting (or maybe it is in fact a wrapper that held spices), only keeps a hand on the white pitcher, but she will at some point take a rag to clean up when the two go outside in the rain, looking in the bushes for the vanished one with their hearts on fire.

The music will tremor, clay on clay stacked, with morsels scattered, and the lips that were there on the cup will still be picturably pink. She’ll be the only one left in the room by the table of her broken bread, standing in the shadow and the lamplight, somehow moved to a deeper love for her own story.

*

This morning he is cleaning his house, blasting the Stone Poneys, Linda Ronstadt on vocals, traveling to the beat of her different drum. He texts me the Spotify link. With Linda you are less likely to curse the hair and Lego men in the drain or the stubborn stains in the toilet.

In my own house I do some of the kids’ laundry and find their candy wrappers and old gum in the drier, and I think: what’s it like to tend a fever of a child that yesterday ran through the woods and ate a ginger chew? Would I know this if we shared a home?

He and I look on Zillow and Realtor.com now and then, text links, decide it’s far too complicated to buy a place together, then text more links. Sometimes we simply imagine ourselves in the ranch or the Craftsman, or in the one with a barn with horse stalls, though we have no horses.

*

Clopas and Mary knew even if they didn’t yet know. They said, Didn’t our hearts burn when he was talking with us on the road? As he opened the truth to us, peeled it like a fruit? They could sense already his alwaysness.

Recognition is underneath somewhere, or amid, and it must be unsheafed, and it’s always different than you thought. Our hearts respond to more than we can understand. Like how Susan Brind Morrow, in The Dawning Moon of the Mind, her book on the Pyramid Texts, says the meaning of poetry is signaled as a glimpse of the active hidden layers of reality. Just a glimpse of the secret workings.

Jesus spoke more in poetry than prose, more in parable than homily. He dropped hints. The kingdom is a mustard seed, he said, and in a seed is everything. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.

The kitchen maid knows the next one by heart: The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.

*

I try to help with his son’s science lesson on independent and dependent variables. The boy reads the problem aloud and fidgets with a gear from something he’s taken apart. The problem involves fertilizer, will it turn the bushes a deeper color and how much is needed.

“I don’t know the dependent variable,” he says.

“I don’t either,” I say. We are at his house. I pull the pizza from the oven. We take ball gloves and a ball which loosens talk, the plotlines of the Lost in Space episodes I’ve missed. “Just go ahead and tell me the end,” I say when he’s describing a robot-attack episode too scary for me to watch.

I think: I’m ready to help with science homework. Even if I don’t really help because science is confusing to me, but I love to work together to fill in the orderly worksheet where there is a space for each answer though the answers elude us. I love how science is one of those fields that contains everything in it, us and our pizza and our atoms bouncing around. This is what home means, what it is.

*

I’m fascinated by that part when Jesus disappears, poof, as if he’s too welled up with everything to bear being contained in the small room any longer. Maybe the maid turned and watched the vanishing. Did it look like a rupture in space, or a glitch, or a half-second blip of a black hole?

I think it might have been so complicated a vision that it was actually simple, pared back to the starkness of winter woods, starting her over in a place where she could see her breath. Here is each stone on the steep hillside and each handhold-sapling and the sheer light right before dusk when the sun gets brighter, then is gone. I love the brightening before the gone. He was holding the bread, then he went bright, then—

*

Last week, he and I went to meet a realtor to look at a house. Off-grid, solar panels and a generator, surrounded by national forest. But the road had six creek crossings and we had just gotten a hard rain.

His Subaru made it through the first three and we hoped the water didn’t reach the engine, but we parked and waded across the next two in rainboots. The sixth crossing was running too high and too fast, so we had to turn back and never saw the house with its deck and pond and beautiful wood floors pictured in the online listing. I reasoned that it was just as well, we wouldn’t have been able to drive to work sometimes, too much anxiety for me. Lousy Internet options probably, iffy cell signal.

But seven acres and roaming bears and room enough for him and me and the kids. And a room for us to write in and for a guest’s bed. And a creek nearby to play in and watch flood its boundary. It sounded like a dream.

Sometimes you get a feel for a house right away, a home-feel—yes, this is a place where cornbread will mound golden, where you can easily forgive the hen its shit on the porch swing—so if we just could have seen it, we could have known. But we were cold and soaked up past our knees so we headed back and said, There will be others.

We tucked into his house, the kids with their mother, heated up beef barley soup with sourdough, laid a fire in the grate. He set up two camping chairs on the kitchen tile so we could dry our bones, thigh to thigh, and share a beer. The firelight flickered across his mantel clutter—books of poems and shorebird taxonomies, the cobwebbed mirror, his son’s linocut print. We slept like spoons in this home he rents, a place both solid and temporary at once.

In truth, it felt almost good to let the real estate gem go since there was something vivid in simply fording the creek in our boots and taking each other’s hands when it got deep.

*

I think Jesus was gathering his many selves in those forty days because, for the rest of eternity, wouldn’t he be invisible except in paintings? A couple millennia of incorporeality have already accumulated. Does he ever look out over it all with a kind of homesickness? What he’d give for hot cornbread with butter. Slab of bacon. To handle it with his dishraggy hands. I

love that his wind-instrument torso remained speared though maybe not gory-looking in the resurrected afterlife, a healed scar but not an eradicated one, so that doubtful Thomas could open the soft wound as if opening a letter. Doesn’t that suggest that resurrection includes everything, all the selves good and gathered, fulfilled in their story, none annulled? Was he trying to show us how to love our stories no matter what?

*

I was rereading a little book that fits in a dress pocket, Mystical Hope, another by the priest Cynthia Bourgeault, and I found beautiful her interpretation of apocatastasis, a theological doctrine which means, in brief, a final restoration of things to a blessed state at the end of time. When treated in depth by the likes of Gregory of Nyssa and Origen of Alexandria, the doctrine handles the end of days and what happens to evil souls and how to bring them back to the fold and so forth.

But in Bourgeault’s small book, it means something different, something closer to this definition of home as a place teeming with your multiple selves. She writes that, in this restoration, time is held in the big bowl of Mercy itself, Mercy as a space, and the space grows wide enough to contain all potentials.

In that Mercy all our history—our possible pasts and possible futures, our lost loved ones and children never born—is contained and fulfilled in a wholeness of love from which nothing can ever possibly be lost. It is not a vision we can stand too long in the presence of. It is also a vision that helps me understand why the yes is simple.

*

And maybe that’s what my friend Devon meant when she scrawled as if already always. Love—Mercy—as a trustworthy and inevitable container of everything, even not-love; a moment kernelled with all possibilities, even the ones untapped. Maybe that’s why the outcome doesn’t matter so much, all this business of partner and children and marriage and cohabitation and children’s future science projects and a dreamy off-grid A-frame in the woods—it’s all simply a window looking out.

Or a tutorial, once again, in the subject of desire, for how many times must I learn that fulfillment already breathes within longing itself and breathes even more deeply in longing relinquished, that the eternal thrums in time, and abundance is found in the meager stalk? That the end is seeded right there in the beginning.

Just now, he comes back from paddling Johns Creek, swollen with spring rain, and giddily brings me bone-white sheds he found, a lucky nine-point set of antlers a whitetail had dropped in the plain open instead of losing it to the usual snarl of thicket. And I think: Yes, I have all this, the solid and temporary simple sheds in my hands and the solid and temporary bearded face that I kiss in gratitude for the gift.

No matter what happens, it’s a foretaste of the greater Mercy that holds us, this coming to love one another’s stories, this experience of home in our togetherness, where all my selves, out of breath, come racing like kids in a summer night game. Here’s the girl drawing feathers with pastels in junior high art class, the bookish teen at the demolition derby, the woman once married to a man who drew her fallen asleep reading before the woodstove with twelve shapes he called consolations painted white over her sketched head.

Here’s the me who still pines for a woodstove and has to let go of the A-frame because the creek is impassable, but who doesn’t let go of her stubborn willingness to risk love again, as if risking it for the first time, with this man who takes her to a tributary of the James River deep enough to skinny-dip in the light lucking through the August canopy.

And here are so many selves I hope to still become before I die, and maybe after.

And here are so many selves I hope to still become before I die, and maybe after. In an email today my mother said she wants to swim more and grow her hair long before she dies. Me too. Long-haired fishlike selves. I wonder, does he feel, in my love for him, his prolific selves all welcomed? I hope so.

*

But she is the one I can’t help dreaming about, the kitchen maid. The enslaved one she was modeled on, the person she became in oils on canvas, listening, and the other versions of her and her story that only she knows. This version in the painting is the only one I know, and I love the folds on her headwrap, the white towel spilling from the basket hanging from a nail on the wall.

I wonder about her simple yes to a lover, despite the complications. I wonder whether she wants a child to send off to and pick up from school and take out for a walk in the woods to crumble old cornbread for the juncos. Or whether there might be children nearby and love for them is enough, more than enough. Or whether she’s had her fill of childrearing altogether.

What kind of life does she make once the table is empty, the bread long broken, the Christ vanished, and the electric air all static around her? Mostly I wonder—what exactly does she hear right before that, in the moment of the painting, alert at her worktable, in the midst of clay on clay? Maybe the entire pageant is really about her story, how she hears the sudden sound of her many selves rushing, about to come round the corner.

______________________________

Yoke & Feather by Jessie Van Eerden is available via Dzanc Books.