Work Text:
Work is prayer, girl.
Work keeps your head bowed.
Work wears your fingers until they crack with blood, until the blood runs from your fingers into the cracks of the stone of the floor, new stains to scrub away, and with each new scrub, more skin peeled from bone, more blood to scrub, to sponge – until bone alone remains, white bone, bloodless – skeleton hand as grey as the stone beneath it, greyer than the stone…
Work teaches the renunciation of pride.
The annihilation of self. The image of yourself, reflected in the grey of the stew you stand before, already broken by the bobbing bits of beef boiled into more grey, the morass – that image of yourself, the rhythm of the stirring annihilates, the ladle swirling the image of your own face before you into nothingness, splintering it – and yet not swirling, not splintering – for swirling calls artistry to mind, the swirl of a scripture’s S like a studded sea-serpent, all stained with the jewels of wrecks from which it rose, uncoiled itself… for splintering calls to mind stained glass, Papist-particulate… and the rhythm of the ladle is a rhythm of monotony, breaking, blurring you in each boorish sweep, the monotony of the mundane…
Your spine begins to shape itself to the abjection of yourself, your movements and your modes of thought beginning to adapt…
Robyn sees it in the elder maids in the scullery – not in their bodies, for it is not of the body, is not physiognomy – but in their motions. Hooping backs and wrinkled brows are but the marks of age, each crease and furrow beautiful as the creases of the earth through which Robyn had run at nightfall, but the hanging of your head in futility, the cringing and the curling that comes not from age (which is of you, yourself) but from the anticipation of some sinister thing to come – that is fear, that is the renunciation of self.
Trained to cower and call it kneeling, trained to dread and call it worship…
Golden hair and grey both share the same luster, she realizes, but both are bound.
The unnatural thing comes to call itself nature, to say that lips are hatchet lips, to ascribe morality to the form of flesh, denounces nature itself as unnatural as it imposes its own nature upon you, deeper than in skin, in instinct – but it is not instinct, it is learned…
This is the lesson that calls itself the renunciation of pride.
Into your arms, my Lord, I commend my soul…
Renunciation of self.
Self-annihilation.
Abasement of himself before the Almighty…
Before a Power greater than himself.
The ultimate dissolution of pride – to give oneself into God’s hands, to put one’s trust in Him and not oneself –
And yet – it was not God that unshackled the Lord Protector, sent him falling like one of many leaves scattered from a tree, lost to the foaming cascade that dips from nature’s bosom, not unique, self-erasure, humility’s self-erasure – it was himself –
Self-slaughter.
(And Pilate asked him, Art thou King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him, Thou sayest it.)
Self-slaughter, she says, the whisper of dread still in her heart, the shadowed shape in her mind taking long to uncoil, although he put it there – his teaching like smoke-shadow, chimney-grey, Puritan imprint… and the Lord Protector’s white lips enunciate through smoke-shadow shroud, Thou sayest it.
As though she is Pilate, as though he speaks in defiance of her – he, who despised defiance, burned it like the forest, like Drogheda…
He, the judge, sitting in judgment of her for judging him…
His white lips still enunciating words where she is in the wrong, even in death…
Even when he is defiant, he does not tolerate defiance from her…
Not Christ before Pilate, but Christ out of Revelation, sword-mouthed.
(He is not Christ…)
(Was not. Was not Christ – but a man, with a man’s title…)
(But… had he ever said that he was Christ?)
(Thou sayest it.)
(She she she says it.)
(Into your arms, my Lord, I commend my soul – was that sword-mouthed?)
(Thou sayest it.)
(Thou sayest.)
Thou sayest offers freedom of interpretation, a looseness, a liberty of thought… a looseness for him, who abhorred looseness in life… a looseness that absolves him as his life’s rigidity absolved him… Freedom of interpretation, adherence to the strictness of the Word – all things absolve him – it is not he that says this of himself, it is her, it is you, the blame is yours – Ye say that I am.
Thou sayest it had a simplicity when Jesus was brought before Pilate.
An admirable simplicity of the like the Lord Protector would admire – If you have grievances, you should speak with me directly – a directness of speech, plain speech without art…
Yet, there was an indirectness in its directness, an artfulness without art… Yet, even that was admirable in a man brought before a governor, a man fraught by false witnesses, a man brought low, a man about to die… Artfulness is necessity when up against oppression – even Christ knew that. Robyn knows it from experience…
(The Lord Protector knew it – she fears the thought, but feels it just the same – knew it because, to him, he was the man of flesh faced with an oppressive force, insidious and encroaching, all-consuming… He was Truth, draining white before a pagan Darkness that glittered from his wound like sheerie lights over a bog, false fire, mire’s shadow malignantly illumined…)
(Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.)
What is the truth? Robyn whispers to herself.
She has become Pilate now, indeed. The Lord Protector makes of you what he will.
Did he believe it? she wonders. Did he believe himself the Truth? Or did he simply fashion the word of Truth to his purposes?
If he believed it – if his death was more than vainglory – if his last act, in his heart, was an act of righteousness –
It did not matter.
It gave him no tragic quality, no heroic tragedy…
If he meant to do good, if he was good – in his motives, in his heart – it didn’t matter.
He was wrong.
It is not intolerance to say that of one who had no tolerance for her…
The unnatural thing comes to call itself nature, denounces nature itself as unnatural as it imposes its own nature upon you…
Perhaps his righteousness was not the mask of pride. Perhaps his righteousness was pride itself – not false righteousness, not hypocrisy, but true belief that knew not its own vanity…
Robyn studies so many shades of light and shadow gliding over the covering of the cart like witches sweeping to a Sabbath… She has come to abhor the black and white imprint of the printed Scripture, to settle more easily into the dim dapples of the dusk, silver-grey as her own fur… but when dusk’s dapples equivocate for the Lord Protector, when the in-between twixt black and white is not a shelter for her as she escapes the rigidity of the morality imposed upon her, but merely the lighter grey shadows of the same cage’s bars – then it is not the in-between at all… and Robyn will have none of it…
She shuts her eyes and the shadows that dance upon the cart’s covering are gone, the smoke-shadow vestiges of the Lord Protector’s teaching, of a will that outlasts death because it is more than one man, it is an ideology… and Robyn roams the hill slopes with her pack at her side… and if witches soar overhead, they are not specters of her scarred heart but true witches, nude upon the night air, wild-haired and free…
She feels a pride in her – a self-love so different than the Lord Protector’s pride – and although the shadow-coils of his harm will take too long to fully leave her, there is none of him in her – and as she runs, she renounces any vestige of the renunciation of pride…