Corresponding Authors (Letter 9 of 9)
In response to:
3 June 2017
Dear Anthony,
I have pictured that kitchen so intently that I can tell you what is on her calendar of saints this month. It’s the holy card of Saint Dymphna with her marvelous ribbon halo of gold floating above her otherwise mundane peasant scarf dotted with black and orange blossoms. She was already promised to Christ and had taken her vows of chastity, so the story goes, but shortly after, her father lost his senses in his grief over his wife’s death. In his madness, they have decided to say, he mistook (they have decided to say) Dymphna for his wife and lover. Dymphna escaped for a while, but her father eventually finds and beheads her. It’s just the kind of story that would appeal to the grandmother, who would have you know that life offers challenges so that we may eventually become beatified, become surrounded by lilies in soft greens and creamy whites, buttressed by impressive swords of fire, and of course those golden halo ribbons. These kinds of images were to her the final stage in a transformation not unlike that of the unimportant caterpillar who via some sleight-of-hand and invisible design—some molting, and various period of challenge within a shiny chrysalis—morphs into something winged and symbolic of so many things.
Like the butterfly, which to us appears beautiful after its long and frankly odd, self-digesting of one life for another in their metamorphosis, we beatify our suffering girls after we have allowed them their suffering. But for whom does beauty exist, this beauty of the beatitude? It isn’t anything we can own or lend; it doesn’t rub off when you are in close contact with it, like that dust on a moth wing. (I don’t really mean dust; moths and butterflies have what seems like dust but are actually tiny scales that are necessary to their existence. If you dust it off, you can damage the wing for good.)
Am I thinking of how the grandmother used to yoke together the wings of butterflies and those of angels? For her any wing was a beatification on the part of the great and cruel designer, a payback for loyalty, and there was no arguing her out of it. Next to her calendar is a small, framed image that I might use to illustrate her. It’s the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), a butterfly that was abundant in her homeland and had its own stories that occupied her thoughts. But except in sighs and silences, she did not share those stories with me.
Amy
