It's Still Life

Strikethrough

a book called “Le Grand Herbier en Françoys”

I am wearing time’s dust skin here: this is Montpellier University Library Archive, and beyond the tinted glass lies a flame-singed copy of Le Grand Herbier en Françoys — a sixteenth-century root-system of human knowing — it has brought me full circle, and something in me goes very still grows very quiet.

I look up from my journal; pen paused; the Gatekeeper sits opposite, quiet and solid, turning worrying an unlit cigar between his fingers. “Light it,” I tell him — he coaxes it to life, and when the first smoke begins to blue the air, I read aloud from the page: “Hundreds of copies were carried to the fire as sorcery and heresy, knowledge judged too dangerous for hands not sanctioned to hold it, while beyond these pages women themselves burned at Montpellier’s Gate of Masks; but this book escaped because a nun reached into that obedience and chose otherwise.”

The Gatekeeper gives a slow nod; cigar smoke settles into the alcove like it owns him around him, blue and reluctant to leave… 

“…a woman,” I repeat, “a woman of faith who understood that what men commanded in God’s name need not therefore be God’s will, and who trusted what lived in leaf, root, remedy and ink enough to place her own hand between knowledge and the fire.

I have spent much of my life searching for knowledge dismissed or forbidden, and standing before that scorched survivor I felt the centuries lose their proper distance, as though time had drawn one long breath and forgotten to release it; scholarship ceased to be something I had studied and became something I was standing inside.

And perhaps that is why I cannot call yesterday merely history, Gatekeeper: because for one quiet moment, at opposite ends of five hundred years, a nun took a book from the fire — and I arrived in time to understand what her hand had refused to surrender.”

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