Helen of Nowhere

ACT 1
MAN

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I was in the middle of nowhere. I was looking for a simpler life. I had driven all day, alone, to get there.

Everything had become so useless and vast, like acres and acres of lodged wheat.

My life had been lived in tune with one philosophy, which is this: within nature exists the divine. That’s all. And because the tools of human construction have warped the meaning of things like songbirds, it is the work of teachers—and people—to remove our constructions, and upon their removal, invoke our innate ability to engage in simply being. Nature is the teacher, not I, is what I always told my students.

I built my department from scratch around this beautiful idea. We read and wrote, but the greatest work of all was to remove ourselves from the politics of the city and allow the voice of nature to speak to us, through us. Through the act of such communion, our own true nature might reveal itself. We wrote for ourselves and also as a way to translate nature’s teachings for others. It was enough to witness the patterns of plants, the footprints of deer, the movement of grasses in the wind. This witnessing led to the transcendence of the human spirit.

My program was lauded for its experiential approach, and as such, funding was never hard to find. For years we cultivated a transformative practice through a curriculum combining time spent in natural spaces alongside the study of texts left by humble thinkers who spoke lovingly of the earth and the desires of the heart. I would take students out to wild places around the city, separate them, and alone they would observe, for three full days and two full nights with basic food and rudimentary shelter – no matter the weather or risk – the divine relationships in nature and the thoughts that were born.

Time passed.

And with it came a new generation of teachers.

Women, who were critics, and who encouraged others to be critical too.

Critical of me, among other subjects. Of my work. I don’t think I am wrong to say that they took a special pleasure in criticizing my field of interest.

Who is allowed to feel at home in this so-called nature, they asked, and what are the conditions informing the peace provided those people by the simplicity I espoused? The new generation of teachers said that my approach to teaching was a purity test, the imposition of ritualized discomfort in nature as a means of cultivating virtue.

They questioned my methods.

They rejoiced to find in my hunt for simplicity and silence a complexity of ambition and prejudice. But in their own hunt for complexity, they were oversimplifying.

I had nothing against women.

In fact, I loved women. I’d worked hard for women my entire life.

It just so happened these new teachers were women. I swear it didn’t factor at all into my disdain for them. I didn’t like to think of myself as a man, even, as I was so much more than just man. But they were times of taxonomy.

One of these women accused me of overidentifying with my work. She was a writer who gave a captivating performance at faculty meetings. I found her prose was good at the sentence level, but her vision was still developing. She pointed out problems with my thinking. She wanted to discuss everything on a structural level. Our colleagues found her funny. She was magnetic, self-absorbed, convincing in her beliefs, arrogant in her delivery, annoying, reductive. She interrupted me, she disliked me.

She was successful, widely praised.

And she was close friends with my wife.

Three years, and I had been drinking.

My wife was, at one time, a very beautiful woman. But over time, her beauty faded, and with it went her desire for me. There were so many years of notoriety that had held us together, my success, her adoration, my appreciation, the agreements we had made.

It likely wasn’t fair of me to see her beauty as fading, it would have been fairer to see it as maturing, and yet if I’m being honest it really did look to me as though it were withering not ripening.

At first the changes in my position were devastating, even though they were largely ideological. It wasn’t violent, but quiet. My wife and I would weep gently in each other’s arms.

And yet with time, the lower I felt, the brighter she became, though to me that brightness felt punishing, like exiting a theatre at midday.

I had lost everything. And at the beginning, she felt she had lost everything too. It was a shared loss that at first brought us closer together. There wasn’t a way for us to remain viable without my career, we told ourselves. It was what provided us an excuse to remain in tandem. The university was our container, it was where we had met, it was where we had formed.

But I had died.

That is, I became dead. To the world, and to me.

And yet she was alive, my wife said.

Her dog enjoyed my spot on the bed.

She would caress it while I lay far out, pushed to the edge. Such gazing, such devotion. She would invite it on the blanket and rub its long, blond ear.

Early in my career I taught a nature writing class to a small number of students, each of whom was meant to research a plant that interested them.

Every meeting we would discuss a different student’s work by performing a collective interrogation, all of us asking one student questions rapidly in succession about their plant and their pasts as a way to access something deeper. The student in question would become flustered and exposed, providing an opening for their subconscious to emerge. These questions and answers, paired with a botanical inquiry into the plant they had chosen, culminated in a lyrical theory of each student’s driving inquiry, which was eventually revealed. This aided them in their writing – it gave them a root.

One of my students was beautiful.

(…)