Bustle and Ease

Bustle and Ease

       By Rob Roymer

                If thine eyes offend thee

                        Pluck them out

                        If they don’t

                       Then sing and shout

Thousands of years ago, before the advent of writing, Christmas had not yet been imagined and no celebration of loving birth had entered the hearts and minds of those lands that bordered the Mediterranean. A rushing sea with waves lapping the shores of the Aegean, Cyrus, Turkey, Angora, the Levant, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the eastern realms of Palestine, Israel and Iraq, alone spoke of steady turbulence. Synecdochaeic though the picture, it accurately resembles that time’s full balance of bustle and ease. Nefertiti placed perfume and balm beside the mummifications of all her train, even those of low rank and birth. Mohammedan prepared the Muslim gospels for all to read but butchers whom he deemed already enriched enough by their near presence to abundant food, and to vintners whose cellars could be assumed to contain more than an individual’s fair share of wine and pottage. Nero spent much time in the planning of the burning of the cities of Venice and Cibanitos, causing eventually the deaths of his most illustrious philosophers when they recommended to him that art works alone in those metropoli should exclude them from the flint and stone. Nicis, an early merchant lord in the wild mountains that separate northern China and the Russian steppes, found intolerable the new tendency, then first making itself known, of sparing slight women and girls, since they appeared delicate and also beautiful, the labor of carrying firewood on lengthy treks. William the Beautiful, hardened by stubborn prospecting and the outdoor life that such compulsion required, slew his brother Blanchard the Brutish for quietly retiring out of sight of the camp to a tent and a soft cot he had snuck on a wilderness trip without

William’s permission.

       Of all the examples of strange ease and labor the one of Hildigaard of Scotland strikes me as especially salient. I am not a good judge of best and worst.  My expertise lies not in judgment but in recitation. I, myself, am given to excess and have been know by friends and family to privilege beauty in women. My luxurious state alone, as well as my spending tendencies, should alert you to the slant I give history. As far as sleeping quarters go, mine opens through fine casements on the river Seine. I am a benefactor to the Sorbonne, donating, I almost blush to tell you, upwards of ten thousand francs annually to its Humanities Department. Recently, I acquired a sketch of the vineyards at Roliené by the eighteenth-century Alsatian painter Burbøi that hangs over the fireplace in a prominent location. Chirac himself has dropped by for brandy just to see it as well as, I fondly speculate, to make my acquaintance. I may not, much to my chagrin, be reckoned among the scholars, but do not presume then upon my meager savvy. Art and history, as well as literature and philosophy, I credit to myself as within my sphere of knowing and I have on many occasions shone in discussions with those who have considered themselves learnéd. I relate these details not to boast, though I would not hesitate to do so, but only to give you an idea of the particular bent of the saga I have begun to aproriate to this readership. My magazine attempts to preserve (and I hope you smile with me at the choice of words here) a certain popular broadness of interpretation that established (I do not say that my paper is not established) presses in their anxiety over reception never allow.

       Hildigaard of Scotland (1067-96), slave to opium, niggard in the donning of decent clothing, beloved of God and Christ as she was, died a wretched death in a closet attached to an exterior wall of the Ecclesiast de St. Surpluie in that almost forgotten cathedral near the little village of      Fecience aux Trois Flannette. Her name she derived from her place of birth and early residence. Her father, a collier in the coal mining district of Graadin, far from the country’s larger cities, drummed up a reputation for gluttonous drinking, flatulence and womanizing. Local history tells the story of a feat of nightly liquor imbibition that occurred over a period of two weeks and elevated him to the highest regard among both Loch MacGregoro (a county in the south of Scotland) dissolutes and its celebrated merchants. Apparently, during these personal activities, he compromised, in public, two dozen of the town’s wives, women who had become electrified by his prodigious charm as much as by his feats at the cup and horse.

       Hildigaard’s mother died at the ordinary age of fifty-two leaving to grieve her a brood of nineteen daughters and one son. Each of her offspring became renowned for excesses of one sort or another. Ralph spent lavishly on sword and book. Ruthy owned an inordinate number of flashy dresses. Karen swept continuously, literally plying the broom day and night, even when guests, important or not, visited their cottage. Isobel could not sleep and at the age of eighteen appeared in wrinkles and drooping chins to be eighty. Contenta imbibed with her father and opened her arms to any drunk, old or young, for the price of a mug of mead. Beatrice the Blonde daily consumed great quantities of flounder and smelled more of fish than did those animals themselves. Wyngronka the Wise, the second youngest, spent undue time with the horses, the stables her home, the haycroft her secondary residence, the pastures where the colts gamboled her favorite pastime.

       Hildgaard alone chose abstinence. She pined away until little but skin and bones came at one when she approached. She drank neither wine nor beer and partook of only a thimbleful of water at each meal. She wore no clothing, being so committed to the spiritual, and exhorted with exceeding politeness that none of her worshippers open their eyes in her presence (and she attracted devotees, mainly male, from far and wide, those seeking answers for their lifelong fears about the end of days). At the sound of church bells a rapturous light passed over her face and her eyes belied the deathly state of her bodily health. She read little and insisted that knowledge of biblical texts had come to her as a sudden gift at the age of eleven. She quoted lengthy passages from the psalms and gospels, enough to confound even the most erudite. Once, when she fell from a great height (inclined as she was to ever be as near God’s heavenly realms as possible) onto the pavements below the church towers, onlookers pointing and gasping in terror and concern, she landed on her feet and walked away without disconcertedness as if she were feathers and had flown purposely from the parapets. The stories of her fearless restraint and spiritual adventures abound and I have only begun to share with you their contents. Let this brief account inspire you to study them for yourselves and thus to become fully acquainted with one of the most fabulous accomplishments of the twelfth century.