Logorrhea: Smaragdine

Marly Youmans was one of the first people to finish her story. She read it at a KGB Bar reading in NYC. This was the reading that afterwards I talked to Juliet Ulman about the anthology idea. I like to think that Marly's story helped sell the anthology:

The Smaragdine Knot
by Marly Youmans

Infinity, when all things it beheld
In Nothing, and of Nothing all did build,
Upon what Base was fixt the Lath, wherein
He turn’d this Globe, and riggalld it so trim?

. . .

Who Lac’de and Fillitted the earth so fine,
With Rivers like green Ribbons Smaragdine?
Who made the Sea’s its Selvedge, and its locks
Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?

--Edward Taylor, from God’s Determinations

I’m a child of the Puritans, though my forebears would cast me from the golden rows of the Elect, as surely as the Angel barred Adam and Eve from the garden. But I take an interest in the ‘sad’ colors, the hymnodies that scared the wolves, the hunkered children--as numb in their cloaks as stumps by a frozen church. Foremost of my kin who crossed a sea of mermaids to the New World was a certain minister, scholar, and poet. Centuries after his death, the leather-bound book wherein he had buried his poems was unearthed in the Yale Library. Championed by the Anglophile banker-poet, T. S. Eliot, his sermons and poems are still read.

What hasn’t been known is that he kept a history of his forays into other realms. He was an adept of Puritan meditation techniques meant to restore the bridge between mortals and God. A session began with an elaborate calling-up of tangible place--the drawing-room of Hell with its gilt-framed mirrors, the sogged landscape of straw outside his door, a counting-house where a clerk tallied the gold coins called angels. The more solid the imagining, the greater the chance that drops from the fount of God could fly past the stars until a seeker found himself in a waterfall of spirit. Following prescribed steps, he might commune with men, God, or angels, his soul aroused, and be floated toward new resolution by streams of love and desire and that cataract, joy.

He used no magic; being in strong communion with the next world, what was shadow to other Puritan divines eventually became living presence to him. Neighbors spied lights streaking through the house, and one Goodman Brewster testified that he had glimpsed an angel, eyed like a peacock, at the minister’s deathbed--the visitor stirring the fire on the hearth with bright hands.

The journal was inscribed with the title, The Smaragdine Knot. In childhood, I was enraptured by the mystical, fierce, and passionate accounts. A year back, I felt a blow to my sense of family because of this book.

“I’d like to borrow the Knot,” I told my Great-uncle Samuel, a long-retired professor of Renaissance history. He has been steward of the book so long that we’ve forgotten when it passed from Great-great-great-great Aunt Tabitha.

“Gone,” he groaned, slapping the arms of his chair with both hands.

*****
Jeff VanderMeer wove the concept of smaragdine through his whole story. Here's the part that was devoted to it:

SMARAGDINE

“In the vast city of Smaragdine on the edge of a dying sea-lake, from which come palm trees and a wasting disease, the color green is much prized. It matters not where it is found, nor the exact shade. The cloth-makers produce nothing but clothing in green, so that the people of the city are always swathed in it. The buildings are painted in emerald, in verdigris, edged in a bronze that quickly turns. Even the white domesticated parrots that the denizens have such affection for—these birds they dye green. Year by year the lake becomes smaller and the river that feeds into it more of a stream. Year by year, the palm trees become yellower and fewer. Yet the people hold vast and expensive festivals in celebration of the arcane and the uncanny. There is a constant state of celebration. Yet also it is a point of pride for buildings to fall into disrepair, if at the limits of their disillusion there creeps into the corners of rooms, across the ceilings, some hint of green. Someday, Smaragdine will be as a ruin and the lake will be gone and the river with it. But, in the end, it will not matter, for even when the last water is gone, this city will still be rich and fertile in color. This is all the inhabitants ask. It is all they can hope for. I know, for I lived in Smaragdine for a time. I knew the calm beauty of its streets, the dyed-green water of its many fountains, filled with green carp. I knew the slogans of the leaders in their green cloaks. I knew, too, the feel of the hot sun and was blinded by the mirage of sand eclipsed by the shimmer of the ever-more-distant lake. One day, I will return and know once again the richness of that place by its devotion to its color. One day I will walk through those empty streets and know the very definition of madness.”
– Told to one of Marco Polo’s men by a merchant selling green cloth in a Mumbai marketplace