Scotus
by James Roderick Burns
… this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” (1879)
It was a very curious moment—as odd, in its way, as the time he sketched himself upside down in the unmoving surface of a lake (feet and hat-brim crisp and angular, but eyes lost in a mass of shadow) or when he swam so long at Parson’s Pleasure he could hardly tell where the river ended and his heavy limbs began.
On the cusp of the moment, Gerard felt himself moving forwards, outwards, as though detached from time and the singular concerns of the day. From young man to older, middle age to youth, even young man to boy again. All met each other’s passing looks with calm and curiosity, and no little sense of wonder; their regard flowed in between like a delicate, semi-opaque liquid. Looking back, he would not fault himself for such a fancy. It was at this moment, after all, that his own torn halves were sewn back together: priest and poet, low sensual creature and being of light; long parted, grating continually like the ends of an unset bone, now indivisible as a harlequin’s chequerboard, angles and colours perfectly seamed and stitched into harmony.
No, he must hold it simple and clean in his mind, for there alone it made sense. That place and no other.
*
As a student, Gerard had not given much thought to chapel beyond his normal weekday attendance and joining the other young men with gowns and worn psalters. He had moved from prep school to college as easily as a man who had lived on a street for his whole life but never entered a particular building. On being invited in, he found it slightly odd – perhaps an unexpected kink in a hallway, light falling strangely on the staircase – but on the whole reassuringly familiar. They said chapel’s layers of pink and yellow sandstone resembled streaky bacon, and were his heart in the place he would have objected; but already he leant towards incense and vestments, a whole world of ritual beyond its arched doorway, and he hadn’t the heart to argue.
There were only a few steps, and those well-worn and shallow, so it was a surprise to all when D stumbled up them like a swan flailing in a storm, and fell on one shoulder against the brick. His collarbone gave way with a crack, and Gerard rushed up.
‘Are you alright?’
He placed a hand near the shoulder, and the other boy winced, cried out.
‘Tell the Master I’m taking him to his room,’ he said, though to whom he had no idea. Under the other arm he gave a gentle, upwards pressure, and they lurched back across the quad to their stair. Up the rail, his clammy palm trailing behind, through the oak and quickly onto the blankets. He propped D’s head with a pillow, removed his shoes.
‘You rest while I fetch matron.’ When they returned, she ushered Gerard across the hall, and closed the door.
Baths were achievable, it seemed later that day, though he imagined a great circus-like performance levering even the slight body in and out of heavy porcelain, but shaving was impossible.
‘I can lather alright, old man,’ D said, moving his good hand in languid circles as though it held the badger-hair brush, and he was trying to manoeuvre thick curds onto his cheek, ‘but a stroke or two and I’m a bloody mess.’ He turned his face to the window. Gerard saw one or two red, angry slits rounding the jaw. His friend lowered his eyes. ‘Would you mind awfully?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘I – well, – ’
From outside came the noises of evening – footsteps on gravel, voices lingering round the stonework. The ancient door creaked then banged in the college gate. Tomorrow was lectures, a tutorial. How could he be so selfish?
‘Of course.’
Gerard patted his friend on the shoulder.
‘Just – yes, angle your head down a bit. Turn away.’
He had finagled a pot of boiling water from the buttery, much to the keeper’s amusement, and run with it back up three flights to their floor; whipped up the soap-cake to a pile of standing froth, before dampening his friend’s whiskers and handing him a loaded brush; laughed along with his evident discomfiture, dabbing away foam-spots that landed beyond the towel’s collar; and stood now, razor in hand, its curving blade hot under his fingers where he had rinsed it.
‘Gerard, come along!’ D giggled and shook off a few more droplets. He waggled his good hand backwards, towards his friend’s shadow.
For a moment more Gerard lingered, the steel angled between his fingers, then made his first stroke. The razor’s edge bit into the first patch of whisker and D flinched, stiffening. It gave a sharp rasp, cutting cleanly. He wiped the blade on a towel, dipped it once again in the steaming pot, then paused.
He wished above all not to hurt him, to simply be of service. An earlier slash, pinkish at the crest, showed through the layer of soap like a parted lip, and with the next stroke Gerard cut gently around it. It was odd, this movement of the shaving-hand away from his body; awkward, like tracking collar studs in the looking glass, or pushing charcoal across a sketchbook with eyes on a line of trees. D shrank at the touch, and Gerard apologised, but his friend brushed him off.
‘Ready for my handsome side?’
With his good hand he fingered the plane of his now-shaved cheek, the bump of chin (only half smooth), then laughed again.
‘I shall never get to lectures at this rate!’
But he rose obediently and sat down on the stool, offered up his face. Gerard fluffed up his chin and cheek, where the old foam had run to water. Outside the voices had passed and all was quiet. No sounds of carriages on the cobbles; not even a bird settling, the porter’s first sortie around the gravel.
With a trembling hand he reached out. There was no sudden moment of awareness, no second of flight beyond the window as a bird slowed for the roof. No branch knocked against his conscience, or distant voice startled him awake. He watched as the slow curve of the blade dipped towards the standing foam, and in the second of hesitant air, his friend’s face break out in half a smile.
Oh, how his heart leapt!
Still the blade moved towards its odd combination of slide and crunch, touching yet not quite touching flesh. D paused, head cocked, the smile lighting the unshadowed half of his face with all the grace of the angels. It was a sweet countenance, full of life, but its sweetness was not what moved Gerard’s heart. It was happy, too, despite the burden of injury – open, and trusting, and free of every snideness and the world’s grim patina of experience. But yet its openness was not what captivated him.
As his slow hand reached the target and the blade bit, he knew fully what drew him to this face. The knowledge pierced the rim of his soul, puncturing its resistance, and a warm flood of hunger poured in.
Somehow he got through the rest: stroke, towel and laugh, the thanks of his friend, their rough putting-away of stool and water-pot, the washing out of the brush. He even managed a calm goodnight, and wished him restful sleep before the work of the morrow began with the birds.
But when he talked of these things with Newman – in the most glancing, roundabout way – and was received into the Church, he knew what must come of such terrible beauty and every one of its traces.
One evening, soon after, he hefted the papier-mâché box, took out the letters with their heavy freight of words, and fed them one by one to the flames. He would write no poems for seven years.
*
There was no obligation for him to dwell on such things. He knew that, barring snatched moments of companionship and charged loneliness on moor or fell, his life in the long progression to priesthood would brim over with duty: pastoral, theological, pedagogical, liturgical; duties plain and duties overwrought with meaning, duties sacramental in intensity, wrapped ’round his mind and heart like tender snarls of wire. He did not need to think so, and yet he must.
… his life in the long progression to priesthood would brim over with duty: pastoral, theological, pedagogical, liturgical; duties plain and duties overwrought with meaning, duties sacramental in intensity, wrapped ’round his mind and heart like tender snarls of wire. He did not need to think so, and yet he must.
From the silent quad’s moment of truth to another epiphany, this loud-as-a-torrent breaking through the orderly landscape of his mind: the the waters of the burn. In his closed eye he saw the extended holiday after years of study, the wise release of novices by their masters to a world without pressure, shorn of duty for a few short weeks, both time and men released into the wild.
They departed for Scotland on a steamer, collars tucked away, changes of clothes and books (always books) packed in satchels, then watched as England departed like a shucked fruit-rind, the peel falling away in one unbroken, satisfying curl. As the land receded, a sea mist came up, and his companions departed for the warmth of the cabin, but Gerard remained on deck, fingers tingling with the damp and cold, to watch the line of the prow pushing back waves that slapped musically against the hull. It was not his usual escape, and in an odd way pulled him out of time. He remained in it, conscious of the holiday and its purpose, but no longer of it – moving as he did between past and future, with his present a nest of complex thoughts winding ’round and about in a complex shape. Or perhaps he was of it, but no longer in it. The boat chugged into a white and featureless future, bright as thought, and perhaps as fleeting.
Suddenly he laughed and knocked his small fist on the rail. Such ruminations, and on the first day of the holiday!
He went inside with the rest of them.
*
After Greenock, and another steamer, they arrived at their fortnight’s row of houses overlooking the Firth and began to plot the adventure. He did not mind such organisation; someone – perhaps a man whose head was less likely to be in the clouds – should make the most of their stay, and that required a firm hand. There would be trips to Arran (a miniature Scotland, someone said), to Edinburgh and Glasgow, though these held little interest. He did not wish to bump and chuff his way across the country to peer at sandstone through a blanket of smoke. What held him fast was an outing to the Loch.
‘Do you fancy it, Hopkins?’
He did, and averred to Kerr and his brother that it seemed a most charming prospect.
‘Better than the cities, I should say,’ his friend agreed. As they moved from stage to stage through the clerical life, the young men (gradually growing thicker skins, and perhaps becoming wiser) met old friends passing through new destinations. The Kerrs would accompany him at different stages, and he was glad of their company, particularly Henry.
‘Loch Lomond it is.’
In his room he set up his half-dozen volumes between two bookends carved in the shape of King Charles spaniels, their bulging wooden eyes beginning to split and crack, and smiled. In his mind the lake had all the untapped potential of a distant unexplored fell, a new and unexpected pool shining through parted ferns.
In a couple of hours they were tramping through heather to the shore of the loch. Henry Kerr was familiar with the terrain, his family having holidayed there, and he and his brother had a yen to walk to a small island they remembered from their childhood.
‘Y’ull be alright on your own, then, Gerard? We shall meet up after lunch, back along – ’
Kerr gestured at the steep slope, winding through gorse-land, to the station.
‘Of course. We’ll get tea.’
They nodded and shrugged on their backpacks, struck away round the shore without a backwards glance. He remained still for a moment and mopped his brow in the sun, then set off in the opposite direction. If the guidebook was to be trusted, it was only a few miles ’round the other way; a highlight of nature, a sight to set right the senses, or so the writer’s rather windy prose claimed. In truth, his senses were already aflame; he revelled in the solitary landscape.
It took longer than advertised (or perhaps his legs were simply shorter than the journalist’s), but eventually he rounded the last inlet and stopped, dropping his backpack to the ground. The canvas rasped on stony soil, and from inside came an ominous clunk, his glass water bottle thumping against earth. He did not notice. His legs followed the pack down onto a pack of bent ferns. He ran fingers through his hair, dabbed his brow then stopped moving. It was a sight he knew would never leave him.
Those things at which you look hard, he knew, look hard back at you – from whorls of ice creeping across a milk-churn, left out overnight for the farmer to stack on his cart, to waste water flashing up the sides of a drain, its rough quartz sides suddenly piercing as the sunrise. He knew, looking back, there could be no erasure. Though the words lay silent – quite hidden, for the moment, he was sure – they waited like a deepening pool behind a natural dam, poised for the time when they could burst through and out into the world, released in great leaping runnels like the burn itself, as it turned and tumbled down the mountain.
Here was another moment of wonder; stilled in time, yet ever-living. He was looking at a miracle from the wrong end up; standing, as though struck blind at the sight – though he never felt further from lost vision – at the foot of a mountain of water slicing apart a mountain-range of rock.
The burn was quick, mobile and multi-hued, its sides bright and foam-capped where they churned against stone and grass, its depths dark and roiling with moving shadows, slow as cream poured into black tea. Both solid and liquid, the waters slammed through heath and moor to a churning pool at their foot. Their noises rang out in tandem – wet roll and flat splash against the rocks; slow gurgle and reedy sizzle, as all the force of water ran square into the calm of the lake.
Gerard stood, lost to himself, as the minutes slipped into hours. Eventually he considered a drink, but somehow his hand would not lift the canvas flap. He considered his hat, as the sun was surprisingly hot, but a little warmth seemed unimportant beside such ever-rolling spectacle.
The Kerrs found him some hours later, pink and sweating. They hauled him to his feet.
‘Fine scene, eh Gerard?’ one said. He was not sure which.
‘Indeed – indeed. And – ah, your – little island?’
‘Splendid, yes. Have a sip of this, old man.’
They put their arms around him, one side and the other, offering a leather-lined bottle. The water inside was cool, but as they stumped back along the bank, an awkward six-legged beast, he knew the flood in his memory was cooler, and bided its time in the wildness and wet.
*
When he was not tramping fells, sketching in his notebook or attending to duties he regarded as wholly necessary (but not perhaps best suited to his temperament) he could be found in the library. At Stonyhurst, as at Balliol, it became a second home; with sun struggling to penetrate leaded windows, autumn winds buffeting the latches, or hail pocking against glass, even the coming and going of the sconces’ mean light did not matter. Under his hands the volumes grew, their touch and smell almost as dear as the waft of moorland pools.
With his duties complete, the afternoon’s walk shot down by looming grey that soon erupted into showers, Gerard made his way to the library to see if a promised treat had come. The Badeley collection, gifted by a church lawyer some years before, had taken its time being categorised and readied for use, the bindings repaired and sheets preserved, as though legions of rough characters would soon be pawing through its pages!
The librarian assured him it would soon be available, and may have some utility. He mounted the stairs and shook the rain out of his hair, ran a finger round his collar. He was sure to steam for a while in his bay by the window, but what of it? His fingers were always gentle in the pastures of print.
The librarian had outdone himself: a note, and cloth-wrapped, the largest volume of the bequest, Duns Scotus’s Scriptum Oxoniense super Sententiis. He sat, reverently unwrapping it, readying himself for study. There were inklings, he knew, in his wider reading of the medieval theologian: theories of incarnation and the senses, each thing unique unto itself, and the glorious, wide surrounding world a blessing from God – not the curse his teachers seemed to maintain, some mountain-range of traps and boulders, unseen crevasses waiting to swallow the unseeing traveller – so that his fingers shook as he turned the pages, his eyes pressed close to ink warmed with anticipation.
There were inklings, he knew, in his wider reading of the medieval theologian: theories of incarnation and the senses, each thing unique unto itself, and the glorious, wide surrounding world a blessing from God – not the curse his teachers seemed to maintain…
Head bent and lost in theology, he remained as the storm outside whipped up tapping branches and dumped a month of rain onto the tiles.
The librarian pottered, rearranging notes in a catalogue, tidying his papers then sitting for a while with his feet on the rungs of his desk, simply listening to the wind and water. The young man was intense. Soft and small, with no physical presence at all; at the librarian’s school he would have been trampled underfoot by the lowliest member of the team. But he gave off a glow of bright intelligence, goodness too, he thought; from the small shoulders, set in earnest, the lowered head, he gathered an impression of grace.
After a further hour it was time for the building to close. The librarian walked over.
‘Scotus, eh?’
Hopkins looked up. His eyes were tired, but still bright interest sparkled there.
‘Yes – thank you so much for preparing him. Most enlightening.’
‘You can continue tomorrow. I’ll put the volume up.’
‘Thank you.’
He rose and gathered pen and papers, recapped the bottle of ink. Its cork squeaked in a momentary lull of wind.
‘What do you take as Scotus’s main theme?’ asked the librarian.
Gerard jumped, then covered his nerves by tugging at his jacket. He had not anticipated questions.
‘Well, I – I suppose earlier thinking, or other thinking, perhaps, that the world is a distraction and an evil path away from divinity is mistaken. The world – all that rain! the fells, pools and waterfalls, even those branches knocking on the glass – is a symbol of God, a way of approaching the divine through the senses of man. That’s what I think, anyway.’
‘And the Society?’
‘The Society?’
‘What do your masters make of the famous Franciscan?’
‘Oh! I am not sure.’
They reached the short flight of stairs leading outside. The librarian held the door for the young man to pass.
‘I believe they regard him as an eccentric – hardly central to our thinking, but harmless all the same. You should be fine with further study of the bequest, should you wish.’
Gerard looked at him from halfway down the stairs. He was an older brother, with a calm, lined face, full of simple wisdom and authority. The departing light cast happy shadows about its crags. Without worries he smiled, thanked the librarian again and turned to make his way into the storm. Though the wind was dying down, freshets of water and the odd blown twig flew here and there before his face. He caught one on a blast of air as the library door snicked home.
*
In the end, he realised, it was not one moment but many – indivisible in import, in lasting purpose, but separable with just a small tweak of his mind, like beads on a wire pulled apart to reveal the silver thread connecting them, snapping back on release.
But what to make of it?
…beyond such work lay the crooked world still, scarred with the wicked lines of the flood, to reconcile to the one who loosed the waters.
He supposed, for all the marvellous fancies of his work – the thought, taut and compact, drilling for meaning through dense layers of sound and rhythm; the grand, reaching passages; lives wrestled from obscurity, from the dark loss of the grave to God’s light – there was only one image that lasted, flowing in and out of them all: water. He did not need its clear, sacramental force (though he felt God move through it), its symbols, its song; the substance itself picked him up, a stick dropping into the current, and washed him to glory.
Gerard stopped. The path of his vocation, long and gnarled as a tree-root burrowing through soil, beautiful in its own way; his crisis of art, poems stopped-up and burnt, yet pressed over years into a kind of living mulch, ’til at last he could hold them back no more; the torrent of verse spilling through myriad letters to friends, ending who knew where. These things comforted him. In thinking of them, he understood.
He returned again to the image of his youth.
Rounded hat, clean feet, the suggestion of high branches sketched in the background. Even his nose, he saw, was sharp, the line of a contemplative lip clean as his pencil could make it. But his eyes – these lay hooded in shadow. Why had he drilled the lead down so, obscuring his soul? Why hatched out those windows? Only the tiny currents of the surface could tell.
He folded the drawing back along its accustomed lines, slipped it into the bequest’s next volume. There was so much to do – so many volumes, leaves as yet uncut – and beyond such work lay the crooked world still, scarred with the wicked lines of the flood, to reconcile to the one who loosed the waters.
James Roderick Burns’s novella and story collection, Beastly Transparencies, is due from Black Spring Press in 2024. He is the author of five collections of poetry (most recently Crows at Dusk, 2023) and a short fiction chapbook, A Bunch of Fives. His stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He can be found on Twitter @JamesRoderickB and his newsletter offers one free, published story a fortnight, at abunchoffives.substack.com.
