One Beautiful Evening... A Story

Originally posted June 2009, removed, reposted here.

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There was a devout nun in the fifteenth century who decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and she belonged to an order that wore bags over their heads. And the mother superior told the nun that if she walked through the countryside with a bag on her head, she would scare people. But the nun insisted, so the mother superior allowed to her to walk around and around the cloister, every day for three years until she covered the equivalent distance to the Holy City. At the end of her journey the nun was so exhausted that she collapsed. (Laurie Anderson, from "On the Way to Jerusalem", The Ugly One With the Jewels

One beautiful evening in the garden on Eden
A snake came walking in the twilight
He was leaning on his ivory cane
And he said, let me tell you a little secret about life
There's a certain sharpness to a knife, or a diamond
Come here, Watch it glitter...

Oh beauty in all its' forms
Funny how hatred can also be a beautiful thing
When it's as sharp as a knife
As hard as a diamond
Perfect.
(Laurie Anderson, heavily excerpted from "One Beautiful Evening," Life on a String

Come with me, I'll tell you a story.

This story is about a nun, who, unlike the one I spoke of above, wore the bag that was the mark of her religious order not only into the countryside, but also into the town. She was, as one might expect, hated and feared by the townspeople for her oddness. One day, after the nun had been wandering about the town for many months, one of the bolder townspeople, sick unto death of seeing the nun and her bag, vigorously backed his oxcart into the nun's only wagon while in the bazaar parking area. Unfortunately, there were no witnesses that cared to claim they'd seen anything at all.

After this, the nun got the point. She took off her bag and went back to her mother superior, but the other nuns would not let her back in to the monastery because she had broken one of the cardinal rules of her order by taking off the bag.

So she decided to return to the town, not because she wanted to, but because there wasn't much else around, if one wanted to eat regularly. She covered her baldness with a small triangle of cloth, locally called a 'bandana', so the townspeople wouldn't stare as much, until her hair grew back in. The last time I talked to her, she had decided to take a break from being a nun. In fact, she was taking a break from all of her regular devotions for a while, though she still regularly argued with God about all the mother superiors and their bags.

Did you enjoy my story? I hope so. I was hoping not to sadden you yet again, my dear readers, but I thought you might like to hear this particular story.

Because history has stories that we half remembered, and most of them never even get written down. And so when they say things like “We’re gonna do this by the book”, you have to ask “What book?”, because it would make a big difference if it was Dostoyevsky or just, you know, Ivanhoe. (Laurie Anderson, from "Same Time Tomorrow," The Ugly One With The Jewels