Her Body Is His Bookes

Stanza's little sister, I'll wager

. . . her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought.

—John Donne

Had another birthday last week, on Thursday the 9th – Holy Thursday, in fact – and, counting back, I realized it was the first time it had fallen thusly since 1998. This odd fact was no doubt rattling around inside my head last Wednesday on the way home from work while I played Cosmo's Current Favourite Game to keep myself from winking in and out of existence, which I tend to do while riding in the car, and which can be quite annoying, both to myself and others. I mean the winking in and out of existence, not the Current Favourite Game, which I try to play as silently and unobtrusively as possible.

The Game is made possible by the fact that in Alberta our licence plate "numbers"  consist of a three letters followed by three numerals. On occasion the three letters actually form intelligible syllables – and of course there are also vanity plates, which can be no more than seven characters and quite fun to decipher, e.g, HEEBGB or TRCKSTR. Cosmo's Game consists simply of trying to string together as many plates as possible and associate them with his Story, which is also, of course, the Story of him and Stanza. In other words, getting Cosmo his daily fix of HEEBGBs. It's a child's game, but my birthday horoscope did say I'd become more childlike as I grow older, so it's really okay, and it all makes perfect sense (ahem).

So what did Cosmo see? Well, first I saw MET, followed closely by GAL. Actually not that uncommon; I've seen it before, and of course Stanza is my Gal, so meeting her was already on my mind when I saw this vanity plate that said LOOKE. Cosmo being Cosmo, I noted the archaic spelling and immediately thought of John Donne (wouldn't you?): "To our bodies turn we then, that so/Weak men on love revealed may LOOKE/Love's mysteries in souls do grow,/But yet the body is his BOOKE." So I LOOKEd, and the car ahead of it said TST 777. A few moments later, YAH. Now those sensitive tumblers in Cosmo's mind started to click open, in rapid sequence, before I even suspected, really, what was inside the vault.

Sometimes the mind's eye is quicker than either the mind or the eye. Inside the vault, I spied myself in the Book & Art Den in Banff on Good Friday 1998, the day after my birthday. It was my second Easter weekend in Banff in three years. As a guest of the Banff International Youth Orchestra Festival, which my wife Jana was managing, I busied myself as I had two years earlier, strolling aimlessly, drinking coffee, reading, and jotting notes – then, as ever, three of Cosmo's favourite activities.

I'd started with morning coffee at La Palette, the art store and café at the Banff Centre where my eye-popping vision of 1996 had culminated so ravishingly. Now I was in the Den to TST, no, sorry, TEST, a hypothesis: Would another book magically – or at least, effortlessly – catch my eye to remind me fondly of Stanza, as the delightful novella SPIRITE by Theophile Gautier had on Good Friday 1996? And better still, would it remind me not just of her, but specifically of her message from two years earlier? I dared hope, and dared even further – vowing to banish altogether my lingering doubts about her existence if she would only deign to leap jauntily off the shelf into my awaiting arms.

I combed the Staff Picks where SPIRITE had found me – nothing obvious. Then Fiction generally, and Poetry and Biography – no bells ringing anywhere. Oh, well, it was worth a try, I thought. But then I remembered there was a small upper floor as well, although I had no idea what they kept up there.

Like an unexpected THUD in the chest, it hit me even before I reached the top of the stairs, with a huge, bold 777. This was too perfect: it didn't just echo the message from 1996, it picked up EXACTLY WHERE WE'D LEFT OFF – THE NUMBER 777. Who'd have thought there'd be a book with that title? Well, of course, it was in the Occult section, and as I snatched it up and digested the subtitle, "and other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley," I realized I'd hit a double jackpot.

I knew next to nothing about Crowley or the Qabala then, but the Philip K. Dick novel I'd just started that morning at La Palette, The Divine Invasion, also featured Kabala prominently (one letter's difference, same thing). VERY prominently, as I would eventually find out. But whereas the Crowley book dealt with the magical aspect, with table upon table of (supposed) correspondences, Dick was concerned with the mythical side of the Kabala. An exiled Earth god named YAH (short for Yahweh, it would seem) contrives to have his incarnated son born on a future Earth submerged in "a zone of evil"; unfortunately the boy, EMMANUEL, has amnesia. But fortunately, he also has an elusive, witty playmate named Zina, who, it turns out, is the Shekhina – the female side of God and the LIVING EMBODIMENT of the Torah – and she tries to help him to remember Who He Is. So, yes, ANAMNESIS again, and we know what a clever anagram that forms with the name of Cosmo's earthly emanation, don't we?

So, back in the car last week, I chuckled to myself that My Gal had certainly passed that TST with flying colours. And hadn't she also just made some sort of tricky, backwards-somersault pun on that last line of Donne's stanza from "The Ecstasy"? In Donne's syntax, our bodies are [metaphorically] Love's BOOK(E); in Stanza's syntax, her BODY [i.e., her physical manifestation to me] is [metaphorically?] a book. Or two books, to be exact – one of which has a crucial female character who is LITERALLY  the embodiment of another, monumental book (the Torah)!

Clearly, this is a gal who doesn't pun just for the fun of it. Not that she doesn't have fun doing it. Next day, on a birthday walk, Jana and I saw, moments apart, a vanity plate XTC and another plate with DUN.

Close enough for Cosmo.