The Isolation of St. Anthony

Posted on June 3, 2005 in Uncertainty Weather

By noon, all my reasons for leaving the condo had disappeared. A friend cancelled a lunch date. No one could make the writer’s group that I hold every two weeks. I faded into the bedroom and read some Oliver Sacks.

Clouds hustled in and crowded the airspace between the sea and the mountain. I ignored them. At this time of year, we frequently get a layer which drops nothing of value on the countryside. The rarity of late spring rain in these parts is such that there are no plants which sprout when it arrives. The grasses stimulated by winter have already dried and will not extend their life for a slight storm. Pressures and winds of the upper atmosphere act as if they know this, so when clouds come in the late spring and throughout the summer, you can lie on your back and watch their march in complete safety.

It’s the kind of weather that can lead to the mind feeling jumpy, a sort of cabin fever southern California style. You don’t go out if it is hot and you don’t go out when this muggy cotton bank spreads over the sky unless you have appointments. If you have no job or reason to leave the house, the demons come out. Hagiography is full of the lives of hermit saints who found demons crawling out of the stones and sands. I remember the famous altar-tableau by Mathis Gruenwald showing creatures fashioned from random bits of the forest coming to life and attacking the fork-bearded Saint Anthony of Egypt.

Gruenwald could have picked his models for the nightmare spirits as he walked through the woods near his home. And it is out of things that I see in my neighborhood, sometimes, that I draw my inspirations for dread. I fearfully dream of wildfires, coyotes, and mountain lions. The stuccoed pipes coming out of the walls menace me. But there is nothing more terrifying that the uncertainty of what the neighbors think, what they might say if they knew the details of the diseases which afflict me.

Both St. Anthony and I suffer the onslaught and ravages of demons who come out of the mind and infest our waking world. When there is nothing which breaks the monotony, you invent savagery and psychic adventure to compensate for the bland routine.

What I have described is the disease of loneliness, the hallucination that overcomes me when I stay inside too long. This afternoon, I sought to break it by calling friends. You pick up the phone and just keep dialing until someone answers. Then you either break your dam or listen as they relate their own woes. It keeps you human.

I got lucky, tonight. On the second call, I reached a friend. We talked about our days and mentioned the weather, the packed cumulous which idled and dithered over the coastal plain. “It’s just sitting there,” I said. Then I looked out the window. Slick patent leather black circled the grass and the condos. Cars drove on it. The rain had come.

And setting all miracles aside, I just shook my head. A pointless rain concluding a pointless day. A pointless rain concluding a pointless day. I could say that forever but the truth of the absurdity would break no cycle, change no predestination.