I was in love over twenty-five years ago with a brilliant, daring woman who, wisely, left me. And so I was delighted to come across her many years later at a flea market in Oakland, California, where she sold used books, specializing in haiku, cookery, and painting—especially Persian miniatures.
She told me this story almost as soon as I saw her. It was her way of catching up. She refused to say anything more.
Once there was a rebellious woman. She found that it was delightful to challenge the social conventions of her day, and she took an impish pleasure in doing so. Convention, she saw, is largely a matter of expectation; and so when people expected to engage her in, say, a tender and grave exchange of confidences, it was just then she felt herself at her most rowdy and acerbic. When gritty, seething tension was called for, she put on an air of saucy lethargy. When indolence was mandated, she was piping with energy. When at a banquet, and expected to be decorous, she was a roustabout and a maniacal joker. More than once she managed to have herself thrown out of solemn, distinguished gatherings for her ebullient skepticism.
She couldn’t help herself: there was nothing more ridiculous than large groups of people submitting helplessly to imprisonment within a cellblock of expectation.
We have all heard of impregnable old castles, with their battlements, their crenels and machicolations; but these walls were nothing compared to the invisible walls of social habits and psychological formulae. In the old days, a soldier might pour down a vat of boiling pitch upon the heads of assailants. These days, we have a still-more extraordinary situation: for society is like a walled city with its battlements turned inward, preventing anyone from emerging. Every time our friend tried, her own companions poured upon her a boiling pitch of assumptions, socially endorsed ignominies, and senseless obligations. Most amusing of all, many went through passionate motions of escape, and by this means attracted attention that fixed them all the more firmly within the walls of their culture.
As well we might expect, our friend had a rowdy, subtle solution to this imprisonment. She decided to build a castle of her own. She meant it to be the castle where she could retreat, whenever she was possessed by the solitary genie of her own reflections. And there was an additional and precious benefit: she now had a place where she could invite the people of her choice—those who were willing to play by the rules of learning, improvisation, experiment, good will, and exactitude.
The only problem was location. Easily solved: she would build her castle in exactly that spot named by one and all as the most foolish and irresponsible: she would build her castle in the air.
And a magnificent castle it was, a dwelling place for her most private ideas, her long-constructed hopes, her iridescence of mood, her overwrought variety of demeanor, her jokes that fell like spindrift upon the events of the day. It was a castle with arches and gables, with courtyards and open plains, with rooms of cardboard and rooms of marble. It had rooms full of books, and rooms full of tricks. Some of the books were so full of affection that when they were read they gave the reader the sensation of receiving amorous overtures. In the courtyards of the castle there were jugglers who demonstrated the way it was possible for a woman to keep all her dreams aloft, spinning, headed back always into her hands.
And best of all: as everyone was looking toward this castle afloat above the fortified world where we all live, our friend was able to approach unnoticed the big gates of society. As everyone found a way to visit the world she had made for herself, as they entered and mused, marveled and understood, it became the world she had made for everyone else. As the visitors came to know the books and tricks, the songs and dreams of her castle in the air, she came to know an unprecedented peace. Until at last, down in the walled city of society, her moment come, she slipped out the gates and was gone.