The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
He arranged for us to meet that winter for one hour a week coinciding with the evening vespers service followed by a social gathering at our church, so that the evening hour would not be questioned by my family. During these sessions I would stand at the garret window and he was seated just behind me on the stool with his hand around my waist. In this way he would guide my line of vision and instruct me to look through the telescope and observe some of the most distant mysteries of the night sky.
I remember feeling a warm sensation at his touch of my waist and a tingling sense of playful apprehension as he held both my temples from behind and tried to position my gaze through the instrument. Pointing at some object in the heavens, his hand would open as if to release some energy of his own to the night sky. “Look at the world beyond us, Lou,” he would say, “the universe beyond you and your family, beyond you and me. The universe we’re just beginning to know—we’re all a part of. See those stars, Lou. They float way out there in the chill of the heavens just like us. But we feel them. They are burning.”
I remember feeling a perplexed thrill at Gillot’s words, as I was pulled out of my troubled self, the world I knew, and delivered in the simplest way to the distant orbit of the stars. I looked forward to this one evening per week when he would hold me in his arms and I would be transported for once to a world I had not created. He gave me a running commentary of celestial objects infinite distances away from us and yet we could know them intimately by observing the course of their travels, the intensity of their light. Venus, the brightest star in the sky, commanding the stage of day’s beginning and end as the morning star and the evening star. And he marveled at the distant planets and their discoverers—that poor heretical creature (who had his own run-in with the church hierarchy) Galileo Galilei who beyond challenging the conventional wisdom of our place in the universe had also discovered Jupiter. Jupiter with its swirling red spot and its many moons, invisible to the human eye and barely visible to our telescope, seemed to live in a huge world of its own, a Goliath rivaling solar system to our very own David earth and its one lone moon.
What fascinated me about Gillot’s excursions into the stars was that the inhabitants of these heavens bore no Christian names at all but something more original and primitive. These heavenly objects were the namesakes of mythical gods who carried the legends of some enduring “all-too-human” behavior.
I remember Gillot telling me about Io (one of Jupiter’s moons), the “other woman” in ancient myth who for loving Jupiter (sometimes known as Jove), a married man, was turned by his vengeful wife, Juno, into a cow. And while Jupiter could assume at will all forms, in this case, that of a bull to be with his bovine paramour, Juno would not be made a fool. Though Io might be saved by a peacock named Argus, Juno the wife managed still to lure her husband back. Not only that, but she commended Io forever to a pasture where unbeknownst to Jupiter a gadfly would forever sting Io in the hide. “Hell hath indeed no fury like a woman scorned, or a goddess no less.”
Stories of such ancient and familiar vengeance sent us both reeling in giddy laughter, for though I was young, the age of Gillot’s daughters, and he himself was settling into the dawn of middle age, I could feel the undeniable visceral attraction directing my every word toward him and his approval—as natural a part of me as the gravitational pull of the earth around the sun.
Imagining another world drawing us together, keeping us in balance, denying all the while the real gravity of the world we lived in.
Yet too, I knew from our forays into myth that there were harsh consequences for even the most natural behavior. This was made clear to me when one evening as Gillot hovered over me at the telescope, his daughter Katarina burst in, and blurting an apology, “Papa, forgive me—I didn’t know,” she frowned, hesitating, her hand to her mouth, checking her words. And as Gillot, letting his hand drop instantly from my side, cried “Dear,” his daughter quickly disappeared.
It was done. We were as exposed as those stars in the heavens, suddenly spied by other eyes. We never spoke of that moment openly but the hand that let go that day was an admission of intentions Gillot could not reconcile within himself. The neutral territory of our celestial studies had suddenly turned perilous and Gillot wished to return to the safe terrain of our confessional pietist studies. Yet I in my naïve girlish and inexperienced way would not be cast out of his orbit. I tried to make light of our attraction, thinking that we could forever hold desire in the balance in the same way that heavenly bodies might never touch though were forever joined by huge distances of intimacy.
My dear Pastor Gillot, QUOD LICET JOVI NON LICET BOVI
Don’t talk to me of civilization and its decline. The gods still reign.
Day follows loyally on the heels of night and Argus pierces through the blue black gloom of solitude and guides a lover to a mate.
Somewhere in a wooded glade a nymph succumbs to a god, is discovered by a wife, and all hell breaks loose,
when out of the dark struts a peacock, splaying the eyes of a giant, fanning his prey before the kill, dancing a tune no longer melodious—he will, he will.
Her beauty regained, but never the same, She is pure and proven form. Io is strong and she knows, Io knows, so much the wiser now, what Jove is allowed is never permitted the cow.
—Yours ever, Lou
I wanted him to laugh. I wanted to be taken absolutely seriously. I tried my hand at poems I sent to him and began to write down my stories. What I discovered to my surprise was that my lying that was censored everywhere else found its appropriate true form in writing. The written story could be untrue, a lie; it could be fanciful, as long as it had its effect. And it did.
A smile from ear to ear when that afternoon Gillot opened his study door. He loved the strutting peacock and in a moment of levity he said he wished that we had such a dutiful protector for our trysts. But in our case, he told me, “God would have to do.” I found myself ever so slightly taken aback by this hint of sacrilege and by some vestige of faith deep within myself—a faith I would never have admitted to. I tucked the hurt away, didn’t want to know.
Many years later, when the great philosopher Nietzsche was discussing the nature of laughter (its tendency to implode on itself) for a book of aphorisms he was working on, I was reminded of this particular period with Gillot, when he would almost hold his joy in check at our tender meetings. Fritz had said that “Laughter” was the full release of hope into the joy of the moment, that being only momentary, must dissipate into nothingness. And I guess that was true. But I was annoyed at the philosopher’s presumption, that he could arrogantly declare someone’s happiness, our happiness, people he had never known, fatally doomed and yet he, sage messenger that he was, escaped unscathed. What really bothered me though was being reminded of this shaky, all too brief time with Gillot when all our intense joy would take its natural course and evaporate. (The philosopher was right after all.) First love in hindsight had become a cruel joke.
That autumn Gillot’s demeanor toward me, his young tutorial charge, seemed to soften and become tinged with a distanced acquiescence. He surrendered to the reality of our affection within that garret study, as he accepted too its absolute censure outside those walls. A kind of quiet reserve overtook him. He seemed less an authority, and was disturbingly weaker to me. Though I know he delighted in my stories and my bold attempts to unmask the prophet Isaiah and Paul for the mere mortals they were, and to be au courant with the philosopher-saints of the day—Spinoza and Kierkegaard—I would catch him looking at me from time to time with a sad smile. Like one who knows an end for which there are no words....
Abandoning celestial science and our evening hour, we returned to meeting each Tuesday and Thursday at four o’clock and took up once again our religious studies, moving to the Passions of Christ. It was a lugubrious time in our lessons. I felt precipitously thrown from heaven to earth. But I did not question Gillot’s decision, for he seemed to be questing for some answers of his own. I sat and listened, transfixed by the painful endurance of this