As soon as I settled, the taxicab accelerated, and I was off to a new day. How often I had taken this route, daily in fact, and yet always it had its surprises. Three or four nights before, a road gang descended upon a constellation of potholes to make our passage on the part of the road, thirty meters east from the village gate, safe from sudden gravitational pull. Inside their triangular hutches on a vacant space beside the road, five roosters flapped their wings–whether or not simultaneously I do not remember. But this I remember–the wish that sometimes, instead of a taxi, I could ride a chicken, like the married couple in Marc Chagall’s painting.
In fact, after that–and perhaps this was partly due to the driver’s way of steering–the world seemed to float, exactly as Chagall would have it in his art. At an intersection, water did not crawl on the ground so much as spout into the air, thanks to a busted main, which workers from the water district were attending to. And not too far onwards, a sight that effectively opened my somnolent eyes, a man was cycling above the ground. A closer look assured me, however, that his bicycle was merely rolling on an elevation, the sidewalk.
But I realized that always there was to this dreamlike dimension a rootedness in reality. Indeed, Chagall’s fluid world was moored in the people and images of the village of his childhood, his reverie was really a river of reverts.
A manual on writing, well-thumbed and kept open on my bedside table, observes that “[g]ood writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like ‘freedom’ and ‘literacy.’” In other words, abstraction requires exemplification.
Amazingly, this was Jesus’ method of expounding on the greatest commandment of the Law when, Matthew tells us, he was pressed by the Pharisees who sought to disconcert him.
“Master,” they asked, “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” Jesus said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.”
God, of course, is invisible, and so the idea of loving him occupies the top of the ladder of abstraction. But quickly Jesus paired this love with love of neighbor, which stays at the bottom of the ladder, and which, as William Butler Yeats puts it, starts, like all ladders, “in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
As we took the winding road by the sea, there was mostly only the landscape to engage my eyes, and the waves and clouds conspired to pull me into sleep, whose world, the world of dreams, is a pure world of abstraction that completely forsakes reason and excludes meaning. But in his work Chagall rearranges reality to draw out from it a content that has always lain there, buried by the alluvium of secular preoccupations. Of such are love, joy, innocence.
Something checked my drowsiness. When we took the causeway before the tunnel and the exit, a white car parked at the side came into view. A man and a woman stood beside it shielding themselves against the sun with a red umbrella. The woman was waving a white handkerchief at the passing motorists, obviously for help. But the speed of the taxicab was such that it would be dangerous for us to stop for them. Shucks, I said to myself, and then I just prayed for the couple, for God to send them assistance, no matter if it was Chagall’s giant white chicken, anything at all that would take them to safety.