The Visioner

 

ONCE THERE WAS A BOY who was born with his legs bent backwards, so for a long time he did not know whether he was coming or going.

         During his boyhood he endured years of pain in physical therapy to get his legs straightened out, and for a long time he wore braces. He was a genius, and his mother, who was also a genius, had the sense to teach him everything she could and send him to every kind of class. That way, when he was a man he could stand on his own even if he couldn’t stand.

         He learned many things, including how to dance, and he could make shirts with a sewing machine, a very complicated task for most people. By the time he was a young man, he had achieved mastery in many, many areas. He was, especially, a supernal artist.

         He avoided this imprint, though no one knew why, and became a builder instead, an artisan of highest degree. He was skilled in this work not only because it was easy for him, being an artist, but because he somehow knew everything there was to know about wood.

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         Many times he had gone into forests and listened to the trees, which spoke to him and told him their secrets. He knew how to use a tuning fork to tell the dryness of a piece of wood, how long to wait before laying new floorboards so that they would not warp, how to make new work look old and fit in like it had been there all along.

         At an early age he had come into harmony with nature, and thereafter nature divulged its knowledge to him continually. He noticed all manner of things, especially small things, that escaped most other people’s attention. Even the minutest of insects had a place in his world, and his respect and reverence.

         So when he constructed a sweeping staircase or fitted an impossible ribbon of wood into a floor or lofted a fanciful balcony, he imbued it with the subtlest of details and the broadest of understandings. Whatever he built was beautiful to the beholder, and magical.

         In the various houses where he labored, some of them owned by the billionaires, not just the millionaires, he also worked his magic on the people themselves. While they might not fathom the significance of the most ethereal change in the angle of a few floorboards or his managing to camouflage a stain that others before him had tried and failed to remove, they somehow understood, through the imposition of a higher law, inviolable by them, that now their life was to be happier or their marriage better and that he had made of their dwelling a little corner of paradise.

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         And because he often walked at times in rivers and lakes, he knew everything also about water.

         Long before, when he put ink, which is kin to water, to paper, which is just another form of wood, magic would happen. But drawings he rendered when he was sad or angry about the state of the world, unhappy things came to pass, things he had depicted, and it disturbed him deeply. It was not only because this power demanded great responsibility of him and held great danger, but because he found he was weak in the face of it, that he let go of his art and turned from it to being a builder instead.

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         Sometimes the children of a house would come around and ask him questions. Often he spun them off on some adventure or invented busywork for them so that he could attend to his own work undisturbed.

         But one day the child of the house was a small boy with braces on his legs. And when the boy asked him his history, he could not refuse. When the boy wanted him to make a drawing, the man put aside his work and sat down and with great care rendered one, a story that unfurled its infinitesimal electricity from the junctures of paper and ink.

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         And one day it came to pass that the boy grew up to be a supernal artist himself.

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         And eventually he knew everything there was to know about nature and people, and also drew beautiful drawings that came true.

© Anne Ross 2003–2020