Brown: The Last Discovery of America (25 page)

I am the observer.

Every American comes upon the “I,” awakens to it. The prow of the ship. The top of the tree. The hilt of the sword. The animate eye. The quick. The reader of the card pertaining to the sword. Very interesting, but now I need to go to the bathroom. The American I. As in,
I believe, I take Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I am sorry for the earthquake victims. I will have tuna on rye. I love you.
The I does not impose solitude, though it is lonely; the I is alive. The I may be an instrument of connection, but even as such it is an assertion of will.
I have my rights.

As so often happens in America, the I attached to me at school:

You!

Who? I was no longer my brother’s brother, my sister’s brother, my mother’s son, my father’s son, my backyard’s potentate. I was alone. I . . . I had to go to the bathroom, what should I do?

Go to college, become a man different from your father. It’s up to you. Don’t go to college, become a man different from your father.

The American I is as old as the Boston Tea Party, as old as the document of Constitution: “We the People . . .”

We? But I am a royalist. As the son of immigrants, I do not remember America seeming like a choice, though Americans were always and everywhere talking about choices.

They talked about black beans or refried. Presbyterian or Methodist. Ford or Chevrolet. Cinema One or Cinema Two. Gay or straight. CBS or NBC. Paper or plastic. Diet or regular. Regular or decaf. Plain or buttered. White or whole wheat or sourdough or English muffin. Every lighted window, every court, every slug of type, every knuckle of America strained to accomplish my assertion: I am innocent.

I may be unwise, I may be mistaken, I may be guilty. But the essence of the American I is that I am irreducible.

I can be punished for my crime, in other words. Isn’t that odd? My body can bear the weight of punishment for a crime weighed in the apprehension of others who did not see, who do not know what I know.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value. The American I is deconstructed for me by Paolo, an architect who was raised in Bologna: “You Americans are not truly individualistic, you merely are lonely. In order to be individualistic, one must have a strong sense of oneself within a group.” (The “we” is a precondition for saying “I.”) Americans spend all their lives looking for a community: a chatroom, a church, a support group, a fetish magazine, a book club, a class-action suit.

But illusions become real when we think they are real and act accordingly. Because Americans thought themselves free of plural pronouns, they began to act as free agents, thus to recreate history. Individuals drifted away from tribe or color or ’hood or hometown or card of explanation, where everyone knew who they were.
That’s Victoria and Leo’s son, isn’t it?
Americans thus extended the American community by acting so individualistically, so anonymously.

As traitors do. To my unformed eye, the woman sitting on my aunt’s sofa looked just like the Clairol Lady of the magazine advertisements of the time. The Clairol Lady was married to the Hindu. That much I got. The Hindu was my Indian uncle’s nephew on his dark-scented side, snuff-after-dinner side.

As we came home from that long, heated Christmas dinner—the enforced good behavior seemed an extenuation of the forms of the High Mass the evening previous—my mother grew impatient with my childish pesterings concerning the blond woman who perched so demurely upon my aunt’s sofa. The woman’s first name was a biblical name. Her last name was his, an Indian name.
But where did she come from?
My finger traced circles within my warm breath on the dark car window. My brother and sisters were asleep.
What is it you want to know, Richard? They met in college.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to know.

I had impure thoughts.

I never questioned how we were made. God made us. Or how we were related to India. We were Mexican. They were Indian. Somehow we were all brown.
That thou shouldst descend to mortal clay.
Mortal clay. Ashes to ashes. I was an altar boy. But I wouldn’t believe such a blond woman was natural to us.

I had heard the term “ash blond.” Perhaps she was an ash blond. She was unnatural is what I meant. Unnatural to us. She was the opposite of divorce, but just as strange. She was the opposite of Adam. She was Eve, coming out of nowhere.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
And so I believed, that I had sinned, whenever I confessed to the unseeing voice of Father Edmund O’Neill in the dark confessional box. This was the opposite of punishment.

Pure thoughts are few and far between. Impurities are motives, weights, considerations, temptations that digress from God. I think I’ll have hotcakes for breakfast, for example, during the Elevation of the Host. Or, I threw a rock at Billy Walker because I loved him.

Well, who attended the ash-blond wedding? Was it accomplished with saffron robes? With incense? Did they make the blond woman dance some hootchie-kootch dance in a red veil, a diamond stuck in her navel as in a Betty Grable movie?

A young woman from San Jose who writes to me, tells me, by way of introduction, that she is the daughter of a “New York Jew” and an “Iranian Muslim.”

That is what I want to know. That is what I want to hear about—children who are unnatural to any parish because they belong to no precedent. Brown children are as old as America—oh, much older—to be the daughter of a father is already to be brown. To be the rib-wife of Adam was already to be brown; to be Adam summoned from dust as the magpies watched and nudged one another. But public admissions of racial impurity are fresh and wonderful to me.

The reason I remain interested in brown history today is because, as a boy, I was embarrassed by my sexual imagination. I was looking for the world entire. I suspected dimensions I could not find—by find I mean read about, I suppose. I never expected to form a “we” beyond my family. When would the impulse come, as it came to the birds, as it came to the bride? That was why the presence of the blond woman disturbed me so. She was proof of some power in the world I could not admit I felt.

Mixed soul, I suspect, may become, in this twenty-first century, what “mixed blood” was for the eighteenth century. A scandal against straight lines and deciduous family trees. Against patriarchs who do not sufficiently recall that Christ formed an alliance of the moment with the Samaritan woman—some spark of wit, perhaps; some amused recognition or willingness that intrigues us still. Perhaps a smile. Already, the assembly of holy men, the rabbis and priests and mullahs agree they do not like it. The brown theology of syncretism abroad in the land—cross-dressed Christmas dinners—the lotus and the holly. That apostasy should form flesh they do not like. My church’s definition of “mixed marriage,” for example, had nothing to do with blood, I knew that, but with the irreconcilability of questions and answers.

Love conquers all. As does Saturday night at the Rose and Crown. As does the rain that falls on the just and unjust? Is the love of God brown, really, like the love of a man for a woman? Or are you just saying that? That’s what I want to know. By brown I mean biological, not some drapery or mist, but spirit stuck in flesh, pitiful, like those mastodons stuck in the La Brea tar pits, bleating for mamas who died millions of years ago. The love of God beating a path through birth canals in order to call us mama. Is it real?

Painters sometimes refer to brown as a “dead color”—not as in Aramaic, or the bosom of Abraham, but in quietude, slowness to delight, misgiving.

I recently asked a painter which were the brownest paintings he could think of.

He said cubists found their preoccupation with form disallowed a bright palette; nothing more than burlapy brown. The capture of form rather than the capture of light. Form, space, but not progression. There is no time in cubism. All is present tense. The Nude cannot descend the staircase. Though she has reached the bottom, she has not yet left the top.

A texture favored by cubists, an illusion favored by cubists, was the plane of wood. A plane of wood favored by cubists was the table. The table favored by cubists was the table upon which objects had been arranged. Ladies and gentlemen, the table made of wood:
Part the curtain. Stand there. Or over there. Or here. Crawl underneath. Stand here, directly above, careful of the light.
The table, the book, the matchbox, the chessboard, the cigar, the coffee, the
Figaro.
The rock I threw at Billy Walker. All present at once as several points of view. The illustration of a faculty humans intuit, though we do not possess it. A faculty Virginia Woolf intuited. A faculty we ascribe to ghosts or angels. Or cubists.

Cubism, as ghosts might see us: manifest, but without motive; moving through the form of a room, but without motive. Incapable of recalling a motive for what we are engaged in—passion, chess, music, absence, descending a staircase—a series of stop-frames fanning out from a pin in the middle, which is the moment. The moment for which Emily in
Our Town
pleads:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

We cannot. We must be mistaken to live. We do notice, however, how oddly we are constructed, how oddly we are evolved. Hands. Lips. Birth canals. As are our implements. Things we pick up and put down. Gloves. Forceps. The way we must hold the guitar constructs the guitar. It stands to reason. We have only two hands. The guitar constructs music. Music constructs silence. (An Icelandic composer interviewed on the radio said silence constructs music.) Silence constructs hope or fear. Of ghosts or angels. Cubism is not for angels. For angels, as for Virginia Woolf, motive alone is manifest.

The reason I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s stupid face was I had a crush on him.

How many times? At what velocity?

The priest does not ask if I intended to mar the face. One of the things I love about the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human. What alone interests the confessor is the form of humanity I wish to confess. Confession is constructed as we are constructed. The confessional box prefigures the American I.

I am the sinner, irreducible. My soul is irreducible. Not my red hand.

I looked for the impure in everything. I truly looked for a mixture of motive. The stories in the history book that interested me were stories that seemed to lead off the page.

I lived my life in fragments. For I knew nothing was so dangerous in the world as love, my kind of love. By love, I mean my attempt to join the world. My cubist life: My advantage (my sympathy toward brown and the bifocal plane) was due to the fact that from an early age I needed to learn caution, to avert my eyes, to guard my speech, to separate myself from myself from myself. Or to reconstruct myself in some eccentric way—my pipe protruding from my ear, my ear where my nose should be—attempting to compose myself in a chair that slants like a dump shovel. My eyes looking one way, my soul another. My motive could not be integrated with my body, with act or response or, indeed, approval.

And the crucifix, too, superimposed upon my every thought, was a kind of cubism, a private perspective, a quartered plane, a window from which I observed, unobserved, and apparently without motive.

I looked to art to reconcile me to life. But nothing in art is remotely like life. The cross is closer to life than art is.

A man of my acquaintance, now in his seventies, tells me he needed, as a boy, to go to his small town’s library in summer, surreptitiously to slide his hand into the liverish side of Noah Webster, to divine what he knew all along he was. This, after he bent over his prep school roommate one night to kiss that sleeping boy. He hadn’t meant to. The boy woke up!
What’s wrong? Frankie, what’s wrong?
Nothing’s wrong. Go back to sleep.