Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (84 page)

When his smile vanishes, that doesn’t mean he disapproves of how I
spoke to him so much as that his hearing me is a serious matter at the moment, more serious than the other matters—i.e., he doesn’t want to run away from this topic so much, so he is attempting to hear in stages, depending on how much it’s bothersome to him to hear me now that we mentioned sex for the first time this morning.

We move along on our slender machines among the conditions of travel: the potholes, the crookedly and swoopingly centrally humped road, macadam and pebbled; we bounce and sway in the air currents and rush of nerves when a brushing, racing, wind-loaded and wind-spilling, bristling and snuffling boar-machine, an automobile, goes by. Christ, the weird hissing and, neurally, the staggering hesitation of their passing; then their dusty and advantaged, motor-steadied, keeled diminishing into the glimmering and dusty glow of distance with their amazing speed: distance is golden this time of day, in this part of the country, this part of the world.…

The sun, at moments when it is sunny, heats the air, which then rises like a ghost of a huge dairywoman, gray and yellow, and of another century, and in the immense fluster of her clothes, sounds are lost.

I am testing him, in part. If he makes a real attempt to hear now, it will mean he is in a state of affection, even infatuation. This test is and isn’t purposeful, on my part. I want to talk to him: I am used to being with him: I mean, since we started out; I am young and flexible in my habits; it’s something I’ve gotten into over the years, doing this, testing people but a little dishonestly, as an act of intimacy of a kind, as I’m doing with Jimmy: but I really want to see if he is A Good Person. He’s An All Right Person (in some ways), but he is not good. But I am so far out of control, so overfitted with energies and blustering restlessness at this hour—this vacationer’s day in my life—that I am almost as pleased by his not listening, by some blindness in his friendship, as by the other. I’m almost as pleased as if it were a sign of goodness, his being wicked or whatever. Anyway, the goodness probably is not there. And while I really can’t live (or love) without it, I can’t want it to happen now. I’m probably safe. He’s leaning back and just pedaling, which indicates his vanity and my unimportance. If he felt a lot of affection, he might listen and feel still more affection, and common sense might leave him, and he might come to me and cuddle and nurture me, here on these backward and decaying slopes of childhood, and I know damn well I would never be able to bear that.

T
ODAY
The Angel of Silence and of Inspiration (toward Truth) appeared to a number of us passing by on the walk in front of Harvard Hall—this was a little after three o’clock—today is October twenty-fifth, nineteen-hundred-and-fifty-one.

The shadow came first. In my case, I looked up to see if the sky had clouded over and saw instead with amazing shock the rudiments of a large face, not in any perspective, but a facelike thing that was also a figure, not with feet nearest me, then legs, and so on, and not frontal, but smoothly and yet crudely present in all the visual and mental ways figures and faces sometimes are for me in my dreams.

It was like the shifting sense of things in dreams, seen and known in varied ways; and what was paramount was an observing—and kind but not forward—
facedness,
a prow of knowing making Itself known—a Countenance, not human, not exactly—or entirely—inhuman, conceivably human in relation, but one that did not suggest It ever knew unconsciousness or error—or slyness—and I was startled but not made insane but was studentlike—but not at once awed into complete readiness to be changed in every part of myself, but that came within seconds, as the world, the visible bricks and roofs, trees, leaves, people, lost color and shrank in scale—by comparison.

It has been ciderlike weather; and local faces are not yet as badly strained as they will be in a few weeks, in the shorter days and the realities of study and competition here (Harvard). The crypt-and-ghost
pallors of ambition and mental hubris have hatched some of our mothlike look, we devourers of stored fabrics of emotion, but only a few of us are exemplars of whiteness—that is to say, faces have flecks of leftover health but it’s a more and more remote pink they have, the complexion of a fire in a veil—fire dressed as a bride for an unknown groom—and The New Figure was white indeed, but the white of all the colors, as if it were dressed in prisms.

People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren’t they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity—we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires through which This Figure had clearly traveled and about which It knew, one assumed, or felt, and on which It was an improvement, being unchemical, unthought, decidedly unitary as if Its fires were not widely scattered as all others were, as if It were a steady and unparticled fire, or as if It were invulnerable (by human measure) and white and yet with colors and without fire at all.

At any rate, a whiteness spread, and everything and everyone is chalk and blackboard, and is will and grammar like dried and leafless branches of the trees in the dire light of a December, but at the same time it was a scouring bliss. The sloppy Armageddons of fucking with girls comes to mind: the air is damp and chill and pale and white, a celebratedly dead light for Puritans, not a punishing light, but perhaps a fools’ light, cold, pale, and as if spitefully luminous; and then it grows dry—and relentless—but it remains a dead light.

I don’t mean to be paradoxical but I thought of The Creature of Light at that time as The Shadow, I guess because It had been cast by A Brighter Light—It was A Mechanism or Device, It was not a living thing as we, the watchers, were.

The Shadow seemed to touch and take the attention of perhaps half a hundred people, a random Cambridge mélange of men and women, some few children, students, an uninteresting sample of the ambitious and troubled American privileged, and then the world beyond—i.e., Cambridge—was banished and went about its business unilluminated, although at the time it was not known if the rest of the world had been destroyed or not.

One was as if inside a dreaming skull. The Figure had no Great Light or Clarity at first or Clear Dimension or Knowable Perspective except that It seemed in a logically apparent way to be somewhat taller than Harvard Hall.

The altered light named itself at once in exclamatory thought and in strange confusion of soul,
A Doomsday Light;
I am, in my willful identification of myself, Jewish; but perhaps my Jewishness has long since rotted away except as a root—I have often been so accused—but even so, my Jewishness is also the absence of Pagan weight and detail and gloom and of Christian secular frivolity and sacred populism: I was often enough accused of that in college.

But I am not Christian. I do not feel in my soul any right or privilege of immediate access to the Divine, the Divine that once took
human
form and suffered excruciatingly as we do. Nor do I think prayer is answered by Figures who are excruciated; just as a man being hanged or a woman in childbirth or being fucked is so entirely available to our usages of eyes and thoughts and physical action if we so desire, if we are not prevented, so was Divinity on the cross and is still as Suffering Mother or Father or Son or Wisdom. That Divinity in such a form causes, in one’s thoughts, a curious mingling of impious and pious etiquettes, presumptions and pride, charities and pieties, an entire texture of horror and justices and permissions which is present because of these beliefs and only these, and because no other conceivable actuality could supply authority for that Christian texture I think of as
Christian
—I am excluded from that although not entirely: I am a borderline figure, renegade or climber—or herald. It is not so far known about me what I am—history and life have not decided yet.

I was Christian enough to expect to see further Figures, many with trumpets and swords, rising in spirals upward or arranged in tiers ascending toward the soon-to-be-revealed Ultimate Radiance, God the Father, and I felt this, I confess, as a Jewish defeat—but since I thought it was, indeed, The End of the World, that querulous home-team rooting silenced itself in expectation of justice, logic, orderliness of a divine sort at last.

I was born and had so far lived among those who considered it a life’s work to fight that creeping urgency—of Apocalypse—that final tan” trum of would-be and assuredly horrible Explanation and Meaning, but now I found in myself a fascist or willful or demonically proud element that welcomed it—half welcomed it, to be honest.

No wholesale hosannahs broke from me—or the others there—out
wardly or resounded in my soul inwardly except as a kind of test to see how it felt to think that.

But that’s not true, either, quite, and some hosannahs did resound in me, and in odd tonalities—and, as I implied, some were, maybe most were, made up of inner whispers and doubts.

Clearly, a great variety of doctrines and secret beliefs was present among the watchers, and I found I was aware of that—that I was aware of more than The Angel and of more than myself—and that under the pressure of meanings and of possibilities now, and of verification—or
proof
as some people present took it—many people present fainted but remained erect (only a few fell); and some shouted or started to; others turned their backs to the manifestation as if incurious (in order to protect a seated faith); of those in that posture, some then cried out; some waited or peered; some were doubtingly curious and adopted postures of supplication: the women present were more fainthearted—i.e., less trusting, more careful—the men were more overcome with Christian dread in one form or another and with Jewish exaltation and pride and readiness to celebrate or with Jewish fear and resignation, or so I read their postures: that and now the words on paper, these words, in part breed themselves from unnoticed information earlier and in unlit parts of my mind according to odd effects they have on each other as utterance, once the utterance is made.

And, in this case, I find the extreme conceit of speech to be shattering.

The Catholics were the most startled—the people I assumed were Catholics, promptly the palest—or whitest—ones, with dark circles around their eyes and a look of knowledge, confession, and surrender and The Idea of Hell.

Whitely, like poor mirrors of The Seraph, in oddly angled postures, often leaning back and with one or both arms raised, we mostly stared directly toward The Face of The Seraphic Messenger—all of whom, light and imputed arms and seeming feet, was face—and most of those who cried out did so wanly, and many were not conscious for much of the time at first although they stood upright, to some extent. Very few people kneeled, or remained kneeling—there was a lot of stillness of response but there was no stillness of response at all, if you see what I mean—some people stared down at the ground, and only a few faces showed any trust at all, any real obedience of soul: that steely masochism that requires so much training. We merely looked, we partially looked, at It, someone kneeled slowly at a certain moment, and many others,
prompted, slowly did so, too; and then they rose again mostly, but some did not, among the trees, in That White, Dead Light.

I confess I felt mostly shock and doubt; I was blinkingly, rebelliously, impiously, ineptly disrespectful and restless among moments of severe awe, even at first; I was withdrawn, then attentive, then withdrawn again differently. My attention, my attentiveness, my strained and straining openness, my aching openness, the struggle to be open with no self-defense, was not singlehearted—I resisted The Announcement, The Inspiration, The Angel, The Seraphic Messenger, not that I doubted that the soul (which is, in a way, the whole of what we have done in the light of what has been done to us) in its distances of belief—philosophy and awe—was at bottom
childlike-and-pious
but I could ignore the child in me to some extent even when, if I may be permitted to say this, God in this form faced me.

The Great Seraph did not seem to be, in any sense,
militant
—not the least
military
—or, for that matter, musical, either. It was neither distant nor fond, It was not commanding or alluring; the phenomenon of Itself was of rare abilities on a not-human base—but related—compacted here into a somewhat recognizable Figure—somewhat recognizable—considerably larger than I was, more undeniably fine than anything I had ever seen, more conscious, but oddly in a way, so that I do not know and I did not know then, I did not know and I had no continuous faith, no conviction about what It was conscious of—love, say, or distant patience, or what. I was aware even then that others saw It differently—as Patience, say, or as Love, or as Militance—but to me It signified nothing, not even the degree to which It was willful and what It might or might not do or say: It represented only Beauty and Meaning, which is to say Truth, but not my truth so far, which is to say, then, New Truth—ungraspable at first, and perhaps always—and It was partly Old Truth, from which I had strayed—but Truth would always be so new, as new as This Figure was, that one might then be slightly—or even strongly—driven to slighting behavior toward It as a result.

Impiety. Self-defense. Rebellion. Whatever.

Those were clearer to me—those modes of resistance—than was the terror of what Acceptance would bring.

It seems to me now it was impiety or selfishness on my part to think that except as the end of things It was not otherwise humanly relevant. It was relevant at its own say-so.

I noticed that It seemed to be overwhelmingly
suitable
—I wanted
suddenly to be like It; this struck me at the second I felt it, this desire, as it formed, that it was now the supreme fact of my life, this aesthetic, this being influenced by a function of The Angel’s quality—this was
Love,
I presume, for an apparition, one that affected my senses, a reality, an appearance.