Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (85 page)

The absence of vengeance in Its stance and Its being without any of the accoutrements of myth—It carried no symbols, It was dressed in nothing but undefinability, It was not dressed or undressed, It was not naked, It was neutrally and luminously clear and unclear—It was contentedly beyond the need of further signification—It would never be modified or added to, argued with, corrected, or moved—that is, It was post-Apocalyptic: I fell in love with It as
The End and Be-All;
I fell in love with silence—Its silence anyway.

But the mind, bemused or sanctified or not, in love and a-soar and wishing to be obedient, does not cease to feel and wobble—wobble means think—it discards thoughts and feelings as they draw notice, as they appear they are dismissed. But still one’s heart vibrates, too, between attention and inattention, or rather between low desire—physical desire—and a wish
consciously
(i.e., sinlessly) to know—without physical will—but one gives in to physical desire anyway as feeling if not as act: I did not walk toward The Angel—not more than a few feet, if that; perhaps I imagined it. I expired in a kind of light. The Angel was suitable and I was not, but I imagined an embrace, my will having its way with this Lighted
suitability
that had altered history and was altering it now, without apparently being altered by any of this.
My God, my God.
I thought The Angel had ended history. I thought I ought to walk in The White Furnace of Its Glory—The Grand Wars of God, The Chambers of Holocaust—Daniel and Joseph—I don’t know what my ego and heart and soul were thinking of—It was there, The Angel, and merely in Its being present, It made it stupid to lie; and this was so whether It was an Angel or a hoax, or rather It could not be a useless hoax since It was authentically, irregularly, idiosyncratically joy and awe and so summoning and wonderful in Its form. I longed to know how the others there felt This Apparition, but it seemed pointless finally since our opinions did not matter, and since so long as It was present we were not commanded by ourselves, by our opinions, or by each other but only by It, Its presence. It hadn’t occurred to me before this moment that ours was a species of habitual judgment, but now that this faculty of conscious mind was useless—assent and praise were hardly required
—I did think, with some unclarity, that Judgment Day, like now, would be an occasion of the banishing of judgment from us. This seemed tremendously sexual. It was awful to know my life had to change beyond my power to influence or judge or analyze or find Reason—I could not limit the new consciousness except by unconsciousness, by fainting. Mind would change in the light of Possibility inherent in the fact of The Seen Angel—Its Goodness, Its Forbearance: It did
NO HUMAN THING
. We saw This Angel and It did nothing, This Particular One, Its Appearance, It was one Angel and not an
example
of anything—it could not be multiplied or divided—by us, by our minds, by mine. It was
a Thing,
a kind of Silent Goodness, but not an example. To be governed by Revelation in this form is a tremendous thing and unmanning, much as when a woman says,
All right, I will tell you a truth or two,
and she means it as an act of rule, and what she then says does affect you; if it does, if the revelation changes the way you think, it does make you crazed and weak, perhaps: you are in an unknown place or facet of consciousness: It was like this but much, much, much more so. It was at this point that I went down on my knees and then, after a second, rose again, choosing to stand in the face of This Androgynous Power, which being of this order of magnitude and of this maternal a quality yet seemed male to me.

Of course, It was perceived by others according to different bodies of symbols derived from their lives and dreams—and they saw It as warlike or virgin-maidenly, or virgin-maidenly and warlike, or as like a father, and not at all in the way that I saw It. For some, It was Pure Voice and Radiance and not a figure at all, but for everyone I spoke to or looked at, It was Actuality—and It could be ignored or interpreted as one liked but only at one’s peril: that was admitted.

It was glumly radiant inside a spreading bell of altered light: not the light of a dream, the light of thought. Perhaps the light of unquestioned and unbelievably Correct Thought of a sort no one has yet had, a thought so Correct, I cannot imagine It transmitted to me without my becoming capable of holding It: i.e., equal to It, similar to It—husband or wife to It. It was what my teachers and lovers and acquaintances claimed to possess in their arguments: an undeniable Truth, visible to all—within the radius of Its light. To have comprehended It would have made me an angel roughly to the extent It was one—just as scholars, at colleges especially, feel they have mastered and, by mastering, have surpassed (and brought up to date) the men and women whose work
they interpret. Humility is a very difficult state in its reality, difficult to maintain. The statement or claim, the profession of it, is easy enough. But The Angel was not like Christ or anything human in terms of vulnerability—It was not equal in any sense—It did not mitigate Its authority for an instant. An unchosen humility is very peculiar—it oozes through the self and distorts the framework of one’s identity—the foundation of the self is pride. But pride was gone—off and on—in the presence of The Angel: it was Very Sexual, as I said. I would think that love must abandon any sort of hope of a limit to the finality of caring, no limit exists to that ruthlessness except in the will to disobey. Final Tightness would explode you—The Angel’s was not final. If the truth is not final, then it is not greater than me beyond all endurance—The Angel did not end my life. A belief that permits questions is human. Any entirely true belief ends any problem of will. I did not believe The Angel was of that manner of authority after the first few seconds—perhaps a minute all told. The light of The Angel lay among trees that had individual leaves and clusters of leaves in a familiar and regular scale but diminished in the fraught depths of their real dimensions in Its presence in the powerful and upsetting light, the unspeakably peculiar but very beautiful radiance of the eerie Seraph.

To survive—as in my dreams when I am threatened with death—it is not believable that one will live, and one doesn’t live longer in the dream; one wakes to cynicism, to morning air, to faith of a sort.

But the nearby buildings and paths and faces were not dreamlike. The sky beyond The Shadow and The Figure was real sky. Nothing became less real in that light, merely less important
for the moment.
It became less interesting than the light itself, than what stood so tall-y and so changeable and stilly at the center of the light—time had stopped for It to some degree, although my breath and my heartbeat continued—that stood so forbearingly and goadingly and silently.…

This manifestation of meaning and silence—it was comic to think—overrode several fields of study, lives’ work, notions of guilt and convictions of sins and sinlessness, and most theories so far, a great many things all in all—but not everyone present perceived It as The Angel of Silence. Many thought It spoke but no two agreed about the speech they claimed for It. As usual, the visions of audible or written or seen grace were solitary—except that The Angel was present to a number of us, all who were there, who were not clever or devious. Everything was changed, was undercut. Being a student and largely without family
and not solidly in love although I loved a few people, a foolish selection as usual, I was susceptible, I was ready, for the obliteration of Old Thought in this anxious excitement, as suffocating as an asthma, of The Angel’s Silent Truth, Its Testimony by means of presence and silence—undoubted presence individually, doubtful only socially although everyone within the bell of light agreed Something Extraordinary had been present: unless they thought it clever to hedge, to pretend to a more complex sense of human politics afterward than the rest of us. Extraordinary—and of extraordinary merit to us, to me.

That is too mild but I am trying to avoid error. I admitted It was an Angel. If It was fake, It was impressive enough to convert me to what It stood for, although I didn’t know what that was yet, but I would spend my life searching, perhaps not monomaniacally but with considerable persistence for Its Meaning. The readiness for this in me, the credulity if you like, submissive and sportive, violent and pacifistic and partly rebellious in turn, became my irreverence, which burned like a titanic shame—a terrible and yet naive and entire
amusement,
perhaps lifelong. It hardly seemed a matter of spirit and belief in a fancy way so much as a kind of anecdotal thing about me being dragged into the proximity of Holiness—and Holy Vision—now seen as a vast suitability beyond my powers of judgment and not requiring my assent in any form. Holiness manifested Itself, remained silent, and excluded me, mind and spirit and body—but not my emotions—and included me in a certainty of knowledge about Something for which The Creature of Light was an emissary but of which I could hardly speak.

It was not perverse or wrong—it was
suitable,
appropriate: I was perverse and wrong.

The direction of The Hinted Doctrine and of the change overall that was called for by the sight of The Figure was just not clear. Human inventions, human crimes were not descried. Nor did The Angel seem to be any sort of absolute example of anything—even of eternity. The awe I felt at the beginning of The Manifestation had within itself that startling power of truth of a film of a seedling growing over a period of months; the film is continuous; then the film is edited and shows the seedling forcing its way through pavements and into an as-if-eternal sun, and the film is true although one will never see such a thing as it shows.

Some of the
truth
I felt as present, some of the meaning was false such as that it, my awe, would soon not be parenthetical but be worldwide,
then universal, then eternal, more than a world conquest, a conquest of space and Time, but this was not the case. I was
passively
evangelical, expectantly evangelical—which is perhaps a middle-class cast of soul—but nothing happened of that sort.

I was not sad. My expectation of eternity, my sense of Revelation here, contains, in a startling form, my belief, hidden to me until this moment (when Eternity or something partway to It showed Itself but did not adopt me and take me within Itself), of a common and individually willed but universal disrespect in us, because the power—love or force—was never in fact absolute—irresistible—final. I don’t know why so absolute an object—which would crush me—was desirable; or perhaps it wasn’t; perhaps it’s just that one knows one would have to love absolute power absolutely—the soul has odd twists and knowledges of politics in it. Deity, in the form of some reasonably final force, was showing Itself, was showing It did not mean to bridle this time, either, the disobedient and spiritually incoherent species. No finality—such as the rising up of the dead—occurred to make this clearly the ultimate moment. Disrespect and its inevitable companion, sentimentality, were then at once as apparent in us (me) as the silence of The Apparition was an aspect of It—if you compared stories.

A great many people present must have wanted to deny It as I did not. Disrespectful—and sentimental—as I was, I was willing to accede to It (even if It was an error, a hoax) from the start, partly I think because It was not dressed in gold but mostly because It was so lovely in the way It was
suitable;
but I’m a sort of orphan; and others must have wanted to preserve their investments and truths, partial truths and nervous lies and disrespect, as not symbols but Truths. They did not want to defuse the power of lies to obliterate the powers of the mind; I must say I was uneasy and sickened by it—the thought of truth, Truth,
TRUTH,
TRUTH. The deep sense of value they had in their lives made them seek some emotional or sexual message that would leave them intact, that would be the rest of their inheritance, so to speak; whereas I knew you would have to throw yourself away entirely—entirely—if you wanted to come to being able to bear TRUTH—of course, then you wouldn’t know ordinary truth, the truth of most people, and so you couldn’t speak, either; you’d have to make your way back, so to speak: It was in the myths and metaphors: I’d read about it, I’d dreamed about it. To respect this has never been hard for me, but it was sickening to start to live it through: and there was no ceremony of denial or of mutual
agreement, no asking if you wanted to see This, no testing of the reality of the affection of The Apparition, no formal establishment of ceremony concerning The Somewhat Final Dignity of The Actuality of The Seraph and making It bearable—or whatever.

It did not speak. It spared us. I can theorize about
Holy Speech,
the Timeless rending Itself to make one syllable of somewhat businesslike utterance—one syllable would be all It would have to say if It chose to speak at all and not simply occupy everyone’s mind and all matter—more easily than I can about the possible speech of The Actual Angel. It would have stammered, It would have been loud, It would have been skyey trumpets and an earthquake, a known language, a mixture of a lion’s pure vastness of temper and self-will and a mother’s exhausted or defiantly unworn lullaby. Listening to It would have been one of those epic affairs of
Listen, comprehend very fast, comprehend at once, or die or nearly die,
as in childhood; or as when one is in love or when, as in first grade, one must learn to read in order not to doom oneself in relation to the Middle Class and money and Ordinary Thought; or as in a fistfight or as in a battle. One is very attentive in those cases. It is hard, nonetheless, to make out the sense of what is happening. One tries, and the moment takes on a transcendence from that trial, if one does succeed at all at the grace of listening. By which I mean The Angel could have trained us or could simply have implanted knowledge in us and not be bothered with words if It chose. But The Angel was silent even in that sense, as if It was too democratically inclined, Its knowledge of justice was too great for It to consider such coercion.