Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (89 page)

I cannot bear The Seraph’s Message, I cannot exemplify It or Them, Its messages. If It had spoken, I could not now reproduce Its Words, Its Diction, Its Authority. I suppose part of me had always known that a sense of Failure must accompany any attempt at Truth, that satisfaction can never reside in an answer but only in the politics—or warfare—of answers as the Greeks knew, as appears in those famous plays; but still I felt a curiously profound shame, an increasing embarrassment: it seemed to me that there was more shame and shamelessness now that The Seraph had appeared, more than I had imagined could exist, and an increasing embarrassment among some of those undergraduates present who were struck dumb and some who were struck senseless and some who were struck giddy from the strain of a continuance of honest knowledge of how limited and silent knowledge is—ever and always.

It is easier to take a small formulation and lyingly—and honestly, too—use it as an amulet or whatever to stand for a bigger amount of truth and to say that that is
THE WHOLE TRUTH
than to use a large amount of truth with all that labor and still have to admit that it’s only partial and needs correction.

That day, those who became giddy and giggly and who took the soldierly persistence, the Immediate Depth of Belief, of the more serious starers and watchers and tautly awed head-averters as authority for the reality and value of what was occurring saw that the more serious in some cases passed out or rose from the kneeling position when their knees began to hurt. Others scratched themselves or looked suddenly tired or doubtful. Some, not shockingly under the circumstances, actively pursued sexual shame, sexual release, like temple harlots, men and women, because their minds and hearts had been set that way, probably by chastities they practiced; they offered this to The Seraph, or they did it out of greed to taste the excitement of it or in case it was the last one or as offerings of themselves or as disrespect or as a way of claiming attention as some children do with trickily obscene or dry parents or by association of ideas as a form of honesty and of abnegation of the world
and its rules concerning shame and self-protection. Well, I have said all this in a confused way. But again it was clear that no actually universal or regimented reaction occurred among us, even the small group of those fortunately present here today, this afternoon. We had a great variety of responses in ourselves and in others around us. At some point, two people began to dance, far apart from each other. One man disrobed and stood with his hands over his breast and his elbows out and he looked very dour and sure of the holiness of this; and a woman with a powerful voice began to sing but she soon stopped. But then two other people began to sing, but different hymns, and then one changed and sang the other’s hymn, and the strong-voiced woman joined in, the three sang for a while, less than a minute, I think—it just wasn’t one of those times for showing off in that way, even though that wasn’t showing off, really.

I tried to sing but I was off pitch as usual. I was shocked and a little irritated that I was not inspired in a vocal way—it bothered me that I was not raised into the air. It bothered me that we were not joined in a choir, that we were not enjoined to be a group; I began to cry and I got a headache. And the headache and the tears altered in nature and were purgative or oppressive by turns, complaining and merely nervous, joyful and meaningful and then not—this was as time passed.

The witnessing was eccentric, and hardly admirable, what we noticed and how we showed off, and the way we stared and did not stare. There was belief and various ways of enduring and attempting to recognize what was in some regards stupid—It was too magnificent—It had been suitable at first, in getting attention and governing our regard, but we had adjusted in various ways, or failed to adjust, which was partly unbearable, and no further uplift of will or of display or of realized fantasy occurred, and a lot of us wondered how we were to live.

I was in favor of our being raised into the air and of our becoming an amazing choir, and failing that, our marching to downtown Boston in midair, or failing that, on the ground, in the name of the Truth and with the perhaps grandly ambulating and accompanying Figure, Which might, though, have refused to move, Which remained in Cambridge right there, at Harvard Hall.

We might have circled it like the Jews the walls of Jericho or David the Ark.

But no, we stood there—now some people sat—It continued to give no message, It continued to exist in front of us, and that made the
structures of will necessarily docile and responsible, which was grating but which was, in other regards, an ecstasy like other occasions I had known although not so gloriously as this. A serious kind of ecstasy, grave and unexpected, at least by me. The effect of thrumming modesty and immodesty that The Seraph evoked in me (I can say that as if that effect had been constant if I pretend I exhibited no variations of reaction) was a matter of a very precarious sense of brotherhood or equality with It, or of descent, as in blood descent or lineage, in that I seemed to myself to mirror It or know about It to any degree—that knowing made it seem to me I comprehended It—one loses track of how ignorant one was when some terrific knowledge or other is glowing there in the forefront of one’s consciousness; and this sense of union with a great force, a greater force than any I had imagined as showing Itself on earth, carried me toward a swift, terrible pride and delight in the human availability of such a grand inhumanity of spectacle, the specialness, the half-inhumanity of It now that It was somewhat familiar, the way Its Colors and Shapes overlapped suddenly what one knew from one’s own experiences in life and of representations of the ineffable, maybe, so that one as if
recognized
in It light itself and the size of night as well, and starry numbers and grandeurs of air and vistas, and then the way It, Its Colors and Shapes, departed while It stood there, departed from my powers to see, perhaps, the way It became phenomenally ghostly, like speech, conceivably present but not present, imaginable and said but mostly absent, a whisper, an echo, a hint—this had a gravely incremental effect of ecstasy, which in my case became a kind of illiterate eloquence inside me, a babbling, a glossolalia of childish and dream rhetorics: I had been freed from certain human restraints, I was free to be insane—human restraints were mostly absent in the presence of The Angel, It overrode them, satirized and splintered them—and I was not insane in relation to It, the light; by my own or private standards I was allowed to have been adopted by the moment, if you follow me, and to testify in my own blur of languages, in my own meanings, which part of me quite clearly understood and welcomed as being poetry and music, but I know now no one around me could have recognized much of what I said except insofar as it was ecstatic and self-concerned but directed to The Angel as release and as offering.

It was there but in such a way that seeing It was as if Its passage or the passage of Its attributes among us was on some orbit of Mere Being,
and our specialized and ignorant responses seeing It, or not seeing It, our accepting It, our testing It, were A Truth and Necessary but peripheral to the other watchers and could not possibly matter to The Angel Itself.

It was painful but harder on the believing Christians, who are convinced God deals in the details of our existence in memory of His Son. For me, a Jew, I writhed with powerlessness, I ached at the complete humility Its presence forced on us in relation to meaning itself. We could not possess It or treasure It or distract It or own It or guess Its will: we were given no power at all—but none was taken from us, either, except the power of a certain kind of conceit, of not knowing The Angel existed. We were given or granted irresponsibility, silliness, enormous possibilities of dutiful sonhood and subservience in a sense, but we were given none of the ancient or antique power to
command
God through His Son or His Covenants.

We were not like It, we were not cousin to It in the realm of matter and mind and the possible dignities of soul and vision, we were secular and strange and minor, we could mirror It as children do adults at times, and that was to show madness, lunatic attempts at private meaning, silliness, to a grownup immersed in a silent passion and meaning, I guess.

It Itself was irrelevant and gray and transparent for entire moments as one’s state changed, as thoughts involved one in slow chains of inner recognition and outer curtaining to the world. If I wish to remember Its Light, which was more a shadow, really, a displacement of the only light that had been familiar to me until now, Its peacock and flaming sun and star and moon and flower and garden and winter colors-of-a-sort, I remember a partial reality of Its Presence intruding on my thoughts, on my confused rhetorics and outswell of honest syllables, how I was corrected when Its Colors returned or when I refashioned and resharpened my vision, since The Angel’s Colors were, of course, ungraspable by the mind or memory, the many-fingered, hundred-handed mind. The unfingered but shoving memory had no chance. Memory shoves things forward, but only the mind can hold or handle images, can study them. Memory can show things to me as I understood them once, not usually in their presence but in an early memory or daydream or dream at night; that’s all it can do.

Brotherhood has odd passages of deadness toward one’s brothers in it. One’s brothers, a stricken audience—but not entirely, if at all.

They matter, one’s brothers do; they prove me sane, that this is actual—the communal mind judged this to be perceptible.

Under the circumstances of Its silence, should we worship It? Well, not compete or intrude or ask things of It—except gingerly.

One graduate student in English threw a rock at It; and an Oriental physicist attempted to sketch It, to stand both in Its Light and safely behind a tree and look at It from there as if to triangulate Its Height or Quality, which was impossible since It has no shadow, no ordinary relation to Light or, consequently, to dimension or time.

Free Will continued to exist in the very face of the Divine, the Divine on this order at least, but it was Free Will partly shamable by our being Middle Class, our training in
Respectability,
in self-willed conformity, self-willed facelessness, law, democracy or smudged holiness or piety.

Historically, God and the middle class are at odds, or I would guess the middle class hasn’t produced theology. Comfort and decency aren’t much like grace and the nonelect, aristocrats and the poor. Our God would supply universal shelter and would go easy on the punishments since we were trying and would be less severe a figure and hardly doctrinaire—I really can’t imagine a feudal theology in a suburb. Or at Harvard. Or in a poem except as a ludicrous—but beautiful—term about one’s own success in the now more and more middle-class world—the world is the human universe, really.

Many of us asked things about It of It silently, but we obeyed the call to politeness issued by the phenomenon and our own allegiance to
decency
in some cases and our allegiance to celebrity and specialness in other cases—The New Higher Respectability and Fashion of the Soul—since great power suggests coercion and, partly, makes disrespect noble by making it expensive, as expensive as Respectability, at which point it has in it clear responsibility toward meaning.

To some extent, we surrendered a great deal to The Seraph, we were mostly not disrespectful—like dogs. So we did not hate each other’s ill-timed disrespects very much, so far as I can judge now. The sketcher stopped sketching very soon. The rock-thrower stood very still in the pale, strong, low-lying altered light around The Seraph.

That fierce and terrible and altered light, what weird geometries of hints of pinions and limbs The Seraph displayed in slow pale and then brilliantly colored semifluttering. It was like nothing else—of course. Thank God.

I was humble. There He-It is. I had felt as a matter of personal
doctrine that God would not bother with a manifestation, nor would The Devil—or any demon, either: why should Power bother with mediation or an image when It can do and be The Thing? It can impose unspeakable bliss, unspeakable belief in us, horror in the mind as well as in the air, horror or charity in the act. A Power would be not merely greater than life and death—we have that power with tools in one case and will and belief in the other—but a Power would be more insistent than life or death, which no man or woman yet can be.

Unless a Power exists but is not omnipotent and must consider the economics of Its Acts, the politics of sheerly animal truth in making Itself apparent to us and in us finding It out as apparent. I could not see why It should be so patient. Men mostly did demand that they be recognized as having access to The Divine and that they spoke in Its name and with many or all of Its privileges—the idea of The Divine was an Idea of Impatience. I “knew” The Seraph was bullshit—as was, therefore, my pain concerning It, my awe and longing about It, my silliness, my bliss—it was like a dream of happiness slowly making itself known as a dream. Some human had to have dreamed It up. The real and its politics were about to return. It was just flattery to believe The Superhuman would bother with us. I envied the wit, the malignance and magnificence in the knowledge of Goodness, and the obliquity of the jokester, perhaps the groups of jokesters, who had imagined and vivified the image, The Imagined Messenger-Thing, and set it here, who had caused It to appear to me
and others.
Deity can’t be transcendence of Itself toward the human—can’t need us or care unless It, too, is finite—not final. The Angel did not transcend Itself for us. The Seraph in a lower sense transcended Itself by suggesting Heaven and a message—the stillness of utter safety, of no further hunger of any sort. Only a trick would move me toward God in a human—or comprehensible—way. I am moved by Deity that cannot speak to me, that strangeness, that foreignness as yet so unlike us, something beyond what I can or can’t know, nothing of It lies within the procedures, the progression of the moments now, and the ones before, and the ones to come, and the jolted and erratic groups of images of them in memories—God and This Angel are the final points of acknowledgment for me, me, Wiley, who can say, in a case like this, only yes or no, Yes I see, No I will not grieve. A binary form, a Binary Fact—perhaps a chain of sets of binary fact—my religious belief: It is True or It is Not True—but I will believe much that I don’t
otherwise believe if it is understood I believe it for the sake of brotherhood. But Deity for me is a fact without presence to which I say Yes or No. It is present or not present, It is felt or not felt, known or not known—It is always felt and is not known inside the human range, only in human terms. This form of agnosticism, if it must have a name, means I can’t conceive of a Transcendent Truth but only of truth and falsity and sloppiness in a mix—I can’t imagine what a final truth would be in actuality. Those who speak of such a thing say it is not apparent, it is colorless like glass, it is a radiance that lies beyond things, it is summonable by magic, by incantation, by acts named as virtue, it is known by faith. Some say it is apparent. It is referred to in words and known in the heart and passions, apparently, but it is not present beyond those words to me, and it does not enter my heart and my passions. I saw merely a local Seraph that enjoined a respect toward the real as a kind of exile and honor and as disrespect and fear toward the silences that exist in meanings. It bade me love incomplete meanings and with my whole heart but only for a while. It told me to be fickle. It said—It did not speak but I say
It said:
you see how I lie, how I twist things—It said that only new positions are honest or possible but they ebb into old ones, into ghostliness and confusion (a tradition is what one remembers from one’s childhood, one’s grandparents, say—a living tradition is never more than twenty or thirty years old). It said that differences could not be escaped from, politics were inevitable, that political meaning is out of place in relation to real power, genuine beauty, true silence or speech, but they will occur then anyway. It said to abjure tyranny as much as possible and if that meant having many gods, do so, but to recognize that anarchy was weak. It said to love incomplete and complex meanings and One Speechless and apparently not Omnipotent God and to struggle toward a new idea of idea, therefore.