Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  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.

  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, th
en 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.