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.
It never did speak, but in the actual moment it was very strange not to know or to be able to guess what It would say when It should speak soon as one expected It would. I had once or twice in my childhood thought about, noted, even imagined tones in The Tactful Silence of Deity—imagined tempting and taunting It, or earning from It an omen or a sign. I had once held an idea that an Angel need not and might not speak. But in the moment, I was afraid and I hoped for the trial of attempting to grasp Its Word and in being judged consequently. In the weight of the truth of Its Appearance, in the presence of the marvelous, one would struggle vastly, terribly, when a Seraph spoke, homosexually, I would think, to be a True Ear and to understand and respond faithfully, to show docility. One would be like a child again, immortally, irrevocably vulnerable, one would hope to be the favored son, the soul most blessed by Divinity as shown in one’s comprehension, one’s response and perception of the penetration of the message, of the occasion of Angelic speech. I say this from deduction. I see how Jewish or Christian-monastic or Christian-arrogant it is. I see that a true Christian would feel differently, even a blurred Christian—such a one would not imagine it was an occasion for performance, or that one’s performance would matter except as etiquette within a complex form of respect and a half-acknowledgment of one’s own powers of being damned through disrespect and one’s own silliness, a sense of one’s twistedly complex and figurai place in dozens of hierarchies, even of immortality seen as human effort stored in various ways—art and power—inside the giant tribe.
Or perhaps this is me as a prophet, as no one’s son—i.e., a renegade from The World, an adherent of Faith, hiding it in a notion of the Christian and then saying I am not a Christian.
It is sad to know by how much a written account, removed from physical presence, fails. There is no equivalent in speech of the Seraphic appearance, no silence or stillness imposed by the dignity of what was seen and by one’s wonder. The appearance of words on paper has only the unprovable presence of a sort of unhierarchical music and a black-and-white liberty of response; we speak to each other—honest listening is a form of speech—in a black-and-white republic of secrets and corners and sil
ence in which what was present that afternoon is present in the language only if one is attentive and willing to be impressed or if some conviction concerning the subject and its meaning makes one patient or if some reputation of success and of duty and pleasure makes one attempt to attend the ceremonies of the music—otherwise, it seems the soul of the occasion is lost; and if it is not lost, it seems so mutual an act that in the light of the failure of language to be a presence, the listener has spoken it in its truer form, the reader has written it with more faith and conscience—and workmanship—than the writer has written it although he tried, but perhaps not full-heartedly enough; or perhaps the efforts of inscription dirtied things, and reading, or listening, is the purer and truer act, the better part of attention to the event.
I tried to keep my humor so that I would not faint. I did not want to not be present and fail the moment or have it be a dark moment and as far away as if I saw it through a veil of fever or other pain of the nerves as in lovemaking or writing or other forms of grace. I suspected that the initial courage of not fainting, of doubting and not doubting and being sane, would have to give way to a profound and unremitting awe sooner or later, which is to say, a madness of attention—I was more afraid of that than I want to admit: I was barely twenty—but I had my disrespect, my sentimental awe, rather than the real thing. At that age, to give way would be a limitlessly sexual surrender—and of a body young and of considerable common value and not yet greatly dirtied or misused. It was not profoundly surrenderable. I was proud still. Perhaps after torment or in certain kinds of ecstatic aggression, it would glide toward surrender—an outcry, a spilling—and I would listen. The silence would drain away and be full of sounds including that of my own freed voice: freed in this other—and not American—form. I had known some of the rapturous and tormented Berserkerhood of fighting and of earnest sports and of adventure, from which I more or less quickly returned to my usual forms of consciousness, rescued from adventure and mystic silence, both, so to speak; but not yet having been broken by physical ordeals or psychological ones, by love or by ambition, and not having agreed to service in projects of acquisition or advancement or duties, I did not know the chains and secular horrors of prolonged intimacy with a manifest Truth as other people, more broken or less, in other patterns, knew about that stuff. Like any virgin, I wanted to set willful limits on whatever I did now—but only in the name of being strong enough for anything, a kind of boast that would not be proved out. My feelings of humor were a form of virgin independence, chastity, maybe obstinate—my lesserness was a great problem, you know? I said The Seraph spared us and did not speak—now, that is something I say, but when I try to imagine it not as a written fact but as a truth, I see it occurring second after second, in various forms of possibility and doubt, gambler’s (and athlete’s) odds, pretty much at the edge of an extreme surrender that the body yearned for and embraced and denied and scorned, and powerfully in each of those impulses or states; and the mind still more passionately within the frame of its own kind of passion soared and fell, believed and waited—and had opinions, judgments, even though I said earlier one didn’t judge The Angel, one did; one gave assent and withheld it—well, it became clear that you had to do something, stand still and breathe, of course, then smile, salute, ignore The Angel, greet It, attempt to study It, love It, serve It in the face of Its gentle silence, Its complete diffidence toward the real. Or one should rebel. It was clear (or rather it became clear) that Its Appearance was such that It did not need the assistance of language, or of patience. It was not a dubious object like The Serpent in Eden. It had nothing about It that was doubtful in the way ascribed to Angels sometimes in Holy Writ—It could command us in any way It chose, merely by a flexion of Its will, or if It had no will, then a flexion of Its thought, Its prayer, Its mode of song, whatever. The patience The Serpent had to show was necessary because its surface, its cold, legless glittery surface, its being a scaly anomaly of a creature had to be overcome for the sake of persuasion; but the appearance of The Seraph as an example in the world, in Its own light inside the ordinary Boston sunlight, of nothing familiar in an altered and unfamiliar light, was so self-proving, to say the least, or I was so persuaded, that It did not need to persuade us further—that was hardly the problem: I think assent without saying: I can’t begin to describe the atmosphere of persuasion—but it was also a kind of big so what. We were persuaded—I want to say in the way light seems to be persuaded of itself, candlelight or sunlight—but we were given no instructions; and this was so extreme a feeling, so PROFOUND a feeling, that I could not ever again doubt the extraordinary power of emptiness to be just about inevitably also a plenum of persuasion—of belief—and disrespect.
I understood, waveringly, how fame, the mania to build a palace, a pyramid, a book, how that male or human and female hunger to say This will make history could rule one’s life, to make manifest this mixture of will and belief and silence—and suitability and effect on others, as if forever: for as long as most things mattered to people. Mostly in real life I didn’t feel that spur—for a lot of reasons—but I saw it now: a form of feeling it at a distance. Nothing could be more marvelous than to fill the earth with the reek of glory—but I was in need of the patience and charity and silence, the absence of ill treatment in The Seraph that afternoon at Harvard, to feel that, to see it.
I have dreams of being like that. I can list elements of Its manner as I somewhat confusedly noticed them: a skin or integument or covering that was made of prisms or was sweaty and the sweat was prismatic. A hovering faceyness. Waterfalls, elephants (patience and strength), all manner of lightnings and glares, large and small flowers, rivers (of a lot of different kinds), children’s faces in shadow in polite rooms, mirrors, explosions, plumages, grass, stairs, large (or monumental) doorways, and large and famous façades—It was of those orders of things visually but more suitably, wisely, more dear, more distant, so that they probably ought not to have been named or listed as I have just done; it seems a childish list to me.
It was very fine throughout Its height and width and Its surfaces and in the implications of folds and pinions, gowns, wings, hands, and the angle of Its presumed neck and the unspeakable face, which I do not have the courage yet to remember and probably never will, and which I may have largely invented because what I saw was not seeable, and I had these things, these forms, in me from other occasions and used them here.
The furthest extent of human perversity and independence of will was startled into good behavior, not completely, but to the point of attesting the miracle, the pause in natural law. No reporters or cameras got there, no one summoned further witnesses; it was a particular event, public but inward, and in the end private and without commotion or disturbance, except inside us, of course, those of us who were accidentally present, but, of course, I don’t know what in the light of the nature of this occasion and of the Angelic Visitant the grounds of reason should be in speaking of an accident of presence.
The Seraph didn’t try to register on us anything by way of words or gesture, rewritten or explained commandments or biddings or forbid-dings or predictions, none of those things. It didn’t produce any audible effect except for a low hiss or whisper as of a fire. The tangles and fuzz of the human minds and sensibilities present, the ambitions—everyone, of course, was in midstory, was in the middle of a dozen stories of enmity and friendship and of money and of circumstances and studies and love and family and politics—we were in a sense let alone inside our stories. We remained unbidden, unspoken to, untrumpeted at.
At this stage, once we were past the initial internal uproar of seeing It and having to make room for belief that this was happening, it seemed incredibly loving and fond of It to say and do nothing, to let us alone.
Inside us, inside our skulls and bodies among the various physical devices of awe and caution (fear and attentiveness for observing), while being very shocked, some were like me, curious beyond the reaches or range of sense, good sense, wh
ile being somewhat unable to be disbelieving and amused (although in off seconds those feelings came anyway), and even drunk with relief in some instants because of having a conviction now of a final sense of importance about my life as a witness in this case, the actual case, the accident or fate or the luck or meaning of being present at this revelation—the revelation of the presence of an actual Seraph, no revelations so far in recent history having promised so much of the chance of a divine meaning separate from holocaust or apocalypse, although, of course, It might level us with fire or immediate oblivion now if It wished.
The idea that one might be incinerated or punished does bring in some people an illuminating burst of manners. Others, the women more, become hysterical at the implicit constraint. And one or two young men joined in with them in that. I was tempted by my own hysteria as well as theirs and verged on it but was reined, bitted, by upbringing and respect (the concomitant of disrespect in me) and curiosity.
And in a short time, the hysteria was quiet again.
It was stifled by awe, by the possibility of not having the strength to endure all the kinds of weight of the occasion that is The End of The World but not entirely. The entire end, that would be a Final Meaning. This had only a breath of a sense of Apocalypse, one not at our will; and it was Apocalyptic without any need of display in that the end of the world as it had been for oneself, one’s death and the death of most of what one knew and the ways one knew it, the extinction of will in the old sense, of belief in the usefulness of will, occurred anyway, a kind of elicited asthma, self-annihilation, the birth of inhibition because of The Angelic Presence and Silence, a Silence that saw us, and if It did not choose to look, a Silence that was—since it was an undeniable presence—in an elaborate relation to us.
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