Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  But that sounds as if I were living out a pattern of being a younger child or some kind of scholar with a balanced wit or wit of balance and I’m not like that, and the moment was not like that. I was not at the center of Its Attention, but no drama and no testing inhered in that: the quality of Divine Speech, of mattering as an equal to the Divine Loneliness, if such a thing in some form exists, is a long way off and involves many more kinds and depths and heights of metamorphosis than puberty and death. Purpose is really an odd thing, a very odd thing. The Angel made no request for affection or service, It did not exemplify or ratify any human dream in the sense of what one dreams for oneself except in being not like us and closer to The Great Power or The Great Illumination.

  I could not know if I was shrewd enough or intelligent in piety or the most severely black-souled and sinful or what—if It had a message, it was that silence, that one of not choosing anyone. Since It didn’t speak, it was easy to feel It hadn’t chosen us—we were a random sample. Beauty and goodness may very well, from a higher point of view, be matters of accident, defending and preserved, or sung about; and they may very well test you first of all by being uncertain in themselves as to their nature and, secondly, by giving you no answers. You mimic and sing the best you can and try to become someone whose life makes a music of a sort you can admire; or you had best stand still and mimic the silence of The Angel since you cannot reproduce a quantum of Its beauty or Its silence.

  I was given nothing and I was given everything, I was not tested, I was too much tested, the test would continue the rest of my life now that I had seen This Thing, provided life continued. I was not the most just or good or the most obstinate or the most sly (or sly at all in Its eyes, Its view) among those who were present or I was but it was not known. I was not the median or the worst. None of that was at issue. Its light made me blink in such a way that it was as if I stared even while my eyelids were lowered—I don’t mean the light was oppressive or insistent; or that it interrupted the darkness with its bright oddity: It interrupted everything by Its presence but only in the way you don’t escape from someone you’re infatuated with—their mind and presence—and this was inwardly so for me now that I had been given The Sight of The Thing. I saw steadily inside my own identity now even when I blinked inside, even while I tried to rest from, escape from, attentiveness and Awe. As in any romantic situation, my flirtatious or gallant and damnable silliness, my more and more straining nerves, my sense of meaning and of my being chosen, my rising to a new condition of mind, my being named and at the same time forsaken, my New Love, kept me in an excited state and on the edge of folly—but I didn’t do as some men there and some women did, I didn’t start talking and claiming to be the mouthpiece of The Spirit.

  No one listened—you had The Thing Itself right there. You didn’t listen to more than a word or two, you could tell from the faces those people were no help—what’s the point of hiding inside Error? I would rather be openly wicked—inattentive—jolly.

  I mean, the talkers were duplicitous, were hypocrites: they were playing with damnation after it was fairly likely The Angel had not brought death or salvation. Perhaps by implication, by presenting us with a speechless premise, which, if no one appeared with a television camera, if this occasion could not be proved to have occurred, would have to be argued over and socially dealt with, absorbed, socially digested, turned into an issue, another one, all our lives, and after we were dead, depending whether another manifestation occurred or not. But meanwhile these feverish souls, unable to regard The Marvelous Thing, were talking, were arguing about Its nature, were claiming to know Its nature, were making offers in Its Name—it was sad, that part of it.

  One or two other people spoke intelligently: they testified to Its silence and to Its beauty, to the fragile commonness of the event, they wanted to know if others saw something of the sort they saw; and I thought each thing they said was of immense beauty, but then some of the chatter about Heaven and Hell The Seraph had supposedly whispered to those other minds was beautiful to me too—but these two people, a man, a woman, each of whom said only things such as “It is silent,” and “I don’t know what to think,” and “Isn’t it beautiful? You could never build a church that would testify to such beauty—do you think It wants us to try?” seemed to me more remarkable than the things about Heaven and Hell, which, also, as a matter of truth, I believed while I listened.

  While I listened, I felt, I guess, it was in sympathy to the speaker, some part of my own consciousness of belief.

  The effect of Its Height, of Its Colors and Their Extraordinary Nature and Their Changeableness and The Exceedingly Plangent Pleasure It gave by The Sight of It, did so ornament the burden—and extend it—the half-dear and agonized onus of recognizing that the event had meaning and that The Meaning of This was not given to us in any simple way—Its beauty eased our condition at living now with no Final Meaning of This Manifestation, and in no absolute condition of Testimony that it was almost all, all right, but not really.

  It didn’t judge, It didn’t raise a sword or other weapon or even Its Hand, It spared us Its speech, and if It spoke to us, did so by inducing thoughts inside us, and yet, if my case is that of others, those thoughts, too, were uncontrolled. Years of shame at my inept powers of attention, at the vagaries and caprices of mind when it, the mind and its cohorts, the other horses (or motors) of consciousness, sensing and instinct, so called, and what’s called heart and what I call physical will, those forms of consciousness, in ordinary states or raised up by discipline and grace, had always meandered and reared and run away and never were chemically or animally exact or mechanical.

  Nor were they now raised—or inspired at all—a little, because of happiness and awe—an allowed coltishness and what seemed instinctual caprice, chemical caprice, mild or greater devilishness, interfered. In fact, all the attributes of mind were present now, inside me, but were soothed by the absence of fire and anathema or any sign of wrath or lightning. It was not a matter so much of The Mildness of The Figure as it was of Its Tender Otherness: no war, or antagonism of a great sort, even in the love, existed, since I could not speak for It or embrace It—such a moment was so far off.

  I had known moments of love and goodness and beauty, and this moment was much, much less up and down than those but not very certain. The Sheer Otherness toppled me—balked me. It was not flesh or stone or any regulated kind of light or any known anatomy or architecture of the human that I now loved and regarded, nothing that humans had known, no sunset light or movie light. It was not any recognizable thing. Except, of course, It started—no, no—I mean It offered starting points of recognition: bits of recognizable light, a suggestion of hand and arm and chest; and you went from there to recognition, or I did. But I could not see myself in It or imagine It as related to me in any way but that of superior power or perhaps of Its Hidden-ness as a Personal Reality on the other side of a metamorphosis that was not occurring at this instant, that was not bringing me any closer to the possible thing of It and me embracing each other at least partly by my own will. Just as being a man had been hidden from me on the other side of the sharp ridge of puberty when I was still ten years old, so The Angel existed on the far side of a metamorphosis involving Beauty and Goodness, strength and knowledge, that would never happen, but that I would dream about, or edge close to in moments of grace now, although I was quite sure I would not be able to remember The Angel because my memory, my mind, hasn’t the ability of my senses to regard something for which I have no formal means of interpretation and retention. To be granted grace—or to have been someone who has stolen grace—is no final state: part of its definition is that one has no formal means of identifying or summoning it, only of guessing at its presence and speaking later of its occasion. I don’t know. The effect of imagining or sensing now that I was not going to undergo a metamorphosis in that sense, that I was not going to become like It and in any way equal to It and able to control Its attention or admiration,
made my mind wander and made me love It as I might have loved an older brother had he been of any worth but, of course, much more than that, but considering my wickedness and pride and my common sense, since I was so excluded, the love was hopeless; even in the terms of my own dreams, it was not a final love.

  Along with the other things I felt, which I felt inconstantly, as I am trying to describe now, this was, oh, a factor in suggesting the possibly universal reality of rebellion—disrespect as making itself into truth, even into revelation. Revelation has in it two themes, one of deprivation and one of acquisition: inferiority to the ideal and even to the best of one’s own possibilities of attention, and on the other hand, revelation granted you an imperial grace or role, the means toward the acquisition of Grace and Meaning, or at least knowledge of it, a sense of its place in one’s kingdom or nearby.

  But there could be no peace because of It, no cessation of motions of the mind or of the hurt and self-consciousness and arduous labors of will and of Love.

  And since The Seraph did not organize us—an army or, more beautifully, a choir—or change us frighteningly as suppliants with torn faces and fire and ashes and risen bodies and the dead around us and rending noises, the soul at Judgment—one could see how revelation brought no unison and only the most complex imaginable forms of union and this probably would not have changed even if The Seraph had asked us to line up and sing—unless It had transformed us first. The brotherhood I felt toward the other bystanders was mitigated by embarrassment, which, lo and behold (if I might say that), had to do with competition and shame, with rank in terms of behaving well, or seeming to, those who seemed to know what to do and feel, those who had risen to the occasion and those who hadn’t, grace in my Gentile sense of things, and also a competition about the fiercely scoffing egalitarianism and consequent contempt for us all in our pride and identities (since we are interchangeable), which was at that time my most essentially Jewish trait—this led to a sense in me of struggle, which I denied in the moments of peace, but whether denied to be such or not, the moment of revelation was individual, with only limited aspects of being shared.

  But those were very beautiful—the sharing part.

  But even The Pleasure It gave by The Sight of It or the fear It aroused or themes and thoughts of Holiness and Awe, these were not universal among us, at least not noticeably so at any one time. What was universal among the fifty-eight watchers in The Yard and on Massachusetts Avenue according to later studies were things that could be called Awe, but two people denied having had any sense of holiness at all. Massachusetts Avenue was at once renamed The Street of Universal Light and the street was rebuilt to form The Square of The Seraph, but when the struggle between, on one side, the Irish and black officials of Cambridge and Boston and Massachusetts, and, on the other, those of Harvard, was won by Harvard, the whole thing was considered not a folk phenomenon but something for the educated classes—this is my own lifetime that I am talking about.

  Certainly, for a while, religion ruled at Harvard after this; one might call it a fashion, religion being more important than the state—the state being slowly moved toward being theocratic—but that was something brought by people who had not been present.

  What I saw was a special event that did define the state as secular. The Final Meaning that many of us hungered for had little to do with the politics of daily stuff. I myself would much rather be Holy than Secular—I mean in the world—but in some form other than an insectlike union or a vast and regimented family of sons, say, or of wives, or all of us as wives, male and female alike, or all of us as husbands married to a truth that is so unclear in purpose as the one of The Apparition that day.

  Some of us expect a union of souls and Meaning that will be both clear and simple, and more than either of those, Final and unarguable—each man, each woman, a key, an explanation, a Thrust of Holy Will—and some of us feel that way now but not sensibly, not based on evidence, more as a matter of practical will, staying alive, loving one another to the degree that that can be managed without hypocrisy.

  This wish in me bled that day with consistent wounding. Each stab, each cut, came from more evidence at the complexity of Truth in seeing The Seraph stand and maintain Its silence. The spirit sank and was wounded and pale at the trigonometry-like extent of any answer or response, moment after moment, second after second.

  And like the shadow that I still cast on the walk and that lay in the air between me and the ground, a granulated semilightlessness that had the shape of an irregular pyramid, so that when I think of my eyes and consciousness near the top of the pyramid, I think of the figure on the dollar bill of the pyramid and eye. The desire for simplicity and a portable and easily mentioned answer cast this shadow of my will—this attempting this account—this attempt at meaning, at mattering.

  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 pur
gative 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.