I imagine many of us to be such fighters that we try to hold on to certain advantages for dealing with what comes next even when what comes next is likely to be flame or more light than one can bear—perhaps it is impossible to give up one’s nature at first or perhaps ever; one has one’s strategies and appearance of virtue for the passage here, one’s cunning, the Odyssean strengths at the vestibule to the Afterworld or within it, according to poetry, within the confines of Death.
Its presence, considering Its speechlessness, and power, was like a death.
But I imagined all that as laid aside with regret or even hatred, but since, if one lives, one will most likely be a witness from now on, what need is there for most of such aspects of will in one’s self as one has needed up until now when one was not a witness? Almost certainly, one can expect to be inspired now and protected—oh, not physically: one can be martyred, used in various ways in whatever time or timelessness there is to be now: one has a very different sort of soul—the total of one’s self now includes this occasion and one is different.
It was so impressive, The Seraph, that in the moments of seeing It, I had no wish to speak, to shout Alleluia or anything. Quite simply, there was nothing to say and there never would be now unless, of course, this was local, and one would want or be driven or inspired to speak of It to others who had not been here, who were absent from This Truth. At first, one or two of us did essay a casual Hosanna or Alleluia or Hallelujah or Pax or Pace or Peace, but it was like a mere further murmur and rustle of the leaves, of the air. After a while, no one shouted or cried out, every one of us, even a blind man nearby, we all forwent acclamation and the relief of outcry and of astonishment—we rested in an amused and unresting and exalted silence.
Then that, too, passed in the lengthening pause or hiatus of the world, in this pause of our worldliness in which judgment, assent, and dissent continued but not as before, and those of us who remained sane and unhysterical inwardly and unrapturous in a total way, unblissridden and as if in tears, and interested in dealing with others in this lengthening arch of time, of belief, glanced around at others on the walks to see if we were mad suddenly or if this moment was attached by the same approximate rules to the moments before as moments had always been attached to others. This was curiosity and disrespect, as I said, and unrestingness, but not a restlessness of an exalted sort. Of course, moments couldn’t be attached to each other by the same rules now, the rules that inhered in the moment before, of life taking place among us day by day, with breakfasts in it and bathroom acts and classes—but some of that did still obtain. One was not amnesiac. And the Heavens still had not opened to show The Ranks of the Seraphim and Cherubim and the Archangels; our Seraph had not spoken. What we had was enough even for someone greedy of spiritual glory, but it was not the ultimate. In turning my head to look at what others were doing in the face of this unfinal magnificence, I did not deny that this was a rare moment, and in the light of final hope, the most rare moment in any recent age, matchless and singular, unspeakable and terrible, as I said at the start, this Marvelous Beauty and fearfulness and embarrassment—and It was not a night dream, not a noon or late-in-the-afternoon hallucination. But unless It was those things after all, a dream or a hallucination, then, since I wasn’t destroyed yet and the moment was real, I probably ought to attempt speech, now or soon, provided I hadn’t been stricken dumb, speech as in prayer or greeting as I’d read men did in times of emergency or with Angels. I could question and plan, show piety (to some degree), praise, beseech, sing—it did seem that was what I ought to do next. I wanted to address The Apparition, The New Reality, and I murmured this and that phrase of salute and gratitude, Hear, O Israel and The Lord is my shepherd and Our Father and, without intending blasphemy, Hi, my name is Wiley, but, of course, It would know. The language of ancient government, Latin, seemed more dignified, and I said, Credo, credo.
Part of me was freed from any urgency about manners or seriousness or awe ever again. One could testify by a kind of rough readiness since Salvation is inherently irresponsible once it occurs, if, that is, this was Salvation and not Damnation, or something Entirely Neutral. But assuming from Its silence and the great beauty It had and from my continuing to live (although, to be honest, I did not much care to live; I was grateful, though, and slightly sad or grated on by having my old consciousness) that what was occurring was kind, deeply so, well, one need not worry then, except, of course, as love or the spirit directs. The honest and for the moment and perhaps forever now monastic and martyrish soul, saved by visible presence, only that, is simple in spirit, like a child, one is a directly childish soul with a parent about whose judgment one is assured and about whose powers one has few doubts. In this state of trust, in this form, my will, as a fighter, if I may say that, led me to whisper, experimentally, out of an honest adherence to my own identity, my own soul, My God and Hey, not exactly without and not quite with irony. I did contemplate, maybe with distaste, the impossibility of speaking of this later, this so obviously great happening: What could I say to anyone not present unless this event itself gave me a proper vocabulary for such an account?
But The Angel’s silence supplied no clue to a language. How would one address the difficult auditory and intellectual apparatus for listening to me that people have? Here are the holes into which words drop and roll—and then unroll themselves into images—words and syllables; and here are the screens on which messages blink, jump, and are so radiantly tentative (while lyingly claiming supreme fixity and absolute reference); and here are fields and responses of electricity, electric bloomings and rustlings. One would have to organize a movement, have disciples and superiors and a kind of priesthood; the message has to be prepared for or it is entirely incomprehensible to the ears and eye and mind.
The Angel I saw did not speak because Its message was too corrective, too new: Its appearance had reference to Colossi and movies and other things. How could someone like me address such an apparatus as each modern man had for attending to speech or messages in reference to the truth of a vision like this one? People have their own knowledges insistently. Words, spoken or not, are by most educated people maybe brokenly re-created and read a second time, inwardly, and edited to replace what was said in accordance with what the listeners have already learned, and they have not learned this. Every man or woman listening to me is riffling through his or her past to find a former meaning or sets of old meanings to use rather than actually listening to me. Or rather they are listening to me in that fashion which means riffling through themselves to find old snapshots and records which they look at and listen to and say that that is what I mean. They have not learned what I now know—and I only partly know it.
And it was not certain that this was not The Last Trump, and that God Himself was not appearing over Rome, say, more probably yet Jerusalem, and we here in Harvard Yard were getting this outlying but impressive Local Show, a road show, A Local Angel, not The Central Figure but A Mighty Beauty anyway, and God would come to us later: that kind of old time and space notion seemed at once ludicrous and courteous—God acting like a man and being subject to a schedule and to time and space. How would one speak of this notion of Provincial Revelation and not be joking to the point of a painful inanity? Someone who had never had a Visitation or imagined such a thing or been given words and forms for thinking about it, what would he or she think, how could one convey the grandeur of a moment that omitted so many people, assuming they were omitted, that this wasn’t the end of the world: Don’t look like that, Wiley, it’s not the end of the world. So many left unvisited, unvisioned, which somehow seemed unlikely, undemocratic—elitist and selective—unjust—if this was an aspect of Deity, how would one deal with such injustice, accept it? We were privileged in The Yard—would that make one see one’s life as a missionary effort, would one become finally evangelical, a matter of salesmanship and soul, perhaps of truth and bending the truth in order to serve The Truth? I had read of such things. It is hard t
o know and silly to speak of one’s reactions honestly when they did not persist. Certainly I was conceited, and just as certainly I was modest. The moments did not continue being profound, and my heart and soul were not steadily attentive to The Figure but often meandered or stumbled into delight or odd forecasts of the possible and a very great deal of hope about the future now as the silence of The Figure and my own continued life hinted that questions of meaning would remain.
For God is final meaning. And any intention of final meaning rests on thoughts of God. Any pure example, offered as purely true, hurls us skyward, halfway to the old Heaven. We in the West claim Divine Lineage for what we say and do and how we feel and act—not me: not me—and in The Figure and around it were such perspectives as cathedrals and theologies offer except there was no trace of Gothic or of columns and no symbol of theology that The Figure carried. There was beauty and awe, a low hiss, great size, and a light that in spite of clarity and brilliance and beauty was mysterious—but this tone of order, Tacitean or Latin or whatever, was not present in the moment. Those of us who saw The Angel were not ennobled in any old sense of being invited—or forced—to be figures of a new government, of minds and of men and women—we were governors of nothing—but silence. Our testimony, I think I knew already, would be valueless except insofar as it was labored and worked on and logical, in some wholly logical sense, starting from an unideal premise, and having to admit that This Marvel, fine as it was, was not an Ideal Example of Divinity or of evil or of intrusion by Superiority—superior mind or whatever. One knew better than to claim the figure was Meaningless, that it had no Divinity or tie to Divinity—a claim of meaninglessness like that, or any such claim, like the claim to know or to have guessed at final meaning, claims to know Deity and challenges the darkness. The Angel was silent. Why accuse The Figure then of meaninglessness? I did not turn my attention away from It for long. I did not stop desiring It. I did not begin to find It unsuitable. I did not turn my back to It and walk away. I remained there as long as It did. It was Glorious, It was the best I know about, but It was not Final.
And I used folly to rest myself from awe, from childish awe—perhaps it was childish—to rest myself from jealousy and jealous demand that It be more than It was or that It care for me more.
I thought even that perhaps some satellite system was in place and doing this; and Light and Electricity of no Divine Order would now flash from The Figure in front of me to underscore Its undoubted but obviously unclear meaning as a test or study of us: or perhaps it was unclear only to me: but I did not look around to see how others were acting, I no longer had the courage to maintain a belief of my brotherhood with others—I said to myself that we all were fools and were being fooled and perhaps This was a mocking device of Extraterrestrials and The Military, but whatever way my nervous mind took at any forking or point of quandary, The Sight remained and so did my conviction of Its worth and meaning. The Seraph was so marvelous a structure that even if It was false, It didn’t have to figure us out anymore or do anything further or say anything: It had solved the problem of fooling me and taking over the center of my mind and heart just by being there in some incredible accident or plan which It seemed to have no intention of explaining.
Whereas I did have to do something. I had to speak to myself when My Awe or My Astonishment blinked. Self-preservation and pride reacted in their various automatisms when The Seraph refused to give a command, to display a sword or gun or trumpet, or to release salvos of ancient or celestial fire, when It did not command me to be humble and to listen to Its silence, Its will, for which I was grateful since I would have tested Its Divinity or power in accordance with my systems for being a man here on this earth, in this life, and might have been punished more than I was by knowing The Angel had shown itself without explanation or proof of Divinity or purpose.
I know that I have to die like everyone else, and that displeases me, and I know every human born so far has died except for those now living, and that distresses me and makes most distinctions and doctrines look false or absurd or semiabsurd, but often I yearn to die, to have it be over, and then the doctrines look all right to me, and my own recklessness seems a verification of them, my folly proves them in part, by default: that happens up close to things and not at a distance; or rather each state, of fear of death and of appetite for it, is a peculiar mix of distances and closeness and of happiness and unhappiness.
To accompany The Seraph, to undergo the extinction of the earth in Its company, and my own extinction, to be forcibly seduced as by my father or my nurse or my mother when I was a small child, is a curious adventure to have as an adult. In just the way my father, S. L. Silenowicz, used to say, We have to go inside now, when we were out of doors together, The Seraph might take me out into the universe and dissolve my earthly self and make me into light or darkness at Its own will—it hardly mattered which: I could not sanely resist except in terms of silliness or inattention as a form of gallantry or as (along with obstinacy and the risk of bringing down punishment as a similar form of) flirtation with a potency so much beyond my own. The Seraph, by Its Presence, hoax or not since It was so impressive, announced the end of perhaps all my earthly pretensions; and It did this simply in the fact that It was There. It had arrived and become materially perceptible, and It remained materially perceptible, second after second, hoax or device of rule or whatever It was, and It did not care to cure the earth or me, time or light, although perhaps It touched with grace and final knowledge a number of minds, but if so, the possessors of those minds have been secretive about it—nothing human so far possesses ultimate grace. At most, The Angel was an emissary of The Final, but that was left to us, I think. I do not intend to reenter the frame of mind I was in then. It existed in front of me, It had only to exist in my sight and as the major sweetness and crisply, almost burning center of the field of my attention, It had only to be There in Its Very Real Presence in front of me, for Its Literal Existence, Its True Presence, to precipitate in me a changeable and varying conviction about many things and a Great Love for It, and This Conviction and This Love, this immense burden of meaning and awe, loosened my self-control violently every few seconds, so that my inner state was one of varied heats of pieties, madnesses, catatonias, bits of peace, of grace, the varying convictions of Final or Real Meaning and of my struggles of will not to expect further moments and a return to silliness and doubt and emptiness: that is, my will still struggled to be a Will That Mattered and to be The Will that dominated my conscious existence—this even in The Presence of So Awesome a Will as that of The Seraph, or The Minds Behind The Seraph—and this came and went, these opposed heats and states of the soul, or states of mind, burningly and varyingly, like a flame, like one’s heartbeat, without seeming to have any nature of a paradox any more than one’s usual heartbeat does—I mean one’s own heartbeat, which, variable and many parted, confers, with a reason, a rhythm: that a kind of invariable or unvarying meaning exists so long as my heart beats. One’s own heart is a true heart, is true to one, one’s own heartbeat is true, is my truth. Look here, now it is clamorous and now it slows; it is slowing, but when one was excited, one’s heartbeat, one’s life, one’s tidal nature were clearly present, the salt rush of blood truth, the taste of truth in one’s mouth, the grown-up taste of salt blood and heartbeat among fluctuations of heat and chemicals, the chemicals of sensation and of breath. I held my breath at times but I breathed, I had to go on breathing. I wasn’t changed into a new order of man, although, to be fair, I expected to be. At times, I wasn’t even changed into a new form of spiritual amphibiousness if I can say that, able to breathe and live in another medium besides the weekday one of ambition and cowardice and so on, the one I had chiefly known until now, but I had known another medium of awe and true docility, although nothing that so breathed as this moment with the unbreathing Angel did of an actual eternity. In fact, my breathing—mine and that of one or two people near me on the college walk—seemed pointedly human, noticeab
ly swoopish, gasping, and even asthmatic with nerves (or Awe) in comparison with The Seraph, Who pointedly didn’t breathe. And the oddity of the moment did seem to suggest we might be able to do without breath or might now be able to breathe in a new way, now that we were illumined or whatever, but it wasn’t true, any more than I might be able to have the traits of my father or of an older brother merely by having a moment in which in my presence they prove their greatness of soul. I expected Its traits to be universal now, and I held my breath to see; and at one point, in simplicity of spirit, and at another time, with more complexity of mind, I half rose on my toes and moved my arms to see if we (I and the others near me) could now rise in the air in final human pyramids, airborne, flocks of souls like grackles, humans in the absence of any story but this one now, going through the Aether to Heaven.
Or, if that is too optimistic, to The Last Judgment.
Its Quality of Forbearance, of Distinguished Patience, had so much Meaning for me that I had no real doubt that It was a Manifestation and not a hallucination, that It was a phenomenon of lived existence, a phenomenon of lived theology and goodness, not a trick that could make It be of No Meaning except a human meaning of ruse or whatnot.
Indeed, I thought that was Its purpose, so much so that I did not fear my humiliation at Its will, I did not think It a policeman of any kind, or a messenger exactly, so much as a marker. I accepted it, my humiliation in relation to It, which you could say was at Its will, at Its permission, in a (if I can boast) burst of being civilized: I wasn’t what It was; and it seemed ugly, even blasphemous, both as human stuff and toward the divine, to assert myself: it is enough I have had a chance to see It.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 68
