Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  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 word
s 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.

  The Seraph I quote, who never spoke, is not present beyond these words. It was never present for a second except as revelation to the eyes and senses in great and even dreamlike power and richness—that abundance in solitude, inside one’s head. I speak of It now as a vicar of Its absence. I serve in the vicarage of absence. What I am is a man of service in a reality that has degrees of truth and of presence.

  Deity is Itself. Transcendence would be, logically, a term for us cheating on a Final Awe—it would be a trespass. A final awe, even uncapitalized, is hard to practice. Nothing was transcendent in The Angel’s appearance, actually—Its presence was merely, or not so merely, the presence of meaning—meanings complex and not as yet known, and the knowing of which is without set value and cannot be enjoined as a duty. I was humbled as I have often been—I gaped, I did not claim then or ask to be a leader or Messiah, but then only a few short men did in The Angel’s presence. No one was able to misrepresent or to speak for The Manifest Meaning when it was present. One lies later for the sake of being audible and triumphant. To speak to fools as a good hostess does, does Deity authorize a foolish manifestation?

  That was beyond me. I thought of what the image cost. I thought of what such a grand image cost in the universe. I was always broke and I didn’t have the money to do anything even moderately splendid except in my sleep. I couldn’t help thinking of money. I had never dreamed of so splendid a spectacle as this. I could see that some churches and temples ought to be made of gold, dangerously I mean, if they want to suggest belief or faith, really. The final commitment of all that is material to the appearance of divinity shows that the community is serious in what it says about God, is what I am saying, I suppose.

  It towered up, a structure of light but palpable like and unlike the church of light the Nazis made at Nuremberg, and maybe more like the statues of Athena and Zeus that Phidias did of ivory and gold at Olympia and Athens, which were painted as unearthly flesh that was apparently weird with divinity as in the curious light and colors and scale of dreams—but this was wakeful, this was very wakeful. Or at any rate, so people said who saw those manifestations. The Zeus was one of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  This Seraph in front of me was not the work of a dead artist in another state of soul, other from mine. This one I envied. Do you love or respect anyone who’s alive? To the point of self-obliteration and awe? I suppose in prison or in hospitals, in certain states of anguish of soul, some people do. At any rate, I envied the creator of This Angel and was in awe still, was still plucked at by love and a wish to be Good—this was toward the end of the manifestation and I had a headache and considerable nausea and an erection.

  I could not imagine who could live and create such an illusion, the reality in front of me. Surely, the creation and the ambition involved would manipulate the Creator. Much of what I have witnessed in my life, all that I have witnessed, I have resented at times, at one time or another. My having to see It was hard to bear, my having to return to the thought of It later was hard, too—maybe worse. Witnessing is a terrible duty, a kind of horror—especially the witnessing of otherness and of incompleteness, which is what witnessing is as we know in life. Self-love alternates with confessions of ignorance, and selflessness, in a difficult way. I was distended by The Sight of The Angel. When I do not violate my knowledge of It by claiming to have found a final truth about It, I become so charged and swollen with vision that I go pretty far toward being lunatic. And the pain of that and of the extended effort to speak is silencing, is very great. But I can’t say I would have preferred seeing nothing. Or even that I would have preferred seeing indirectly, on the face of someone, not me, what happened, rather than undergo the act of witnessing the stuff myself and being a conduit for such things as the joke or farce of the at-times-ghostly, at-times-glass-mosaics-in-sunlight angel and then its ghostly avatar in gray, in a single color in myriad shades again. I can’t say seriously what I would prefer: less beauty, more beauty—this is what happened. Clearly the truth of it lies in the moments, not in my opinions. My opinions, though, hint at what occurred, they hold evidence together in abbreviated form, but it is incomplete evidence. It is troubling, however, and it takes too much time to open each case, each trial again. I am so broken and burnt with the effort of resurrecting and of continuing and containing the unuttered messages of this event, which admittedly was not ordinary, but was, in its nature of abstraction, infinitely easier than an event involving people on both sides, with both power and arrival and messages and departure. The human messages seem to me to be much harder. But about The Seraph’s arrival and the messages of that and their lasting or twisting into messages implicit or otherwise of duration and their going on afterward in me, the memory even during the time of the visible manifestation, during the moments of the reality of Its presence, I can almost say I am not to be trusted any more than if I were testifying about what I saw in a brawl or an act of murder. I admit that often while It was present, before It vanished, I was sarcastic and angry, cheap and self-destructive and stupidly thrilled, knotted with obstinacy and reluctance because what was going to happen was so commanding a fate that I preferred to be evil or foolish or wasteful in order to be slightly free. Will is so strange a substance, so willful, so self-blinding, that I felt bullied and shoved either way, whichever way I went. But, of course, Awe returned and gratitude, the real kind, the kind that at moments is not embarrassed, after a while, by my having been mean-spirited off and on or always during the course of the manifestation in relation to an ideal of some sort, and by the certainty of my being it again.

  I could not have left Its presence. I don’t think many people could have left Its presence without first having the capacity to be vastly bored: that would free them to their willfulness. Or the conviction that It was overall a lie and oppressive and, most likely, an act of Mammon, something done for money in the service of a god who was a servant of Unrighteousness, some such thing: I was immersed in Its moments, the thickets and plain fields of meaning—of meanings. As I said, I regretted my presence—I regret my testimony now—I keep thinking to myself, Wiley, don’t get lost, don’t get too humble, you have the moments. To guide me, I mean. I can almost say I regretted it, but maybe in the end I’d rather not say it because it isn’t perhaps true enough. What can I regret or prefer in the face of The Real? In a way, it is wrong, or impossible, to speak of The Seraph’s vanishing. The nature of Its presence changed, became more human, more subject to absence, as if much of one’s humanity was based on absences, too, on memory and its showiness in its display of things.

  The particular drama of the departure of The Real Angel, of Those Colors It has, and Its Odors of flame and darkness—and of light—and Its Faint Whisperings and low whistlings and humming sounds, was mixed with the unexpected and untimely appearance of the Moon, a sudden silver rose
that showed itself in the dusky air, large and unlikely and at treetop level—a sudden dizziness of the zodiac, of time. Perhaps an illusion based on misperception of what the passage of The Angel away from me, from us, was like, and how that energy played in the universe and in the immediate and local air, as well, and how it illuminated the darkness with extensions of the angelic colors. And these were spread everywhere among the trees and over the buildings, whether they faced us or not—one knew because the light showed at the corners, too, and on grass behind them, light, shadows, outlines, and surfaces washed in—so to speak—the shallows of this light, at this shore of an ocean of the universe’s capacity for further light; but it was as if The Seraph had never been there but was now present in this mixture of sun and moonlight, auroras, and unseeable lyricisms of illumination, as if memory and opinion might invent new colors that would color the world outside, and the poor eye among its lashes and with its retina would try to deal with this and would be as happy as a child feeling foolish at the seashore seeing something marvelous washing in the waves, in the shallows, but understanding nothing of it, not the light, not the salt smell, not its own happiness. Memory and opinion and the new colors then existed briefly according to new laws, different laws; and this illumination was partly a mirage of a sort common at dusk, but that was a hallucination: one doesn’t see dawn at dusk or associate sunset hopefully with ideas and sensations of dawn: one suggests thought and rest and one suggests actions and waking from the megalomaniacal selfishness of dreams—dreams and error, self-love and fear. In this magical dusk one might think of gathering with others at dinner as if at home, but also as if at dawn right after waking or after a vigil. To wake taut from sleep and dreams, from dreamed crowds and the actual solitudes of sleep, and to return to a moment centered on family or on colleagues—these domestic and selfish moments are ones in which one regards oneself as favored by Deity or in disfavor, in combinations of luck and will and errors or not-errors and accident and not-Deity or whatever—responsibilities, laws, the day, the night—somehow us partly in the grace of the illuminated All-Powerful. Perhaps I was wedded to myself for a fraction of a second, and in that blink, in that slow-witted, human, disobedient act of my self-regard—in the way a child blames himself for having brought on the eclipse by turning on a light switch that he was not supposed to touch—The Angel already visually forgotten by me stopped being there.