Shame and Wonder Read online

  It was the kindness of it, though, I found most troubling. Oh my, this is very good. Yes, this is lovely. Oh, but look…(Old Mrs. Gilbert, drawn to error as a vulture to corruption, would have made it easier, hardened my response to mere obedience.) Oh, but see if you look at the grass, it isn’t really solid green like that. You know? (Perhaps I knew. Perhaps in a background sort of way, as one knows there is death and history and other imponderables. But of course it’s green. We all know grass is green.) But look. You see? (I didn’t really need to look. But here’s this angel gently guiding me to look back over ground I thought I’d crossed, transcended, managed to express within a workable idea—am I to toss all that away, go mulch it up, return to unresolved constituents?) See, look. Look at the colors. Look at all the browns and yellows. See if you can draw that, won’t you? See if you can try to draw it as it is. (Why should I draw it as it is? We already have it as it is. Why have it twice? And what will John Hernandez do—reduced to realism? All that he’s invested. I suspect it will not translate very well.)

  One Sunday morning, late in January, I stopped by my old school, parked, and walked across the mostly brown and yellow grass to the rear of the purgatorial section—now the oldest part since, years ago, the orphanage was torn down and replaced by a clean, low, practical structure. Practical structures have extended at a number of points to confuse my sense of how things used to be. But the purgatorial wing stands clear and unobstructed with its odd exterior brick and concrete fire-escapable staircase angling up along the side to a little second-story porch that overlooks what’s left of the playground. There’s enough left to imagine it, recover how it felt, I think. Almost. That potent emptiness of childhood. That contentious ground. I guess some sort of contention was involved. It felt like something was at risk. This angel asking us to set aside our perfect understanding, to consider that it all might be discardable. That one should have to figure out what things are, moment to moment. Rediscover oneself in doubt. Rebuild the picture over and over. How can you get anywhere like that? The mist takes over in that case. Manila paper has its way, imparts its qualities. From up here on the porch—we weren’t allowed up here, I think, except for fire drills—I can follow the weedy grass where it used to go, imagine it running under the basketball court and the other additions, a broad expanse of grass clear out to the four-foot chain-link fence, that same old chain-link fence that still surrounds the schoolyard. It remains unsatisfactory. As I’ve come to understand it. Standing up here on the purgatorial porch and trying to reconstruct the picture and the problem. I remember actually wincing at her approval. Isn’t that strange? That I’d achieved it. Found it easy to produce the sort of picture she required. But took no pleasure in it. So you want an ugly, mottled, messy sort of picture, right? Let’s see what I can do then. First, ignore what, in my heart, feels like the truth. Then pick the crayons that seem least essential, furthest from the critical idea; that represent in fact erosion, indecision, ambiguity. That compromise the fundamental thought, let all that background, all that brown and orange and yellow fear and desire get mixed up in it. Get the system and the subject all confused. Is this what angels want? I guess I went along. But it remains unsatisfactory. Refuses to resolve. That same old neighborhood out there, the line of cars along the street. A realistic Sunday morning—how do you make any sense of that? Just as it is? Where is the workable idea?

  My friend Chuck Watson made a cloud chamber once, he says. When he was a kid in junior high. He had a basement room where he was left alone to pursue such projects as he found described in the pages of The Boy Engineer or Scientific American. What he remembers is the darkness (and it’s hard not to inflect the sense of darkness here—as silly as it sounds, inside the fish tank or the Mason jar or whatever he used—with what I’ve come to know about the sadness of his childhood) with the flashlight held up to it, all alone down there, a balloon hooked up somehow to be deflated, popped, or something to reduce the pressure suddenly at the critical point inside the jar, the vessel, charged with alcohol-soaked cloth and mounted upside down on a cake pan filled with ice. But all alone down there in the dark with this cold device, his flashlight held up to the side—and having not had much success all afternoon; such things are naturally very delicate, dependent on so many subtle variables. It was a trick to get the angle right, to shine it into the dark inside the jar just right to catch whatever happens, if it happens, let the pressure drop to the dew point or below…and then what? What is going on? The rest of the household settled down into the indifferent clatter of dishes, muffled television laughter. So what then? Here’s what’s remarkable: experience as removed from all that sad, indifferent life as it is possible to be and yet right there within it all the time, invisible till now. The dark in the jar goes cloudy, misty like he’s breathed upon the glass, and then a streak, or possibly not, it’s hard to tell, you blink, it’s gone, but then another, surely, straight down like a strand of cobweb pulled and snapped to show the ghostly ionizing path from space, it had to be from space, a cosmic ray, straight through the sky, the house, the mist inside the jar. I think he must have held his breath. To sense himself impinged upon like this. His cold, somewhat evacuated life brought to a state of such unbearable sensitivity.

  Somewhere among my mother’s things I’ve packed away in pale gray cardboard boxes is a picture of my father that I drew when I was five or six. That I remember drawing—not the usual stick schematic but a portrait. As it were. What I intended as a study of his face to get the feeling of it. Something about the wide, thin line of mouth I can remember meaning something. I can remember that. And then, as I was putting things away, to come across it, know exactly what it was and not be able to make any sense of it at all. Like suddenly seeing, and remembering, what things look like to a dog. The mindless clarity. A loose confederation of experimental symbols for the features, gathered signs for nose and mouth and eyes all floating on the surface, vague Manila paper surface, of what seemed like a clear idea, a workable idea. I think I thought I had it down. Had got the feeling of him caught in there somehow. I felt his sternness and his kindness were successfully involved. But now—my goodness. What in the world? Each symbol, here again, a world unto itself. Just drifting by and by some accident assembled into something I had feelings for. These deep unalterable feelings.

  All our feelings, I’m convinced, are simply varying proportions of desire and fear. Chaotic interaction of the fields. Events pass through or get deflected, scattered, clumped and all so suddenly, surprisingly, it’s hard to know what’s happening. You do the best you can to get it down, to find a reasonable notation. Something quick and clear to mark it as it passes. Check it off before it’s gone. Why did she feel she had to put a stop to that? It could have worked. It might have held together somehow. Why did she lead us out and sit us down and make us reconsider, pause and look to think about it, draw it out, belabor the thing, the moon and stars, the grass, whatever? How much time did she think (do angels think) we have?

  Not long ago, I caught the end of some science-channel program having to do with electron microscopy. They were summing up in the presence of the most powerful electron microscope in the world, whose clean and vast and serenely inexpressive rectilinear bulk had TITAN printed on the side and filled the room with a sense of bigness here in principle. Abstracted. A compensatory impulse in there somewhere, I suspected, to establish at the start the fact of size, the big idea. To get the massive physical facts down first, to reaffirm all that before proceeding in the opposite direction. Otherwise, it seemed to me, you might get lost, the physical facts called into question. I mean this thing looks at atoms—in a crystalline array, bright points imponderable as stars. Can’t you imagine getting tangled up in the complexity of a machine like that, to the point where you’re not so certain where you are within the scrutinizing process—in what surely must consist of layers of systems whispering finer and finer electromagnetic rumors of the truth on up the chain. I can remember back in college coming
down with the flu—at my mom’s house, in my bed and drifting off into that leading edge of fever, chills, and general loss of personal definition, as it seemed, until such simple understandings of the world as had to do with big and little, mass and masslessness felt strangely insecure, refused my grasp as, on the one hand (in my dreamy state of mind it came to hand), a locomotive felt the same as, on the other, something tiny like a pin, with the confusion given a hard, impossible, sickening, contradictory sort of texture of its own that spread to the other sensory realms and got me out of bed to turn on all the lights, upstairs and down, to no effect. To send my mom away and ask her not to speak. I’d lost my feeling for the world. I knew what things were—just not how it felt to know.

  It lasted ten or fifteen minutes and I’ve never been more frightened. Which, I’m sure, explains the twinge, that little pinprick along my spine, on contemplation of the Titan. Who in the world designs such things? Who gets to know what’s going on in there? I want to imagine a guy like that. Who designs electron microscopes—or certain specialized subsystems. Works in Princeton, say, or Boston, up there somewhere with some university program in obscure and complex partnership with West Coast manufacturers. Who lives about an hour’s drive away in a nice old house in a nice old rural-feeling neighborhood with his wife of many years, who, though no longer teaching full-time, substitutes in the local schools, is still attractive, smart, and interested in things, is always good with plants and children and their two grown sons and families when they visit. And whose natural, easy grace seems, over the last few years, to have turned more inward somehow. She’s let her hair go straight and white or nearly white in a simple bob, what he suspects must be a bob, that he’s prepared to approve should it ever come up, which it hasn’t really. Isn’t that curious? Missed his chance way back there, it would seem. And it would seem it’s too late now. What’s there to say about it now: “You know, I’ve given it some thought…” Across the gulf between their stations in the evenings—he in the laptop’s glow at the old pine Shaker desk next to the fireplace, she across the room on the couch beneath the big green-shaded floor lamp with a book or turned to watch TV. That’s two years probably, fifteen feet of evenings intervening. An impossible distance surely. “What?” she’d say and lift and turn her face, her haloed smile, adjusting for the interval, the shadows, the rotation of the earth, toward him. And then what? Try again? How can you tell if a thing like that makes any sense at such a distance?

  He likes driving home each day. The drive itself. From a fairly rigorous, highly organized state of things to a somewhat lower. Somewhat artificial these days, he supposes, yet still genuinely preservative of something once quite close to where our lives emerged for our consideration. I’ve not spent much time up east but I remember how it feels. My girlfriend, Nancy, who grew up in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, can remember pretty clearly—all the trees, the maples, birches, oaks and sometimes mighty oaks. A deep and mulchy sort of thatch that’s always damp beneath the trees. Jack-in-the-pulpit (now protected), blueberry bushes where it’s sandy; where it’s wet, skunk cabbage, scum and moss and cattails, stone wall remnants here and there. And sometimes, as you leave the highway in the evenings, little mists you’ll find have risen into the slightly warmer air above the creeks and drifted out across the lawns to demonstrate this subtle lower state of things beneath the yard lights and the brighter, colder mercury-vapor lights above the white-fenced pastures, one such pasture, one such mercury-vapor light to mark the corner where he turns and where he’s comforted to note, each time it’s there, a big gray horse is usually standing.

  I imagine he has something like a briefcase—not much in it, but a bulky-looking briefcase. Not everything can be compressed. There might be journals, special files, reports from engineers, even legal papers—though I shouldn’t think he’s much involved in that. He is involved in the idea—perhaps not deeply, philosophically. But, over time, habitually. The thought of it seems cumbersome. Of late he feels encumbered. Such an airy, easy house to move around in. The kitchen too, you pass right through, don’t think about it. Here’s your inside and your outside, light and dark. What’s to encumber? Be encumbered? Not the shadows or the mists. The growing old. That’s not a thing. It has no mass. It is a quality of things. A sort of field in which things alter and distort. But not so much as to encumber—quite the other way, in fact. Things tend to lighten, drift apart. The briefcase always goes beside the little desk. It’s not a genuine Shaker writing desk, but it’s old. And very plain. And very purposeful with the briefcase there beside it. What has happened? He allows himself to wonder—once out loud, to give it weight, to see if, uttered, it was marked, stained like a substance to be studied, to be followed, just the question, like a gas as it dispersed. “What?” she called back from the front of the house where she was placing plants in pots. “What?” he returned. So much for that.

  It seems so natural that astronomers should develop out of childhoods filled with wonder at the heavens. Farm kids raised where stars are visible. I remember coming across a touching photograph of the young Clyde Tombaugh standing out by some wheat field (what I want to recall as a wheat field) with his spindly homemade telescope as if it were a ribbon-winning sheep or a brand-new piece of farm machinery. Easy as that. Inevitable as that. Where does the young microscopist go to have his picture taken? Hard to say. Does wonder enter in? Does he remember? Maybe something about the nearness in itself. That it began as simple everyday experience come to hand and brought so close. Then, under scrutiny, disintegrating, held too close to see anymore. Is it the loss that fascinates? You think you’re going to nail it down, this piece of stuff, but then it’s just too much to hold the thing you thought it was before, so you try again. It is the kind of gaze that tries to find the splinter. You can feel it but you can’t get at it somehow. You’ve no doubt it’s there, its presence irrefutable as Rutherford’s famous inference of the atom. So what happens?

  I suppose he tries to settle down, decides it’s how things go, that life attenuates—is that the word? He thinks it is. He thinks he likes the rows of potted flowers she’s arranged out on the porch, along the walk. So many colors. Primrose maybe. All the same but different colors. Each in the same little red clay pot. It is incredibly sweet and inexplicably distant, as if somehow at the edge of observability. Like the impossibly brilliant colors of impossibly distant galaxies you’ve seen in those Hubble photos. You’d think color would be the very first thing to go. It seems so fragile. Accidental. And yet here it is, so sweet and yet so distant.

  One night, much later (this, I think, is how it probably ought to go, more like a story), he is up quite late and steps out on the porch. It’s cool but pleasant and the mists have drifted in. It hasn’t happened lately much, but still, it will when the air is warmer than the water in the streams—or maybe the other way around. It’s fifth-grade science, but he really can’t remember. And, although it’s not his habit, he decides to take a walk. No preparations. He just finds himself by the street where the curbless pavement decomposes into the grass and, looking up and down, the house lights in the mist seem to have drifted in as well. And so it seems a good idea, somehow. Past two or three blocks of tidy, older houses like his own. Some dark already, some still lit with TV light. Around the curve at the end of the block with the black-on-yellow cautionary arrow on a post to warn that here we must accommodate the older cow-path lay of things, not simply barrel on as some have done, as testified by the bent steel posts and barbed wire tangled up against the scraggly oaks that border what was agricultural land at one time, surely, though he’s never seen it planted. Now it’s just a deeper darkness as he passes. It’s so strange—he’s not sure what his hands should do. Just let them swing or go in his pockets. Not a choice requiring much consideration, as a rule. This sort of walking, though, is different. Not a thing he usually does. A little wood-railed, two-lane bridge you don’t even notice when you’re driving. Then a rise toward the white-fenced pasture
on the right. Way on the other side the cold, white mercury light that marks the corner. Makes you glad for warmth and simple incandescence. Makes him feel he shouldn’t mind to be encumbered. Shouldn’t be out here, unused to this. Unpurposeful. Uncertain of his hands, his grasp. Of how he ought to hold himself at all. It’s getting chilly. He proceeds along the fence. He likes the fence. Real painted wooden planks and very well maintained. Cold, wet white-painted post-and-rail. He’s in the grass, his shoes and trousers getting wet. He really should have worn a jacket. Near the corner, near the light it’s all involved in misty glow. He stands awhile and takes his hands out of his pockets. Here we are. He thinks. Decides to think as if it were an established point of interest. As if there were a tour of old microscopists behind him. Here, you see? A paler gray against the dark beyond the cold white glare presents itself. Detaches from its privacy, its unimaginable purposes, and stands some yards away a little sideways, drops and lifts its head and seems to look at him. He steps to the fence and onto the bottom rail, then gets his arm hooked over the top. How in the world might he explain? We are microscopists, you see—my colleagues here and I…the horse is simply looking. Is it strange this horse should still be out in the pasture at this hour? He has no idea. If asked, he could not estimate the strangeness. Find the point upon the chart where two lines cross. He rearranges himself. Secures himself upon the white rail fence. Extends a hand. And it comes over. Just like that. The whole great thing, which sort of thing he has no comprehension of, nor ever will, comes over. Walks right up. And here it is. The great gray head right here within that tiny, careful space belonging only to oneself, within which only things to have or eat or love may generally enter. Nose to hand; then, very slowly, hand to massive side of jaw, along the neck. A little pat. Then somehow getting one leg over the middle rail to brace himself, to free his other arm, to bring both arms up to it, holding there. A flinch, a shudder, deep and soft expulsion of breath. The sound of traffic far away. He is so cold. There’s such a volume to its smell and to its breathing. Like a regular shift in atmospheric pressure. Here we are. His hands discover how to place themselves and then he has his cheek against it, finds it’s even possible to hold himself, the whole side of his face, against it, keep it there a moment as descends upon him quietly and darkly such a joy and peace as he has never known.