Shame and Wonder Read online

  So you get somebody crazy enough and rich enough to do this with conviction. Buy the land and bull it through. Hire all the lawyers, pay the necessary tribute, overwhelm the legal difficulties. Form some sort of new municipal zone and cause to come into existence, in the bleakest part of town, the Trinity River Bottoms Homeless Park and Astronomical Observatory. Maybe a hundred acres—no paths or trees or anything, just grass kept like a golf course or a cemetery. Constantly, and more or less invisibly, maintained. And scattered, here and there, across these green one hundred acres, leaving space at the center for the observatory itself, small concrete shelters. All exactly the same. I’m thinking precast-concrete box-culvert sections. Six by six by eight, say, or whatever standard size comes close. You see them on construction sites sometimes—those open-ended concrete boxes. If you think of them as shelter, there’s an eloquence. That hard, cold open-endedness. In that we’re all just passing through. You know? Essential homelessness, you see. But it’s the arrangement that’s most critical, I think. It must be beautiful. How can it not be, though—so long as it doesn’t get too structured. It should seem a sort of scatter, all those empty concrete boxes on the grass. What’s happening here? And at the center like a dream, this great domed building, also concrete, with its heavenly implications.

  This has always been a terrible part of town. The hopeless center of West Dallas. Lead-contaminated flat land by the river where the bodies tend to turn up and the streets have names like Fish Trap, Life, and Nomas. This is the area that, according to my old friend Nolan White, who, from the fifties until his murder in the eighties (and whose tales of his grandfather’s life under slavery I somehow neglected to record), lived not too far away, across from my father’s automobile battery warehouse, where junked batteries were collected for their lead content and hauled straight to the smelter down the road—but anyway, this was the region he remembered, back in the thirties before the levees were completed, as the Bottoms, where respectable people weren’t advised to go. But if they did, they should be armed and should not linger after dark.

  It never really gets too dark down here at night. It gets opaque. It closes in. The dust and haze and bleary sky-glow from downtown. It is no place for an observatory. They belong on mountaintops, we know. We’ll have to force it. And who knows if anyone will even come—it’s not so much to offer, is it? Precast-concrete culvert sections. The observatory staffers, of course, get paid—to wear white coats, to try their best to use the telescope and figure out what possible application there might be for such a large and optimistic-looking instrument down here at the very bottom of the world. But as for the homeless, who can say? Perhaps, as the local news gets bored, there is a gradual, intermittent, and uncertain drifting in. Around the edges first. The little concrete—What to call them? Perma-Potties?—spaced among the residential units might serve as an attraction. There’s no signage. Various rumors of the most fantastic sort will circulate. The armed security guards are likely to intimidate, though trained to be receptive, helpful, friendly when approached. Who knows how that will work out—otherwise, though, everything will start to go unstable pretty quickly. Without means to filter out the bad intentions, keep it safer than the street. It starts to sound too complicated. But as long as you can see through complication to the basics, it should work—the concrete facts the homeless find themselves addressing every day, but clarified here within this place, admitted to, and purified past all resentment, I am hoping from both sides, at such a silliness, the waste, the presumption. Do it. Simply do it. Let them come and see what happens. Spring and summer, fall and winter. Here’s our homelessness at last. Here’s what we’re dealing with. It’s deeper than you think. Can you imagine after a while how it might be, the sounds of maintenance and other practicalities having slipped into the background. Just the natural—what should come to pass for natural—coming and going, ebb and flow of things. Especially at evening. Like a breeze. The sounds of settling down would come across in waves, old feelings somehow at this moment emerging in uninterpretable ways. The calls and sighs and who knows what it means. And all the coughing and the yelling and the opening of containers as the daylight fades and the big dome turns and opens from the garden of the hopeless at the bottom of the world.

  Bob Goes to Live Under Mary Kay’s Pink Cadillac

  In the early seventies, as the arcs of our postgraduate expectations seemed to be losing loft and conviction and the music seemed to be playing somewhat slower and the need to find a seat before it stopped had occurred to most, although not all, and everyone had already lived with everyone else for a time, it seemed, and the whole idea of domicile and self-reliance made for reluctant conversation—in this sad, departing summer of our lives, my friend the poet Robert Trammell lived for a while with me and my mom. My mom, an old freethinker herself, enjoyed my arty, pseudobohemian friends, and Bob, perhaps the artiest and most deeply pseudobohemian of us all, fit in quite happily, picking through her rather strange selection of books and watching bad TV in the evenings, though Kung Fu was pretty good. We really got into that Kung Fu test of enlightenment and reaction time, sometimes well into the night out on the patio, drinking our way toward the true way, snatching pebbles from each other’s open hand. It was during this time that Bob—responding, perhaps, to these simple domesticities—conceived that it would be a most amazing and important and poetic thing were he to go and make his home beneath the big pink Cadillac we’d noticed always parked in the drive of the house, not far away, of a wealthy cosmetics manufacturer.

  He sort of basked in this idea for a while. We’d joke about it. Marvel at the justice of it—his becoming something like a moral visitation, like gout, the painful consequence of opulence and excess. Or, a little more dramatically, the Phantom of the Opera or the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the dark imponderable at the center of our loftiest affections. He began to imagine what he’d actually need: a few small tools, the means to siphon from the gas tank (for the camp stove) and the radiator (should there be some workable filtration system—failing that, a means for gathering rainwater or an expansion of the protocol to allow an occasional visit to the faucet or the pool while on those requisite excursions undertaken in the small despairing hours when the world is fast asleep and there is none to watch the slow, precise detaching of himself, the separation of the shadow from the mechanism, something like the soul released to drift across the lawn into the plantings for a while and maybe even into the dreams of she who sleeps above in splendor under fragrant moonlight-colored layers of anti-aging cream).

  He would need lightweight, dark-colored, water-repellent clothing. Maybe a jacket for the colder months. A flashlight and a radio. A picture of his Scandinavian girlfriend—in a little oval frame perhaps, with a magnet on the back. A pen, a notebook. Bungee cords and marijuana. He would probably need to consult one of those Chilton automotive guides devoted to that particular year and model. He would have to make a study, as would anyone preparing for an extended stay in some exotic country. As did Dracula, of course, before embarking on his fearful journey west. As did Thoreau, don’t you imagine. Take your time and figure it out, devote yourself to the idea, and then, when it’s right—you might want to wait for a storm, a terrible night with lightning scattering all across the city, rushing, twisting wind and bending trees and window-rattling thunder all night long—then you go in, in the middle of that, insert yourself as if the moment had developed from within the actual process of the storm.

  And there you are. It seems impossible at first. But then you feel around and touch the blackened surfaces, inhale the dark eternity of this, the mix of fluids spilled and burned. The lightning flashing off wet concrete gives you glimpses of the structure so obscure in its reality, like the history of the underclass, ungraspable except by slow, assimilating stages. Not till dawn do things let up. The tattered clouds withdraw before the pink-and-golden light that, from an upstairs window, shows it’s all okay—blown leaves and twigs and a branch or two in the drive b
ut all is well. The pink of the Cadillac has never shown so purely pink before, as if there could be any purity in pink, as if it could be understood as fundamental, even primary, in some way—the blush of passion as experienced or as skillfully applied.

  Bob felt there ought to be a point at which his instincts should turn inward. All his cunning with regard to stealth, concealment of the evidence—the smoke, the smells, the residue, the groanings in his sleep, those soft, unbidden little noises that emerge on contemplation of the photograph, whose bright, clean, snowy Scandinavian distance stretches out behind her fading smile forever—when all that has fallen away and he no longer needs to care, it is because he’s come to inhabit the Cadillac truly and completely. He has come to understand his place within it. Found the yoga-like positions corresponding to the circumstances, sensed the pallid color of desire as emanating from himself, as percolating from these elemental regions where he rides along, essential to it now, adept at snatching raw materials from the street. Half-eaten meals and bits of clothing if he’s lucky. All of life in its disintegrated forms comes back around to him. He’s at that deep, regenerative level. At the level of the barnacle, the saint perhaps, the Cadillac infused with him at this point. They reduce toward one another, and inevitably there are compromises—subtle at first but gradually more detectable. Gas mileage suffers—hardly an issue ordinarily, of course, in such a vehicle. But noticeable after a while. A sort of lassitude or something about the steering, about the functioning in general—you can tell when something’s changed, a general change, you know. Before you know it, even. An alteration in the basic terms of things. A Cadillac—well, that’s a thing to be relied upon to carry certain assumptions. There’s a mass and a momentum to appearances—that’s one. Conviction overpowers error is another. Doubt is weakness. Life is sweet. And so on. There are smells that come and go. And dreams. And so at last it’s taken in and hoisted up. And there is quiet in the bay. Pneumatic power tools fall silent. From within the glass-walled waiting room she watches with her driver till she’s summoned. Eyes of four or five blue-uniformed mechanics fix upon her. They withdraw at her approach, then stand around not saying anything. Not getting back to work. A radio somewhere across the shop plays Mexican songs of love and loss. Her own mechanic stands by quietly with a work light and a look of vast apology, as if to say there’s nothing he can do. As if, were she not dressed in such a delicate print, her presentation of herself so near the fragile verge of passion, pink and saffron shading into frail translucencies of age, all love and loss as it turns out, he might reach out to take her shoulder, guide her under. But she follows, gazes up with him. A short, soft phrase in Spanish is repeated over and over right behind—they’ve gathered in. The light’s too bright and there is nothing for a while. What should it look like anyway? What should she be expected to find in any case? She’s never looked beneath her Cadillac before. She’s never listened to Mexican music on the radio. She knows, of course, those mariachi bands that play in restaurants—so exuberant and colorful and festive. Not like this. What is he saying over and over just behind her? Like a prayer. She looks and looks until it strains and starts to darken at the edges. Light draws in to a sort of halo, which surrounds a sort of face. Is that a face? What sort of face is that—so battered and composed? Is this what she’s supposed to see? What is he doing under her Cadillac? A couple of the mechanics and a woman from the office have knelt down. Can she emerge from this somehow? She must look awful in this light. Is this a miracle? Is there another car that she can take? Can she be beautiful again?

  How can I make this mean what it should? I will insist at least on meaning of some broad, unspecified sort. To get it started. I read somewhere—and I’m sure it came from an exalted source—that the study of the Torah is so virtuous beyond all other virtues, that a gentile, even a gentile, who applies himself brings immeasurable joy to God. So here we go.

  My friend the artist Doug MacWithey owned a huge, historic, three-story former Odd Fellows hall in Corsicana, Texas. Though the scale of his work was usually rather small, he was inspired by these immense old spaces, loved, as much as anything, the sense of grand necessity, the fitting out, in this case, of the upper floors—their great high windows looking, from the corner, east and south along the main street—with these massively timbered ten-foot working tables of the kind that might, a hundred years before in similar vast, unheated rooms, have supported ranks of grim industrial sewing machines or something manned, as it were, by ghostly, sad-faced women. And although the big ideas that might have needed ten-foot tables never quite got into gear, and as his work, in fact, reduced to narrowing views of a very narrow field of interest, he required, all the more I think, all that expansiveness for reasons I was unable to appreciate (we had a running joke about the Disney character Goofy carving a toothpick from a tree), or fully appreciate at least, until after his death.

  I think such spaces meant to him a kind of endlessness. Historical and physical. Whatever concentrated, pared-away-to-almost-nothing bit of art he did, he wanted to be endless. As if nothingness and endlessness depended on each other. Even some isolated scribble would, in his heart, belong to an endless series endlessly elucidating endless variations on its faint, essential self. And when, as toward the end of his life, a single thought took hold, he’d go with it, he’d crank it out (most times with a little xerographic help) with no intention of ever shutting down until some practicality, like death of course, intruded. This is why he loved the Xerox machine so much, I am convinced—less for the time saved copying patterns than for the endlessness implied. How it suggested art might be cranked out forever automatically, might heap right up to the ceiling, spill from the windows, fill the street with blowing handbills bearing glimpses, advertisements, of the truth. You can’t escape it, can’t ignore it in a little town like that. All of a sudden here it comes, the blessed truth, right down the middle of the street.

  It took a while to get a sense of what he’d left behind. He had a kind of system but it wasn’t known to others, and it changed from time to time: the way he’d think about those hundreds of accumulating pages tucked away in plastic folders (he imagined a sort of book); how they referred to one another; to their source, an early-seventeenth-century series of alchemical engravings called “The Seals of the Philosophers,” whose 160 enigmatic figures—each assigned to one of the great alchemical worthies, real or mythic; each in that weirdly mechanical allegorical style that seemed to assemble secret knowledge out of parts of the everyday world mixed up and recomposed at random—whose figures he intended to revisit like old research data needing fresh analysis by up-to-date techniques. The hundreds of drawings that emerged (he called them drawings, even the transfers and the pasteups, whether or not a pencil ever got involved—something he resisted, as approaching a kind of “showiness,” I think, or even worse an intervention in what ought to be an automatic process), what emerged, though, he had filed away in categories subtle and mysterious and wise beyond our puny understanding. His wife, Karan, who was closest to his thoughts on all of this, had no idea how he’d imagined it should finally come together. It was certain that there was to be a set of 160 numbered “emblems” corresponding to his seventeenth-century model. It was likely, furthermore, that he’d imagined it continuing toward the production of 160 sets of 160. And beyond, the way he would. Why not keep going, he would think. If this is it, and it probably is, just keep on going. And we had another joke—or not a joke but an exemplum having to do with the comedian Richard Pryor, who, in the famous freebasing incident, having set himself ablaze, began to run and, still on fire, conceived that he must not stop, for if he were to stop, he’d be consumed, so there was nothing for it, in his mind, except to keep on running. On and on. Perhaps forever.

  So it seemed we had been left with an eternity of images. A beautiful idea. A sort of extrusion, a sort of drawing out forever of the whole idea of meaning. I think he thought he might get under these in a way, these esoteric seventeenth-centu
ry reimaginings of the ordinary world. Like circus posters—see the mystical conflated beast, the self-devouring monster. Just crawl under, get a glimpse of what compels that sort of thing. What forms the impulse that must operate in all of us at vastly lower energies than here, beneath our notice all the time. I think that might be what he was after, what he left us—something like an active principle. The yearning sensitivity to meaning unencumbered, opened up. The empty emblematic gaze.

  When he stopped running, when he dropped dead in the middle of the night in Uncertain, Texas—I’m not kidding, in a cabin under a full moon at the edge of Caddo Lake in the nearly nonexistent town of Uncertain, Texas, right out into which, right out into whose dirt streets and whose vagueness and that vague, unsettled dark that comes behind the setting moon, still in her nightgown, Karan ran to scream for help, she who had borne herself through childhood on the phony graveyard mists of British horror films and loved to lock herself away for hours in her family’s green-flocked, gold-appointed bathroom to approximate the grandeur of those Hammer production sets and, in her mother’s fancy nightgown, practice turning the doorknob slowly; all that practice useless finally; nothing for it when it’s real; it has no meaning—but at that point, as he dropped (a pad of notes, his endless notes, there on the table) he had come to terms with what the will to meaning probably looks like by itself. And it reminds me of a gaudy British horror movie I saw many years ago where scientists imagine they have photographed the soul—a startled, skittery faint blue light.