Shame and Wonder Read online

  Here’s what it looks like: Take an emblem—one of the seventeenth-century images in “The Seals of the Philosophers”—and set his corresponding piece beside it. Here is emblem number 9 from the original engravings. “Calid the Jew, son of Gazichus,” it is labeled under the motto that surrounds the circular image. I have no idea if any sort of reality attaches to this guy, but he’s important, I assume, so near the Thrice-Great Hermes himself at number 1. It is a complicated image, as most are: three seated lions holding up a great, round table, which, in turn, supports an open book and a flaming brazier or chalice, from which smoke ascends into a smoky, mushroom-cloud-like ring, from out of which the blazing sun appears to rise. Well there you go. It’s all in place. For all the mystery, look how heavy and well-founded all that is, as if assembled from a kit. How perfectly balanced under the rules of common gravity. How a careful child would stack it. And so clearly upon the actual earth, beneath an actual sky. You’d think such mysteries, such visions, would exist in a sort of visionary space. Would seem to have flickered briefly, faintly and mysteriously into view. But no—in almost every case, they’re drawn as grounded in the ordinary world. It seems so clunky and mechanical, our longing. You can see how the engraver must have spent more time—and probably had more pleasure—rendering ground and sky, each weed and clod and pebble, the varieties of clouds. Are we to understand that such things are simply out there? Go for a walk out in the country, you might simply come across it. Secret knowledge all stacked up like something left out in the sandbox.

  I remember in the little town of Palmer—south of Dallas, about halfway to Corsicana, where a number of my ghostly, sad-faced, agricultural ancestors are interred—attending funerals with my father as the ancient aunts and cousins of that era and that region, so obscure to me, began to pass away. It seemed for a while we’d make the trip to Palmer every other month or so to stand awhile outside the little white-frame, turreted, turn-of-the-century church, in that strange emptiness, that glare of not much left out here at all, the crunch of gravel as we circulated carefully, my father’s clear, anticipatory smile that knew the ones he didn’t know had photographs at home of ones he probably did. Then filing in to take our seats. Once—I think maybe it was the first of these—a young man in a well-pressed cowboy shirt stood up to sing, and I thought, Oh crap. It was lovely, though. Whatever it was he sang, it was dead-on; he was incapable of error in that moment, of adornment, affectation, in his beautiful, pearly-buttoned cowboy shirt. You couldn’t beat it. From within that dark and graceless little church with all that emptiness surrounding.

  But the one I recall most clearly—and I think it was the last—was when the preacher seemed to go off on his own, to talk about heaven. He’d been looking into Ezekiel, I suppose, or Revelation and he wanted, on that summer afternoon with all the cicadas out there chattering away, to get down to it. To describe it in its physical actuality. Now, I am told when it comes to figuring the size of the Heavenly City, there can be some divergence of opinion, amounting to several orders of magnitude, depending on the text and whether Greek or Aramaic, how the units are interpreted, and so forth. But I’m guessing he had taken the more conservative view, deciding, perhaps, the smaller possibility contained the greater promise and appeal to the common working faith. And, as we all seemed interested, I think, he took the liberty, departing for the moment the sad matters at hand—the passing away of generations, our bereavement passing through like that invisible ionization that precedes the flash of lightning that is all we have to hope for—leaving that to point toward something true, eternal yet describable, accessible as what? What to compare it to? The way he spoke about it. It was rather like the first amazed reports of Cowboys Stadium. And not to be despised because of that. You must understand, he said. I think he may have actually said, cicadas humming, people fanning with their programs, you must understand how real it is, how wonderful, right here and now, eternity right here, his arms uplifted, all the windows probably open, the cicadas going crazy.

  So, place Doug’s version of the seventeenth-century emblem number 9 beside his model, and there’s not much correspondence. In his drawing, on the right, a penciled circle painted solid orange inside, to hold the shape and thought, I guess, of the original round engraving, and, at left, a few loose xeroxed lines of text—the title and motto from the original and some similar lines, encouraging love of God, from somewhere else—but that’s about it. “Calid the Jew, son of Gazichus.” Where is he? Is he approaching? Has he left, with his lions and table and book and chalice? And all his secrets? This orange circle is as empty as the parking lot outside that little church in Palmer, Texas. Are we waiting, then? I think that’s the idea. That we are waiting. This is like an open window. The cicadas going crazy. I think that’s what it was like for him. Imagine him up there, those great high windows propped wide open to let the summer air come through. To get a breeze. To keep from sweating on the paper (usually new, white eleven-by-twelve-inch sheets or old, browned five-by-seven-inch notebook pages, three-hole-punched to demonstrate provisionality, that these are only notes and therefore endless). Having to stand away a little, then lean in to do it quickly, trace the circle with a pencil and a crumpled pie-tin template. Imperfect struggle of a circle. Stand away and wipe his face. The sounds outside, distinct, immediate small-town noises. Some cicadas maybe, mostly trains and pickup trucks and voices. And one time quite late at night, like three or four, when he would usually be up working, someone walking down the street all by himself and singing loudly, as he passed, the silly jingle to a well-known cat-food commercial—hard to render here of course, without appropriate notation, but whose chorus, sung by cats, consisted solely of meows reiterated to a happy little march that seemed intended to continue on and on—meow, meow—with touching mindlessness forever down the street into the dark. But wipe his face and take the paint—orange paint, unmixed, straight from the drugstore or wherever Karan bought it, straight from the common, collective notion of orange paint—and lean in quickly keeping, carefully as a child, within the line to paint it orange, to paint out all that marvelous circus-poster allegory, get back to the blankness of that moment just before. Just hold it there within that ionizing moment as we wait for a flash of meaning—Calid the Jew, Hermes or heaven or whatever—to arrive. To find that potent state of mind before we know what we’re imagining exactly.

  I can imagine him up there in all that space, with his three-hole punch as at some grim industrial process. All the ghosts of all those nineteenth-century garment workers whispering to him, soft as cicadas. You will never finish, Doug. And he knows that. Of course he knows. And that’s the deal. And yet they hang around and whisper all the same.

  —

  SO, WHAT IS TORAH study anyway? I doubt it’s much like Bible study class when I was a kid—which seemed straightforward. Mostly having to do with learning the names and order of the books. The study of Torah I imagine altogether more demanding. To be so virtuous. Requiring ingenuity and rigor. I imagine it insists on meaning immanent throughout, at every level. Meaning, not just information, as itself a sort of saturating mystery.

  —

  IN 1884, IN CORSICANA, down the street from the Odd Fellows hall, which wasn’t built yet, there occurred a strange and terrible event. A lone performer came to town. And though some versions of the story (there’s a file in the local history room of the Corsicana Public Library) place him there as an attraction for the opening of a dry goods store or something, most just have him showing up: a lone, itinerant, Jewish rope walker with a wooden leg shows up to stretch a rope across a major intersection from one building to another at a height of twenty or thirty feet, his peg leg notched to receive the rope; and, bearing (inexplicably—why in the world?) upon his back a large, iron cookstove, tries to cross but, halfway over, falls and, crushed by the stove, expires either there in the street, according to some accounts, or later, according to others, in a hotel room, but in either case refusing to disclose his name or any in
formation whatsoever about himself beyond his Jewishness, attended, in the absence of a rabbi, by a local Jewish merchant who assists him in reciting, in good Hebrew, prayers for the dying.

  After Doug died, and his studio was photographed, its contents gathered, cataloged, and a good many of them organized and framed for a really beautiful posthumous show (Can I just say that without getting all cranked up, all theoretical; without reference to first principles and going on and on about the clarifying doubt and risk of emptiness that comes to modern art? Can I just say, Oh crap how beautiful it was?), and all, with Karan’s help, conceived, curated, mounted by Doug’s great old friend the critic Charles Dee Mitchell, at the MacKinney Avenue Contemporary—after that, and after the silence after that, I think we all calm down a bit and start to come to terms with things: the loss, the practicalities. The Odd Fellows hall is sold to a bright young artist friend of Nancy’s. And pretty soon he’s got this sort of atelier going—weavers, painters, sculptors coming down from Dallas, renting space, a communal kitchen. Ground-floor woodshop. Nancy rents the whole third floor. At last a place removed from practical constraints where she can set her giant canvases like sails. I come to visit when I can. Her bright young artist friend comes and goes, as do the others. In the mornings it’s just me and Nancy usually, making coffee in the kitchen on the second floor. Doug’s kitchen. Karan’s kitchen. Coffee and doughnuts in what used to be Doug’s studio, windows open, propped with two-by-fours, the sounds of trains and voices. And this little stapled pamphlet Nancy’s artist friend picked up from the visitors’ center. Walking Tour of Historic Downtown Corsicana. On page 4, the tale of the wandering Jewish rope walker. Good Lord, Nancy, listen to this.

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  AT DUSK, IF NO ONE’S down there working, I’ll descend to the second floor and stand for a while in the southeast corner, where Doug usually spent his time. With windows open on two sides. There is a Main Street, but the real main street is Beaton Street, which runs along the east side of the building. From the south side’s east-most window—right behind Doug as he worked—you get the best view straight down Beaton. If it weren’t for the trees, not here of course in 1884, you’d see to the Collin Street intersection, which the rope walker tried to cross. From the southeast corner at Collin and Beaton to the northwest, I believe. Doug, at his table, would have been facing away. But were the windows open, as they probably would have been, he would have turned at the sudden silence, then the cries. What had he missed? A vision, surely. Nothing real. But something meaningful, I think. I have decided.

  —

  THERE’S A PHOTO WITH the article in the pamphlet showing the tombstone marked “Rope Walker” in the Jewish cemetery. Just a simple round-topped slab. The letters a little too far apart, too near the edge on either side, as if these words were awkward, difficult somehow. I need to see if it’s still there. And ask around to see what people think about it. If they think about it. How could they not? Even after so many years. I mean, my God, a cast-iron stove. Right out in the middle of the street, in the afternoon. A peg-legged Jew with a big iron stove strapped to his back, way up in the air. As clear as anything. An ordinary day, and then this happens. What can it mean?

  It is suggested we go talk to Marie at the sandwich shop—or, actually, Sandwich Shoppe. She’s lived here all her life and loves to talk. Our bright young artist friend has been here only a few months and already he knows everyone. Her sandwiches are pretty good, he says.

  I get a Reuben, which, in fact, is pretty good. Whatever Nancy gets is pretty good as well. A pretty good little sandwich shop. An elderly couple sit at a table by the window, holding hands. They haven’t got their order yet. At first I think they’re saying grace, but they’re just holding hands, four hands across the table by the window. She appears somehow bewildered. Nancy thinks that may be how she is and why he holds her hands. They’re in between. They’ll get their order in a minute but right now he holds her hands. How sad and hopeful. Now it’s drizzling. I forgot to bring my jacket. Pretty soon it’s time to pay and ask the question. Maybe this will be a children’s book. Where the rabbit, say, is on a quest and has to go from place to place and ask whomever he meets—the bear, the lizard, the crow, and so forth—if he’s seen what the rabbit is searching for; and each one sends him on until at last he’s back where he started and whatever he was looking for was right there all the time. Or else it is way out there somewhere and it’s not what he expected. You should go see Babbette Samuels, says Marie. Babbette is old but she can tell you all about it. I had hoped Marie, who must be in her sixties, might have stories of her own, or might, at least, express some interest in the question. She gets going on more recent local history though. Did we know at one time there were five movie theaters here? We did not. Nice ones too, she says. And then she names them. It appears it’s going to be a wet, gray day. We’ll stop by the visitors’ center next. And then the cemetery.

  All the shelves and tables and displays at the visitors’ center have been crammed into one room of the little early-twentieth-century railroad building. They’re remodeling. Who is there? inquire two ladies from within the little room, beyond the bookshelves. We are visitors. Of course. We are remodeling. I see. I get another of the Historic Downtown pamphlets, a map of the county, and directions to the Jewish cemetery. Babbette Samuels, they agree, is the authority on matters such as these. But it turns out she’s had a fall and is recovering in a local nursing home.

  I can’t recall ever having seen old tombstones laid to rest like this. Quite a few of them here in this older part of the Corsicana Hebrew Cemetery. Simple nineteenth-century, arch-topped slabs that—to protect from further breakage or theft, I guess—have been laid flat, embedded in concrete, which appears to have been poured out on the spot. It has the look of an emergency operation. Doug would have loved it. The necessity of it. A diagram of how things fade away. Shovel out a big, more or less rectangular patch of dirt, pour in the concrete, drop the slab, and press it flat. Then stand away and wipe your face. Then let it set. And let the edges, where it thins, begin to crumble. Let the moment of attention pass away. Let no one think too much about it. Here is something pared away to almost nothing—just those two words strung so awkwardly, so strained across the marble, which is framed by even less. The even less, the sad gray concrete, crumbling out to nothing at all at the edge where the mowers or the weed trimmers tend to dig up under into the dirt so it gets muddy all around.

  —

  WHAT DO YOU THINK could have been seen? Was there a moment, as he fell, when he just hung there? To a child, say, something dangled in the mind. Held in that strange consolidation like an allegorical figure in some Brueghel painting. Goodness, there’s your emblem. There’s your sudden flash of meaning out of nowhere. And preceding this, a blankness or an emptiness somehow? The sun too bright? A loss of clarity or something as that subtle little shiver in the wire goes wrong and everyone can feel it in their hearts. The children all shut up at once. And there it goes. It all just goes before you know it. Way up there, the whole thing—Jew and stove and balance bar and peg leg kicking out—all up in the air, an object never seen before, a sort of vision for a moment in the buoyant afternoon.

  —

  WHAT IS THE MEANING of the stove?

  It’s hard to say. Just something clumsy and ridiculous to carry. Like a pig or a piano. Though a stove, it’s true, was carried once by the great Blondin in 1859 to the very center of a rope above Niagara Falls in order to cook an omelet, which he lowered to the audience on a tourist boat, the Maid of the Mist, below. That was a lightweight prop, of course, to make a joke: It smokes, you see? A stove! He camps above the torrent! There’s no wit, no cunning here, however. This is not to be explained that way. It’s like the kitchen sink. It represents the last thing you would choose. The heavy randomness, the tragedy of things, of all our sufferings and comforts and desires, against the perfect thin extension of the rope.

  —

  AND THERE’S THE WOODEN
LEG? The rope itself?

  The peg leg is self-knowledge. And the rope is aspiration—endless, abstract, without substance. It’s that endlessness for nothingness. You see?

  —

  TOO MANY NURSING HOMES out here. I didn’t listen very carefully. Didn’t really think we’d try to look her up, but here we are. I think. I think we’ve got it this time. Mainly just to say we followed through, I guess. And who can tell what wisdom waits down bright and cheery, floral-papered halls. Such long halls. So many nonsequential numbers. It’s a test. If we can pass through this okay, we have a chance. Her door’s ajar. The room is dark. She’s not there, someone says. A woman—not a member of the staff, I believe, just someone being helpful. As if anyone might know where Babbette is at any moment. One just knows. The word goes out. She’s in the beauty salon. She should be almost done. She points the way.

  And sure enough, she’s just about ready. Whichever one of three or four nearly identical, perfectly coiffed white-haired ladies cycling through in phase she is. Of course we’ll find out in a minute. We will ask for her and introduce ourselves and she’ll come forward bright and eager to engage on any subject we might like, though she suspects it is the rope walker as, it seems, it usually is. And we’ll feel silly to admit it. People always want to know about the rope walker, says Babbette, back in whose room we’ll sit and talk, and I will do my best to draw some natural, darker, broader meaning out of this without success. She is so clear and smart and open and pragmatic. She is secretary-treasurer of the cemetery board. At eighty-five, she gets it done. She is responsible for the simple replacement headstone I neglected to describe—above the old embedded slab, a blocky, light gray stone with the date of death as well as the profession cleanly cut and perfectly centered. It’s all over, one infers. We are content. It’s just a story, she will tell us. People did crazy things like that back then. That’s all. But in that moment as we’re standing in the door to the beauty salon confronting three or four—I wish I could remember—pretty much identical radiantly white-coiffed ladies gazing back at us so hopefully it seems, all finished up, all ready to go, complete, all equal paths to mysteries of their own, it’s as if here we have a choice. Which allegorical white-haired lady shall we pick? Before we speak we must decide, and if we’re wrong, what then?