Shame and Wonder Page 13

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  DO YOU KNOW THE PAINTING Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, thought for years to be by Pieter Brueghel, but now believed by some to be an early copy? It is a picture of the fruitful, functional sixteenth-century European world as viewed from an eminence above a slightly dizzy slope of farmer’s field and pasture falling away to a vast blue harbor whose departing merchant ships sail calmly out past luminous cities in the distance. In the foreground, just beneath our point of view, a tidy red-bloused plowman guides the plow downhill behind his slow plow-colored horse. Below, a shepherd, with his dog at heel, his flock dispersed close by, leans on his staff and gazes somewhat blankly up at nothing visible to us. While down on the rocky shore an angler casts his line. It’s all suffused in brilliant sunset. Why not sunrise, I can’t say—the art historians seem quite certain. And I suppose, at least in my pallid reproduction, there’s a certain weary pallor to the glow. The horse looks tired. So that would mean—to take these things perhaps more seriously than is useful—that poor Icarus, whose tiny thrashing legs are disappearing way out there, beyond the angler, in the bay, would have been falling, if one estimates an apogee at noon, for half a day. Or, who knows, maybe even longer. Maybe centuries—the qualities of atmosphere and gravity and grief were not well known. In any case no one is paying much attention. Look how pliant and obedient all the functions of the earth. The soil folds gently under the plow like pleats of cloth in the plowman’s cloak. Auspicious outward-blowing breezes fill the sails of the departing ships. The sheep constrain their browsing, and the angler has a bite. Is it just me, or is there almost always something a little uneasy in Brueghel’s pictures of the peasant life? (Here too—no one disputes that, if a copy, it’s a good one.) It’s the thoughtless, common life. Such life, you’d think, would run together, get averaged out, get lost in browns and grays. What can it mean to bring all that to an almost religious point of clarity? Benightedness itself receives its color and its gesture and its place. There’s no ennobling going on, or not exactly, but there is a sort of charge—it could all burst into a Bosch at any moment. It’s the thoughtlessness that’s clarified. Intensified to a point where you feel like anything can happen.

  Let’s imagine that Brueghel painted Doug MacWithey. Like the plowman, in the foreground, leaning toward us, working away, while out the second-story window right behind him, in the distance, unaccountable events from long ago are taking place. It makes no sense. And he’s oblivious. Pasting something down, I think, and bending so far over the table that all we see is the top of his head, the hump of T-shirt that, historically, was black but here is red like the plowman’s blouse. A red for emphasis. To hold him in that moment, to that spot. Late afternoon comes in behind and casts him into his own shadow, so whatever he is working on is dark; his face is dark. Our eye slips past him out the window into the glare, the ambiguity. Out to where the very tiniest brush is needed to show anything. If anything is possible. Way in the distance where the masters of the Torah, if I understand correctly, look for meaning. To catch the whipping of the rope, the glint of balance bar, the strange suspended flailing of it all to show us something we have never seen before. That we had no idea was anywhere except, perhaps, in dreams.

  I’m not paying close attention, just floating along with them out to the end of everything and back. And at some point I blink to realize they’re using photographs, old photographs, as old as they could find, I guess, along with maps and paintings, to confer a photographic actuality on events predating photography by forty years or so. It hardly matters. The photographic actuality of one old Indian seems to stand, quite naturally, for all. Such people lived along the shore of the Missouri in those days. And would have photographed, leapt into actuality, as easily as this old Indian here. There seems to be a certain pleading for reality, a sense of doubt or loss to be addressed. Look how the camera scans these stationary objects—portraits, landscapes—like the eyes of someone wakened from a coma. Sitting up and gazing round to take in not so much the things as the reality of things. The slow, interrogating zoom into the famous painting of Lewis as some stern Shoshone warrior might regard it, first presented with such a thing: Is this a man? What does he have to say to me? How can I know that he is real? You hear the wind across the prairie, through the scrub along the river, as you lean in to examine Lewis’s firm yet somehow sad and delicate features. Sad and delicate, of course, is Ken Burns’s style. (The same harmonica, so to speak, is always playing.) But I think never so appropriately, expressively, as here. They’re on their way to the ends of the earth and it seems natural, fundamental, that the brave, despondent Meriwether Lewis should be leading, and his sadness seem to trail behind like smoke. Not just regret on taking leave of the familiar, resignation to the dangers, to the fatal possibilities. But a deeper sense of going away. Not like at sea, where you’re consigned, at once, to placelessness and know, somehow, to gather yourself to yourself for the duration. But to have no destination in a way; to have to pass by destinations all about you, all the clearly promising places along the way where the heart might rest, to come to the place where destinations come to an end. There must have been a different kind of trepidation here, I think. A different kind of risk and doubt. Though not to contemplate—except for Lewis, indirectly maybe, when those dark depressions found him at a loss in every sense and the journal entries come to a stop and nothing moves him but his duty. And these sunsets. What’s the deal with all these fading crimson skies whenever the camera brings us back to the present flow of things, the river and the prairie and the mountains as we drift along like not-quite-sleepy children at the surface of some bedtime story, gazing out the window at the evening. Always evening. All that red and gold and shadow on the prairie makes us sad. For what? I wonder. History maybe? Simply that? That seems to be what Burns is good at. Baseball. Civil War. Whatever. It’s all out there on the prairie as the sun is going down. Or do we sense in Lewis’s dark predisposition what, in us as well, might find itself released, expanded out into those lower-pressure regions where our presence seems unstable and evaporative and difficult to locate with precision.

  When I was seven, I imagined I enjoyed a special understanding with regard to outer space. Much like the cowboy’s for the prairie or the sailor’s for the sea. What was I thinking? I was seven—I remember actually thinking, “I am seven” as I’m standing on the sidewalk near my house one time. I’m looking down and it’s the usual sort of concrete sidewalk, scored in sections, each one framed by smoother troweling at the edges, gritty surface. Somewhere, probably, a handprint or the name of someone lucky enough—who knew how many years before—to see the workmen leave and take a chance. And I imagine it was summer, yellow grass along the walk on either side and in the cracks, and I’m just standing there and thinking, “I am seven.” I know nothing at that age. I do not know the names of the states. No sense of distances between the most familiar destinations. What is honor, death, or anything. And yet right there in the blazing Texas afternoon, I know that I am seven and I also know the deep and inexplicable, cold and breathless joy of space. How can this be?

  There seem to have been, as I think back—and in our hearts there may still be—two kinds of space. The horizontal kind that, back then, came so easily to mind—somehow more gradual and receptive to the horizontal (which is to say the fundamental, thoughtless) imagination. Which is to say, of course, my own. The kind of space required, or presupposed, by the horizontal spaceships that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and Commando Cody flew—the ones that had to sputter along the ground for a couple of feet before ascending through the clouds into that odd, residual mistiness that gave the vacuum structure to support all that adventure, I suppose. This was the kind of outer space those coin-operated rocket rides addressed outside the five-and-dime or the grocery store. I loved the one at the little strip of stores a block or so from where we lived. I sensed the silliness but loved the small red button on the otherwise functionless joystick. That the coin drop didn’t activate,
but only armed the system, gave you access. And then time for the embarrassment to steam away and leave you with a moment to allow the possibility to gather, to extend beyond the idiotic mechanism out across the parking lot and the neighborhood and past all the familiar destinations and the indeterminate intervals between them to a point where you might leave your meager everyday experience behind. But all you got, and all you needed, after all, was that initial lurch. The back-and-forth that followed simply had to be endured. What was important was that sudden thrusting forward that you had to get yourself all set for. Tensed to feel it shove you like a bully in the back. You had to wait. Let passersby pass by and pity you your dimelessness, the pretense; let them go, the ones with rattly metal grocery carts departing with their own kids turned to look. Don’t look at them—they pass from under the awning into the light and heat, now craning around. The little ones too, in the folding seat all hot and squinty, folded in among the paper sacks. Don’t even think about them. Wait. There needs to be a clear space. Then you hit it. Hit the button. Then a sort of double lurch, to be precise, a double take as if accounting for the disbelief, a nudge as the gears engage and then the big one snaps you back and, for a second, less than a second, though in principle an indeterminate interval, you’re gone.

  The other kind of space was vertical and difficult and strange. And I’ll get to it. But I really need to slip in here to get back to the sidewalk for a minute, check my grounding as it were. (And as I tend to do, apparently—in an earlier piece on baseball I returned to a childhood site to check the scribblings in the concrete.) I am told that concrete never stops consolidating, keeps on getting harder year after year for maybe centuries. I hope that’s true. I like to think that concrete is receptive to events—beyond the way it seems to beg to get marked up. It is the fundamental artificial surface, reproducing ground with none of ground’s uncertainties. Events embed and hold their place and harden into something to get back to later, maybe. So I try to. So I did the other day. Drove back to that little postwar neighborhood and parked there on the street right next to the sidewalk, which was just as I describe. Dry yellow grass on either side and in the cracks. I should explain that I’ve never lived very far from anywhere else I’ve lived. Just driving around, it’s like I’m always passing through this sort of vague and rather poorly maintained theme park. Which I guess sounds pretty sad, except I’m very fond of theme parks. All the better if they’re fading and the structure of the make-believe shows through. No one’s around. I take some pictures of the houses and the sidewalk, which is buckled here and there a little more than I recall but otherwise is still the same. The time of day seems right as well—the sun quite high, the glare and heat that must have fixed that moment, overexposed it into the concrete surface like those shadows at Hiroshima—less visible and less terrible here of course, but no less mortal. This is the place where I was seven in a blaze of natural light. I do my best to hold the camera out away from me and point it straight down. This particular uncracked section feels right. I was walking home, about to turn the corner when I stopped. I’m pretty sure I stopped and looked down at the sidewalk and it caught me. It occurred to me. The fact of me, I think, that just came out like that. Expressed itself that way. Now here I am again and everything’s the same. So, later on that afternoon I’ve got my camera under the magnifying lens above my desk. I’m paging through—a shot of the neighborhood to the west. There’s Mr. Saunders’s house, the sidewalk, and the street. A shot of sidewalk at an angle. And another at a slightly different angle. Then the one I tried to shoot straight on. I didn’t quite get all of it—a strip of yellow grass and a dirty tennis shoe at the bottom. Hit the zoom a couple of times and there it is—just sidewalk. Simple. Like the memory. Why would memory want to hold a thing so simple? What was I looking at? Or where had I found myself that I would stop right there, look down, and think that thought? My little camera is kind of old so you have to look straight into the view screen to get full illumination. Angle the screen too far one way and it goes white, too far the other—which is to say away from you—and it goes dark. Not all of a sudden, of course (bear with me here), but gradually, so if you’re sitting at your desk and you’ve put your camera down in front of you with the screen still on, you’ve got a certain angle—and remember it’s that shot of the sidewalk surface zoomed in slightly so it’s pretty much the view you’d get if you were three and a half or four feet tall and, being a child who tended to look at things straight on, extremely sensitive to everything, the texture of the concrete and the tiny brilliant particles of pure white scattered all throughout the mix—but anyway, the point is, glancing at the camera at that angle before the power-saver feature shuts it off, you see the darkened shot of the sidewalk, for an instant, as a view of something altogether different. Even opposite in a sense. And it’s amazing. It’s a glimpse of outer space. As true, as subtle and deep as any shot of space I’ve ever seen. Those bright and faint and fainter chalky specks just floating over the dark, eternal emptiness like stars.

  By vertical space, I mean the kind of space achieved by going straight up. Straight away, without transition or translation. From a point upon the surface to no surface at all. No place for superficial thoughts and sentiments to operate, for horizontal-propagating feelings to occur except, perhaps, as a sort of forced theatricality. Remembered signs and gestures. I would watch Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and sense this dark constraint I didn’t get from Space Patrol, whose graceful, horizontal spaceships you could stroll through like a ranch house, where the latitude of human possibility was generous as well, between the hero and the idiotic sidekick. As if life were understood to have spread out, as it always has, not up, into the distant future. On Tom Corbett, life made sorties into space. Straight up. A very narrow passage that required the clearest possible expression of intention and direction. I still have somewhere my old Tom Corbett lunch box, which I don’t remember using very much. It made me sad, somehow. A nice blue metal lunch box with exhortatory graphics—lots of spaceships, space, and space cadets posed rocketlike, legs wide like fins, belts grasped with winglike elbows out. I don’t know why it saddened me. The space cadets so perfectly straight up in all respects. The sky dead black. The gentle sound wax paper made as I unwrapped my tuna sandwich.

  I would vacillate—not thoughtfully of course, not analytically, but inwardly, emotionally—between Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol. Between those ways of thinking or imagining. I probably still do. How is it best to get to space? To understand it? Stand on the sidewalk on a hot day. Think about it from the simplest point of view. Consider your age. The joy. The emptiness. In David Clary’s Rocket Man, a photograph from 1929 shows Robert Goddard, the famous rocket pioneer, along with four of his assistants, posed by the wreckage of a fairly large experiment. They all look pretty happy (even Dr. Goddard smiles) lined up in the scorched grass, standing over the remains, a jumble of twisted tubes and sheet metal that looks nothing like a rocket anymore. And all a little less than two hundred feet from where they touched it off. You have to wonder what’s the deal. Two hundred feet. It’s been two years since Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic. What’s to celebrate? What had this rocket done? Where had it been? To bring back something worth a picture, getting everyone lined up out there like that in the empty field. I’d like to suggest it had, in principle, been to space. Or been toward space. In fact it hadn’t even gone straight up—went sideways, finally falling to this point where it exploded, frightening everyone for miles around apparently. Which seems to be important—that this perpendicular thinking ought, in principle, to frighten people, bring out the police and the news reporters, which it did, right after the photograph was taken. That it ought to be so difficult and strange. It’s just mechanics. What’s so hard? Here’s aviation—horizontal aviation—soaring into a kind of pure, romantic moment. Breaking records. Glorious posters. What’s the problem? Just the angle? Have a look sometime online at the National Archives footage of Goddard’s tests.
It’s crazy. Everything blows up. And sad, the way the seasons come and go. Look—now there’s snow on the rutted ground. And how the sky remains this hazy, overexposed, impenetrable white. It’s all so painful, forced, unlikely—as if up against some deep, unstated protocol—that just this much, this wreckage in a field, is worth a little celebration. Not so much, I think, for getting off the ground as for sustaining the intention to escape it altogether long enough to fall out here in an empty field as if from heaven.

  I imagine Goddard’s neighbors were as sensitive to all this sort of thing as to the weather. I imagine most of them up there near Auburn, Massachusetts, lived on farms and had a farmer’s sense of earth and sky and how things go between them. I should think they might have been on edge already. Then a louder one. And longer probably. Long enough, at two in the afternoon, to bring a halt to preparations in the kitchen. Walking over to the screen door, brushing little clouds of flour from her hands against her apron. It is going to the moon this time, perhaps. The clouds drift through the screen, disperse into the yard. A soft explosion in the distance. What in the world must they have thought about all that? How strange, how intimate to have it going on so close to home. As if whatever he was trying for were not so far away. The moon, whatever, as a child might think about it.