Shame and Wonder Read online

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  MY UNDERSTANDING OF OUTER SPACE when I was seven probably had to do with openness more than emptiness. The latter held unthinkable possibilities. The former, something else. I’m not sure what. Whatever it was that little rocket ride was pointed toward, I guess. A place from which the world you know has been essentially removed. Where it remains implied, however. Which is to say where there remains a sense of place. So, horizontal in that sense. And maybe, somehow, amniotic. If, at seven, one were not so far removed from one’s beginnings that that darkness might not cast a shadow still.

  When Mickey Rooney, in an episode of his 1950s TV show, imagined he and his idiotic sidekick had successfully flown to the moon in their homemade rocket, whereas actually having landed only a couple of miles away in a farmer’s field, I was less interested in the comedy than the strained but undiscouraged capability of our belief, of my belief, in his. It is the middle of the afternoon. And here they are on the moon. And there is grass. And sky. And ordinary air, which lets them take their helmets off. And a cow. Just standing out there by itself. A dairy cow, I think. And this is pretty funny when the guys decide it has to be a moon creature of some sort. But right before it gets so goofy, there’s a moment with them standing in their space suits on the surface of the ordinary world, two miles from home, among such clear and natural evidence of the world that it appears in a child’s first drawings of it—grass and sky and cow—and yet they’re seeing it as alien and strange. Who could have known the moon would be like this? Perhaps they’ve been knocked silly by the landing—nose first; surely they’re affected. But I loved it. Kept the memory all my life. The clearest possible distinction—close and distant—penetrated, idiotically, sure, like a drumhead by a clown, but still. Exactly like in Renaissance and ancient comic theater, where identities seem so fragile, arbitrary, trading places all the time. The earth. The moon. Well, who can blame them? It’s an easy mistake to make and, after all, no harm is done. It all works out. Except I’d like to change it up. Have Mickey and Freddie (that’s the idiotic sidekick) come to terms with what’s occurred, their situation and its irreversibility, the curious yet reassuring symmetries—how each world, for example, calls the other one the “moon.” And then the loneliness and sadness that these symmetries evoke. How they assimilate eventually, sometimes waking next to their moon wives in the middle of the night and wondering if their families ever gave up looking for them, might be looking still and sometimes, gazing at the moon, be gazing toward them and not know it. How the light from home shines brightly on the lunar crops and open fields and how the eyes of children here—so nearly human, easily mistaken, so heartbreakingly mistakable for human—widen, brighten at the telling of the story and the bringing out of the space suits every year or so to show them (how their wives will smile and stand away a little). How the myth persists in spite of certain arguments. And how it seems to matter less and less with the passing years, the literal truth against the deeper understanding that accumulates like dust, the kind of dust they used to think the moon was covered with, as fine as sifted flour.

  I suspect there is no loneliness in vertical space. No room, as it were, to translate those expansive, horizontal sorts of feelings. Or at least not very much. You’d get this fairly low-grade emotional agitation on Tom Corbett now and then, but it was usually expended within those very narrow confines—mostly technical or interpersonal stuff between the more or less identical male cadets. There was no idiotic sidekick (till much later) to diffract or magnify such moments, act upon our sympathies for foolishness as standing for all foolishness. Nor any but the briefest female presence. Human feelings seemed to echo off the curved, metallic rocket-ship interior, bounce around, and cancel out. Not that I sat around and analyzed all this, of course. I’m seven. But I felt it. Something about it. And so strongly that the feeling hangs around, recurs at odd times like those feelings you get when passing on the street some older lady whose perfume trails ghosts behind her, thoughts and longings—always longings for some reason—you’d forgotten from some region of your past that’s inaccessible except by such emotional indirection, like a spoor too faint to follow or you follow and it overloads and deadens and you lose it altogether, but which held for just that instant seems to present a garbled rush of so much ancient sentimental information you can’t possibly understand it, only feel it, like some complicated waveform it would take a mathematician to untangle. It’s like that. And so without the mathematics, one must do the best one can.

  I can remember my position on the floor in front of the TV as I watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. A foot or two away in a sort of crouch. A sense of peering into it. It was serious. Less dramatic, less elaborate, I suppose, than Space Patrol. But I would fasten on that seriousness. The clangy sound effects of verticality—they must have used a cast-aluminum pressure cooker like my mom’s to make the sounds of hatches opening and closing. Lots of hatches. Ladders. Everything so strenuous. The blastoff most of all. Poor Tom would writhe beneath the forces of ascent. Why wouldn’t I crouch? I didn’t know how this would go. To have to suffer just to leave the ground like that. That’s one of those things that could affect you for a while. In bed at night to try to feel it for yourself—what kind of dark would cause discomfort risen into? Not this kind. This horizontal kind that lies upon my bed and fills the room. That has the quality of thoughtfulness and stillness that fills all the little apprehensive darknesses you learn to pay attention to. Don’t put your hand up under there, you think, but then you do and there’s that moment when the dark you think is probably inside you (as I say, you’re not so far from your beginnings) rushes forth and you jerk back and hold your hand though you’re not injured in the slightest. You’ve not formed the hard distinctions yet. And so you’re very sensitive. You scrunch your eyes and throw your arms out sideways on the bed and think about it. Try to imagine taking off to outer space and it’s like nothing. There’s no writhing. What Tom Corbett rises into must be different. You can tell. How, given the impulse, maybe a little shove for emphasis, you’d lift into it easily. Even the air, at last, could peel away and leave the dark like carbon paper (Who remembers carbon paper? I knew carbon paper), all the information pressed into it invisible yet recoverable, implicit. So, in fact, you’re losing nothing. There’s no struggle.

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  I MUST BRING UP Dayton Miller. He’s come up before in other things I’ve written. His experimental struggles against the Michelson-Morley results, against the emptiness of space and relativity. I want to get back to him in the 1920s when he’s spending all that time up on Mount Wilson with his giant interferometer enclosed in a fragile tentlike structure it was hoped would be like a screened porch to the cosmological breeze, which is to say permit detection of the “luminiferous ether”—that imponderably subtle substance many still believed (notwithstanding the Michelson-Morley results and special relativity) must pervade all space with means for light to propagate and common sense to keep our amniotic understanding of the emptiness in place. It would take months to bring it out. To sift, develop all the data to extract this thoughtless, precious, dare I say it horizontal understanding out of nothing, out of emptiness itself—to find, in the clearest, most objective way, the emptiness configured to receive our simplest longings. What are the odds? It would assume the essential vacancy of space to be an immanent, expressible, and absolute condition, present everywhere among us and within us, through which we are always passing and to which we have forever been resigned. And into which the subtle light of this device is introduced as into a stillness, as a candle thought to flicker in the presence of a ghost. He’d have to gaze at it while turning it, recording it, for months—the light, a confluence of two beams producing a pattern known as “interference fringes,” which discovered, upon analysis, to have shifted, to have flickered, in a regular and statistically meaningful sense, would mean that one or the other converging beam of light was being retarded, like a boat turned into the current, as the device was turned
as the earth moved through the (therefore not quite) emptiness of space. As if the emptiness were a comprehensible thing, like air or water.

  I must wonder if it’s meaningful to wonder how it felt. I mean it’s such a curious physical situation. A bucolic slope of ground up there on the mountain, pines or firs, what look like cedars maybe, wooden-posted wire fence in the foreground with a small steel, wire-strung gate across a worn path I suppose he would have used. No cows. You look for one. There ought to be a cow. To go with the grass and trees and pale, impenetrable sky. The wood-frame structure housing the instrument might serve as well for storing hay or feed. It has that practical, perfunctory agricultural sort of look. Or, in the photograph in William Fickinger’s biography, which shows the white-cloth insulating covering in place, like a tent revival setting up—that kind of sentiment quite naturally arising from the simple facts apparent here, that yearning to detect the Spirit passing like a breeze, a smell of rain. He’d had the whole thing hauled up here. In a sense, the whole accumulated mass of forty years’ experiment hauled up from university basements where they’d come to the conclusion that the failure to obtain a clear result was best accounted for by ground-level disturbances—involving local mass as well as that of the earth itself—which ought to be reduced, they reasoned, at greater altitude. The whole idea—by now quite large, with fourteen-foot-long crossed iron beams (the Morley-Miller instrument of 1905, essentially, with improvements)—the whole ungainly, clanky, awkward, yet somehow exquisitely sensitive arrangement gets hauled up into this purified situation. Such an unprotected, clear, and strangely pastoral situation as if seeking some kind of philosophical clarity as well. Should they have simply set it down out there in the pasture by mistake, gone off and left it, I doubt anyone, merely passing by, would have thought very much about it. It belongs out there like that—at least from a distance. It’s a feeder, see, for cattle—buckets to dangle from the arms, or one of those pony-training things where they learn to trot around in circles. Or a carousel for kids. Who knows. You see all kinds of strange, abandoned mechanisms rusting away in fields. You think they must be agricultural, but it’s hard to know for sure. There could be anything out there. The agricultural condition—the profundity, the clarity and simplicity that recommends itself to children’s drawings and underlies the common experience of the world and its mechanics—must engender a kind of instinct toward invention. Miller himself enjoyed a boyhood on the farm. That little gate up there on the mountain probably squeaked the way such gates have always squeaked to the performance of one’s chores.

  When I was eighteen, my friend Steve and I decided to take a hike along the railroad tracks to the north as far as we could go. I think at that time, in the summer of ’65, the tracks—a corridor of the Cotton Belt Route—were quiet, decommissioned, and about to be transformed into the weirdly warm-pink-sodium-lit Dallas North Tollway, which would draw our civilization north until there’d be no north of town anymore, no relaxation into distances, no clear and deep transition back to flatness from which cities and all knowledge must derive and into which, sometimes on weekend nights, we liked to take our girlfriends to go camping, as we called it. Come, we’d say, out into the fundamental lowlands of the heart, out Preston Road to the north then left down FM 544 and right on unmarked roads, some unmarked road, that ran out into all that cropland past those shotgun-blasted POSTED signs and the faint, suspicious glow of farmhouse windows, get as far out into all that as we dared, then pull off somewhere into trees or onto a rocky rise where we could have a fire and a bottle of wine and sit around and say whatever we could say and if love missed, as it generally did, it would keep going; you could sense it gently moving straight on out above the fields, the lines of barbed wire, angling above the dark low silhouettes of trees that lined the creeks and, totally massless, therefore heedless of the curvature of the earth, on out forever on a pure straight horizontal into the empty starry night. So, with all this in mind, I’m sure, and how it all would have to go—those girls would move and Steve would join the Marines and I’d be off to college—we decided we should take the clear straight cut along the tracks out north to get a clear straight sense of things as time was running out. My dad said sure. He rode the rails when he was young. Steve didn’t need permission. He was pretty much on his own already—high-school-dropout motorcyclist. Very Fonze-like but for his stature, six foot two or three. I’m only five foot eight. So, in my mind there is a comically vignetted (like the end of a Charlie Chaplin movie) shot of us from behind, like Mutt and Jeff or perhaps George Washington and whatever comic sidekick he took with him to survey the vast frontier, as we departed pretty late in the afternoon from Lovers Lane to take the measure of the prairie to the north, my surplus backpack stuffed with curious equipment—pyrotechnical flares, a foot-and-a-half-long bayonet. Why in the world should I be telling this? I think to get to the sense we had of venturing into an indistinct but somehow pristine state of things. Not tidy, certainly—tracks through cities cut through all that sad, subconscious backyard clutter—nor do we ever actually make it out to clear, continuous cropland. But a sense of being drawn into a freshly opened seam quite close to home. The unused tracks a sort of wedge into our day-to-day experience—our assembled understanding come apart along that line to spread out flat like one of those cartographic projections where the greater truth requires a certain distortion. I remember how, at dusk, the hum of power lines took over. How the traffic noise receded and this deep, uncomfortable murmur from the wires between the huge high-tension towers that accompanied the tracks set up what seemed a kind of privileged apprehension. Not the sound of power usefully expended. But a strain. A vast and unrequited hum into whose influence we had drifted. With whose sentiment—How else to say?—we felt ourselves drawn into parallel, and so grew silent for a while. A couple of miles, maybe. Until the dormant rails and the power lines diverged or terminated and we crossed a complex gathering of east-west tracks and lines of idle railroad cars (to make way, in a few years, for the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway) to discover ourselves, at length, upon a dark and silent cultivated field of blackland prairie, freshly plowed, than which there is no darker, quieter natural surface. Nor, I think, one more uneasily traversed. At least at night. Like empty space but corrugated so you’re always falling in and out of phase. You can’t see squat. As if whatever residual light should be left hanging in the air gets sucked away. And sound as well. With the clear exception of the sound a cowbell makes—which we were able, bedded down among the furrows, to confirm at regular intervals all night long from various points about the compass, all within what seemed a fairly constant radius and without the slightest shift in tone or frequency to lend some qualification to the dark, to what my sleepless thoughts constructed as a pitiless tintinnabulating emptiness of furrowed prairie reaching out forever until morning. Had we not been quite so eager to depart, upon discovering we had camped almost beneath the eaves of the farmhouse, I believe we would have killed that cow for scientific reasons—there it stood not twenty feet away, a stupid child’s drawing of a cow with a great big stupid copper bell. Is science everywhere? Like metaphor and tragedy? I think perhaps I’d drawn my bayonet, but Steve prevailed and off we went.

  There’s nothing much until about noon. Dirt roads or asphalt roads so crumbly I remember them as dirt. An outdoor faucet on the blind side of a tidy little house—and all the sweeter by itself out there like that. The house. The faucet. Now we’re hobos. Now we’re capable of stealing apple pies from farmhouse windows. Now we’re ready, as the little unpaved road we’ve taken narrows to a double-rutted path, to hop the fence and head cross-country. Open country, it in fact appears to be. Whatever that means. A sort of feral ground, I guess. If one can tell by looking down. If one extrapolates from this discouraging patch of grassy, scrubby stuff right here on the other side of the barbed-wire fence on out forever to the north. So now it’s noon. And here’s that somehow pristine, disassembled state of things I spoke of—finally laid out flat,
untidy, indistinct, and, after an hour or so, uncomfortable as the murmur of the power lines. Things come apart and you can feel an urgency. The way, with jazz, the melody becomes more clear, more precious, as it threatens to disintegrate. The whole idea of melody exposed and placed at risk. What is the whole idea of ground? An expression of the flatness at the bottom of the heart. That dark reflecting pool we’re always gazing into. We’re so tired. We’re thinking maybe this was not a good idea. We are not thinking philosophically at this point. To the extent we think or speak at all it has to do with dung beetles. They are everywhere. At this stage (and I think by now we sense—not to articulate or anything—a vaguely Dantean structure to our journey), but at this particular level, they’re the most conspicuous life-form. Holy crap, I think I probably actually said. Look at ’em go. I did not know what I know now, but I perceived I’d made a joke. Of course the crap part. Pretty funny. But the holy part as well. Here’s what I know right now and what I may have had a faint awareness of back then. I’ve got my mom’s old bright green copy of Sir Wallis Budge’s transcript and translation of the Papyrus of Ani or The Book of the Dead, propped open on my desk to page 339. I’m quoting footnote number 2 and trying to imagine having had this book among the crazy contents of my backpack, having paused and set my backpack down to read while all around us we imagine we can hear this tiny, soft, and ancient skittering of the sun across the sky: