Shame and Wonder Page 15

  Kheperȧ was self-produced, and he was the creator of the world and of all on it. He was the father of the gods, and men and women sprang from the tears that fell from his eyes upon his members, and so became sources of life. His name in its simplest form seems to mean “he who existeth,” “he who is,” but in later times the verb derived from it means “to evolve,” “to develop.” The oldest symbol of Kheperȧ is the beetle, and the earliest conception of Kheperȧ was that he existed in the form of a gigantic beetle, which rolled the ball of the sun across the sky. The ball of the sun was regarded as the source of all life, and was compared to the ball of excrementitious matter which the Scarabaeus sacer collects, and rolls along to the place where its larva is so that it may feed upon it.

  And imagine how I’d close the book and sit there on my backpack for a while. And we’d be gazing off and thinking what a penetrating, fearless intuition of the mundane path to heaven. You can’t get any more mundane than “excrementitious.” Do we hear it? Really? Maybe, if we sit here long enough. The sound the sun makes in translation. And another thing: a discovery published just this year in the journal Current Biology shows that dung beetles, who must roll their ball of dung away from the heap in as straight and rapid a course as possible to prevent its being stolen, are able to navigate by means of the Milky Way. No kidding. Think of that. They’d known for a while that certain kinds of beetles in the daytime use the sun or a pattern of polarized light that appears around the sun—and, given the ancient associations, how can it get any better than that? But, still, the Milky Way. The whole galactic plane. You cannot help but want to think of it quite closely and imagine it somehow—that it is possible to apprehend the instant of comparison or reception or whatever is going on. At night the dunghill black and deep as furrowed prairie. There’s the quiet digging in, the separation. Nothing lower. Nothing less than this is possible. And then what? We must not pretend it’s possible to know. And yet we do. The little eyes look up—or does he have to elevate himself, incline himself until a feeling enters in? Can we say that? Allow such notions to reduce to a sort of point? A certain feeling funnels down toward a solution—like a scribble, hearts and arrows on the ground. It makes you wonder, though, since these particular beetles are good fliers, if a glitch in the code or something might occasionally instruct a strange and marvelous reversal of the process.

  Most of the day, then—until midafternoon—we cross this pure, undedicated emptiness we’d no idea was out here. Just an emptiness of the sort you’d find appearing in the alley, in the unmown space behind the garage, but spread out over miles, expanded, aggravated, getting in your shoes and burry bits all over your jeans. We shall escape before too long. We’ll reach the edge and find a road that takes us out to 544 where an old brick church stands on a rise and a man on a riding mower rides round and round tossing plumes of yellow dust and giving us a little wave. And so dispiriting is this, somehow, that we toss it in and hitchhike back to Dallas. But before this, well before, as we are making our way across the terrible emptiness, we see this house, this leaning two-story farmhouse in the distance and behind it something shining—all spread out, complex, and shifting in the breeze. You can’t have shining out here, can you? That’s not right. But sure enough, as we approach what must have been a backyard once, distinct from the philosophical ground state that’s reclaimed it, there are these things. These shiny, galvanized-sheet-metal, modern-arty constructions. Maybe four or five feet tall, most built to turn upon their bases in the wind. Some have these hoods like giant flared and crested gladiators’ helmets. Others more like tents or kites—all open, seemingly presented to the air as if to take it in, to gather the expressions of the atmosphere unto the marvelous, vaguely scientific-looking shine of it. “Like shining from shook foil,” in Hopkins’s phrase, which I once thought so strangely, awkwardly descriptive of “God’s grandeur,” till I realized the brilliance of that reaching for and blasting through the lowest, simplest, homeliest point of wonder. It would be years before I learned that these things were cattle feeders. “Mineral feeders,” actually, each to receive a plastic tub of bovine dietary supplement and be left out in the open, commonly fitted with some sort of spinning, wind-directed shield to keep out rain. And of course, although I don’t remember any, there would have had to be cattle out there somewhere. How, otherwise, the beetles? But at this point we are tired. Worn out and captured in the superficial moment. Drained of doubt. It is a bright, uncritical wonder, this array out here like this behind the almost-certainly empty, gaping farmhouse—blasted back to bare wood, leaning toward that instant when the earth moves out from under, yet not quite beyond the faint, strained possibility of life. I know there was something—an article of clothing on a line, perhaps—still bright enough to speak of human presence not quite finished, not quite given up all automatic movement. Something like that made us think we’d best not hang around. That this arrangement here was to be glimpsed and looked away from. As, years later, I would come to decide was the way to regard the strange, dark still-life paintings of Sánchez Cotán—so few, all done around 1602, all black and cold beyond the cold stone open window where the brightest things we love to see and eat are placed or dangled on these strings as if to tease us or admonish us for gaining such a glimpse of them, so brilliant where they’re kept in secret storage here, the best things in the world, so brilliant as they seem just barely here, emergent from the dark. It isn’t anything, of course. It’s just we’re beat. It’s just the back side of the farming operation. Here, eternal, pure, untidy, philosophical ground we like to use for forage. Here, the house. And here, somewhere, the point where human life departs. And here, the sky. And all this shiny, spinning, atmospheric, instrumental business at the interface. For cattle, sure. For cattle.

  By September 1924, the massive interferometer in its barnlike shed was ready, and the measurements began. It was a physical operation—very strenuous. And Miller was a small man. Again, I have to wonder how it felt. Though I must not pretend it’s possible to know. Or that it carries any meaning—though it might. Can I say that? That much? There were, the following year, more data-gathering sessions (so exhausting, he himself would note) in April, August, and September, wrapping up at last in February 1926. He’d have to stand and actually shove this thing around—the mercury bearing helped, of course, but there was still inertial mass to overcome—through sixteen stations every circuit, every 22.5 degrees. A little bell would tell him when to stop and bring his eye up to the eyepiece for a measurement—an estimate of the amount by which the interference fringes’ delicate vertical bands of bright and dark had shifted in relation to a pointer—which, called out to an assistant, would be entered. There’s a pretty wide divergence of opinion, it would seem, as to the number of measurements taken. How many ringings of the bell (the hateful bell, you’d think, eventually). How many tiny, unfelt lurchings of the heart. I’m going to go with Fickinger’s low-end calculation of about two hundred thousand. So, let’s round it off to endless. How about endless. Gazing, one imagines, at (for a couple of thousand turns), then through the screen of lines. You can’t maintain that sort of rigorous opacity forever. Pretty soon the world comes in—or at least approaches as someone standing on a screen porch feels the breeze and smells the rain before it gets here. There is that. What else? There’s light through trees like riding on a train, say, through the country, late afternoon, and all the trees line up just right against the reddening light that flickers bright and dark across your half-closed eyes. Or getting lost out there in the corn or wheat. He must have done that as a child. But this, of course, so much more subtle. The interrogating means itself interrogated. Hoping for a slip. A flicker of something more than data, finally cold and pale as ash—all hope and data ground together fine as flour in this deeply horizontal sort of milling operation. And you note, of course, his name in this connection, how he works in this regard to turn this thing around and around the simplest question, over and over—milled to nothing almost (n
o one ever managed to reproduce his faint results or justify his faintly hopeful interpretation), ground to dust you can imagine settled out upon the ground as if to try to catch a footprint. “Are we here yet?” is, I think, what it reduces to. Can we be shown to have a proper motion through the dark, then we must have a place as well. I think that’s it. And it’s so close to simple knowledge, the requirements hardly any more complex than farm equipment—see, just turn this big old tractor axle sideways, weld those combine struts on there, then we can send off for the mirrors. If we even need the mirrors. If we even need to do this. What do you think? I think somebody already did this, maybe. Long ago, with light through trees or something. How light fades across the sidewalk in the evening, maybe. Something pretty simple.

  —

  GIVEN ALL THE CLEAR and rigorous direction of Tom Corbett—all that struggling verticality, that strict, wide stance and arms-akimbo military stuff; straight up, straight down—there was about the gentle, horizontal thrust of Space Patrol a more sustained and more specific act of will. You had to lean into it. Something I have noticed about the way old people drive. How far ahead they seem to look; how close they press against the wheel. Do I do that? I may be getting there. I’d like to see what they see, in a way. I’d like to gain that sense Commander Corey has of unimaginable distance, light-years, zillions of light-years, crossed while leaning on the stick, the yoke. While peering ahead into it. Pressing on into the dark. As if such distances might be anticipated. “Are we here yet?” On and on. He grips the stick. He has to know what he is doing.

  1.

  The friend I told this story to insisted I write it down. He is kind. And thinks there may be kindness in it. But I’m not so sure. I tend to get excited on the phone—he lets me go and I get all jazzed up in telling this, and sure it actually happened, it’s all true, but still, you have to understand I’m in the oral tradition here, and pacing back and forth and probably making gestures he can probably infer. And bringing everything into it, getting back to it myself. And here the actual truth of the matter is assumed to be subordinate. Oh, this goes way back, you know. This letting the story be the thing. Can you imagine? Back before the reflections on apples and eyes were shaped like tiny windows. Back before the little arrow that we draw between the object and its utterance knew for sure which way to point on all occasions. It’s that back-and-forth, that sloshing out, the spillage of the meaning that seems generous, I guess. And possibly kind. I’m not so sure.

  There used to be a single tree atop Enchanted Rock in Texas. It’s a pretty popular tourist spot. I’d been here once with my kids and thought it quite remarkable—the huge granitic dome as if some asteroidal body were emerging. And it does, as one ascends, begin to feel like you’ve set foot upon an alternate possibility. A simplified expression of the world before our eyes acquired the windows we observe it through today. Above the rubble at the bottom, which supports all sorts of scrub and scattered oak, mesquite, and cactus, where the deer will come to browse at dusk, it all gets pretty strange. It all emerges as a simple, vast convexity of granite, bare and singular. A single thought at work, arising here above the muddle, the default, the general endless settling out we’ve come to think of as the ground, as fundamental. On the rock, though, it gets fundamental. Oh, my goodness. Huffing and puffing your way up, you sense that the greater struggle isn’t so much against the slope as against the change of thought, the shift in reference. Whatever it is, it takes some climbing. So, on this particular visit, this ascent, my second I think, and long enough ago that the tree atop the rock had yet to fade and curl away into a stump, my friend the artist Doug MacWithey, his friend Karan (later, gradually, his wife), and I had paused about halfway up. He needed to rest. We wouldn’t know for years how bad it was with him, his heart and everything, the horror of his childhood having beaten him up so badly he insisted that his wit (a truly transcendental goofiness—he’d sing Sinatra’s “My Way” in the voice of Donald Duck with such ridiculous sincerity it almost made you cry), but that his wit, his grace with silly crowds at openings, was essentially apotropaic, a word I taught him, and compensatory. Anyway, he felt the need to rest. While I, on my part, felt the need to be a jerk and so agreed to meet them later, setting bravely, ostentatiously off for the top.

  The spoken version, how you tell it over the phone or in the mead hall, is more spooky and direct. The other climbers, other tourists with big hats and water bottles, are not mentioned. Nor, I think, that I had been up here before and noted the tree all by itself—that scrawny, twisty little oak—at the very top. Though merely noted; there were kids who needed watching. Nor, in fact (for at the time it was not clearly understood), that the phenomenon at issue, the essential apprehension of the story, is not technically, arboriculturally, even possible as interpreted. The oral version comes through Anglo-Saxon, blurts its way straight to the top to find the tree, among the shallow vernal pools, a spectral object right away. There is no doubt. No time to wander around up there with all the tourists holding their hats on in the wind. We’re drawn directly to the point where love cuts in, whereby the vision is received and that is that. And that’s enough to stun the rowdies in the mead hall into silence.

  But, in fact, it took a while. I figured maybe I should go back down and check on Doug. But, as I say, we’d no idea at that time. How much rest he really needed. How loss builds up like cholesterol or barnacles or something. So I waited by the tree. And finally noticed, lightly touching, where a pocketknife had scraped the bark to make a place to carve a heart around two sets of initials. Still quite legible. And others too, less clear, about the trunk. And if you looked close you could see, along the two main branches, older ones—the heart shapes darkened, healed but still detectable; initials, faint intentions, nearly gone. How about that. Here is where they come. The granite, much too hard and coarse, would wreck your blade. A stuttery scratch is all you’d get. To scuff and wash away in no time. By the time you reach the bottom, get back home, get into bed, and send your thoughts up here, it’s gone. No kindness there, I think, for sure. And spray paint seems so loud and gets you into trouble. Who would want to close his eyes, her eyes, at night and think of that? I had to strain a bit, to squint and look away and look again to see the higher branches, tertiary branches, nearly black against the sky. I’d shift my angle, lift my hands against the glare—I could have climbed up to the first split for a better look, I guess, had I not feared some sort of citizen’s arrest. But it was clear enough—and here’s the apprehension, here’s the vision that defies all arboricultural understanding—that the scars, the little heart-shaped memories of love, were up there too, just barely, smaller, fainter, taken up the way the body moves old wounds along and why (so strangely, it once seemed to me) they give those beautiful gold-and-purple-enameled heart-shaped medals (Was I wounded? Yes, of course. I have this medal), like a valentine to come across and not remember anything about it but the loss. There was no other way to think of it. The hearts move up and up until released, somehow. Old lovers lie in bed down there and touch their hearts and feel the fading scars like vaccinations. Holy moly. I went skittering down to Doug. He looked all right. He made a joke. This is no joke. Get up. You want to know where love goes? Sure you do. We all do, right? I looked at Karan. Right? Of course. Of course. Well, this is it. Come on. So, up he got. And forth we went to see this marvel, to acquire this understanding of which, to this day (notwithstanding some research and consultation with Doug’s brother Kevin, an arborist who actually lives down there in Fredericksburg, about the way trees grow, not like we do but from the very tips of branches), I will not be unconvinced. If Doug were here, he’d tell you too. He’d tell it straight. And all the sad old drunken warriors in the mead hall would fall silent.

  2.

  Atop a vast and smooth and otherwise barren rock as big as a mountain stood an oak upon whose surface had been carved by countless lovers countless hearts surrounding names or pairs of initials. Something about the grand reduction,
the finality perhaps, of this arrangement seemed to have acted to constrain the amorous impulse to a regulated flow. A certain urgent uniformity of gesture—though not rigorous; exuberances in terms of scale or ornament were visible here and there, but overall it made an orderly release. It was as clear as it could be—from trunk to branch, love carried up into the sky, a rising plume like one of those oil-field towers flaring off the volatiles. The fresher, clearer, hopeful hearts below, with, higher and higher, older and older, tighter and darker scarifications, all but healed, erased, released into the elements, the constant wind, among the higher branches.

  Now, it’s true that trees are not supposed to grow like that—extend throughout their length—but rather only from the tips of recent growth. The trunk and branches grow not up but out—in girth. Love should not, therefore, hope for altitude but find itself fulfilled in its expansion, with the increase in circumference, toward a state of vague, benign illegibility. Specifics to dissolve, at last, within the broad intention, in the spreading heart-shaped smoke ring of the heart. Yet I am certain no one ever came away from that extraordinary place with any simpler, more intuitive understanding than the one I took with me—that love ascends and disappears. I can’t conceive of any other. Unless lovers are imagined to have come equipped with ladders in those days, whatever days those were, and eager to begin at the very top. Which would explain the oldest declarations way up there like that. Which makes a very different story, I suppose. How love descends without disturbing any arboricultural principles. A top-down sort of thing. Like a siphon—you just get it going. Then it comes. Just keep it coming. Coursing down. But that’s no good. You’re not the source. It might cut off at any moment. You’re dependent and detached. Besides, it’s awkward and unnatural and would have you lying awake at night reluctant even to touch the hand that’s next to yours for fear it will have stopped. Which isn’t how it goes at all. Love goes away, but not like that. The first and clearest, least explicable understanding is the best. Against all technical reports. Love rising, fading, flaring off. How sad and beautiful, the volatiles igniting. One imagines certain frequencies of light beyond the ones we normally see, in which the tree might be observed to burn, in fact. A barely visible, alcoholic sort of flame. Which can’t be good for trees as trees. It can’t last long—the tree itself, I shouldn’t think.