Shame and Wonder Read online

  And so it proved to be the case. A few years after my encountering the mystery, thinking I might write about it, I endeavored to look it up online expecting to find a site devoted to it or maybe a cult. But there was nothing. The rock was there, of course, all over the place—a famous tourist shrine. But not a word about the tree. Although I noticed, way in the background of someone’s vacation shot, a blur that might have been it. So I began to thumb through everyone’s vacation photos. Everything’s online. There’s no forgetting. No unconscious, no subliminal anymore. As if our eyes had got stuck open. No one ever goes to sleep. And sure enough, I’d catch these glimpses, distant silhouettes beyond some random moment entered into the racial memory. Here we are and there we were, can you believe it? Sure, I see you. I see all of you. But now and then a closer, dated shot and a progressive thinning out and dying back until one, dated March 14, 2005, with this warmly dressed old couple standing next to it—an “old dead tree,” it’s captioned. Here they’ve managed, with some effort I imagine, to ascend to the very top of this strange, solid granite planetary emptiness. But do they wish to have themselves remembered in the emptiness? Of course not. Let’s go over by this old dead tree, this leafless, brittle remnant, so it doesn’t seem so empty. So it feels like there is hope. Or once was hope. The wind has stopped. Her denim overshirt, his jacket, hanging open. Look at them—so there-by-the-grace-of-God, so far from knowing, caring how they look, so simply standing and residual like the tree. We are residual, after all. It’s how we are and what we do. “A young Chinese man took this photo…” After they took one of him. You see? The whole world knows to stand next to the tree, alive or dead, in these bleak circumstances.

  3.

  With regard to the enchanted tree reported to have stood atop Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg, and which has been described as bearing countless carved memorials, generally hearts enclosing pairs of names or initials, that, in apparent violation of the rule whereby trees grow, in linear terms, from the very ends of branches only, seemed to ascend with age from trunk to branch and so forth steadily upward, growing fainter till they disappeared, as it were, into the air in a sort of diagram of love’s transcendent vanishing—regarding this, there is an explanation that preserves, perhaps, both science and appearances.

  It is natural to suppose the earliest carvings would have appeared upon the trunk. And that the later ones (maintaining the established arboricultural understanding) would have had to find their place a little higher. Newer above and older below. Then, to explain how it might come to appear the opposite were the case—that love, all love, begins below and naturally carries, with the growing of the tree (in ways it’s not allowed to grow), into the branches, up and up and older and older until released into the wind—we need to grant a pair of conditions. First, that the evidence—the coverage as a whole—is of some age. And second, that it represents, in its entirety, a limited event. Let’s just assume that all this clambering up and carving of memorials occurred as a florescence, a sort of eruption of desire among the youth of scattered, lonely towns and ranches down below. A rush of feelings normally insular, discouraged and expended in that dusty central Texas isolation, suddenly loose for whatever reason, quietly gathered into a self-sustaining confluence toward expression in what must have seemed the most exalted way. If we allow that what we have here is the record of a passing moment—which seems to accord with observation that the freshest-looking markings were already fairly old—then we’ve a shot at making sense of this.

  Trees grow, throughout their length, in girth of course. Each year, as we all know, another ring is added. So, the surfaces of trunk and branch expand, although at relative rates that vary with circumference. Thus the girth of a branch the size of your arm might double in a few years while that of the trunk would seem to have increased, as a percentage of diameter, only slightly. Any sentimental carvings, therefore, correspondingly more or less distorted. More or less healed, and therefore aged, with those below retaining clarity much longer than the upper ones, especially somewhat smaller, somewhat desperate, tragic, comic ones on secondary branches carved with acrobatic difficulty and perhaps less care and all the more exposed to the elements as well. Thus it might not take very long before you’ve got this false impression that love rises to its vanishing. Ascends like Roddy McCorley, in the ballad, to his hanging “proud and young.” Is that all lost, then? Is transcendence thus disqualified? Do Roddy—golden ringlets ’bout the hemp-rope—and our love just go away? How can that be? We’re left with this. Must we depart without inflection? What if we learned that Jimmy Durante, at the close of his fifties TV show, so famously receding, to the melody of “It’s Time to Say Goodnight,” into the dark along that spotlit path—the Great Schnozzola pausing in his trench coat, schnozz illumined, chiaroscuro, in each spot to bid farewell as if it were the end of everything, of comedy and tragedy, to turn and throw a kiss, to touch his slouch hat, tug his coat, and, finally, standing in the last little spot of light, to touch his hat again and turn into the dark—what if we learned that, for some technical reason, it had been filmed backward—kinescoped instead of live—and what we saw was a reversal of the truth? Would he have lied? Would Jimmy Durante, one of the greatest, saddest jazz pianist-comics in the world have lied to us?

  I suspect a broader meaning to our breakfast cereal back in the 1950s. To the ritual with that dreary, quickly soggy, deeply comforting stuff we loved as kids, depended on as antidote and sacrament against the differentiated terrors of the night. To that and all accreting to it—the marvelous offerings on the outside of the box and even, now and then, inside; just trinkets, sure, but so remarkable recovered from the sameness, from the spillage. There were powerful feelings that attached to this, somehow. As if all the comfort and the terror of the whole world were involved in having breakfast every morning. I remember this terrific sort of longing, but the meaning has escaped. I think such meanings shot right through us like neutrinos at that age. We were set up more as detectors than recorders. So extraordinarily sensitive to meaning yet transparent to it, I suspect profundities passed through us all the time. We knew all sorts of deep, important things but only very briefly. What I’d like to know is what might be required to get it back. What sort of action might be taken to reconstitute the moment, those conditions. Like, say, standing on a windy day in a field of wheat or corn and reading Homer. Something crazy. What’s the language for such meaning? What did Greek sound like back then?

  The other night I’d barely started this and found myself jammed up. I had this title: “Cereal Prizes.” It was late. Nancy was here. And I decide I have to have a limeade—one of those carbonated limeades with a chunk of lime tossed in to show it’s real or almost real—from the Sonic drive-in down the street. Oh, nothing else will do for a jam-up at that hour. Want a limeade? She declines. So off I go—and on the radio, on NPR, a young man is speaking about his life. It’s in the middle of the interview. So I don’t know who he is or if he’s famous. Why he’s speaking. But I’m captured by the sort of graceful fright of it—how his language seems to have a kind of built-in resignation, seems to move toward some fatality, like opera. Medium limeade, please. Is that all? What else is there? Nothing. Nothing. Thanks. No problem, as they say. They always say. But there are terrors in the night. And this young man on NPR is talking about them. And he’s speaking in this way, this casual way that seems to slide across events, that I imagine has to come from such a vigilant simplicity the language forms around the need to clear the view, to hold yourself away, not let the words catch on to things, not get caught up in specificities, unnecessary, unbecoming twists and knots that bind and slow you down and make no difference in the long run. Here the words must run together like a single thought, inflected where they need to be, like music but continuous like radar so if something really important shows, it shows like blazes. Gunshots, he’s describing. How he lives with them. And how he’d rather not. How he would like to sit on his stoop all day if he wants and
not get shot. A guy got shot. And he was there, this young man speaking, passing by. And there’s this guy all shot up, lying in the street—and here’s the part that can’t be said, I think, in any other language in this way and have this meaning, this Homeric sort of sense—he says the holes, the bullet holes, that killed this guy are in himself. Not as if in himself but in him. They are in him. And perhaps he means the future but he also means right now and possibly always. I don’t know. I’m in my driveway with my limeade. And I guess I chicken out and turn it off.

  That night I’m wakeful. She’s asleep, but I say, “Nancy?” She’s so beautiful and kind, awake or asleep. She doesn’t wake up easily, but if I say her name she finds another circuit somewhere and comes instantly and practically awake. And so I tell her about the young man on the radio and what he had to say about his life among the terrors and the dead guy in the street and how his language seemed the only possible language to address such things, as if it had developed over centuries to do so, and if sometimes it was difficult to understand, it’s easy to imagine thus with Homer, how a listener might have lost the high and ancient Greek at moments in the song when passions lifted clear away from ordinary understanding. And how here I am discussing cereal prizes. Good night, Nancy. Holy shit.

  The ones I’m talking about, the prizes, were the ones that came in the box. Not the ones you had to send away for—those were “premiums” and attached an altogether different set of feelings; not so deep, the surprise and mystery lost in the weeks it took for them to arrive. I mean the ones you’d find in the cereal box itself as if by accident, like finding them on the ground. On the street. That something-out-of-nothing sort of power and unlikeliness—to which a child, so recently produced out of that powerful unlikeliness, would be especially sensitive.

  My friend John Lunsford, a former museum director and teacher to me in my youth, who retains, in spite of age and erudition, much of his childhood sensitivity, has given me his “Episodes with Zuni Ancestor Spirits and Gods,” an account of his recent expedition to the annual Shalako ceremony of New Mexico’s Zuni Pueblo. It begins with a simple paragraph within whose plain description is a broader understanding:

  All of the main streets in Zuni Pueblo are paved, unlike at the time of my first visit in 1962. Even today, however, the secondary streets and passageways are all in the clayey Zuni soil, and thus remain rutted and uneven. At eighty, one has to watch one’s step, and this year, on December 7, 2013, as is usual in December, residual, or larger, patches of ice add to the need for care in navigating the ways to shrines, or to certain of the houses chosen annually as one of the six Shalako houses.

  As he comes across “the clayey Zuni soil” it all goes softly metaphorical to me. It’s just a whisper but sufficient to suggest the larger risk (like the beginning of a Lovecraft tale—“When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork…”) that’s involved in such a visit, such an ambivalent invitation, to observe a different vision of the world. John knows to watch his step, and how to keep his deferential distance in all circumstances—no less at the trading post or the visitors’ center than along the margins of the ceremony, sometimes in its shadow. His meticulous and naturally generous gaze seems to enlist all in a kind of metaritual, a sense of the miraculous emergent from the commonplace. This is ancient stuff. It happens where it happens. And so strangely in the middle of the day, right in the middle of a dirt road where some rock that’s always been there with the cars and dogs and daily operations passing over it now reveals itself to be the sacred focus. Here they come—the striped and speckled, masked and feathered higher powers, with their rattles and their mystifying utterances to sway and shake and turn about and place, beneath the lifted stone, their offerings. And pretty soon they’re gone, and with them all the ritual-cornmeal-tossing Zuni who had gathered, leaving the rock back where it was and one to wonder where the other sacred shrines might happen to be and in what seemingly random, unaccountable ways the unaccountable intersects to trip us up and to remind us that it’s all right here, has been here all along.

  But what gets me even more than this in John’s account is a moment shortly after dark as he and his friends await the arrival of the Shalako themselves from across the river—which goes dry at times and, John confirms, is usually much as shown in the early photographs and paintings, hardly more than an extended muddy puddle without proper banks or structure; though John says, since those old photographs, they’ve built a decent footbridge for the crossing of the gods, who have descended from the sacred mountain a couple of miles away, over to our side of things. The Zuni side. They come across the puddle like it’s nothing. Like that rock. Why should that make it so exhilarating? Something out of nothing. Like those wild Homeric street gangs, drive-by shooters, that the young man on the radio was telling us about—all at the dangerous verge of myth. Of epic poetry. His language like a poetry invented to exalt the random terror of it even as it seeks to find a distance, an escape. Did Pasolini, in Medea, mean for Jason and the Argonauts to come across as street toughs on a raft?

  But, anyway, John and his friends are out there waiting at the edge of the Zuni village in the dark, about to freeze but listening, now, to birdlike calls and sounds of chanting. Now the Shalako are coming—ten feet tall with clacking beaks and rolling eyes as big as grapefruit. These are crazy-looking gods with no concern for human sympathy or sympathetic affect. They come looming, swaying into the beams of headlights from the cars along the other side of the river. You’d think candlelight or torches but it’s headlights like they’re deer or something sudden, unexpected. Like an accident. The terrible reality you hate to have to see. What sorts of things get caught in the headlights? Nothing pleasant. Headlights shine on things you’d just as soon not deal with. Things that aren’t supposed to be there in the road or on the bridge. John says it’s stunning. Sometimes blinding with the beams directed toward you, casting you into the uninterpretable shadows of the gods.

  I think, as children, we have the code for all of this, if not the formula, the language. And it doesn’t take too much to set it off. As if significance—the abstract possibility of meaning (let’s allow the faint redundancy of that if we allow it in ourselves—the you that’s you and then the you that knows it’s you)—as if significance, as a pure abstraction somehow, filled the air and only waited to condense. And as a child you’ve no instructions, no resistance. Here it comes. You plunge your sticky little hand into the cereal and here it is, whatever it is. Whatever arbitrary thing upon whose surface meaning glistens like the dew. The Cereal Prize. It sounds like something ancient—having to do with gods at the harvest, meanings bright and terrible. And maybe it was like that in a way.

  A few remain quite powerful to me. The army patches in boxes of Rice Krispies or Post Toasties or whatever. There were ranks. You might get private, corporal—sergeant if you were lucky. Quite substantial and authentic-looking. Smaller than the real ones. But real stitching, real embroidered yellow stripes, as I recall, on canvas ground. You could iron them onto your jacket or your T-shirt. I knew a kid who got a staff sergeant patch and wore it all the time as if he’d actually earned the rank. And, in a way, it seemed he had. Three stripes, one rocker, I believe. We loved to contemplate the heady possibilities. All the way to first sergeant, I think. At least in principle. Imagine one of those ironed onto your T-shirt—too many stripes and rockers to count, with that little diamond in the center. Way too big for your sleeve; you’d probably have to iron it on the front and then, oh goodness, parents, teachers, Eagle Scouts will step aside. One is invested and complete. There is no longing anymore. There’s only you and the U.S. Army and around it all a sort of timeless mist.

  Then there were those little cards with images from Space Patrol, the Ralston (Rice Chex, Wheat Chex)–sponsored TV show. Baseball card–sized cards with “negative” pictures (white on black) of the principal characters, planets, rocket ships, and such. You were supposed to stare at the image for a while, then
at a white wall or the sky, and there would appear a fleeting positive afterimage. I didn’t care too much for Ralston products, though I loved the show, so I remember only the card from that one box. It was a rocket ship. No problem there. I went outside and stared at it while slowly counting to thirty as instructed, then looked up and there it was. As if descended through the clouds. As if I’d passed some sort of devotional meditation test or something. My novitiate or something. Something wonderful in any case. I think I must have made a habit of it, sought the vision in the sky with regularity, because I know, at some point, I no longer needed the card. It would just be there on its own. I’d gone too far and burned it in. For years, as styles of spaceships changed, it hovered, needle-nosed and scythe-finned, way up there like some religious cult delusion. Until sometime in my thirties, when it seemed to lose coherence as a spaceship and to join the other natural small afflictions—specks and “floaters”—I’d begun to notice entering my vision, and a tendency toward which might seem a better explanation from the start.

  And then, of course, the one that turns it all around and takes it right back to the pre-Homeric landscape, back to the street, back into the clayey Zuni soil. It was the deed to a single square inch of land in Canada’s Yukon Territory that came in boxes of Quaker Oats Puffed Wheat, although I don’t remember much about Puffed Wheat. I must have bought it for the prize. And more than once, I should imagine, since the whole idea became a sort of land rush. Lucky the lad whose aunts and uncles liked that stuff, who could inherit without the sacrifice, the tedium, or the shame of surreptitiously exhausting the supply by other means. It was a little like those afterimage cards in that we found ourselves directed to look elsewhere for our actual gratification, though the elsewhere in this case—not only distant but deferred, and even a bit abstract; the Yukon stood for cold and distant, hardly more real than Timbuktu in our minds—placed even greater demands upon the imagination. We would gather, each of us separately, our certificates together (so peculiar, this required more territory than was promised), spread them out or line them up to find some sense of an accumulating fact—of place or something. Even coming to understand the vast unlikeliness that any two square inches were contiguous, might there not still be a way to shuffle these around to make a sort of place? The way a kid thinks of a place—which is to say, a place to be? Such efforts seemed to render each square inch more isolated. More a concentrating focus upon the cold and bleakness. What had happened here? We thought the whole point of the cereal prize was to be plucked, like an act of grace, from bleakness. From the sameness, from the comfort and the tedium. Not to clarify it or focus in upon it. “Here’s your property, little man,” the Quaker Oats man seemed to say, with a chubby half-smile like the Buddha’s. (Quakers, Buddhists—weren’t they pretty much the same?) “See what you think. It’s all right here.”