Shame and Wonder Read online

  What, for example, was I thinking turning my mom’s old record player into a seismograph? I mean, my goodness, 78 rpm. That’s good for what? For Guy Lombardo. Smart cocktails and fleeting moments. Not the slow, eternal creaking of the earth. You’ve seen a seismograph, of course, the clocklike turning of the chart against the stylus. It’s a meditative instrument. It listens. It has nothing to do with 78 rpm. And I knew that, I really did. Yet here I had this thing all set up with a coffee can or something wrapped in graph paper and a brick on top to keep it on the turntable, coat hanger bent around and straining to present a stub of pencil to the chart, and a wire—just plain utility wire—that led from the coat hanger all the way across the room and out a window to a steel rod I had shoved into the ground. And just that crumbly black clay ground that we have here in Texas. The kind of ground that grounds things out, where hope and energy go to die, that’s not much fun to play in, even. Hard to dig. What information did I think might come from there? What was I thinking? I had read enough to know you needed bedrock. Who had bedrock? Maybe those smart kids. Not me, though. No bedrock here. No fundamentals. Yet it wasn’t an altogether empty gesture. It was hard to let it go.

  Once you’d assembled your imaginary instrument, you needed an imaginary quantity, imaginary causes, fainter and fainter suppositions strung together in a Zeno’s paradoxical sort of way on out the window to converge upon the vanishing expectation. Say there were out there in the yard—in everyone’s yard, the common ground—unlikely properties, effects oblique and subtle and evasive to which bedrock, proper seismographs, and smart kids were insensitive. What if there were vibrations of so high and fine a frequency (the properties of Silly Putty, recently discovered, came to mind) that dirt might act more like a solid or a gel and send its pulse through slack utility wire like wind through weather stripping, mournful saxophones at New Year’s. I don’t actually remember turning it on. It would have tugged against the weight, the brick and everything on top, to get to speed. And then the coffee can would not have been quite centered, so the pencil would have skipped and dragged and skipped and dragged like time to change the record. And I bet it was a nice day, too. A weekend probably, kids outside, one’s whole life out there waiting as I’m standing there, watching this little mark get darker and darker on the pale blue-gridded paper, as if meaning might accumulate or something.

  Hank Van Wagoner was the most spectacular smart kid in the neighborhood. And though a few years older than the rest of us, he counted still, I felt, as an impossible example to my superficial longings. He lived two or three houses down and we could hear him testing rockets in his backyard sometimes, usually on weekends. Bear in mind that this was before those little foolproof rocket kits came on the market in response to general horror at the mounting number of injuries sustained by young enthusiasts. The call to space rang clear across the land, and none of us who chose to answer was discouraged in the slightest. It was easy for a kid to buy explosives at the drugstore, bring a bag of potassium nitrate home like jelly beans. Though Hank, of course, had progressed beyond such simple solid fuels into the truly touchy realm of liquid propellants, which included caustic, toxic, self-igniting “hypergolics” such as hydrazine and something called “red fuming nitric acid.” So we listened, in our own backyards, my parents in their folding canvas lawn chairs, with some interest.

  I remember a test so loud it woke me up one Saturday morning, sent me running down the alley. I have no idea where Hank’s parents were. I hardly ever saw them, don’t recall his mom at all. His sister—rumored to be, in her own way, as precocious as her brother—was an intermittent, dark, alluring presence in the evenings on the balcony outside her little suite above the garage. In any case, Hank seemed to suffer under no constraints and here he was, while other kids were rising to Rice Krispies and cartoons, about to blow it all to hell. A rocket engine, when it’s working most efficiently, is pretty close to blowing up. You feel it. You don’t have to know a thing to sense some limit is about to be exceeded. It’s ecstatic in that way—you grip the Cyclone fence, your face against the wire. You note how close he’s standing to it. Is he crazy? There’s no smoke, just hard blue flame and a roar like nothing you’re prepared for in the general calm of 1957 or ’58, when leaves were raked and airplanes still, for the most part, had propellers. How can he have a thing like that? How can he stand there like he knows what he is doing? It’s suspended from a sort of parallelogram that’s hinged, I see, to swing up with the thrust, which is recorded by a marker on a graduated chart. All this is clear to me as small details are said to be at the moment of one’s death. This sort of noise can only mean that something terrible is happening, or we’ve passed beyond the normal intuition. Surely everyone can hear it. Surely all the other kids can hear it, paused before their TVs, their Rice Krispies suddenly silent in the bowl. And then the flame is yellow, sputtering, and the parallelogram goes slack, rectangular again. The other noises of the neighborhood return—I can’t recall but I imagine barking dogs and screen doors slapping. He had stuff you can’t imagine—some sort of rocket-tracking radar thing he showed me once, my God the dials and switches. And a ten- or twelve-foot framework—maybe six inches in diameter, longitudinal spars and bulkheads made of welded steel and weighing probably fifty pounds—he gave me. The absurdly overbuilt interior structure of some liquid-fueled experiment. Some rocket never launched, I think. Sure, take it. And I did. I dragged it home and leaned it up against the fence, amazed, bewildered like a member of some preindustrial tribe deciding how it might be hammered into spearpoints. There was nothing to be done with it. My longings seemed to get all tangled up in the rusty pragmatism of it. Here was fundamental structure, to be sure. The wind blew through it. Had we honeysuckle growing on the fence, it would have made a sort of trellis.

  Here’s what I would do: I’d pack an aluminum tube with a fifty-fifty mixture of potassium nitrate and sugar—wooden dowel jammed in at one end and a Testors model airplane enamel screw cap with a quarter-inch hole surrounded by a bunch of little holes because it looked cool at the other—glue three cardboard fins and a cardboard nose cone on, apply the paint (all-over silver with red fin tips), touch it off, and watch it melt. What was I thinking? And I mean it. What was this half-assed demonstration all about? I knew you couldn’t make a proper rocket nozzle out of a screw cap. I could have told you it would blow right out, that the glue and the cardboard fins would ignite. The melting—more like wilting—aluminum tube surprised me, though. You see, we do learn from our failures.

  Have you ever seen Olivier’s film of Henry V? How carefully it graduates reality from act to act, unfolds it like a pop-up book from stage and painted scenery to something close to real although compressed into the conventions and teetery perspectives of the fifteenth-century miniature. And holds it there. You wait for another jump. For the origamic sets to fall away and the play to charge straight out into the world. And it almost does. The massive chivalry of France comes pretty close to bashing through—you think the churning, swampy earth can’t get more real than that but then the battle’s over and you look around and find that the rolling distances enclosing all this realistic mayhem are imaginary still. “What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?” A miniaturist, imaginary castle folded into painted hills. It’s Agincourt. You think of Krishna’s admonition that the battle is a dream—and how, you want to ask, how is it, then, one’s duty to do battle is not also an illusion? And why is the inconsistency so thrilling? So ecstatic to imagine that we merely represent ourselves. That our going through the motions might be everything.

  Sometimes, on Saturday mornings when there wasn’t something noisier going on, you’d hear a kid named Lefty coming up the street. That wasn’t his real name, which was Gilbert, nor even descriptive, I don’t think. I guess it was just a name he liked. You could always hear him coming up the street because he always kicked a can. And it was always pretty early. I imagine the opening eyes of sleeping parents. Here he’d come. Way down
at the end of the block you’d hear him turn the corner. And remember, cans were heavier then. When kicked, they went much farther and produced a clearer note. I felt it counted as a sort of public service. Rise and shine. But bright and early as he was, he was benighted. Seventeen years old, I think he told us once. And very tall. But acting, seeming, more like six. We didn’t quite know what to make of him. He’d pass by Saturday mornings—pass right through us in a way, past even our instincts to make fun—and that was usually all we’d see of him that week. One thing about him we admired, though, was his sidearm. It was a Hubley Colt .45 in a leather holster. And although, at eleven or twelve, we no longer placed toy guns at the top of our list, you had to respect the Hubley Colt .45. It was the fanciest, most expensive cap gun out there. No one else had one—a full-sized replica of an 1860 Colt with a brass-plated cylinder that functioned and received six realistic-looking bullets, each to be realistically charged with a single cap. You had more firepower, I suppose, with one of the ordinary types that loaded endless rolls of caps. But that was different. There was no conviction there. No sense of the almost real about it. Someone loved him. Someone had said, Here, Gilbert. Here for you is something very precious, just like you, and almost real.

  One Saturday morning Bobo Riefler and I were standing in my driveway and waiting for Lefty. In the garage I’d put together a sort of laboratory: anything that looked good from my chemistry set; a big glass vat (I’m not sure where that came from) full of water into which had been dissolved whatever chemicals were left in those little square bottles, plus a sprinkling of potassium permanganate—wonderfully explosive when mixed with glycerin (just the one-ounce jar please, thank you, and a pack of Dubble Bubble), here though merely for the vivid, toxic purple—and right next to which I’d set up one of those “traveling arc” devices with its brilliantly ascending and expanding, zapping discharge so beloved of mad scientists and which, I had been shown by one of the smart kids, could be made from a discarded neon sign transformer (half-burned-out ones still were capable of 15,000 volts, produced a two- to three-inch spark, and could be had quite inexpensively); and, finally, gathering all this up in a philosophical sort of way, attached imprecisely here and there like ivy, coils of wire meant to conduct by faith alone the whole idea, whatever it was, the very spirit of mad science, to a leather football helmet I’d suspended over a borrowed canvas lawn chair.

  I would like to suggest that Lefty was our choice for reasons other than unkind ones. Though we were unkind of course—so, as for that, I’m pretty sure what I was thinking. Yet within that there was something else, I want to say: surprising, not unkind. I don’t remember what I told him. But I don’t think it was difficult to get him to come with me down the crunchy gravel drive to the garage—a little two-car frame garage, quite dark, not finished out or anything, just studs and planking, garden tools and stacks of cardboard boxes, all the stuff that tends to wind up in garages, with my laboratory over in the corner and the lawn chair by itself out in the middle of the concrete floor. I think what was surprising was how easily and heavily he sat there. How resigned he seemed to be. His six-gun shining—those holsters alone cost a fortune. So, I’m standing at the switch—and naturally nothing’s going to happen; nothing ever really happens. But you never know, it’s God’s domain, and here it’s such a beautiful Saturday morning, all our lives aglow out there, somehow, and glaring through the single open overhead door into the dark garage. And Bobo’s finally sort of calmed down, thinking who knows what but waiting. And then after I throw the switch we’re all still waiting there for a second or two, all three of us, the zapping of the traveling arc behind us, gazing out into the glare as if some limit were about to be exceeded.

  The religious and the modernist impulse seem to spring from the same engulfing moment of self-consciousness and doubt. “My God, where are we?,” then a space of ten or twenty thousand years to give us time to wander out into the shallows, gathering shells and stuff exactly like we’re not supposed to do, before the secondary wave brings in the terrible apprehension once again. It seems so hard to know what we are really doing—what it all comes down to, finally. I remember an exhibition of modernist objects at the Dallas Museum of Art a number of years ago—for the most part just the commonest sorts of things we’re used to living with, but emerged from this terrific redesign, this reappraisal toward first principles as if, to our surprise, such thoughtless accidental things could have first principles or even be adjusted to suggest the possibility. Is this what we’ve been doing all this time, it made one think, when we thought we were only sitting down or making tea or listening to the radio? Is this what we’ve been doing? How extraordinary, beautiful, uncomfortable and strange our lives have been. And maybe risky too, somehow. The very idea that there might be a pure idea about such things appears to force, or reveal, a certain instability. The eye, the hand attempt the thoughtless move toward such a thing as they have always done and then you think, Well, have I got this right? Am I positioned in the way I ought to be?

  Nancy and I once took a trip to Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg, Texas, to try to escape some personal anxieties of mine. I was not happy. Things had not been going well on a variety of fronts. So off we went in that uncertainty to climb the great peculiar four-hundred-foot-high hemispherical, spalling granite bulging-up of forces deeper than can easily be made sense of. I was her bearer, carrying giant rolls of drawing paper big as sails that caught the wind and needed little boulders brought to hold them down and sometimes needed me to hold the boulders as she drew. If you’ve not been there, it’s a pretty spooky place. As if mitosis on a planetary scale had been arrested at some point in the Precambrian to leave this half-emergent, asteroidal sort of world as a place where one might actually stand upon first principles and try to keep one’s balance. Not so easy, as it turns out. So coherent and extensive a distortion takes you with it. Halfway up you’ve lost your proper sense of ground and start to feel the near horizon as the clearer one, the granite one toward which a simpler Yves Tanguy–like flatness falls away. There’s nothing picturesque—not even scary eighteenth-century picturesque—about it. It subtends the picturesque with an idea that’s hard to get across, to keep your footing on. On our way down we found ourselves having to cross great slabs of spalling rock. These are the slabs that, broken and weathered, make huge Yves Tanguy–like shapes upon the Yves Tanguy–like surface—so uneasy, that surrealistic sense of things as simply, purely strange. Depictable strangeness you can point at and describe and even come to regard as familiar, in a way, without depleting its expressiveness of underlying strangeness as an irreducible property. The fact of strange as something to consider along with up and down and near and far and so forth.

  We had come to a place where we had to step from one vast, weathered spall of rock to another across a gap of maybe a couple of feet. No more that that. Quite deep but just a step, which I had managed without thinking, rolls of paper on my shoulder, Nancy standing on the other side with her box of art supplies, as I remember, though she thinks it was a backpack and that maybe it was earlier in the day when we were simply scrambling around, exploring. I recall it differently. With evening coming on. Wind picking up. I waited, maybe to take her hand, or not—sometimes it’s better not to interfere. And yet I did. I made a joke. A little tease. “Don’t fall,” I said. A look of mock concern. Or maybe “That’s a long way down.” Or maybe just the look. And she stepped back from the edge and looked at me and found herself unable. Couldn’t do it. In a minute she would force herself—she won’t submit to being afraid for long—but in that moment she just stood there, as did I on the other side, unable now, myself, to step across and join her, stunned to be there all of a sudden as if stricken with self-consciousness or something, with the whole thing so unsettled, all my worries and the gravity here so out of perpendicular, the ground itself not altogether clear, not quite developed yet as place distinct from object, and this gap, this gulf between us where the rock was breaking up t
hat I just had to go and point out like an idiot, just at dusk, wind whipping through the rolls of unsuccessful drawings (she would tell me later how she couldn’t seem to find the proper edge, the boundary for a drawing; how her eye kept sliding off). As if such gaps, such inconsistencies were not all over the place up here, the fundamental state of things, in fact—the deep and dangerous give-and-take of ground and object. But I had to go and point and say, Oh my, look where we are and how precarious this is. And we could hear the other climbers coming down. Faint clumps of voices here and there beyond the limited horizon coming and going with the wind. And way down there at the bottom everything in shadow now—the little stream, the parking lot and visitors’ center. How I loved the visitors’ center—pamphlets, maps, displays; the crummy telescope you plunked a quarter into for a strained and blurry view as if it were some sort of planetary body you were gazing at, a glimpse of where mankind might one day venture at his peril, with his children on his shoulders, picnic lunches, plastic water bottles, silly-looking hats.

  That instability must be built in, I think. That terrible give-and-take. We seem to reenact it all the time. How long did the Buddha take—the Buddha, for God’s sake—to complicate into those marvelous polychrome and polybrachiate “deities”? A thousand years or so?