Shame and Wonder Read online

  By the time we got down to the bottom, it was nearly dark and deer were everywhere. We’d heard there were too many for some reason—odd climatic circumstances, too few predators. And here they were emerging from the trees, all rather small and probably hungry, coming right up to the path. One sniffed my hand. We spotted thirty or more on the road back into town. The dark was full of them. That night I got a call and had to head back to Dallas in the morning. But before we left that morning, Nancy waiting in the car, I finished off a really terrible bottle of wine from one of the local vineyards—probably a product of the same climatic circumstances. All the grapes of every kind surviving some big hailstorm had gone into it. And it tasted like that, too. Like screw first principles, just get me on the road.

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  THE AUTISTIC ANIMAL BEHAVIORIST Temple Grandin, through her own unstable sympathies, has shown how cattle, urged along a chute, will balk at an unfamiliar object like a paper cup left carelessly in their path. Get rid of the paper cup and off they go to the killing floor as easy as you please. But just like that they’re overwhelmed. A simple, thoughtless little thing like that will bring them to a sudden realization. Stop to notice and you’re lost. Sun going down, wind whipping up. My God, where are we? We would really like to turn around and go back to the pasture where we came from but we can’t. We must proceed.

  I have acquired a list of the objects from the modernist exhibition. (It took some time and a helpful “imaging technologist” in the archives since there was no published catalog.) There is more than I remembered. So much of it, I suppose, I walked right by. It’s not like paintings. It’s just stuff. It is, in a way, the very idea of all this stuff. Not all of it picked up off the beach, as it were, and cleaned and reappraised to the same degree. There’s all this silverware, for example—Contempora salad fork and dinner fork and so on. Century soup spoon. In the little thumbnail photos with the list it’s hard to tell what makes them modern, what has happened to them. Not too much, I think. The ornament scoured away in the surf. But maybe back in the thirties there was just the slightest tingle in the hand to pick these up, like accidentally brushing someone’s sleeveless arm. The slightest question. It’s so strange how things look strange devoid of ornament. How things can get so simplified there’s almost nothing there—these points of contact, simple ordinary contact, with the world called into question. Here’s a clear glass Corning Silver Streak electric iron from just before the Second World War. It’s beautiful. But how does it feel to press your clothes with that? Beyond the visual sense of mass, what else is lost? How clear do we want such things to be? Do we want to lose the heavy moment? Slip away into the future with our chores?

  That night in Fredericksburg, we spread the one big drawing Nancy had done out on the bed and found that she had drawn a face. She hadn’t realized, but up there in the wind and cold, her paper trying to blow away, her ideas sliding off, her hand had found a face in the rock. A great big rocky face—an ornament. A handhold. Reassurance, I suppose. She’d no idea until we rolled it out and there it was. How about that. That’s what ornament is for. To give us purchase. Show how things entail and anchor one another. Spread our understanding out. Extend our grasp. Keep things from being too surprising.

  What I mostly tend to remember from the show—my main impression walking through it—are the fragile, simple surfaces of things. A decorative surface ages gracefully and easily. It’s already formally compromised and mutable. These surfaces, though, were singular, exposed and unprotected. Taut. Like membranes pulled as tightly around the idea as they could be and, in most cases, showing strain. A little Rudolph Schindler writing desk from the thirties, listed here though not depicted, I remember especially—very small and made of simple painted wood, so tightly folded around itself, some pure idea of itself, so tensely here-and-now, so free of ornament and history, its cracking and abraded surface seemed about to burst, to let it go ahead and slip into the future. With no past, where else to go? I wanted to sit there at that desk, to try imagining the future as a special form of history. Writing letters. Growing old, thin-skinned and startled into the future, onto the killing floor wide-eyed and sitting down. My goodness, such a sad and clear and urgent thing, it seemed to me, that little desk.

  I loved the future as a child. Which sounds like a thing a child would say. A peculiar thing to be able to say. The darnedest thing. But that’s how I thought of it. As simply as that. Nostalgia, maybe, as a kind of redirectable potential. Personal history nonexistent, what do you do? You think if you hold yourself correctly, get yourself reoriented, you can cast yourself, present yourself, that way. I can remember persuading my mom, somehow, when I was eleven or twelve, to buy me a Danish modern armchair. I’d decided that was it—the very thing to situate me in a clear, anticipatory sort of attitude. To face the future seated and relaxed meant you were ready for it. I cannot imagine how it passed beneath my father’s frugal gaze without objection or concern. That he would not have paused at least for a second there outside my bedroom, glancing in to ask himself why should his son possess a Danish modern armchair. And deciding such a question asked too much, I guess. And so it probably did. How to articulate the rigorous imprecision? All the hard, pragmatic thrust and brace smeared out into those curves in such a graceful contradiction that knew how, exactly how, to take the weight without constraining one’s position, which, in a Danish modern armchair, was encouraged to be variable, slouched, uncertain, ahistorical and open to all sorts of possibilities. I knew what the future held. There was no question it was airless, black and empty but for rocket ships and blobby-looking stars. But mostly black. That’s what you’d see, what you’d imagine from your Danish modern armchair with your homework on your lap, your mom and dad still watching TV in the den—The Honeymooners’ pointless self-inflicted difficulties, Lucy’s crazy struggles and deceptions. You could feel yourself detached, uncomplicated, free to lift your eyes from these impossible problems to the window, to the blackness that, as we know now, is death, the future’s only critical feature, the essential apprehension. But back then you weren’t so sure. You didn’t know so much about it. That it might not really be a place to go.

  I’ve decided to look up cars online. I started to write “computer”: “look up cars on the computer.” I just barely hear the awkwardness, the old-fashionedness, of that. I’ve had a computer for only a few years—five or six. My children finally shamed me into it. Anyway, my little Honda has begun to show its age, so here I’m scanning thumbnail images of Volvo station wagons. A bright and virtuous array. You can’t go wrong, I tell myself, with a Volvo station wagon. Nothing else provides that same ingenuous, truly voluntary style of practicality—receptive, never submissive, to the burden. For the money, of course, one could go for the sleek and insulated self-assertion of an Audi, say, or a little BMW. Yet one must decline, to choose, in this case, openness and kindness and forgiveness of life’s bulkier contingencies, embracing, as an elevated concept, everydayness, life-in-general here at home. To demonstrate to all concerned that you’re pretty happy where you are. You’ve got your red ones, blue ones, silver, black, and white. I like the white. I pause on that one. White looks fine. It’s going to be just fine, I think. We tend to think. And then descends across the screen—or simply appears, I can’t recall—a little ad. What is the word for when that happens? There’s a word. You’ve got your mind on what you’re doing, eyes adjusted to the glow of all the tiny possibilities, and then this thing drops down like a rubber spider on a string. As clear and simple and alarming and imperative as schizophrenic voices probably are. “Go kill John Lennon.” “Sacrifice your son to Yahweh.” Or whatever. Here in the middle of the easy, cheerful yearbook shots of Volvos, like a whisper, like a leaf onto the surface of a pond, this ad drifts down. “Fuck Sexy Girls Near Dallas.” That’s it. And below, five little animated photos of the sexy girls themselves. What can it mean? I mean, I know what it means but what can it really mean? Not “Might I care to…” “Please accept
our invitation…” “Come on out…” Somehow beyond mere exhortation of the sort you used to get in the backs of comic books: “Hey, Boys! Have Fun with Chemcraft.” Out of nowhere. You will do it or you won’t. It makes no difference. There is nothing more to say. Unless you click on it, of course. Which I am not prepared to do.

  I am a prude. And there are rules. Rule number one is if you find it—or it finds you, as it were—then it’s okay. That’s ambient culture. You’re allowed to have a look. And maybe even take your time, install your monocle, peruse the publication that’s been left there on the cistern in the bathroom of the warehouse where you used to work. That colorful brochure someone has dropped in the post office parking lot may be retrieved, examined for a moment in your car, the sounds of traffic out there, daily life, a buzzing in your ear. Get in, get out is the main thing. Keep your critical distance. Don’t go native.

  On the other hand, this ad may suddenly vanish on its own. Whatever algorithm sent it here to haunt the bland, complacent Volvo customer is subtle and may understand the limits, the diminishing returns. The window’s open. I’m permitted. It’s like standing at the urinal and this is on the wall. You can’t just look away. Which brings us to the second rule: You can’t just look away.

  How sweet and sad they are, of course. How could they not be? They just barely move. As if they weren’t quite sure what they should do but here they had this capability built in and why not use it, so each naked sexy girl is told to move a little. How? Well, just a little. You know. Back and forth or something. And they do. The sexy girls sway back and forth. One sexy girl has breasts so large they don’t move with her very well. They tend to stay right where they are. Remain at rest. She looks so young to be so anchored—universalized like that. It can’t be easy. Are they out there now, I wonder. How near Dallas might they be? Just right outside the city limits like those fireworks stands I used to love to go to with my dad on the Fourth of July? As near as that? That was so wonderful. To head out just at dark, beyond the neighborhoods in those days, past the streetlights into planted and unplanted open regions, to the edge of town and there they were, the corrugated structures with their fronts propped open, bare-bulb-lit explosives of all colors, types, and potencies, degrees of complication glowing softly in the dust of cars departing and arriving. Raking headlights like a prison break. My God, you crossed the line and it all seemed crazy. It was possible to feel that here was everything worth having, every ordinary, slow, drawn-out desire tamped down into combustible units. All those warning labels. Do not hold in hand. Unless that’s what you have in mind.

  I can’t imagine such things now. The ordinary life, the city just go on and on. There is no edge of town. Or maybe south there is—beyond the city limits there’s a gradual end to things out Highway 45 toward nowhere in particular. There are empty stretches that way. Certain places where you might pull off the road at night and roll your windows down and turn your engine off and wait.

  My dog Rocky—“Our Gang” comedy–looking pit bull mutt—is an idiot but he’s good at catching possums. Or he was before his hind leg gave out. Even now, though, every couple of months I’ll go out on the backyard deck in the morning, bend to dispense his pint-mug measure of Science Diet, note his slow and strangely patient panting, and become aware of another off to the side as gray and weathered as the pressure-treated lumber, tongue hanging out, little Xs for eyes. Where do they come from? Why do they pass this way at all? They do not learn. Or it doesn’t matter. In his prime he might get two or three a week—not counting all those little pink ones tossed like seeds from nursing females. I have one of those, from June 2005 the label says, curled up in a little jar of alcohol. They’re shadows till he grabs them. Then they’re real for a second or two. Then shadows again.

  When I moved here with my daughters, ten and twelve, my teenage son, and a couple of floppy, friendly dogs oblivious to possums, it was hard. For the girls especially. So uneasy. Families break up for such subtle, imperceptible sorts of reasons. My wife, Jean—dark, pretty, thoughtful, sad, and distant—always said we live too long. We’re not designed to just keep going. We’re supposed to get run over by a mastodon or something long before the conversation starts to slip. One day I picked them up from school and brought them home to a different house. You can’t explain it. You place flowers in their rooms—the girls’ rooms down a narrow hall at the very back of one of those early fifties houses built out here on the postwar grid as life returned, spread out, and settled onto the surface where the cotton used to grow. And you still sense it. Forty or fifty years later, you’re still able to feel that thin necessity. The sudden, somehow incomplete transition. How the simple, low-roofed, rectilinear neighborhoods retain an almost agricultural feeling of exposure and fragility. The flowers weren’t much help. Nor my suggestion, quite sincere, that neighborhoods like these provide perhaps the last clear manifestation of the colonizing spirit—and, besides, we had a shopping center they could ride their bikes to. And I used to hang out here myself, had friends who lived out here when I was in high school. I can show you where they lived and tell you stories, cannot stop myself no matter how you roll your eyes and wish things could return to the way they were. Our lives had sort of sifted out, or had been sectioned, cut across at a certain level and exposed to the air. And everything was sensitive, reluctant to be touched.

  So maybe that first night I’d tell them bedtime stories like I used to. They’d make fun but what the hell. That’s what you need out on the prairie, on your own beneath the empty sky. It’s what comes naturally, after all—the endless, animal-populated tales of deep, uncertain meaning. Even John, at seventeen, could be amused. The girls—Elizabeth, the older one, and Anna—would object, think me too jolly for the circumstances. Yet I would persist. They seemed so isolated down there at their own end of the house. In their peninsular little bedrooms looking out through curtainless windows into the backyard, toward the alley where the unfamiliarity lay dark and undisturbed. You can’t just say good night. Well, here we are at the edge of the known world. Off you go. Sweet dreams. You need a story. You need deep, uncertain meanings—rabbit, fox, and bear to come and act them out, to hover over like a mist above the cotton fields. Or maybe Mr. Possum. Than whom, I’m convinced, there is no deeper, more uncertain animal.

  You know how things get sectioned for analysis. It’s how you see what’s really going on inside a specimen, of course. A tissue sample, meteorite, whatever: slice it, magnify it, and the operating structures come to light. It is destructive but it works, reducing everything to level, common terms. It pulls the curtain back. Oh, Lizzy. Such a lonely little room back there. I know. And Anna’s too, but especially yours. It broke my heart. All by yourself down there at the end where you could see straight out across the dark backyard, across the fences and the other dark backyards, the cold, eternal, light-years-distant gleam of backyard security lights. But here’s exactly where the operating structures are revealed (I think at that point more to my delight than yours). Exactly how things are discovered that you didn’t know were there.

  Had I begun to tell a story? Had I been to John’s room first, then Anna’s, sat by each a moment, done my best and been dismissed? It’s only Dad. It’s what he does—makes light of everything. Well, everything is light now, isn’t it, Lizzy? “No,” you’d say and shake your head. And I’d bend closer, imitating Homer Simpson imitating wisdom: “Isn’t it, Lizzy? Isn’t it?” “No.” Had I begun to tell the tale? “Once there was something…” I don’t know. I can’t remember. I remember how the shadows on the wall became the story. Something moved. Once there was something like the shadow of a possum. Then it moved. Well, look at that. We never had a magic lantern show before. Look how he creeps along the shadow of the fence. He’s out there somewhere, isn’t he, Lizzy? And we’re looking back and forth between the shadow and the window but there’s nothing to be seen directly out there in the dark except the backyard lights, of which the nearest seems to cast the shadow. I go ove
r to the window, kneel to bring my eye to intercept the line between the shadow of the possum and the light. It’s one of those mercury-vapor lights, I think. That cold, discouraging light that hardly ever needs replacement, burns forever behind the garage and in the interstitial regions where one hardly ever goes. I move my head a little, side to side, to try to find the possum. There’s the fence line. Where’s the possum? He should be right there. His shadow hasn’t moved. I move a little, keep the light above the fence. There. Now he’s moving. It’s an astronomical moment. There. The mercury-vapor light dims, brightens, dims. It is a complex occultation. He’s an inference like those extrasolar planets they detect by noting subtle, regular dimmings of their stars. One cannot know these things directly. One requires the proper instrument. The mediating principle.

  Did you know astronomers actually used to ride inside the two-hundred-inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar? And maybe they still do from time to time, although I doubt it. I imagine it’s all remotely monitored now. But they used to. They would ride all night up there at the top in the “prime focus cage”—a cylindrical room they fit behind the secondary mirrors at the point, eighty feet or so above the floor, where all the light from the primary mirror came to its first and purest, widest-field and deepest-gazing convergence. There were other, smaller mirrors—complex sequences, in fact—that they could introduce to redirect the light wherever they wished, including, down at the end of a billiards-trick-shot series of reflections, into the temperature-stable coudé room, where permanently stationed spectrographs received it. These reflections, though, involved a certain magnifying strain and degradation of the image—whereas “riding the cage” meant cutting right to the front, where, for the first time, the observer stared like Perseus straight down into the pristine first-reflected light. It’s hard to imagine. It was probably the final, highest expression of stupendousness in science. The mechanical, intuitable extension of our longings. Russell Porter, the artist and engineer who helped design the telescope and established pretty much inaccessible standards for the cutaway illustration, drew a series of remarkable extrapolations from the blueprints. One shows someone (one of the project engineers, named W. D. Burton, it is thought) at the controls of the “prime focus pedestal” in the center of the cage. He’s hunched above it, peering down into a tiny guiding eyepiece as he grips one of a system of handwheels used to keep the photographic plate on target. He would have hunched like that for hours at a time as light accumulated gradually on the plate—though probably not in suit and tie as shown. He is idealized somewhat, like his surroundings. As if he, too, were extrapolated. Drawn with that same angular yet modulated clarity, his surfaces described, articulated—shine of combed-back thinning hair, meticulous wrinkling of his suit—as if he had been engineered along with the rest of it. It’s touching to see it formalized like this. The everyday inserted here, the suit and tie and shiny shoes and wire-rimmed spectacles as part of it. Placed up there at prime focus like it belongs at the edge of everything. What would he have been looking at? Not much. The cold, discouraging gleam of the guide star in the crosshairs. Not much more than that, I think.