Shame and Wonder Read online

  On the mountainous road to Demre…there are pine trees. “Look,” says Nancy, “Christmas trees.” The road climbs up and in and out among the rocky Colorado-looking hills. We lose the shore for a while, then gradually after an hour or so dip down and back to find the complex edge of the deep blue Mediterranean, swerving around the inlets, some of which have cliffs and shallow caves and bathers. Here and there are gauzy quonset huts. Then acres of them—thin white fabric greenhouses. We pass by a giant tomato held aloft in a giant hand—a public monument. The quonset huts are empty though. The ground inside is covered in the same white gauzy cloth. “The earth is sleeping,” says our guide for the day who most call Sam although his name is Ufuk. “That’s poetic,” Nancy says. “Did I say wrong?” asks Ufuk. “No,” says Nancy. “No. It is poetic.”

  It’s an active blue somehow. It’s almost noon, and the light comes straight down into the water so you get the depth of blue against the limestone white of the shore, which you imagine should dissolve like Alka-Seltzer. Fizz away like history. How can it still be blue like that? How can it not have gotten all used up by now—after thousands of years of myth and history, not been neutralized, gone empty bathwater gray like the Gulf of Mexico, say, where myth has long departed and there’s nothing left but fishing trawlers, drillers, and sometimes way out there a tanker, simply going about their business on the gray depleted water. How can it stay that way, you wonder. Blue that holds us in suspension. Wine-dark blue that stands for black. Do you suppose there might be different grades of emptiness? As Cantor claimed for infinities? At about the same time Michelson and Morley sought the ether, Cantor showed, in a very precise sort of way, how there could be greater and lesser infinite sets. How the infinite might, depending on what kind of numbers you used to think about it, have higher or lower “cardinality.” Might we not, then, point the arrow the other way, turn all this inside out to imagine something similar for emptiness? A scale of potentiality? Of blueness, as it were? The variable likelihood that, out of nothing, myth will simply happen.

  A sign by the road we stop to photograph: a Coca-Cola Santa, old style, sad eyes gazing up as saints’ will do, and beckoning us to a local restaurant.

  It’s the fat, red-suited Santa we all love. The Coca-Cola Santa Claus whose mission and refreshment are the world’s. And yet how strange his eyes are here. Their heavenward gaze so sad and saintly, a platter of seafood held before him like the emblem of his martyrdom.

  In Demre he is everywhere. Cartoony ones on signs. Greek/Russian icons. Keychains. Postcards. [Everywhere you look are] motor scooters. A gaggle of Russian tourists. Little tractors pulling wagonloads of melons—some adorned with carefully handmade canvas covers—tractor cozies—over the engine cowl and headlights. One, of faded blue, has decorative scarlet zig-zag appliqué around the edges. Then the owner, at my interest, comes to stand beside it, lets me take his picture.

  Where’s the church? Where is the seat of Holy Nicholas? Our driver spots a sign. Just down the street. It’s hot. Cicadas chatter everywhere. Not quite a Texas chatter. Slightly deeper, lower frequency. Once noticed, it’s oppressive. All the motor scooters too—in such an ancient holy place they seem like temple monkeys. We decide it’s lunchtime. Here’s the Noel Baba Restaurant. Seafood platters, if you please. We sit outside. The garish signage features cartoon Santas. One of whom is listening to something, a wide-eyed Santa with a mitten to his ear. To what, I wonder, is he listening? To the motor scooters maybe? The cicadas? I think maybe the cicadas.

  There’s no church. I see no church. Its iterations—sixth to eighth to eleventh to nineteenth centuries—ought to be piled up right here one on top of another. A great conspicuous, reverential heap. The hopes and fears of all the years. The alternating levels. Midge and Barbie. Love. Despair. The Russian tourists seem to know where they are going. Sure enough, there is an entrance to the grounds. And here’s a company of stray dogs to admit us. All these holy sites have complements of animals, it seems. I love the wonderfully important-looking tickets you’re issued at these places by the Ministry of Culture. I collect them for my journal. I imagine they’re expensive to produce, each with its site-specific photograph and shimmery silver seal and whatever that is—that black magnetic strip, I guess—there at the bottom. Every photograph of every site—full color, at the left below the ministry name and logo—has been taken in the clear, bright afternoon. Blue sky, a wisp of cloud. The past, once clearly identified in ordinary light, seems easy as anyplace to get to. Here we are, then. There’s a gift shop. Benches set about. A great bronze statue of a European “Father Christmas” Santa with the children of the world around his feet. I’ve got a picture of our driver on a bench—he and our guide prefer to wait outside the church, which by the way seems more like a working excavation, down a ramp and partially covered by a huge protective awning; I am told the sea was nearer then, the land much lower; now it looks subsided, unprepared for this attention, just dug up; who would have thought, look what we’ve found—but anyway, I’ve got this photograph of Dogan (from his name tag, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced) in his crisp white shirt, his loosened tie, black trousers, water bottle dangling from his hands between his knees. (I ought to tell you, very quickly, about the bottled water here. I’ve saved a label Nancy peeled; the brand is “Sandras.” Sandras water. Did you know as late as Hellenistic times they minted silver coins with the image of an ancient deity worshipped here and hereabouts called Santa, Sandan, or Sandas? And that on these coins he’s shown atop a pyre where he was burned at annual festivals. And afterward his resurrection and ascension celebrated. How about that. Right up the chimney as it were. You see how complicated all this starts to be.) So anyway, as I keep saying—anyway, I’ve got this photograph of Dogan, our driver, sitting on a bench outside the church near the top of the ramp. He smiles straight back into the camera. We’re about to go inside, walk down the ramp at last—I wish the church were more; it looks much nicer in the photo on our tickets, with grass and flowers, clear of scaffolding and awnings—and I turn to take his picture. He can’t help but look eternal—ears of Buddha, face of Pan. A reassuring smile, I think, is what’s intended. He’ll be here when we come out. But it’s the smile of the guy who runs the scary carnival ride. As complex and ambivalent as that.

  Inside, the church is clear of all except the deepest ambiguities—going to rubble at the edges but within all dark and open with the fading light of frescoes Nancy says are by a provincial hand (11th century mostly, I think—my little guide book’s with my baggage)…but a much less polished hand in any case, observant of the protocols, the chant of it all I guess—it feels like that. The matter-of-factness of the miracle. And St. Nicholas matter-of-factly here as well, at least in principle—his marble tomb apparently borrowed from another [worthy somewhere]. He is everywhere—we know that. The cicadas sound like sleighbells.

  There are dogs here, too. Two dogs asleep right here in the very center of the nave. Is this the nave? Of course it is. There’s someone kneeling at the altar at the far end where the afternoon glares in through arched stone windows. And these dogs, big dogs, a red one and a white one, simply laid out on the cool stone floor. Right out there in the middle. In the novel Santa Claus, the one all this does not belong to, wherefrom I have been released to seek the truth on my own account, there is a kid based on a kid I actually knew when I was one. An easily frightened little chubby kid who lived just down the street and whom we’d torment by pretending we could hear, somewhere in the distance, monstrous noises, sounds of Giant Killer Shrews (a recent locally filmed production featuring dogs made up like monsters who produced a terrible, cicada-like chittery cry). And when we did this, he’d run home. He’d drop whatever he was doing and just bolt. I think sometimes he was thrilled. Exhilarated. At those moments when the always-fearful world revealed itself to him so clearly and he knew exactly what was what and what he had to do. One of the dogs is up. The white one. Trotting over now to Nancy. We were told we shouldn’t
pet them. There’s a danger of disease. But she extends her hand. It sniffs and wags and seems to want a pat. Here comes the other one. My goodness, they like Nancy. They’re like beggars importuning. Jumping up and interfering with each other. Now there’s trouble. Now we’re in for it. Now the Russians turn to look. The red and white are going at it. Just like that. They’re at that frenzy, at that sudden full ferocity that takes your breath away. Where’s Nancy? Over against the wall. It sucks the air right out. The kneeling lady stands and turns with both hands to her mouth. How cool and dark and clear it is, right here at the heart of things. How clearly things reveal themselves. Who knew? The shady afternoon. The fragmentary frescoes like lace curtains. Everything reducing here into this blur, this swirl, the awful, almost vocalizing roar of it replacing, for a moment, all the space. Replacing everything—the miracle, the saints and the apostles and the angels with their sharp red wings. So terrible, the way it happens just like that, so naturally and easily. And just like that it’s over. Dogs withdraw, resume their former life. The light comes in. Cicada sounds. The Russians drift away into their chatter.

  At the gift shop I decide to buy a T-shirt—simple dark blue, almost black, with an image of Nicholas’s hand in blessing. What comes next sort of fades on out. Three miles away are the ruins of Myra—not the town itself exactly, where Saint Nicholas was bishop, but the older parts, the Roman-era theater and the ancient Lycian necropolis. And the residue, more residue than anything else, I think—assorted capitals and column sections, blocks of stone with carvings and inscriptions—like the items in a junkyard stacked and waiting for a better day. And everywhere on every other stone it seems are carved these gaping archaistic masks. Theatrical masks, their empty eyes and mouths wide open—comic, tragic, worn away to something like astonished. Like bewildered. I suppose they once belonged to a great theatrical facade. But now—as it seems to me, and as I say it seems to fade away—so close beneath the rock-cut tombs on the cliff above they seem like faces of the dead. A few have pebbles in their mouths. I’ll ask a member of our company, John Lunsford—my old teacher, former director of the Meadows Museum in Dallas, famous polymath and specialist in everything—about that. If he knows of some tradition that involves the placing of pebbles in the ancient open mouths like that. You think of pebbles left on Jewish graves of course. But he does not. I’ll bet it’s children. That’s exactly what a kid would do. The obvious thing to do. You place a pebble in its mouth. And then what, I would ask the child. Do you stick around? Do you want to hear what he has to say, I’d ask the child who placed the smooth, flat, tongue-shaped pebble there. Would you care to put your ear up close and listen? I’ll bet not. You placed the pebble there and ran. A thousand years ago I’ll bet that’s what you did. I know I would. I’d run straight home. It’s getting late. We need to head back pretty soon and Nancy wants to see the beach. We pass a number of the empty, gauzy Quonset huts on the road back into town, but now they’re brilliant, incandescent in the angling-reddening sunlight. They all glow. Yes, we have nothing. No tomatoes. No bananas. Yet how radiantly, warmly empty. Back through Demre, past another of those signs with the saintly seafood-laden Santa. The shore arcs way around to the east and out to a postcard point of land. There are no cicadas here, just surf. Ufuk and Dogan stand by the car and have a smoke. Did Lowell Thomas ever just shut up, do you think? Just sort of let the camera run? Nancy has kicked her sandals off. She’s wading. We can’t stay here long. We’ve got a schedule for the evening. Now she’s standing in the surf and bent a little with her head turned. Beckoning. “Listen.” There’s the sound of surf but, underneath, something else—a different, deeper, dragging and abrasive sound. The rocks. The pebbles. Here’s where all the pebbles come from. The shore is made of differently colored pebbles and the surf is doing its work. Well, here you go. Here are the voices of the dead. Here’s what the cartoon Santa listens for. Of course. So, what do they want? I can’t imagine. Nothing much. “Look.” Nancy holds some up. They’re processed, sorted—all are smooth and flat but with the larger ones on top and smaller and smaller underneath. There is a system here. She scoops a little deeper, brings up smaller ones—all shades of white and gray and brown and black and even red, with different geological histories, I suppose, but processed here into these simple, pretty things that come so easily into the hand. She chooses a few to keep. To take home as mementos. Just to have. Right at the edge of dissolution, beauty comes into the hand. We can’t let go.

  I can remember being a child and being blank. Without opinion. Walking around like that. Complete like that. All fear and desire with not much in between. I think of it now as an experimental setup. Like a cloud chamber—where you’ve got this otherwise empty vessel filled with a sort of mist through which events, the passage of subatomic particles, leave evanescent trails. And it kind of felt like a mist, I think. Experience loomed. You tended not to see it coming. All of a sudden there it was. Surprise attached to things quite naturally—a property. “Remarkable,” as the only response that toddler in the early “Our Gang” comedies had to anything, made sense. Made people laugh to sense the truth of it. To see it as this monocled astonishment. And all in the course of a day. Here, for example, is a little tabby kitten I remember by the fence. My God. There’s never been a thing like this before, I don’t believe. A tabby kitten by the fence. And here is Donald—I remember how my mother said it, carefully: Here’s Donald—not quite potty-trained yet diaperless, from across the street to play in 1950 in the flat and treeless postwar neighborhood where everybody lived. Where is his mother? It’s remarkable. A fundamental wonder. Irreducible and perfect in his saggy shorts against the great simplicity of things.

  I’m pretty sure I can remember being able—standing out there in the yard one day and coming to realize that I was able—to count to twenty-four. That’s crazy, isn’t it. Not your Helen Keller sort of moment. Twenty-four—enough for now. A point of pride. Each number, after all, a world unto itself. There is no structure, no procedure. There are objects in the mist that leave these brief and sometimes pungent little trails.

  The fear and desire, of course, are initial conditions, part of the basic setup. Something like the electromagnets that I understand were sometimes used to influence the behavior of those subatomic particles leaving traces in the “cloud.” To spin them this way or that depending on their charge. You’ve got your negative and positive. Your fear and desire. And, certainly, events did seem to deflect one way or the other according to something like a charge. Another property—we’re on our way to a unifying theory. So, why muck it up with complicating notions such as long division, grammar, and artistic verisimilitude?

  In third grade, Art became a separate class in a separate classroom in the second-oldest and second-dankest wing of our school. Our school preserved these sort of Dantean divisions. Oldest and dankest, from which hope had long departed and where knowledge, like the smell of disinfectant, seemed residual and corrective, was the grim, three-story nineteenth-century section like an orphanage where old, dank Mrs. Gilbert taught arithmetic. At the other end was the new part with the bright, expansive, modernistic promise of improvement and eventual release. But in between, this purgatorial stage. Uncomfortable. Uncertain. Built in the thirties, merely bleak, through which you had to pass to get to either end, and where we found ourselves presented, in the middle of the third grade, with a novel and uncomfortable understanding of the nature of depiction and I guess, therefore, of the world. And which seemed all the more uncomfortable as introduced so patiently and sweetly by so luminous an advocate, so unaccountably kind and clear and young and blond and beautiful a presence as appeared before us there in those bleak circumstances. Let’s go out and draw the playground, shall we? If you say so, absolutely. Though it seems a bit direct. So out we march into the sunlight with our crayons, little knowing what’s in store, to draw as kids draw, to record the simple axiomatic facts, the green of grass and blue of sky. We had it down. We knew our job. It was an inventory
. Knowing what was there. Of course, the knowing was the point. We knew what the playground was. We didn’t need to go out there to see. But she was new—had no idea that we could bring it forth out of our understanding in complete, schematic, universal clarity, on request. Whatever she’d like—the moon and stars, our homes and moms and dads and pets. Why should we need to summon Bozo in his doggy specificity? He’s established: snout and ears, cigar-shaped body, four straight legs and, if you’re John Hernandez, pooping. All John’s animals were rendered in the defecatory style. Their pungent trails identified them—since first grade, in fact. By now, no longer funny, it was simple iconography. These qualities emerged and that was that. We understood. Though not advanced, we were internally consistent.

  Is there still Manila paper? In those huge impermanent, friable, yellow sheets kept in a stack, to be retrieved upon command. And always called Manila paper? Never just “paper,” though there was no other kind for us to use. “Manila” seemed a special qualifier. Spoken to remind us of the deep discardability of all this. We might find ourselves absorbed, get really into it, wind up actually kind of liking what we’d done, but at the end—and even pinned up on display it seemed a little sad, especially in this sad, uncertain region—it was on Manila paper. All the otherwise so clear and convincing qualities of things. We must have sensed it couldn’t last.