Darling (23 page)

On the day I recollect, the bad man was not about. Wayne was sitting on the sidewalk in his accustomed place. A droplet of rain was suspended from an awning; the tiny bag of water held the sun. A day in early January.

Switch-tense: As I watch, several things happen simultaneously: Up at the corner, in front of Shreve's, the old man who sings
“When You're Smiling”
—top hat, cane—is cajoling some frowning passersby to no
avail. A young man—he is nobody I know—enters the scene from the north, approaches Wayne with a large pink box of doughnuts—left over from somebody's breakfast board meeting, I assume, then left out on a trash bin. Anyway, a box of doughnuts. The man seats himself on the sidewalk alongside Wayne, offers the doughnuts to Wayne and also a cup of coffee—so maybe I'm wrong about the provenance of the doughnuts. Wayne smiles with pleasure, catches my eye as he reaches for a doughnut, and is momentarily connected to the old man singing
“When You're Smiling,”
for he and the other—the doughnut bringer—in mock-mockery,
begin to sway to the cadence of the song like two bluebirds on a bough in a silly old cartoon. The sun, too, now seems a simple enough phenomenon—cadmium yellow pouring onto the pavement. A passerby drops a dollar bill into Wayne's cup and Wayne nods and smiles (and looks over to me). I smile. The design—tongue and groove—of a single moment.

I do believe the moment could be plotted algebraically according to some golden mean (though not by me), a line from A to B, B to C, C to D, D to E.

Therefore:

A = B + C + D
B + C + D = E

Therefore,

A = E.

But here's the thing: Wayne's smile.

I have thought about this for twenty years or more. Wayne's smile said: Do you get it? Wayne's smile said: Remember this moment, it contains everything.

•   •   •

After September 11, atheism has become the most casual interjection into the television conversation. The grand old rock star OBE,
for example, imparts to us, though he hasn't been asked, what he thinks of all that—of God, and all.
Well, that's all gone, thank God,
he says, slapping his shrunken thigh. The music critic in our local paper regrets, on his readers' behalf, the religious context weighing upon the transcendent beauty of a Bach cantata. And on the bestseller lists the ascending titles are apologies for the “New Atheism.” From England, cradle of the New Atheism (as London turns Muslim and Hindu), Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist, proposes that parents who raise their children religiously are guilty of child abuse. On the same shelf, the journalist Christopher Hitchens titles his essay on atheism as a deliberate affront to Muslim piety. Roughly 145 years separate the bereft atheism that drummed upon Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” from
God Is Not Great
.

In the early 1970s, I was a graduate student at an institute in London founded by a German intellectual who went mad. He believed he was the god Saturn and that he had devoured his sons. The institute is devoted to the study of Renaissance intellectual history at the moment in Europe when magic became science.

The government inspector in Jean Giraudoux's play
The Enchanted
(1948) attempts to forbid the supernatural by decree:

Science . . . liberates the spirit of man from the infinite by means of material rewards. Thus, each time that man succeeds in casting off one of the spiritual husks of his being, Science provides him with an exact equivalent in the world of matter. When in the eighteenth century, man ceased to believe in the fire and smoke of hell, Science provided him with immediate compensation in the form of steam and gas . . . The moment man cast off his age-long belief in magic, Science bestowed upon him the blessings of the Electric Current . . . When he ceased any longer to heed the words of the seers and the
prophets, Science lovingly brought forth the Radio Commentator . . . In place of revelation he now has . . . Journalism.

On Bill Maher's cable television athenaeum, the journalist Christopher Hitchens proposes to Mr. Maher—and Mr. Maher wholeheartedly agrees—that science is the last best hope for humankind. Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Maher are unmindful, for the moment, of Hiroshima, drone missiles, chemical weapons, genetic modification, Original Sin.

After September 11, political division in America feels and sounds like religious division. Beginning with the sexual liberation movements of a generation earlier—with feminism and gay liberation—the growing preoccupation of the Left has been with the politics of sexual self-determination. There are some in the “old” political Left who decry the influence of sexual politics over traditional political concerns, like foreign policy and domestic poverty. It is more problematic that the new sexual identity movements allow themselves to be cast by the political Right as antireligious. The Left cedes religion to the Right, in exchange for a woman's right to legal abortion. The political Right intones Leviticus to homosexuals who wish to marry. The Right assumes a correlation between politics and religion; the Left assumes an antagonism toward traditional religion as the price of sexual freedom.

I am old enough to remember the Negro civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. People who today relegate religion to the political Right forget how influential religion once was in the American Left. In those days, for that cause, civic protest was framed as religious idealism. Not only American history but salvation history seemed to weigh upon the present.

On television I saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascend the pulpit of the Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis. It was the evening of April 3, 1968. The civic life of America became part of a larger story, as Martin Luther King Jr. led his listeners to consider “the great and eternal issues of reality.” He spoke of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; he spoke of Athenian democracy, the Emancipation Proclamation, FDR, and the Great Depression.

People said among themselves afterward that Dr. King's speech seemed, in its historical sweep, its elevated view, its summation, like the sermon of a man who knew he was going to die. Dr. King said he was grateful to God for allowing him to see this moment in America—the struggle for freedom by black Americans nearly completed. He said he might not reach the Promised Land with his people, as Moses did not. “But it really doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop,” he said. “Mine eyes have seen.”

2. The Desert Floor

The Israelites picked up a system of metaphor and a pervading sense of the irony of being God's Chosen from their sojourn on the desert floor—the desert floor as an unending test of endurance. For all the humiliations the desert inflicted upon them, however, it was from the desert that the Israelites projected, also, an imagination of the metaphysical world. Hell is hot, for example. Eden green. If the progress of our lives is a vale of tears, the Promised Land will be a psalm. All who are alive above the ground plead with the sky. But the Israelites alone among creation received an extraordinary assurance through the prophet Moses: Where does God reside? God resides with us.

A blessing upon the
New Yorker
magazine. The
New Yorker
continues to commission and to publish and to pay for original illustrations and comic drawings. I noticed, while thinking about this book, that in almost any issue of the
New Yorker,
I could find cartoons that rely upon one of three allegorical ecologies that derive from the religious imagination: Mountain. Desert. Cave. Three ecologies of the holy desert still hold a place in the secular imagination of the Upper West Side.

The Mountain (these are drawings in the
New Yorker,
I remind you): Moses raises his tablets. (Guy in the foreground remarks to another guy, “Sans seraph!”) The Hermit Sage is seated at the mouth of a cave on a precipice—a foil to the Seeker who has climbed the precipice to ask the meaning of life. The mountain penetrates into the clouds to become Olympus, the mound from which sausage-curled Zeus heaves thunderbolts. Cloud cover extends upward to the Pearly Gates and to Saint Peter's Desk, occasion for gags related to the bureaucracy of entry or exclusion, as at a country club. Also, heavenly ennui—gags on the order of:
Not what I expected
. Or:
If only I had known . . .

The Desert: across which a Sun-Crazed Man crawls, or two Sun-Crazed Men, one pulling ahead. Cactus, bones, empty canteens.
If only I had known . . .
Or:
If you had listened to me
. Also, the Desert Island—a single palm, two strandees.
If you had listened to me
. Also, the freeway exit to nowhere. (
If you had listened to me
.) Also, the Crazed Miner, combining allegories of Desert and Cave.

The Cave: the Sage (
see
The Mountain). Or the Caveman—usually a cave painter or an inventor of modernity. Also, the Tunnel of Love; also, the entrance to Dante's Inferno:
Not what I expected
. Also, the Dungeon. Also, Hell—a vast cavern, lakes of flame; themes of bureaucracy, ennui (
see
Saint Peter's Desk):
Not what I expected. If only I had known . . .

And I am forgetting one: Eden.
If only I had known . . .

•   •   •

In his
Confessions,
Saint Augustine wrote of a “region of dissimilarity,” an absence, a nonexistence, of synapse between his, Augustine's, ability to conceive and his attempt to conceive of the inconceivable—between the creature and the creator. “It transcended my mind,” wrote Augustine of his intuition of God. “It was superior to me because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it.” Augustine does not write about distance, but difference. We cannot think about God except insofar as God reveals God to us. And where did the God of the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, reveal His intention to accompany us?

The desert is a region of dissimilarity to us, to what we need for life—water, shelter, a body temperature of 98.6. So, it is logical, in a way, to seek the unknowable in the uninhabitable.

The desert of my imagining is at once extraordinary—the locus of revelation—and ordinary; it is a plain, a disheartening expanse of time and the image of all our days. Such was the desert the Israelites wandered for forty years unchanging.

I found this in an old geography I was looking through the other day (
Man and the Earth,
Joseph Bixby Hoyt): “The desert has a strange fascination for many people, strange in that it is largely irrational . . . in the sense that the desert has little value for man, our interest may be considered irrational.” The Bible and the Koran are deserts, irrational. The Bible thirsts for a promised land. The Koran thirsts for heaven. God yearns for his creation.

My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty. Despite his present aspect, because of his present aspect and condition, I remember him as beautiful—my beautiful brother—which is the way our mother saw him, always. He was her favorite—and why wouldn't he be?—the firstborn, the son who made her laugh, even when she refused to smile.

When I was eleven or so, I went to the Monday-night wrestling matches every chance I got. A wrestler with woodpecker hair named Red Bastien used to climb to the top rope of the ring (as if despite audible huffing and puffing and manifest corpulence he had vanished into thin air) in order to leap down upon his opponent. I saw Red fly dozens of times. Until the year I saw Red Bastien, hair still red, leaning forward on a cane, as he hobbled across the lobby of the Memorial Auditorium. Red had retired from the mat to become a promoter. I was thirteen years old. I saw, as clearly as I would ever see, that the world passes. Red and I had been young together.

Jesus took three of his disciples—Peter, James, and beloved John—to the top of Mount Tabor. In the presence of the three disciples, Jesus was transfigured, passive construction; Jesus was revealed to his friends in something more wonderful than His earthly aspect. He shone. And standing to each side of Jesus was Moses and Elijah. They conversed! Peter suggested the disciples make three tents on the spot—one for Moses, one for Elijah, one for Jesus. Peter had no sooner conceived of an eternal moment than a cloud overshadowed the disciples. Within the cloud, the disciples heard a voice that frightened them, so they huddled together—all of a sudden, a warm-blood club against the supernatural. When the cloud dissipated, they saw only Jesus, the man whose smell and smile and hammered thumb they knew. Jesus told them not to be afraid. He said they must not speak of anything they had seen. They must all return to the valley floor.

In the Hebrew Bible, much of history is associated with life on the desert floor. Heroes become old men. Old men beget sons; sons lay their fathers down into the earth. Some sons find favor with God; some do not. On the plain in Canaan, the favored
son, Joseph, is betrayed by his jealous brothers. He is sold to some passing traders, bound for Egypt.

I do not believe I was ever jealous of my brother. I acknowledged the justice of his preferment. My brother moved with such delightful ease. Where had he learned the secret of charming girls? Always girls.

My brother sits today at his computer and pounds, literally pounds, the elegantly argued e-mails (political argument) he posts to an electronic community in darkened rooms across America. (I imagine darkened rooms because correspondents are anonymous and because so many of these colloquia are nocturnal.)

My brother's politics are left wing, Democrat, in an easy-going way; lots of saints (FDR, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson). My brother's faith is that technocrats will lead us through a sea of red tape and partisan obstruction to the Shining City on the Hill. My brother's mind has long since turned against religion, particularly Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, and the Evangelical Protestants he calls “Christo-Republicans.” My brother is an atheist, though that drab noun hasn't nearly enough pixels to portray my brother's scorn. He calls himself an “anti-theist”; he called himself that one Christmas evening, at the holiday table, as if he were the tipsy, freethinking uncle in a James Joyce short story; as if he were James Joyce himself.