Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Part 38

And, in this case, I find the extreme conceit of speech to be shattering.

The Catholics were the most startled-the people I assumed were Catholics, promptly the palest-or whitest-ones, with dark circles around their eyes and a look of knowledge, confession, and surrender and The Idea of Hell.

Whitely, like poor mirrors of The Seraph, in oddly angled postures, often leaning back and with one or both arms raised, we mostly stared directly toward The Face of The Seraphic Messenger-all of whom, light and imputed arms and seeming feet, was face-and most of those who cried out did so wanly, and many were not conscious for much of the time at first although they stood upright, to some extent. Very few people kneeled, or remained kneeling-there was a lot of stillness of response but there was no stillness of response at all, if you see what I mean-some people stared down at the ground, and only a few faces showed any trust at all, any real obedience of soul: that steely masochism that requires so much training. We merely looked, we partially looked, at It, someone kneeled slowly at a certain moment, and many others, prompted, slowly did so, too; and then they rose again mostly, but some did not, among the trees, in That White, Dead Light.

I confess I felt mostly shock and doubt; I was blinkingly, rebelliously, impiously, ineptly disrespectful and restless among moments of severe awe, even at first; I was withdrawn, then attentive, then withdrawn again differently. My attention, my attentiveness, my strained and straining openness, my aching openness, the struggle to be open with no self-defense, was not singlehearted-I resisted The Announcement, The Inspiration, The Angel, The Seraphic Messenger, not that I doubted that the soul (which is, in a way, the whole of what we have done in the light of what has been done to us) in its distances of belief-philosophy and awe-was at bottom childlike-and-pious but I could ignore the child in me to some extent even when, if I may be permitted to say this, God in this form faced me.

The Great Seraph did not seem to be, in any sense, militant-not the least military-or, for that matter, musical, either. It was neither distant nor fond, It was not commanding or alluring; the phenomenon of Itself was of rare abilities on a not-human base-but related-compacted here into a somewhat recognizable Figure-somewhat recognizable-considerably larger than I was, more undeniably fine than anything I had ever seen, more conscious, but oddly in a way, so that I do not know and I did not know then, I did not know and I had no continuous faith, no conviction about what It was conscious of-love, say, or distant patience, or what. I was aware even then that others saw It differently-as Patience, say, or as Love, or as Militance-but to me It signified nothing, not even the degree to which It was willful and what It might or might not do or say: It represented only Beauty and Meaning, which is to say Truth, but not my truth so far, which is to say, then, New Truth-ungraspable at first, and perhaps always-and It was partly Old Truth, from which I had strayed-but Truth would always be so new, as new as This Figure was, that one might then be slightly-or even strongly-driven to slighting behavior toward It as a result.

Impiety. Self-defense. Rebellion. Whatever.

Those were clearer to me-those modes of resistance-than was the terror of what Acceptance would bring.

It seems to me now it was impiety or selfishness on my part to think that except as the end of things It was not otherwise humanly relevant. It was relevant at its own say-so.

I noticed that It seemed to be overwhelmingly suitable-I wanted suddenly to be like It; this struck me at the second I felt it, this desire, as it formed, that it was now the supreme fact of my life, this aesthetic, this being influenced by a function of The Angel's quality-this was Love, I presume, for an apparition, one that affected my senses, a reality, an appearance.

The absence of vengeance in Its stance and Its being without any of the accoutrements of myth-It carried no symbols, It was dressed in nothing but undefinability, It was not dressed or undressed, It was not naked, It was neutrally and luminously clear and unclear-It was contentedly beyond the need of further signification-It would never be modified or added to, argued with, corrected, or moved-that is, It was post-Apocalyptic: I fell in love with It as The End and Be-All; I fell in love with silence-Its silence anyway.

But the mind, bemused or sanctified or not, in love and a-soar and wishing to be obedient, does not cease to feel and wobble-wobble means think-it discards thoughts and feelings as they draw notice, as they appear they are dismissed. But still one's heart vibrates, too, between attention and inattention, or rather between low desire-physical desire-and a wish consciously (i.e., sinlessly) to know-without physical will-but one gives in to physical desire anyway as feeling if not as act: I did not walk toward The Angel-not more than a few feet, if that; perhaps I imagined it. I expired in a kind of light. The Angel was suitable and I was not, but I imagined an embrace, my will having its way with this Lighted suitability that had altered history and was altering it now, without apparently being altered by any of this. My God, my God. I thought The Angel had ended history. I thought I ought to walk in The White Furnace of Its Glory-The Grand Wars of God, The Chambers of Holocaust-Daniel and Joseph-I don't know what my ego and heart and soul were thinking of-It was there, The Angel, and merely in Its being present, It made it stupid to lie; and this was so whether It was an Angel or a hoax, or rather It could not be a useless hoax since It was authentically, irregularly, idiosyncratically joy and awe and so summoning and wonderful in Its form. I longed to know how the others there felt This Apparition, but it seemed pointless finally since our opinions did not matter, and since so long as It was present we were not commanded by ourselves, by our opinions, or by each other but only by It, Its presence. It hadn't occurred to me before this moment that ours was a species of habitual judgment, but now that this faculty of conscious mind was useless-assent and praise were hardly required -I did think, with some unclarity, that Judgment Day, like now, would be an occasion of the banishing of judgment from us. This seemed tremendously sexual. It was awful to know my life had to change beyond my power to influence or judge or analyze or find Reason-I could not limit the new consciousness except by unconsciousness, by fainting. Mind would change in the light of Possibility inherent in the fact of The Seen Angel-Its Goodness, Its Forbearance: It did NO HUMAN THING. We saw This Angel and It did nothing, This Particular One, Its Appearance, It was one Angel and not an example of anything-it could not be multiplied or divided-by us, by our minds, by mine. It was a Thing, a kind of Silent Goodness, but not an example. To be governed by Revelation in this form is a tremendous thing and unmanning, much as when a woman says, All right, I will tell you a truth or two, and she means it as an act of rule, and what she then says does affect you; if it does, if the revelation changes the way you think, it does make you crazed and weak, perhaps: you are in an unknown place or facet of consciousness: It was like this but much, much, much more so. It was at this point that I went down on my knees and then, after a second, rose again, choosing to stand in the face of This Androgynous Power, which being of this order of magnitude and of this maternal a quality yet seemed male to me.

Of course, It was perceived by others according to different bodies of symbols derived from their lives and dreams-and they saw It as warlike or virgin-maidenly, or virgin-maidenly and warlike, or as like a father, and not at all in the way that I saw It. For some, It was Pure Voice and Radiance and not a figure at all, but for everyone I spoke to or looked at, It was Actuality-and It could be ignored or interpreted as one liked but only at one's peril: that was admitted.

It was glumly radiant inside a spreading bell of altered light: not the light of a dream, the light of thought. Perhaps the light of unquestioned and unbelievably Correct Thought of a sort no one has yet had, a thought so Correct, I cannot imagine It transmitted to me without my becoming capable of holding It: i.e., equal to It, similar to It-husband or wife to It. It was what my teachers and lovers and acquaintances claimed to possess in their arguments: an undeniable Truth, visible to all-within the radius of Its light. To have comprehended It would have made me an angel roughly to the extent It was one-just as scholars, at colleges especially, feel they have mastered and, by mastering, have surpassed (and brought up to date) the men and women whose work they interpret. Humility is a very difficult state in its reality, difficult to maintain. The statement or claim, the profession of it, is easy enough. But The Angel was not like Christ or anything human in terms of vulnerability-It was not equal in any sense-It did not mitigate Its authority for an instant. An unchosen humility is very peculiar-it oozes through the self and distorts the framework of one's identity-the foundation of the self is pride. But pride was gone-off and on-in the presence of The Angel: it was Very Sexual, as I said. I would think that love must abandon any sort of hope of a limit to the finality of caring, no limit exists to that ruthlessness except in the will to disobey. Final Tightness would explode you-The Angel's was not final. If the truth is not final, then it is not greater than me beyond all endurance-The Angel did not end my life. A belief that permits questions is human. Any entirely true belief ends any problem of will. I did not believe The Angel was of that manner of authority after the first few seconds-perhaps a minute all told. The light of The Angel lay among trees that had individual leaves and clusters of leaves in a familiar and regular scale but diminished in the fraught depths of their real dimensions in Its presence in the powerful and upsetting light, the unspeakably peculiar but very beautiful radiance of the eerie Seraph.

To survive-as in my dreams when I am threatened with death-it is not believable that one will live, and one doesn't live longer in the dream; one wakes to cynicism, to morning air, to faith of a sort.

But the nearby buildings and paths and faces were not dreamlike. The sky beyond The Shadow and The Figure was real sky. Nothing became less real in that light, merely less important for the moment. It became less interesting than the light itself, than what stood so tall-y and so changeable and stilly at the center of the light-time had stopped for It to some degree, although my breath and my heartbeat continued-that stood so forbearingly and goadingly and silently....

This manifestation of meaning and silence-it was comic to think-overrode several fields of study, lives' work, notions of guilt and convictions of sins and sinlessness, and most theories so far, a great many things all in all-but not everyone present perceived It as The Angel of Silence. Many thought It spoke but no two agreed about the speech they claimed for It. As usual, the visions of audible or written or seen grace were solitary-except that The Angel was present to a number of us, all who were there, who were not clever or devious. Everything was changed, was undercut. Being a student and largely without family and not solidly in love although I loved a few people, a foolish selection as usual, I was susceptible, I was ready, for the obliteration of Old Thought in this anxious excitement, as suffocating as an asthma, of The Angel's Silent Truth, Its Testimony by means of presence and silence-undoubted presence individually, doubtful only socially although everyone within the bell of light agreed Something Extraordinary had been present: unless they thought it clever to hedge, to pretend to a more complex sense of human politics afterward than the rest of us. Extraordinary-and of extraordinary merit to us, to me.

That is too mild but I am trying to avoid error. I admitted It was an Angel. If It was fake, It was impressive enough to convert me to what It stood for, although I didn't know what that was yet, but I would spend my life searching, perhaps not monomaniacally but with considerable persistence for Its Meaning. The readiness for this in me, the credulity if you like, submissive and sportive, violent and pacifistic and partly rebellious in turn, became my irreverence, which burned like a titanic shame-a terrible and yet naive and entire amusement, perhaps lifelong. It hardly seemed a matter of spirit and belief in a fancy way so much as a kind of anecdotal thing about me being dragged into the proximity of Holiness-and Holy Vision-now seen as a vast suitability beyond my powers of judgment and not requiring my assent in any form. Holiness manifested Itself, remained silent, and excluded me, mind and spirit and body-but not my emotions-and included me in a certainty of knowledge about Something for which The Creature of Light was an emissary but of which I could hardly speak.

It was not perverse or wrong-it was suitable, appropriate: I was perverse and wrong.

The direction of The Hinted Doctrine and of the change overall that was called for by the sight of The Figure was just not clear. Human inventions, human crimes were not descried. Nor did The Angel seem to be any sort of absolute example of anything-even of eternity. The awe I felt at the beginning of The Manifestation had within itself that startling power of truth of a film of a seedling growing over a period of months; the film is continuous; then the film is edited and shows the seedling forcing its way through pavements and into an as-if-eternal sun, and the film is true although one will never see such a thing as it shows.

Some of the truth I felt as present, some of the meaning was false such as that it, my awe, would soon not be parenthetical but be worldwide, then universal, then eternal, more than a world conquest, a conquest of space and Time, but this was not the case. I was passively evangelical, expectantly evangelical-which is perhaps a middle-class cast of soul-but nothing happened of that sort.

I was not sad. My expectation of eternity, my sense of Revelation here, contains, in a startling form, my belief, hidden to me until this moment (when Eternity or something partway to It showed Itself but did not adopt me and take me within Itself), of a common and individually willed but universal disrespect in us, because the power-love or force-was never in fact absolute-irresistible-final. I don't know why so absolute an object-which would crush me-was desirable; or perhaps it wasn't; perhaps it's just that one knows one would have to love absolute power absolutely-the soul has odd twists and knowledges of politics in it. Deity, in the form of some reasonably final force, was showing Itself, was showing It did not mean to bridle this time, either, the disobedient and spiritually incoherent species. No finality-such as the rising up of the dead-occurred to make this clearly the ultimate moment. Disrespect and its inevitable companion, sentimentality, were then at once as apparent in us (me) as the silence of The Apparition was an aspect of It-if you compared stories.

A great many people present must have wanted to deny It as I did not. Disrespectful-and sentimental-as I was, I was willing to accede to It (even if It was an error, a hoax) from the start, partly I think because It was not dressed in gold but mostly because It was so lovely in the way It was suitable; but I'm a sort of orphan; and others must have wanted to preserve their investments and truths, partial truths and nervous lies and disrespect, as not symbols but Truths. They did not want to defuse the power of lies to obliterate the powers of the mind; I must say I was uneasy and sickened by it-the thought of truth, Truth, TRUTH, TRUTH. The deep sense of value they had in their lives made them seek some emotional or sexual message that would leave them intact, that would be the rest of their inheritance, so to speak; whereas I knew you would have to throw yourself away entirely-entirely-if you wanted to come to being able to bear TRUTH-of course, then you wouldn't know ordinary truth, the truth of most people, and so you couldn't speak, either; you'd have to make your way back, so to speak: It was in the myths and metaphors: I'd read about it, I'd dreamed about it. To respect this has never been hard for me, but it was sickening to start to live it through: and there was no ceremony of denial or of mutual agreement, no asking if you wanted to see This, no testing of the reality of the affection of The Apparition, no formal establishment of ceremony concerning The Somewhat Final Dignity of The Actuality of The Seraph and making It bearable-or whatever.

It did not speak. It spared us. I can theorize about Holy Speech, the Timeless rending Itself to make one syllable of somewhat businesslike utterance-one syllable would be all It would have to say if It chose to speak at all and not simply occupy everyone's mind and all matter-more easily than I can about the possible speech of The Actual Angel. It would have stammered, It would have been loud, It would have been skyey trumpets and an earthquake, a known language, a mixture of a lion's pure vastness of temper and self-will and a mother's exhausted or defiantly unworn lullaby. Listening to It would have been one of those epic affairs of Listen, comprehend very fast, comprehend at once, or die or nearly die, as in childhood; or as when one is in love or when, as in first grade, one must learn to read in order not to doom oneself in relation to the Middle Class and money and Ordinary Thought; or as in a fistfight or as in a battle. One is very attentive in those cases. It is hard, nonetheless, to make out the sense of what is happening. One tries, and the moment takes on a transcendence from that trial, if one does succeed at all at the grace of listening. By which I mean The Angel could have trained us or could simply have implanted knowledge in us and not be bothered with words if It chose. But The Angel was silent even in that sense, as if It was too democratically inclined, Its knowledge of justice was too great for It to consider such coercion.

It never did speak, but in the actual moment it was very strange not to know or to be able to guess what It would say when It should speak soon as one expected It would. I had once or twice in my childhood thought about, noted, even imagined tones in The Tactful Silence of Deity-imagined tempting and taunting It, or earning from It an omen or a sign. I had once held an idea that an Angel need not and might not speak. But in the moment, I was afraid and I hoped for the trial of attempting to grasp Its Word and in being judged consequently. In the weight of the truth of Its Appearance, in the presence of the marvelous, one would struggle vastly, terribly, when a Seraph spoke, homosexually, I would think, to be a True Ear and to understand and respond faithfully, to show docility. One would be like a child again, immortally, irrevocably vulnerable, one would hope to be the favored son, the soul most blessed by Divinity as shown in one's comprehension, one's response and perception of the penetration of the message, of the occasion of Angelic speech. I say this from deduction. I see how Jewish or Christian-monastic or Christian-arrogant it is. I see that a true Christian would feel differently, even a blurred Christian-such a one would not imagine it was an occasion for performance, or that one's performance would matter except as etiquette within a complex form of respect and a half-acknowledgment of one's own powers of being damned through disrespect and one's own silliness, a sense of one's twistedly complex and figurai place in dozens of hierarchies, even of immortality seen as human effort stored in various ways-art and power-inside the giant tribe.

Or perhaps this is me as a prophet, as no one's son-i.e., a renegade from The World, an adherent of Faith, hiding it in a notion of the Christian and then saying I am not a Christian.

It is sad to know by how much a written account, removed from physical presence, fails. There is no equivalent in speech of the Seraphic appearance, no silence or stillness imposed by the dignity of what was seen and by one's wonder. The appearance of words on paper has only the unprovable presence of a sort of unhierarchical music and a black-and-white liberty of response; we speak to each other-honest listening is a form of speech-in a black-and-white republic of secrets and corners and silence in which what was present that afternoon is present in the language only if one is attentive and willing to be impressed or if some conviction concerning the subject and its meaning makes one patient or if some reputation of success and of duty and pleasure makes one attempt to attend the ceremonies of the music-otherwise, it seems the soul of the occasion is lost; and if it is not lost, it seems so mutual an act that in the light of the failure of language to be a presence, the listener has spoken it in its truer form, the reader has written it with more faith and conscience-and workmanship-than the writer has written it although he tried, but perhaps not full-heartedly enough; or perhaps the efforts of inscription dirtied things, and reading, or listening, is the purer and truer act, the better part of attention to the event.

I tried to keep my humor so that I would not faint. I did not want to not be present and fail the moment or have it be a dark moment and as far away as if I saw it through a veil of fever or other pain of the nerves as in lovemaking or writing or other forms of grace. I suspected that the initial courage of not fainting, of doubting and not doubting and being sane, would have to give way to a profound and unremitting awe sooner or later, which is to say, a madness of attention-I was more afraid of that than I want to admit: I was barely twenty-but I had my disrespect, my sentimental awe, rather than the real thing. At that age, to give way would be a limitlessly sexual surrender-and of a body young and of considerable common value and not yet greatly dirtied or misused. It was not profoundly surrenderable. I was proud still. Perhaps after torment or in certain kinds of ecstatic aggression, it would glide toward surrender-an outcry, a spilling-and I would listen. The silence would drain away and be full of sounds including that of my own freed voice: freed in this other-and not American-form. I had known some of the rapturous and tormented Berserkerhood of fighting and of earnest sports and of adventure, from which I more or less quickly returned to my usual forms of consciousness, rescued from adventure and mystic silence, both, so to speak; but not yet having been broken by physical ordeals or psychological ones, by love or by ambition, and not having agreed to service in projects of acquisition or advancement or duties, I did not know the chains and secular horrors of prolonged intimacy with a manifest Truth as other people, more broken or less, in other patterns, knew about that stuff. Like any virgin, I wanted to set willful limits on whatever I did now-but only in the name of being strong enough for anything, a kind of boast that would not be proved out. My feelings of humor were a form of virgin independence, chastity, maybe obstinate-my lesserness was a great problem, you know? I said The Seraph spared us and did not speak-now, that is something I say, but when I try to imagine it not as a written fact but as a truth, I see it occurring second after second, in various forms of possibility and doubt, gambler's (and athlete's) odds, pretty much at the edge of an extreme surrender that the body yearned for and embraced and denied and scorned, and powerfully in each of those impulses or states; and the mind still more passionately within the frame of its own kind of passion soared and fell, believed and waited-and had opinions, judgments, even though I said earlier one didn't judge The Angel, one did; one gave assent and withheld it-well, it became clear that you had to do something, stand still and breathe, of course, then smile, salute, ignore The Angel, greet It, attempt to study It, love It, serve It in the face of Its gentle silence, Its complete diffidence toward the real. Or one should rebel. It was clear (or rather it became clear) that Its Appearance was such that It did not need the assistance of language, or of patience. It was not a dubious object like The Serpent in Eden. It had nothing about It that was doubtful in the way ascribed to Angels sometimes in Holy Writ-It could command us in any way It chose, merely by a flexion of Its will, or if It had no will, then a flexion of Its thought, Its prayer, Its mode of song, whatever. The patience The Serpent had to show was necessary because its surface, its cold, legless glittery surface, its being a scaly anomaly of a creature had to be overcome for the sake of persuasion; but the appearance of The Seraph as an example in the world, in Its own light inside the ordinary Boston sunlight, of nothing familiar in an altered and unfamiliar light, was so self-proving, to say the least, or I was so persuaded, that It did not need to persuade us further-that was hardly the problem: I think assent without saying: I can't begin to describe the atmosphere of persuasion-but it was also a kind of big so what. We were persuaded-I want to say in the way light seems to be persuaded of itself, candlelight or sunlight-but we were given no instructions; and this was so extreme a feeling, so PROFOUND a feeling, that I could not ever again doubt the extraordinary power of emptiness to be just about inevitably also a plenum of persuasion-of belief-and disrespect.

I understood, waveringly, how fame, the mania to build a palace, a pyramid, a book, how that male or human and female hunger to say This will make history could rule one's life, to make manifest this mixture of will and belief and silence-and suitability and effect on others, as if forever: for as long as most things mattered to people. Mostly in real life I didn't feel that spur-for a lot of reasons-but I saw it now: a form of feeling it at a distance. Nothing could be more marvelous than to fill the earth with the reek of glory-but I was in need of the patience and charity and silence, the absence of ill treatment in The Seraph that afternoon at Harvard, to feel that, to see it.

I have dreams of being like that. I can list elements of Its manner as I somewhat confusedly noticed them: a skin or integument or covering that was made of prisms or was sweaty and the sweat was prismatic. A hovering faceyness. Waterfalls, elephants (patience and strength), all manner of lightnings and glares, large and small flowers, rivers (of a lot of different kinds), children's faces in shadow in polite rooms, mirrors, explosions, plumages, grass, stairs, large (or monumental) doorways, and large and famous facades-It was of those orders of things visually but more suitably, wisely, more dear, more distant, so that they probably ought not to have been named or listed as I have just done; it seems a childish list to me.

It was very fine throughout Its height and width and Its surfaces and in the implications of folds and pinions, gowns, wings, hands, and the angle of Its presumed neck and the unspeakable face, which I do not have the courage yet to remember and probably never will, and which I may have largely invented because what I saw was not seeable, and I had these things, these forms, in me from other occasions and used them here.

The furthest extent of human perversity and independence of will was startled into good behavior, not completely, but to the point of attesting the miracle, the pause in natural law. No reporters or cameras got there, no one summoned further witnesses; it was a particular event, public but inward, and in the end private and without commotion or disturbance, except inside us, of course, those of us who were accidentally present, but, of course, I don't know what in the light of the nature of this occasion and of the Angelic Visitant the grounds of reason should be in speaking of an accident of presence.

The Seraph didn't try to register on us anything by way of words or gesture, rewritten or explained commandments or biddings or forbid-dings or predictions, none of those things. It didn't produce any audible effect except for a low hiss or whisper as of a fire. The tangles and fuzz of the human minds and sensibilities present, the ambitions-everyone, of course, was in midstory, was in the middle of a dozen stories of enmity and friendship and of money and of circumstances and studies and love and family and politics-we were in a sense let alone inside our stories. We remained unbidden, unspoken to, untrumpeted at.

At this stage, once we were past the initial internal uproar of seeing It and having to make room for belief that this was happening, it seemed incredibly loving and fond of It to say and do nothing, to let us alone.

Inside us, inside our skulls and bodies among the various physical devices of awe and caution (fear and attentiveness for observing), while being very shocked, some were like me, curious beyond the reaches or range of sense, good sense, while being somewhat unable to be disbelieving and amused (although in off seconds those feelings came anyway), and even drunk with relief in some instants because of having a conviction now of a final sense of importance about my life as a witness in this case, the actual case, the accident or fate or the luck or meaning of being present at this revelation-the revelation of the presence of an actual Seraph, no revelations so far in recent history having promised so much of the chance of a divine meaning separate from holocaust or apocalypse, although, of course, It might level us with fire or immediate oblivion now if It wished.

The idea that one might be incinerated or punished does bring in some people an illuminating burst of manners. Others, the women more, become hysterical at the implicit constraint. And one or two young men joined in with them in that. I was tempted by my own hysteria as well as theirs and verged on it but was reined, bitted, by upbringing and respect (the concomitant of disrespect in me) and curiosity.

And in a short time, the hysteria was quiet again.

It was stifled by awe, by the possibility of not having the strength to endure all the kinds of weight of the occasion that is The End of The World but not entirely. The entire end, that would be a Final Meaning. This had only a breath of a sense of Apocalypse, one not at our will; and it was Apocalyptic without any need of display in that the end of the world as it had been for oneself, one's death and the death of most of what one knew and the ways one knew it, the extinction of will in the old sense, of belief in the usefulness of will, occurred anyway, a kind of elicited asthma, self-annihilation, the birth of inhibition because of The Angelic Presence and Silence, a Silence that saw us, and if It did not choose to look, a Silence that was-since it was an undeniable presence-in an elaborate relation to us.

I imagine many of us to be such fighters that we try to hold on to certain advantages for dealing with what comes next even when what comes next is likely to be flame or more light than one can bear-perhaps it is impossible to give up one's nature at first or perhaps ever; one has one's strategies and appearance of virtue for the passage here, one's cunning, the Odyssean strengths at the vestibule to the Afterworld or within it, according to poetry, within the confines of Death.

Its presence, considering Its speechlessness, and power, was like a death.

But I imagined all that as laid aside with regret or even hatred, but since, if one lives, one will most likely be a witness from now on, what need is there for most of such aspects of will in one's self as one has needed up until now when one was not a witness? Almost certainly, one can expect to be inspired now and protected-oh, not physically: one can be martyred, used in various ways in whatever time or timelessness there is to be now: one has a very different sort of soul-the total of one's self now includes this occasion and one is different.

It was so impressive, The Seraph, that in the moments of seeing It, I had no wish to speak, to shout Alleluia or anything. Quite simply, there was nothing to say and there never would be now unless, of course, this was local, and one would want or be driven or inspired to speak of It to others who had not been here, who were absent from This Truth. At first, one or two of us did essay a casual Hosanna or Alleluia or Hallelujah or Pax or Pace or Peace, but it was like a mere further murmur and rustle of the leaves, of the air. After a while, no one shouted or cried out, every one of us, even a blind man nearby, we all forwent acclamation and the relief of outcry and of astonishment-we rested in an amused and unresting and exalted silence.

Then that, too, passed in the lengthening pause or hiatus of the world, in this pause of our worldliness in which judgment, assent, and dissent continued but not as before, and those of us who remained sane and unhysterical inwardly and unrapturous in a total way, unblissridden and as if in tears, and interested in dealing with others in this lengthening arch of time, of belief, glanced around at others on the walks to see if we were mad suddenly or if this moment was attached by the same approximate rules to the moments before as moments had always been attached to others. This was curiosity and disrespect, as I said, and unrestingness, but not a restlessness of an exalted sort. Of course, moments couldn't be attached to each other by the same rules now, the rules that inhered in the moment before, of life taking place among us day by day, with breakfasts in it and bathroom acts and classes-but some of that did still obtain. One was not amnesiac. And the Heavens still had not opened to show The Ranks of the Seraphim and Cherubim and the Archangels; our Seraph had not spoken. What we had was enough even for someone greedy of spiritual glory, but it was not the ultimate. In turning my head to look at what others were doing in the face of this unfinal magnificence, I did not deny that this was a rare moment, and in the light of final hope, the most rare moment in any recent age, matchless and singular, unspeakable and terrible, as I said at the start, this Marvelous Beauty and fearfulness and embarrassment-and It was not a night dream, not a noon or late-in-the-afternoon hallucination. But unless It was those things after all, a dream or a hallucination, then, since I wasn't destroyed yet and the moment was real, I probably ought to attempt speech, now or soon, provided I hadn't been stricken dumb, speech as in prayer or greeting as I'd read men did in times of emergency or with Angels. I could question and plan, show piety (to some degree), praise, beseech, sing-it did seem that was what I ought to do next. I wanted to address The Apparition, The New Reality, and I murmured this and that phrase of salute and gratitude, Hear, O Israel and The Lord is my shepherd and Our Father and, without intending blasphemy, Hi, my name is Wiley, but, of course, It would know. The language of ancient government, Latin, seemed more dignified, and I said, Credo, credo.

Part of me was freed from any urgency about manners or seriousness or awe ever again. One could testify by a kind of rough readiness since Salvation is inherently irresponsible once it occurs, if, that is, this was Salvation and not Damnation, or something Entirely Neutral. But assuming from Its silence and the great beauty It had and from my continuing to live (although, to be honest, I did not much care to live; I was grateful, though, and slightly sad or grated on by having my old consciousness) that what was occurring was kind, deeply so, well, one need not worry then, except, of course, as love or the spirit directs. The honest and for the moment and perhaps forever now monastic and martyrish soul, saved by visible presence, only that, is simple in spirit, like a child, one is a directly childish soul with a parent about whose judgment one is assured and about whose powers one has few doubts. In this state of trust, in this form, my will, as a fighter, if I may say that, led me to whisper, experimentally, out of an honest adherence to my own identity, my own soul, My God and Hey, not exactly without and not quite with irony. I did contemplate, maybe with distaste, the impossibility of speaking of this later, this so obviously great happening: What could I say to anyone not present unless this event itself gave me a proper vocabulary for such an account?

But The Angel's silence supplied no clue to a language. How would one address the difficult auditory and intellectual apparatus for listening to me that people have? Here are the holes into which words drop and roll-and then unroll themselves into images-words and syllables; and here are the screens on which messages blink, jump, and are so radiantly tentative (while lyingly claiming supreme fixity and absolute reference); and here are fields and responses of electricity, electric bloomings and rustlings. One would have to organize a movement, have disciples and superiors and a kind of priesthood; the message has to be prepared for or it is entirely incomprehensible to the ears and eye and mind.

The Angel I saw did not speak because Its message was too corrective, too new: Its appearance had reference to Colossi and movies and other things. How could someone like me address such an apparatus as each modern man had for attending to speech or messages in reference to the truth of a vision like this one? People have their own knowledges insistently. Words, spoken or not, are by most educated people maybe brokenly re-created and read a second time, inwardly, and edited to replace what was said in accordance with what the listeners have already learned, and they have not learned this. Every man or woman listening to me is riffling through his or her past to find a former meaning or sets of old meanings to use rather than actually listening to me. Or rather they are listening to me in that fashion which means riffling through themselves to find old snapshots and records which they look at and listen to and say that that is what I mean. They have not learned what I now know-and I only partly know it.

And it was not certain that this was not The Last Trump, and that God Himself was not appearing over Rome, say, more probably yet Jerusalem, and we here in Harvard Yard were getting this outlying but impressive Local Show, a road show, A Local Angel, not The Central Figure but A Mighty Beauty anyway, and God would come to us later: that kind of old time and space notion seemed at once ludicrous and courteous-God acting like a man and being subject to a schedule and to time and space. How would one speak of this notion of Provincial Revelation and not be joking to the point of a painful inanity? Someone who had never had a Visitation or imagined such a thing or been given words and forms for thinking about it, what would he or she think, how could one convey the grandeur of a moment that omitted so many people, assuming they were omitted, that this wasn't the end of the world: Don't look like that, Wiley, it's not the end of the world. So many left unvisited, unvisioned, which somehow seemed unlikely, undemocratic-elitist and selective-unjust-if this was an aspect of Deity, how would one deal with such injustice, accept it? We were privileged in The Yard-would that make one see one's life as a missionary effort, would one become finally evangelical, a matter of salesmanship and soul, perhaps of truth and bending the truth in order to serve The Truth? I had read of such things. It is hard to know and silly to speak of one's reactions honestly when they did not persist. Certainly I was conceited, and just as certainly I was modest. The moments did not continue being profound, and my heart and soul were not steadily attentive to The Figure but often meandered or stumbled into delight or odd forecasts of the possible and a very great deal of hope about the future now as the silence of The Figure and my own continued life hinted that questions of meaning would remain.

For God is final meaning. And any intention of final meaning rests on thoughts of God. Any pure example, offered as purely true, hurls us skyward, halfway to the old Heaven. We in the West claim Divine Lineage for what we say and do and how we feel and act-not me: not me-and in The Figure and around it were such perspectives as cathedrals and theologies offer except there was no trace of Gothic or of columns and no symbol of theology that The Figure carried. There was beauty and awe, a low hiss, great size, and a light that in spite of clarity and brilliance and beauty was mysterious-but this tone of order, Tacitean or Latin or whatever, was not present in the moment. Those of us who saw The Angel were not ennobled in any old sense of being invited-or forced-to be figures of a new government, of minds and of men and women-we were governors of nothing-but silence. Our testimony, I think I knew already, would be valueless except insofar as it was labored and worked on and logical, in some wholly logical sense, starting from an unideal premise, and having to admit that This Marvel, fine as it was, was not an Ideal Example of Divinity or of evil or of intrusion by Superiority-superior mind or whatever. One knew better than to claim the figure was Meaningless, that it had no Divinity or tie to Divinity-a claim of meaninglessness like that, or any such claim, like the claim to know or to have guessed at final meaning, claims to know Deity and challenges the darkness. The Angel was silent. Why accuse The Figure then of meaninglessness? I did not turn my attention away from It for long. I did not stop desiring It. I did not begin to find It unsuitable. I did not turn my back to It and walk away. I remained there as long as It did. It was Glorious, It was the best I know about, but It was not Final.

And I used folly to rest myself from awe, from childish awe-perhaps it was childish-to rest myself from jealousy and jealous demand that It be more than It was or that It care for me more.

I thought even that perhaps some satellite system was in place and doing this; and Light and Electricity of no Divine Order would now flash from The Figure in front of me to underscore Its undoubted but obviously unclear meaning as a test or study of us: or perhaps it was unclear only to me: but I did not look around to see how others were acting, I no longer had the courage to maintain a belief of my brotherhood with others-I said to myself that we all were fools and were being fooled and perhaps This was a mocking device of Extraterrestrials and The Military, but whatever way my nervous mind took at any forking or point of quandary, The Sight remained and so did my conviction of Its worth and meaning. The Seraph was so marvelous a structure that even if It was false, It didn't have to figure us out anymore or do anything further or say anything: It had solved the problem of fooling me and taking over the center of my mind and heart just by being there in some incredible accident or plan which It seemed to have no intention of explaining.

Whereas I did have to do something. I had to speak to myself when My Awe or My Astonishment blinked. Self-preservation and pride reacted in their various automatisms when The Seraph refused to give a command, to display a sword or gun or trumpet, or to release salvos of ancient or celestial fire, when It did not command me to be humble and to listen to Its silence, Its will, for which I was grateful since I would have tested Its Divinity or power in accordance with my systems for being a man here on this earth, in this life, and might have been punished more than I was by knowing The Angel had shown itself without explanation or proof of Divinity or purpose.

I know that I have to die like everyone else, and that displeases me, and I know every human born so far has died except for those now living, and that distresses me and makes most distinctions and doctrines look false or absurd or semiabsurd, but often I yearn to die, to have it be over, and then the doctrines look all right to me, and my own recklessness seems a verification of them, my folly proves them in part, by default: that happens up close to things and not at a distance; or rather each state, of fear of death and of appetite for it, is a peculiar mix of distances and closeness and of happiness and unhappiness.

To accompany The Seraph, to undergo the extinction of the earth in Its company, and my own extinction, to be forcibly seduced as by my father or my nurse or my mother when I was a small child, is a curious adventure to have as an adult. In just the way my father, S. L. Silenowicz, used to say, We have to go inside now, when we were out of doors together, The Seraph might take me out into the universe and dissolve my earthly self and make me into light or darkness at Its own will-it hardly mattered which: I could not sanely resist except in terms of silliness or inattention as a form of gallantry or as (along with obstinacy and the risk of bringing down punishment as a similar form of) flirtation with a potency so much beyond my own. The Seraph, by Its Presence, hoax or not since It was so impressive, announced the end of perhaps all my earthly pretensions; and It did this simply in the fact that It was There. It had arrived and become materially perceptible, and It remained materially perceptible, second after second, hoax or device of rule or whatever It was, and It did not care to cure the earth or me, time or light, although perhaps It touched with grace and final knowledge a number of minds, but if so, the possessors of those minds have been secretive about it-nothing human so far possesses ultimate grace. At most, The Angel was an emissary of The Final, but that was left to us, I think. I do not intend to reenter the frame of mind I was in then. It existed in front of me, It had only to exist in my sight and as the major sweetness and crisply, almost burning center of the field of my attention, It had only to be There in Its Very Real Presence in front of me, for Its Literal Existence, Its True Presence, to precipitate in me a changeable and varying conviction about many things and a Great Love for It, and This Conviction and This Love, this immense burden of meaning and awe, loosened my self-control violently every few seconds, so that my inner state was one of varied heats of pieties, madnesses, catatonias, bits of peace, of grace, the varying convictions of Final or Real Meaning and of my struggles of will not to expect further moments and a return to silliness and doubt and emptiness: that is, my will still struggled to be a Will That Mattered and to be The Will that dominated my conscious existence-this even in The Presence of So Awesome a Will as that of The Seraph, or The Minds Behind The Seraph-and this came and went, these opposed heats and states of the soul, or states of mind, burningly and varyingly, like a flame, like one's heartbeat, without seeming to have any nature of a paradox any more than one's usual heartbeat does-I mean one's own heartbeat, which, variable and many parted, confers, with a reason, a rhythm: that a kind of invariable or unvarying meaning exists so long as my heart beats. One's own heart is a true heart, is true to one, one's own heartbeat is true, is my truth. Look here, now it is clamorous and now it slows; it is slowing, but when one was excited, one's heartbeat, one's life, one's tidal nature were clearly present, the salt rush of blood truth, the taste of truth in one's mouth, the grown-up taste of salt blood and heartbeat among fluctuations of heat and chemicals, the chemicals of sensation and of breath. I held my breath at times but I breathed, I had to go on breathing. I wasn't changed into a new order of man, although, to be fair, I expected to be. At times, I wasn't even changed into a new form of spiritual amphibiousness if I can say that, able to breathe and live in another medium besides the weekday one of ambition and cowardice and so on, the one I had chiefly known until now, but I had known another medium of awe and true docility, although nothing that so breathed as this moment with the unbreathing Angel did of an actual eternity. In fact, my breathing-mine and that of one or two people near me on the college walk-seemed pointedly human, noticeably swoopish, gasping, and even asthmatic with nerves (or Awe) in comparison with The Seraph, Who pointedly didn't breathe. And the oddity of the moment did seem to suggest we might be able to do without breath or might now be able to breathe in a new way, now that we were illumined or whatever, but it wasn't true, any more than I might be able to have the traits of my father or of an older brother merely by having a moment in which in my presence they prove their greatness of soul. I expected Its traits to be universal now, and I held my breath to see; and at one point, in simplicity of spirit, and at another time, with more complexity of mind, I half rose on my toes and moved my arms to see if we (I and the others near me) could now rise in the air in final human pyramids, airborne, flocks of souls like grackles, humans in the absence of any story but this one now, going through the Aether to Heaven.

Or, if that is too optimistic, to The Last Judgment.

Its Quality of Forbearance, of Distinguished Patience, had so much Meaning for me that I had no real doubt that It was a Manifestation and not a hallucination, that It was a phenomenon of lived existence, a phenomenon of lived theology and goodness, not a trick that could make It be of No Meaning except a human meaning of ruse or whatnot.

Indeed, I thought that was Its purpose, so much so that I did not fear my humiliation at Its will, I did not think It a policeman of any kind, or a messenger exactly, so much as a marker. I accepted it, my humiliation in relation to It, which you could say was at Its will, at Its permission, in a (if I can boast) burst of being civilized: I wasn't what It was; and it seemed ugly, even blasphemous, both as human stuff and toward the divine, to assert myself: it is enough I have had a chance to see It.

But that sounds as if I were living out a pattern of being a younger child or some kind of scholar with a balanced wit or wit of balance and I'm not like that, and the moment was not like that. I was not at the center of Its Attention, but no drama and no testing inhered in that: the quality of Divine Speech, of mattering as an equal to the Divine Loneliness, if such a thing in some form exists, is a long way off and involves many more kinds and depths and heights of metamorphosis than puberty and death. Purpose is really an odd thing, a very odd thing. The Angel made no request for affection or service, It did not exemplify or ratify any human dream in the sense of what one dreams for oneself except in being not like us and closer to The Great Power or The Great Illumination.

I could not know if I was shrewd enough or intelligent in piety or the most severely black-souled and sinful or what-if It had a message, it was that silence, that one of not choosing anyone. Since It didn't speak, it was easy to feel It hadn't chosen us-we were a random sample. Beauty and goodness may very well, from a higher point of view, be matters of accident, defending and preserved, or sung about; and they may very well test you first of all by being uncertain in themselves as to their nature and, secondly, by giving you no answers. You mimic and sing the best you can and try to become someone whose life makes a music of a sort you can admire; or you had best stand still and mimic the silence of The Angel since you cannot reproduce a quantum of Its beauty or Its silence.

I was given nothing and I was given everything, I was not tested, I was too much tested, the test would continue the rest of my life now that I had seen This Thing, provided life continued. I was not the most just or good or the most obstinate or the most sly (or sly at all in Its eyes, Its view) among those who were present or I was but it was not known. I was not the median or the worst. None of that was at issue. Its light made me blink in such a way that it was as if I stared even while my eyelids were lowered-I don't mean the light was oppressive or insistent; or that it interrupted the darkness with its bright oddity: It interrupted everything by Its presence but only in the way you don't escape from someone you're infatuated with-their mind and presence-and this was inwardly so for me now that I had been given The Sight of The Thing. I saw steadily inside my own identity now even when I blinked inside, even while I tried to rest from, escape from, attentiveness and Awe. As in any romantic situation, my flirtatious or gallant and damnable silliness, my more and more straining nerves, my sense of meaning and of my being chosen, my rising to a new condition of mind, my being named and at the same time forsaken, my New Love, kept me in an excited state and on the edge of folly-but I didn't do as some men there and some women did, I didn't start talking and claiming to be the mouthpiece of The Spirit.

No one listened-you had The Thing Itself right there. You didn't listen to more than a word or two, you could tell from the faces those people were no help-what's the point of hiding inside Error? I would rather be openly wicked-inattentive-jolly.

I mean, the talkers were duplicitous, were hypocrites: they were playing with damnation after it was fairly likely The Angel had not brought death or salvation. Perhaps by implication, by presenting us with a speechless premise, which, if no one appeared with a television camera, if this occasion could not be proved to have occurred, would have to be argued over and socially dealt with, absorbed, socially digested, turned into an issue, another one, all our lives, and after we were dead, depending whether another manifestation occurred or not. But meanwhile these feverish souls, unable to regard The Marvelous Thing, were talking, were arguing about Its nature, were claiming to know Its nature, were making offers in Its Name-it was sad, that part of it.

One or two other people spoke intelligently: they testified to Its silence and to Its beauty, to the fragile commonness of the event, they wanted to know if others saw something of the sort they saw; and I thought each thing they said was of immense beauty, but then some of the chatter about Heaven and Hell The Seraph had supposedly whispered to those other minds was beautiful to me too-but these two people, a man, a woman, each of whom said only things such as "It is silent," and "I don't know what to think," and "Isn't it beautiful? You could never build a church that would testify to such beauty-do you think It wants us to try?" seemed to me more remarkable than the things about Heaven and Hell, which, also, as a matter of truth, I believed while I listened.

While I listened, I felt, I guess, it was in sympathy to the speaker, some part of my own consciousness of belief.

The effect of Its Height, of Its Colors and Their Extraordinary Nature and Their Changeableness and The Exceedingly Plangent Pleasure It gave by The Sight of It, did so ornament the burden-and extend it-the half-dear and agonized onus of recognizing that the event had meaning and that The Meaning of This was not given to us in any simple way-Its beauty eased our condition at living now with no Final Meaning of This Manifestation, and in no absolute condition of Testimony that it was almost all, all right, but not really.

It didn't judge, It didn't raise a sword or other weapon or even Its Hand, It spared us Its speech, and if It spoke to us, did so by inducing thoughts inside us, and yet, if my case is that of others, those thoughts, too, were uncontrolled. Years of shame at my inept powers of attention, at the vagaries and caprices of mind when it, the mind and its cohorts, the other horses (or motors) of consciousness, sensing and instinct, so called, and what's called heart and what I call physical will, those forms of consciousness, in ordinary states or raised up by discipline and grace, had always meandered and reared and run away and never were chemically or animally exact or mechanical.

Nor were they now raised-or inspired at all-a little, because of happiness and awe-an allowed coltishness and what seemed instinctual caprice, chemical caprice, mild or greater devilishness, interfered. In fact, all the attributes of mind were present now, inside me, but were soothed by the absence of fire and anathema or any sign of wrath or lightning. It was not a matter so much of The Mildness of The Figure as it was of Its Tender Otherness: no war, or antagonism of a great sort, even in the love, existed, since I could not speak for It or embrace It-such a moment was so far off.

I had known moments of love and goodness and beauty, and this moment was much, much less up and down than those but not very certain. The Sheer Otherness toppled me-balked me. It was not flesh or stone or any regulated kind of light or any known anatomy or architecture of the human that I now loved and regarded, nothing that humans had known, no sunset light or movie light. It was not any recognizable thing. Except, of course, It started-no, no-I mean It offered starting points of recognition: bits of recognizable light, a suggestion of hand and arm and chest; and you went from there to recognition, or I did. But I could not see myself in It or imagine It as related to me in any way but that of superior power or perhaps of Its Hidden-ness as a Personal Reality on the other side of a metamorphosis that was not occurring at this instant, that was not bringing me any closer to the possible thing of It and me embracing each other at least partly by my own will. Just as being a man had been hidden from me on the other side of the sharp ridge of puberty when I was still ten years old, so The Angel existed on the far side of a metamorphosis involving Beauty and Goodness, strength and knowledge, that would never happen, but that I would dream about, or edge close to in moments of grace now, although I was quite sure I would not be able to remember The Angel because my memory, my mind, hasn't the ability of my senses to regard something for which I have no formal means of interpretation and retention. To be granted grace-or to have been someone who has stolen grace-is no final state: part of its definition is that one has no formal means of identifying or summoning it, only of guessing at its presence and speaking later of its occasion. I don't know. The effect of imagining or sensing now that I was not going to undergo a metamorphosis in that sense, that I was not going to become like It and in any way equal to It and able to control Its attention or admiration, made my mind wander and made me love It as I might have loved an older brother had he been of any worth but, of course, much more than that, but considering my wickedness and pride and my common sense, since I was so excluded, the love was hopeless; even in the terms of my own dreams, it was not a final love.

Along with the other things I felt, which I felt inconstantly, as I am trying to describe now, this was, oh, a factor in suggesting the possibly universal reality of rebellion-disrespect as making itself into truth, even into revelation. Revelation has in it two themes, one of deprivation and one of acquisition: inferiority to the ideal and even to the best of one's own possibilities of attention, and on the other hand, revelation granted you an imperial grace or role, the means toward the acquisition of Grace and Meaning, or at least knowledge of it, a sense of its place in one's kingdom or nearby.

But there could be no peace because of It, no cessation of motions of the mind or of the hurt and self-consciousness and arduous labors of will and of Love.

And since The Seraph did not organize us-an army or, more beautifully, a choir-or change us frighteningly as suppliants with torn faces and fire and ashes and risen bodies and the dead around us and rending noises, the soul at Judgment-one could see how revelation brought no unison and only the most complex imaginable forms of union and this probably would not have changed even if The Seraph had asked us to line up and sing-unless It had transformed us first. The brotherhood I felt toward the other bystanders was mitigated by embarrassment, which, lo and behold (if I might say that), had to do with competition and shame, with rank in terms of behaving well, or seeming to, those who seemed to know what to do and feel, those who had risen to the occasion and those who hadn't, grace in my Gentile sense of things, and also a competition about the fiercely scoffing egalitarianism and consequent contempt for us all in our pride and identities (since we are interchangeable), which was at that time my most essentially Jewish trait-this led to a sense in me of struggle, which I denied in the moments of peace, but whether denied to be such or not, the moment of revelation was individual, with only limited aspects of being shared.

But those were very beautiful-the sharing part.

But even The Pleasure It gave by The Sight of It or the fear It aroused or themes and thoughts of Holiness and Awe, these were not universal among us, at least not noticeably so at any one time. What was universal among the fifty-eight watchers in The Yard and on Massachusetts Avenue according to later studies were things that could be called Awe, but two people denied having had any sense of holiness at all. Massachusetts Avenue was at once renamed The Street of Universal Light and the street was rebuilt to form The Square of The Seraph, but when the struggle between, on one side, the Irish and black officials of Cambridge and Boston and Massachusetts, and, on the other, those of Harvard, was won by Harvard, the whole thing was considered not a folk phenomenon but something for the educated classes-this is my own lifetime that I am talking about.

Certainly, for a while, religion ruled at Harvard after this; one might call it a fashion, religion being more important than the state-the state being slowly moved toward being theocratic-but that was something brought by people who had not been present.

What I saw was a special event that did define the state as secular. The Final Meaning that many of us hungered for had little to do with the politics of daily stuff. I myself would much rather be Holy than Secular-I mean in the world-but in some form other than an insectlike union or a vast and regimented family of sons, say, or of wives, or all of us as wives, male and female alike, or all of us as husbands married to a truth that is so unclear in purpose as the one of The Apparition that day.

Some of us expect a union of souls and Meaning that will be both clear and simple, and more than either of those, Final and unarguable-each man, each woman, a key, an explanation, a Thrust of Holy Will-and some of us feel that way now but not sensibly, not based on evidence, more as a matter of practical will, staying alive, loving one another to the degree that that can be managed without hypocrisy.

This wish in me bled that day with consistent wounding. Each stab, each cut, came from more evidence at the complexity of Truth in seeing The Seraph stand and maintain Its silence. The spirit sank and was wounded and pale at the trigonometry-like extent of any answer or response, moment after moment, second after second.

And like the shadow that I still cast on the walk and that lay in the air between me and the ground, a granulated semilightlessness that had the shape of an irregular pyramid, so that when I think of my eyes and consciousness near the top of the pyramid, I think of the figure on the dollar bill of the pyramid and eye. The desire for simplicity and a portable and easily mentioned answer cast this shadow of my will-this attempting this account-this attempt at meaning, at mattering.

I cannot bear The Seraph's Message, I cannot exemplify It or Them, Its messages. If It had spoken, I could not now reproduce Its Words, Its Diction, Its Authority. I suppose part of me had always known that a sense of Failure must accompany any attempt at Truth, that satisfaction can never reside in an answer but only in the politics-or warfare-of answers as the Greeks knew, as appears in those famous plays; but still I felt a curiously profound shame, an increasing embarrassment: it seemed to me that there was more shame and shamelessness now that The Seraph had appeared, more than I had imagined could exist, and an increasing embarrassment among some of those undergraduates present who were struck dumb and some who were struck senseless and some who were struck giddy from the strain of a continuance of honest knowledge of how limited and silent knowledge is-ever and always.

It is easier to take a small formulation and lyingly-and honestly, too-use it as an amulet or whatever to stand for a bigger amount of truth and to say that that is THE WHOLE TRUTH than to use a large amount of truth with all that labor and still have to admit that it's only partial and needs correction.

That day, those who became giddy and giggly and who took the soldierly persistence, the Immediate Depth of Belief, of the more serious starers and watchers and tautly awed head-averters as authority for the reality and value of what was occurring saw that the more serious in some cases passed out or rose from the kneeling position when their knees began to hurt. Others scratched themselves or looked suddenly tired or doubtful. Some, not shockingly under the circumstances, actively pursued sexual shame, sexual release, like temple harlots, men and women, because their minds and hearts had been set that way, probably by chastities they practiced; they offered this to The Seraph, or they did it out of greed to taste the excitement of it or in case it was the last one or as offerings of themselves or as disrespect or as a way of claiming attention as some children do with trickily obscene or dry parents or by association of ideas as a form of honesty and of abnegation of the world and its rules concerning shame and self-protection. Well, I have said all this in a confused way. But again it was clear that no actually universal or regimented reaction occurred among us, even the small group of those fortunately present here today, this afternoon. We had a great variety of responses in ourselves and in others around us. At some point, two people began to dance, far apart from each other. One man disrobed and stood with his hands over his breast and his elbows out and he looked very dour and sure of the holiness of this; and a woman with a powerful voice began to sing but she soon stopped. But then two other people began to sing, but different hymns, and then one changed and sang the other's hymn, and the strong-voiced woman joined in, the three sang for a while, less than a minute, I think-it just wasn't one of those times for showing off in that way, even though that wasn't showing off, really.

I tried to sing but I was off pitch as usual. I was shocked and a little irritated that I was not inspired in a vocal way-it bothered me that I was not raised into the air. It bothered me that we were not joined in a choir, that we were not enjoined to be a group; I began to cry and I got a headache. And the headache and the tears altered in nature and were purgative or oppressive by turns, complaining and merely nervous, joyful and meaningful and then not-this was as time passed.

The witnessing was eccentric, and hardly admirable, what we noticed and how we showed off, and the way we stared and did not stare. There was belief and various ways of enduring and attempting to recognize what was in some regards stupid-It was too magnificent-It had been suitable at first, in getting attention and governing our regard, but we had adjusted in various ways, or failed to adjust, which was partly unbearable, and no further uplift of will or of display or of realized fantasy occurred, and a lot of us wondered how we were to live.

I was in favor of our being raised into the air and of our becoming an amazing choir, and failing that, our marching to downtown Boston in midair, or failing that, on the ground, in the name of the Truth and with the perhaps grandly ambulating and accompanying Figure, Which might, though, have refused to move, Which remained in Cambridge right there, at Harvard Hall.

We might have circled it like the Jews the walls of Jericho or David the Ark.

But no, we stood there-now some people sat-It continued to give no message, It continued to exist in front of us, and that made the structures of will necessarily docile and responsible, which was grating but which was, in other regards, an ecstasy like other occasions I had known although not so gloriously as this. A serious kind of ecstasy, grave and unexpected, at least by me. The effect of thrumming modesty and immodesty that The Seraph evoked in me (I can say that as if that effect had been constant if I pretend I exhibited no variations of reaction) was a matter of a very precarious sense of brotherhood or equality with It, or of descent, as in blood descent or lineage, in that I seemed to myself to mirror It or know about It to any degree-that knowing made it seem to me I comprehended It-one loses track of how ignorant one was when some terrific knowledge or other is glowing there in the forefront of one's consciousness; and this sense of union with a great force, a greater force than any I had imagined as showing Itself on earth, carried me toward a swift, terrible pride and delight in the human availability of such a grand inhumanity of spectacle, the specialness, the half-inhumanity of It now that It was somewhat familiar, the way Its Colors and Shapes overlapped suddenly what one knew from one's own experiences in life and of representations of the ineffable, maybe, so that one as if recognized in It light itself and the size of night as well, and starry numbers and grandeurs of air and vistas, and then the way It, Its Colors and Shapes, departed while It stood there, departed from my powers to see, perhaps, the way It became phenomenally ghostly, like speech, conceivably present but not present, imaginable and said but mostly absent, a whisper, an echo, a hint-this had a gravely incremental effect of ecstasy, which in my case became a kind of illiterate eloquence inside me, a babbling, a glossolalia of childish and dream rhetorics: I had been freed from certain human restraints, I was free to be insane-human restraints were mostly absent in the presence of The Angel, It overrode them, satirized and splintered them-and I was not insane in relation to It, the light; by my own or private standards I was allowed to have been adopted by the moment, if you follow me, and to testify in my own blur of languages, in my own meanings, which part of me quite clearly understood and welcomed as being poetry and music, but I know now no one around me could have recognized much of what I said except insofar as it was ecstatic and self-concerned but directed to The Angel as release and as offering.

It was there but in such a way that seeing It was as if Its passage or the passage of Its attributes among us was on some orbit of Mere Being, and our specialized and ignorant responses seeing It, or not seeing It, our accepting It, our testing It, were A Truth and Necessary but peripheral to the other watchers and could not possibly matter to The Angel Itself.

It was painful but harder on the believing Christians, who are convinced God deals in the details of our existence in memory of His Son. For me, a Jew, I writhed with powerlessness, I ached at the complete humility Its presence forced on us in relation to meaning itself. We could not possess It or treasure It or distract It or own It or guess Its will: we were given no power at all-but none was taken from us, either, except the power of a certain kind of conceit, of not knowing The Angel existed. We were given or granted irresponsibility, silliness, enormous possibilities of dutiful sonhood and subservience in a sense, but we were given none of the ancient or antique power to command God through His Son or His Covenants.

We were not like It, we were not cousin to It in the realm of matter and mind and the possible dignities of soul and vision, we were secular and strange and minor, we could mirror It as children do adults at times, and that was to show madness, lunatic attempts at private meaning, silliness, to a grownup immersed in a silent passion and meaning, I guess.

It Itself was irrelevant and gray and transparent for entire moments as one's state changed, as thoughts involved one in slow chains of inner recognition and outer curtaining to the world. If I wish to remember Its Light, which was more a shadow, really, a displacement of the only light that had been familiar to me until now, Its peacock and flaming sun and star and moon and flower and garden and winter colors-of-a-sort, I remember a partial reality of Its Presence intruding on my thoughts, on my confused rhetorics and outswell of honest syllables, how I was corrected when Its Colors returned or when I refashioned and resharpened my vision, since The Angel's Colors were, of course, ungraspable by the mind or memory, the many-fingered, hundred-handed mind. The unfingered but shoving memory had no chance. Memory shoves things forward, but only the mind can hold or handle images, can study them. Memory can show things to me as I understood them once, not usually in their presence but in an early memory or daydream or dream at night; that's all it can do.

Brotherhood has odd passages of deadness toward one's brothers in it. One's brothers, a stricken audience-but not entirely, if at all.

They matter, one's brothers do; they prove me sane, that this is actual-the communal mind judged this to be perceptible.

Under the circumstances of Its silence, should we worship It? Well, not compete or intrude or ask things of It-except gingerly.

One graduate student in English threw a rock at It; and an Oriental physicist attempted to sketch It, to stand both in Its Light and safely behind a tree and look at It from there as if to triangulate Its Height or Quality, which was impossible since It has no shadow, no ordinary relation to Light or, consequently, to dimension or time.

Free Will continued to exist in the very face of the Divine, the Divine on this order at least, but it was Free Will partly shamable by our being Middle Class, our training in Respectability, in self-willed conformity, self-willed facelessness, law, democracy or smudged holiness or piety.

Historically, God and the middle class are at odds, or I would guess the middle class hasn't produced theology. Comfort and decency aren't much like grace and the nonelect, aristocrats and the poor. Our God would supply universal shelter and would go easy on the punishments since we were trying and would be less severe a figure and hardly doctrinaire-I really can't imagine a feudal theology in a suburb. Or at Harvard. Or in a poem except as a ludicrous-but beautiful-term about one's own success in the now more and more middle-class world-the world is the human universe, really.

Many of us asked things about It of It silently, but we obeyed the call to politeness issued by the phenomenon and our own allegiance to decency in some cases and our allegiance to celebrity and specialness in other cases-The New Higher Respectability and Fashion of the Soul-since great power suggests coercion and, partly, makes disrespect noble by making it expensive, as expensive as Respectability, at which point it has in it clear responsibility toward meaning.

To some extent, we surrendered a great deal to The Seraph, we were mostly not disrespectful-like dogs. So we did not hate each other's ill-timed disrespects very much, so far as I can judge now. The sketcher stopped sketching very soon. The rock-thrower stood very still in the pale, strong, low-lying altered light around The Seraph.

That fierce and terrible and altered light, what weird geometries of hints of pinions and limbs The Seraph displayed in slow pale and then brilliantly colored semifluttering. It was like nothing else-of course. Thank God.

I was humble. There He-It is. I had felt as a matter of personal doctrine that God would not bother with a manifestation, nor would The Devil-or any demon, either: why should Power bother with mediation or an image when It can do and be The Thing? It can impose unspeakable bliss, unspeakable belief in us, horror in the mind as well as in the air, horror or charity in the act. A Power would be not merely greater than life and death-we have that power with tools in one case and will and belief in the other-but a Power would be more insistent than life or death, which no man or woman yet can be.

Unless a Power exists but is not omnipotent and must consider the economics of Its Acts, the politics of sheerly animal truth in making Itself apparent to us and in us finding It out as apparent. I could not see why It should be so patient. Men mostly did demand that they be recognized as having access to The Divine and that they spoke in Its name and with many or all of Its privileges-the idea of The Divine was an Idea of Impatience. I "knew" The Seraph was bullshit-as was, therefore, my pain concerning It, my awe and longing about It, my silliness, my bliss-it was like a dream of happiness slowly making itself known as a dream. Some human had to have dreamed It up. The real and its politics were about to return. It was just flattery to believe The Superhuman would bother with us. I envied the wit, the malignance and magnificence in the knowledge of Goodness, and the obliquity of the jokester, perhaps the groups of jokesters, who had imagined and vivified the image, The Imagined Messenger-Thing, and set it here, who had caused It to appear to me and others. Deity can't be transcendence of Itself toward the human-can't need us or care unless It, too, is finite-not final. The Angel did not transcend Itself for us. The Seraph in a lower sense transcended Itself by suggesting Heaven and a message-the stillness of utter safety, of no further hunger of any sort. Only a trick would move me toward God in a human-or comprehensible-way. I am moved by Deity that cannot speak to me, that strangeness, that foreignness as yet so unlike us, something beyond what I can or can't know, nothing of It lies within the procedures, the progression of the moments now, and the ones before, and the ones to come, and the jolted and erratic groups of images of them in memories-God and This Angel are the final points of acknowledgment for me, me, Wiley, who can say, in a case like this, only yes or no, Yes I see, No I will not grieve. A binary form, a Binary Fact-perhaps a chain of sets of binary fact-my religious belief: It is True or It is Not True-but I will believe much that I don't otherwise believe if it is understood I believe it for the sake of brotherhood. But Deity for me is a fact without presence to which I say Yes or No. It is present or not present, It is felt or not felt, known or not known-It is always felt and is not known inside the human range, only in human terms. This form of agnosticism, if it must have a name, means I can't conceive of a Transcendent Truth but only of truth and falsity and sloppiness in a mix-I can't imagine what a final truth would be in actuality. Those who speak of such a thing say it is not apparent, it is colorless like glass, it is a radiance that lies beyond things, it is summonable by magic, by incantation, by acts named as virtue, it is known by faith. Some say it is apparent. It is referred to in words and known in the heart and passions, apparently, but it is not present beyond those words to me, and it does not enter my heart and my passions. I saw merely a local Seraph that enjoined a respect toward the real as a kind of exile and honor and as disrespect and fear toward the silences that exist in meanings. It bade me love incomplete meanings and with my whole heart but only for a while. It told me to be fickle. It said-It did not speak but I say It said: you see how I lie, how I twist things-It said that only new positions are honest or possible but they ebb into old ones, into ghostliness and confusion (a tradition is what one remembers from one's childhood, one's grandparents, say-a living tradition is never more than twenty or thirty years old). It said that differences could not be escaped from, politics were inevitable, that political meaning is out of place in relation to real power, genuine beauty, true silence or speech, but they will occur then anyway. It said to abjure tyranny as much as possible and if that meant having many gods, do so, but to recognize that anarchy was weak. It said to love incomplete and complex meanings and One Speechless and apparently not Omnipotent God and to struggle toward a new idea of idea, therefore.

The Seraph I quote, who never spoke, is not present beyond these words. It was never present for a second except as revelation to the eyes and senses in great and even dreamlike power and richness-that abundance in solitude, inside one's head. I speak of It now as a vicar of Its absence. I serve in the vicarage of absence. What I am is a man of service in a reality that has degrees of truth and of presence.