Deity is Itself. Transcendence would be, logically, a term for us cheating on a Final Awe-it would be a trespass. A final awe, even uncapitalized, is hard to practice. Nothing was transcendent in The Angel's appearance, actually-Its presence was merely, or not so merely, the presence of meaning-meanings complex and not as yet known, and the knowing of which is without set value and cannot be enjoined as a duty. I was humbled as I have often been-I gaped, I did not claim then or ask to be a leader or Messiah, but then only a few short men did in The Angel's presence. No one was able to misrepresent or to speak for The Manifest Meaning when it was present. One lies later for the sake of being audible and triumphant. To speak to fools as a good hostess does, does Deity authorize a foolish manifestation?
That was beyond me. I thought of what the image cost. I thought of what such a grand image cost in the universe. I was always broke and I didn't have the money to do anything even moderately splendid except in my sleep. I couldn't help thinking of money. I had never dreamed of so splendid a spectacle as this. I could see that some churches and temples ought to be made of gold, dangerously I mean, if they want to suggest belief or faith, really. The final commitment of all that is material to the appearance of divinity shows that the community is serious in what it says about God, is what I am saying, I suppose.
It towered up, a structure of light but palpable like and unlike the church of light the Nazis made at Nuremberg, and maybe more like the statues of Athena and Zeus that Phidias did of ivory and gold at Olympia and Athens, which were painted as unearthly flesh that was apparently weird with divinity as in the curious light and colors and scale of dreams-but this was wakeful, this was very wakeful. Or at any rate, so people said who saw those manifestations. The Zeus was one of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
This Seraph in front of me was not the work of a dead artist in another state of soul, other from mine. This one I envied. Do you love or respect anyone who's alive? To the point of self-obliteration and awe? I suppose in prison or in hospitals, in certain states of anguish of soul, some people do. At any rate, I envied the creator of This Angel and was in awe still, was still plucked at by love and a wish to be Good-this was toward the end of the manifestation and I had a headache and considerable nausea and an erection.
I could not imagine who could live and create such an illusion, the reality in front of me. Surely, the creation and the ambition involved would manipulate the Creator. Much of what I have witnessed in my life, all that I have witnessed, I have resented at times, at one time or another. My having to see It was hard to bear, my having to return to the thought of It later was hard, too-maybe worse. Witnessing is a terrible duty, a kind of horror-especially the witnessing of otherness and of incompleteness, which is what witnessing is as we know in life. Self-love alternates with confessions of ignorance, and selflessness, in a difficult way. I was distended by The Sight of The Angel. When I do not violate my knowledge of It by claiming to have found a final truth about It, I become so charged and swollen with vision that I go pretty far toward being lunatic. And the pain of that and of the extended effort to speak is silencing, is very great. But I can't say I would have preferred seeing nothing. Or even that I would have preferred seeing indirectly, on the face of someone, not me, what happened, rather than undergo the act of witnessing the stuff myself and being a conduit for such things as the joke or farce of the at-times-ghostly, at-times-glass-mosaics-in-sunlight angel and then its ghostly avatar in gray, in a single color in myriad shades again. I can't say seriously what I would prefer: less beauty, more beauty-this is what happened. Clearly the truth of it lies in the moments, not in my opinions. My opinions, though, hint at what occurred, they hold evidence together in abbreviated form, but it is incomplete evidence. It is troubling, however, and it takes too much time to open each case, each trial again. I am so broken and burnt with the effort of resurrecting and of continuing and containing the unuttered messages of this event, which admittedly was not ordinary, but was, in its nature of abstraction, infinitely easier than an event involving people on both sides, with both power and arrival and messages and departure. The human messages seem to me to be much harder. But about The Seraph's arrival and the messages of that and their lasting or twisting into messages implicit or otherwise of duration and their going on afterward in me, the memory even during the time of the visible manifestation, during the moments of the reality of Its presence, I can almost say I am not to be trusted any more than if I were testifying about what I saw in a brawl or an act of murder. I admit that often while It was present, before It vanished, I was sarcastic and angry, cheap and self-destructive and stupidly thrilled, knotted with obstinacy and reluctance because what was going to happen was so commanding a fate that I preferred to be evil or foolish or wasteful in order to be slightly free. Will is so strange a substance, so willful, so self-blinding, that I felt bullied and shoved either way, whichever way I went. But, of course, Awe returned and gratitude, the real kind, the kind that at moments is not embarrassed, after a while, by my having been mean-spirited off and on or always during the course of the manifestation in relation to an ideal of some sort, and by the certainty of my being it again.
I could not have left Its presence. I don't think many people could have left Its presence without first having the capacity to be vastly bored: that would free them to their willfulness. Or the conviction that It was overall a lie and oppressive and, most likely, an act of Mammon, something done for money in the service of a god who was a servant of Unrighteousness, some such thing: I was immersed in Its moments, the thickets and plain fields of meaning-of meanings. As I said, I regretted my presence-I regret my testimony now-I keep thinking to myself, Wiley, don't get lost, don't get too humble, you have the moments. To guide me, I mean. I can almost say I regretted it, but maybe in the end I'd rather not say it because it isn't perhaps true enough. What can I regret or prefer in the face of The Real? In a way, it is wrong, or impossible, to speak of The Seraph's vanishing. The nature of Its presence changed, became more human, more subject to absence, as if much of one's humanity was based on absences, too, on memory and its showiness in its display of things.
The particular drama of the departure of The Real Angel, of Those Colors It has, and Its Odors of flame and darkness-and of light-and Its Faint Whisperings and low whistlings and humming sounds, was mixed with the unexpected and untimely appearance of the Moon, a sudden silver rose that showed itself in the dusky air, large and unlikely and at treetop level-a sudden dizziness of the zodiac, of time. Perhaps an illusion based on misperception of what the passage of The Angel away from me, from us, was like, and how that energy played in the universe and in the immediate and local air, as well, and how it illuminated the darkness with extensions of the angelic colors. And these were spread everywhere among the trees and over the buildings, whether they faced us or not-one knew because the light showed at the corners, too, and on grass behind them, light, shadows, outlines, and surfaces washed in-so to speak-the shallows of this light, at this shore of an ocean of the universe's capacity for further light; but it was as if The Seraph had never been there but was now present in this mixture of sun and moonlight, auroras, and unseeable lyricisms of illumination, as if memory and opinion might invent new colors that would color the world outside, and the poor eye among its lashes and with its retina would try to deal with this and would be as happy as a child feeling foolish at the seashore seeing something marvelous washing in the waves, in the shallows, but understanding nothing of it, not the light, not the salt smell, not its own happiness. Memory and opinion and the new colors then existed briefly according to new laws, different laws; and this illumination was partly a mirage of a sort common at dusk, but that was a hallucination: one doesn't see dawn at dusk or associate sunset hopefully with ideas and sensations of dawn: one suggests thought and rest and one suggests actions and waking from the megalomaniacal selfishness of dreams-dreams and error, self-love and fear. In this magical dusk one might think of gathering with others at dinner as if at home, but also as if at dawn right after waking or after a vigil. To wake taut from sleep and dreams, from dreamed crowds and the actual solitudes of sleep, and to return to a moment centered on family or on colleagues-these domestic and selfish moments are ones in which one regards oneself as favored by Deity or in disfavor, in combinations of luck and will and errors or not-errors and accident and not-Deity or whatever-responsibilities, laws, the day, the night-somehow us partly in the grace of the illuminated All-Powerful. Perhaps I was wedded to myself for a fraction of a second, and in that blink, in that slow-witted, human, disobedient act of my self-regard-in the way a child blames himself for having brought on the eclipse by turning on a light switch that he was not supposed to touch-The Angel already visually forgotten by me stopped being there.
It hardly made a difference at first. Everyone (I think all the watchers) waited, not knowing what to expect or to hope for next. What came next was simply a somewhat sluggish return to a usual afternoon light, a Yankee sobriety of Massachusetts glare at 4:06-approximately: it was not clear at what moment It was gone, and some people were crying and others were carrying on somewhat, and that was distracting. I was bathed in the afternoon's ordinary river of white light, yellow light, its faint heat and the damp coolness near the ground and struggling to grow, an invisible harsh corn, into the ice fields of winter.
A dead edge of cold's in this air, an autumnal vinegar-in my salad days: a joke. The cold is smooth, this mixture of heat and cold is like the rough feel of a cat's tongue. I feel the Cambridge damp as pale, always pale, a thin, decaying heat, a near lightlessness. Darkness comes on. I am in a thinning, fraying light. Vague mist, like lint, lies among some distant buildings in the perspectives here and among or near some of the trees. The restlessness of ordinary time lies between me and the adventure and the vanished light. The Seraph. There is only a make-believe point of stillness, an illness perhaps, a frozen affection, a passion of study and of concentration, to suggest any timelessness to crawl into or to climb on in the attempt to know what happened. Hustled by real time, I am filled with a kind of hushed rage of thought, spilled and quiescent, spilling and restless: What does it mean? When I was young, I lived in a pulsing urgency of thought, thought as flame or bone and blood unless I was in the sun or busy at a sport. It was a kind of rage of thought. It's hard work and focus and a rage of a sort. Labor in the mind punctures and bruises emotion. I think that meaning is a human idea. Only a human one. Someone who thinks that can't be a Messiah, right? No crucifixion for someone who advocates that-right? No.
A kind of disbelief afflicted some of the watchers such that I don't think anyone looked at anyone-much. I did now check the audience: no one looked excited or seemed talkative; words, even exclamations, even the use of one's breathing, the use of setting its tempo as a label for one's use of ordinary sight, for one thinking this is not an emergency, I don't have to be overly alert or whatever-all of that was unappealing and present. A few people did persist in absolute awe for a while, I would guess-maybe not: I have no real evidence from the world on this topic.
I think no one wanted to testify without letting some time pass first, really time for knowing better what had happened, for the newspapers and television to speak as The Seraph hadn't, for one's heart and one's life and one's dreams to express opinions and to allocate worth to this or that belief about things, to judge one's ambition to testify, and time to argue inside oneself first to see what one meant cloudily and as a start, and time to see what others said, to see what would work in the ages subsequent to the event in The Yard.
I did and did not love The Seraph, The Angel. Something so massive, so spectacular, can take care of Itself. It told no one what to do, it was apparent from the clumsiness and abstractness and allegorical nature of the references to The Event that It advised no one and governed no language uttered in Its behalf. It had said nothing and It had vanished, and perhaps that meant it was best if one just let It go, that was what It had advised.
In the end, what was startling was that no one testified at the time. Or rather, it was all journalism and shock at first. And then came lyric attempts, and much cross-referencing back and forth.
Only after many years were there convincing but frail and as if whispered attempts at honesty, of which this is one.
Bibliographical Note.
The stories in this book originally appeared, some of them in significantly different form, in the following publications: "The Abundant Dreamer" The New Yorker, November 23, 1963.
"On the Waves" The New Yorker, September 4, 1965 "Bookkeeping" The New Yorker, April 27, 1968 "Hofstedt and Jean-and others The New Yorker, January 25, 1969 "The Shooting Range" The New Yorker, September 13, 1969.
"Innocence" American Review, 16, February 1973 "Play" American Review, 17, May 1973.
"A Story in an Almost Classical Mode" The New Yorker, September 17, 1973 "His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft" Esquire, August 1975 "Puberty" Esquire, December 1975.
"The Pain Continuum" The Partisan Review, Volume XLIII, I, 1976 "Largely an Oral History of My Mother" The New Yorker, April 26, 1976 "Verona: A Young Woman Speaks" Esquire, July 1977 "Ceil" The New Yorker, September 9, 1983.
"S.L." The New Yorker, September 9, 1985 "The Nurse's Music" The New Yorker, August 22, 1988 "The Boys on Their Bikes" Vanity Fair, March 1985 (abridged version: "Falling and Ascending Bodies") The Quarterly, 6, June 1988.
"Angel" Women and Angels, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
HAROLD BRODKEY was born in 1930, in Staunton, Illinois, grew up in Missouri, and was graduated from Harvard College. Since the early 1950s his stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other magazines. His many honors include two first-place O. Henry Awards (1975 and 1976) as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has taught writing and literature at Cornell University and at City College of the City University of New York. His previous book, a collection of his early stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, was originally published in 1958 and was recently reissued. He lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Ellen Schwamm.
ALSO BY HAROLD BRODKEY.
First Love and Other Sorrows.