Brown: The Last Discovery of America Page 16

  The sole religious orthodoxy permitted in our public schools is the separation of paper from plastic. Not so many miles from this beach, great-grandchildren of westering pioneers chain themselves to redwoods, martyrs of the new animism.

  There is a stand of eucalyptus in Pacific Grove, seventy miles, as the crow flies, from where I stand. Californians have for years gathered there to experience themselves as northerly, as spiritually related to Nature. It is a skimpy, tawdry sort of Nature, in fact—a city block in length, in depth—surrounded by motels. This grove is the meetinghouse, nay, nothing so plain; this grove is the cathedral of the Monarch butterfly. Every autumn, caravans of ragged wings propel themselves hence according to some fairy compulsion. It is a mystic site. We stand with our mouths agape; we look up, up, up—Look! I see them!—circling clouds of stained-glass wings descending in a gyre. Despite the surroundings, the beauty of them is so surprising, so silent, so holy as to be wounding to the soul, for they resemble what clouds of angels in baroque paintings resemble, what toccata and fugue resemble, or what galactic kaleidoscope resembles.

  I assume you know more about butterflies than I do. I experience awe, not expecting to, but do I misunderstand the thrall of instinct displayed to me? The solemnity is one of death, is it not, as much as of beauty? The spectator infers from this rite that the individual life does not matter. The pattern matters. Generation matters.

  There are things one must do. There are things one should do. Moral imperatives propel my soul’s journey. One’s human instinct is to murmur superstitiously, to enumerate the things one must do before Nature pulls one under. One is drawn nevertheless into this beguiling gyre. For these angels describe existence softly, silently as petals fall. We cannot hear the engine that has shredded them. We see only flecks of amber, drift of blossoms. These angels are several generations removed from ancestors who departed this grove last year; several generations removed from ancestors who will return next fall. They alight to hang like sere leaves upon the branches. As the sun turns its face from them, they quieten; some will die, fall, blow away, to catch with scraps of paper, gum wrappers, and twists of cellophane in the crevices of logs. But others will gather strength, others will hoist sail to rise like windmills on torrents of air, to worship, I suppose; to submit once more to the same cruel engine, the same piercing joy that grinds the sea.

  The liturgy of the Roman Mass still gathers a people from age to age, so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made. But from Asia come ancient, bland choreographies, ceremonies not based upon progress or time or moral perfection, but upon the experience of the moment, the balance of chi, an invisible Art Nouveau.

  Sometimes my morning walk will take me through Mountain Lake Park in San Francisco. The lake is natural, prehistoric; now endangered. California Indians once lived thereabouts. It was there the Spanish explorer de Anza set up camp in 1776, having climbed on foot from Sonora, Mexico. It is there, early in the morning, I find conventuals of the moment, Chinese widows and widowers in pastel sweat suits interacting with the vacant air; they are rehearsing the rituals of tai chi, their faces lifted toward the brightening sky. I envy them this dumb articulation. It is not prayer, is it? It is balance. But it is complete. The gestures are complete. Slowly, patiently revolving in the moment, as purposeful, as purposeless as butterflies.

  Tai chi, yoga, Zen, whooshes of air, some of them; some of them stillnesses—each seeks the moment, the reverberating moment. And feng shui—an intuition for freeing the paths of energy throughout the physical world. I believe this western beach, where I stand, is a vast portal for some such impulse flowing into America, the gate through which the wind-colored dragon flies. The dragon clutches in its claws one empty egg, translucent, fragile, or perhaps it is a dense, dead pearl.

  I can see him now, yes, I can see him, a proper Chinatown dragon with silver pompons nodding so gaily upon his spine, his beard of silver fringe, his four, six, eight, hundreds, thousands of athletic, hairless legs, rosy at the calf—crash-gong-crash-gong —mincing up to where I stand. He tosses his leonine head. He regards me silently. I tie a garland of green leaves and red firecrackers onto a bamboo pole to feed the droll monster. I raise the pole sky-high. The silver dragon rolls his ping-pongy eyes and rocks from side to side and then begins to writhe upward into the sky, one segment standing upon the shoulders of the next; his mouth clacking open and shut with puppet relish.

  East meets East upon this shore. The dragon will discover his tail at last. And within bright paradox another lies: The numerical rise of the Hispanic in America today is paralleled by the numerical rise of the Asian. The Asian moves east into the American West to meet the Hispanic immigrant who moves north to reach the American West. The Hispanic brings the idea of a continuous past into a country that preferred to think of time as forward thrust. The Asian brings the idea of moment, of the present, into an America that was preoccupied by the westward movement into the future. America is fated to recognize itself as intersection—no, nothing so plain as intersection—as coil, pretzel, Gordian knot with a wagging tail.

  The dragon, delighted with his savory, articulates downward from on-high—his shoulders jump down from his back, his back from his hind, a plume of fog issues from his throat like a long dun scarf. Once more the dragon rolls his head, his mane a crashing wave. He takes the sleeve of my coat into his silken jaw to lead me to a copse of sand a few years distant.

  Where we sit, dear Lynn, huddled in a present tense, hidden by the tall grass, you in your baseball cap, dark glasses. Me a dry-eyed Indian Catholic praying for the sun to stop its course.

  Your ashes scattered over a meadow in Idaho where only the northern winds can find them.

  I tell you heaven may be architecturally more substantial than you imagine. You tell me you have always loved this beach because it was here, as a little girl, you first saw an order of angels, the great whales, passing, substantially, between death and birth.

  Come now. Whichever the case. See how the metaphor of the West dissolves into foam at our feet.

  Chapter Nine

  PETER’S AVOCADO

  Can’t you see that nothing that goes into someone from outside can make that person unclean, because it goes not into the heart but into the stomach and passes into the sewer?

  —Mark 7:14

  I DON’T KNOW IF YOU HAVE EVER LUNCHED WITH A VEGETARIAN. Probably you have. If you live in San Francisco you have. Then you’ve seen Dominic, his hand raised, fingers slightly crook’d to summon a waitress: Ma’am? (Pointing to the menu.) Is this dish made with meat stock? The waitress (a Chinese restaurant) takes a moment to divine the desired answer. No. (When in doubt.) So imperial, so sliding scale, so uncomprehending is her no, so wise is her no, finally, so Greek, so Arab, so Catholic, so Brown is her no, Dominic cannot be reassured. Dominic’s vegetarianism has to do with upholding the sacredness of life. He needs a puritan answer.

  Whereas Peter. Peter is the son of my friend Franz. Peter is as easy in the brown world of maybe as he is in his own white skin. He is wandering through India as I write this. Peter is handsome, gentle, Hindu-intoxicated, slightly blue; his skin is slightly blue. Peter’s veganism has to do with the sacredness of his own body; with the purity of his lungs and his bowels and his liver and his breath. Peter’s vigilance is maniacal: Do you place meat and vegetables on the same grill?

  Franz, Peter’s father, with whom I am having lunch at yet another Chinese restaurant (this one called the Mayflower), tells me a story. I have just told Franz my book is about brown—not skin, but brown as impurity—and Franz says, “I have been thinking about purity.”

  A few months before, before Peter left for India, before I write this, Franz was leaving his house to keep some appointment when Peter called out to him: “Dad, I need you to pick up an avocado on your way home.” (Peter, as you may imagine, cooks for himself when he visits home.) The door reopens: “Dad, it has to be an organic avocado.”

  On his way home, Franz sto
ps at Safeway. He notices the small display of organic avocados. He notices organic avocados are expensive but look paltry somehow. He notices the larger display of chemical avocados, much cheaper. He is tempted. At Safeway, of all places, Franz has come upon the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; has even stumbled upon the first theological debate: Will Peter know the difference? Which leads inevitably to the second theological debate: Can what Peter doesn’t know defile him?

  It is not that Franz would ever harm Peter. What father would harm a son? (Christ asks.) (As the congregation is inevitably reminded of Abraham and Isaac.) Still, Franz is nothing if not deliberate.

  When the white, wooden Baptist church, a black church, gets torched on a dark night, or when, in the morning light, the synagogue in Illinois is discovered to have been spray-painted with crooked black lines, then holy men gather in front of television cameras to declare themselves united against “hate crimes.” They link arms. How they are composed to oppose hate! What the holy men do not say, however, is that love has always been a bigger problem for churches.

  As for historians. Say what you will about hate, hate is not ambiguous. Historians with bow ties who win bronze medallions for their labors have long told the story of America as stories of hate—vignettes with clean endings, sharp corners, palls of certainty stretched over the toes and noses of soldiers. History has a beginning, a middle, an outcome. Many appendices, many misgivings, many motives have been summarized. For example, about the woodshed at Monticello, the historians with bow ties were unable to tell us or were disinclined. About the honeyed light through slats in the wall; about motes of dust in the air or the smell of excrement, the buzzing flies. We now are able to scope DNA, and we do so as if we are looking backward through a telescope. We find the course of American history muddies considerably by that reading. And this is clarifying.

  American history books I read as a boy were all about winning and losing, contest, vanquishment. One side won; the other side lost; women clutched babes; minstrels composed lays. Children closed their eyes to memorize dates and heard only the buzzing of flies. But what was lost? What won? An acre? A precept? An SAT score? Only the score is remembered. Not the circlet of hair in the oval locket. Not the early frost in the letter, not the breakfast chucked up, not the barometric pressure; the droplet of sweat upon the rib cage; the concussion of the earth, the translucent centipede scrambling for cover. And so it went. So it goes. The progress of a nation, as of a life, is a litany of conflict, score, segment. From conclusion to inception. Conclusion, it is arranged, will stand as the inception of the next segment. It is like balancing books at a business college. And all history books are balanced, as balanced as books in a business college. We can see that one action follows from another in a certain way. The number of dead men who do not prevail against an idea. One political party defeats another political party. One idea in America ascends, another falls. Strikers are mown down by policemen. The tycoon in a dinner jacket leaps to his death or simply eats dinner.

  The stories in the history book that interested me were stories that seemed to lead off the page: A South Carolina farmer married one of his slaves. The farmer died. The ex-slave inherited her husband’s chairs, horses, rugs, slaves. And then what happened? Did it, in fact, happen?

  Or, at the mordant conclusion of a frontier battle, after all the bodies have been counted and pockets gone through, a single observer—and we wonder what happened to him—describes a mountain man leaving the scene, entering the forest with an Indian woman.

  I want to speak of such unpursued scenes and lives as constituting brown history. Brown, not in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generation are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight.

  Missing, I suppose, because of the orderly sensibilities of recorders, and then of their readers. We cannot record time. Time is capacious, a rose. Such is what Virginia Woolf intuited. Such is what Marcel Proust intuited. These heroes of the imagination objected to history because the center of it was missing. But they, too, died.

  The woman who owned the market around the corner never smiled. I noticed her golden wedding ring. I used to imagine the chime of that ring against a porcelain bowl. But what of that? The market closed. Probably because she never smiled.

  That slain boy—the one with the red hair, and of what sort of red?—lies facedown upon a field. A cloud has passed through him, a cloud as soft and as warm as a coverlet has passed through him, has left a blue stain upon his body as it passed. His life is over now, his watch stopped, his fear is pitched away from him like a handful of pitched gravel; all emotion is fled, as if emotions were birds flown from a tree at which gravel has been pitched. Perhaps emotion has flown to the treetops. Perhaps it has flown to the stars. The slain boy is utterly irrelevant to our history.

  The history of the day belongs to the redcoated captain there, florid, morose, in his tent; in truth, it belongs more to his charts and his lamp, than to the powder horn or the sword (though he read the Greeks as a lad). A decrepit sword (his) rests now in a glass case in a museum in Boston with a card of explanation, a legend which has gone unread for many years. The last person to read the card was a girl with brown hair who had run away from home (pregnant) and who tore her last stick of gum in half to save the half for later, and who entered the museum to use the lavatory and she read the legend of the sword and a few others, so as not to appear to have come in just to use the rest room. She left, walked out into the painful noon and traffic of that lost day, walked up the street two blocks, turned a corner and disappeared.

  And what of her observer? What of him?

  What of the card? The card was originally, in measurement, 2½ by 3 inches; standard card; manufactured by the American Paper Company in 1908. The card was hand-lettered by Mrs. M_____ C______ who had a contract with the museum for piecework: “script that shall be legible from a distance of approximately one yard.” For many years she gave satisfaction, for many years—this was the latter part of her life—she worked in the best light (a table near a window in the back room), while her husband coughed up his life, half hours, hours, to spit them into rags in the front bedroom—“spittle rags”—and these lay all about the floor and were tucked under his pillow, while Mrs. M_______ C______ copied legends such as that descriptive of General Whitmarsh’s sword, its maker, dimensions, date, inscription, metal. It is not known whether the gray blade ever smote flesh. Mrs. M_______ C_____’s card was replaced by a typewritten card in 1934. That card was retyped in 1954, again in 1960 on an electric.

  I am the observer.

  Every American comes upon the “I,” awakens to it. The prow of the ship. The top of the tree. The hilt of the sword. The animate eye. The quick. The reader of the card pertaining to the sword. Very interesting, but now I need to go to the bathroom. The American I. As in, I believe, I take Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I am sorry for the earthquake victims. I will have tuna on rye. I love you. The I does not impose solitude, though it is lonely; the I is alive. The I may be an instrument of connection, but even as such it is an assertion of will. I have my rights.

  As so often happens in America, the I attached to me at school:

  You!

  Who? I was no longer my brother’s brother, my sister’s brother, my mother’s son, my father’s son, my backyard’s potentate. I was alone. I . . . I had to go to the bathroom, what should I do?

  Go to college, become a man different from your father. It’s up to you. Don’t go to college, become a man different from your father.

  The American I is as old as the Boston Tea Party, as old as the document of Constitution: “We the People . . .”

  We? But I am a royalist. As the son of immigrants, I do not remember America seeming like a choice, though Americans were always and everywhere talking ab
out choices.

  They talked about black beans or refried. Presbyterian or Methodist. Ford or Chevrolet. Cinema One or Cinema Two. Gay or straight. CBS or NBC. Paper or plastic. Diet or regular. Regular or decaf. Plain or buttered. White or whole wheat or sourdough or English muffin. Every lighted window, every court, every slug of type, every knuckle of America strained to accomplish my assertion: I am innocent.

  I may be unwise, I may be mistaken, I may be guilty. But the essence of the American I is that I am irreducible.

  I can be punished for my crime, in other words. Isn’t that odd? My body can bear the weight of punishment for a crime weighed in the apprehension of others who did not see, who do not know what I know.

  Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value. The American I is deconstructed for me by Paolo, an architect who was raised in Bologna: “You Americans are not truly individualistic, you merely are lonely. In order to be individualistic, one must have a strong sense of oneself within a group.” (The “we” is a precondition for saying “I.”) Americans spend all their lives looking for a community: a chatroom, a church, a support group, a fetish magazine, a book club, a class-action suit.

  But illusions become real when we think they are real and act accordingly. Because Americans thought themselves free of plural pronouns, they began to act as free agents, thus to recreate history. Individuals drifted away from tribe or color or ’hood or hometown or card of explanation, where everyone knew who they were. That’s Victoria and Leo’s son, isn’t it? Americans thus extended the American community by acting so individualistically, so anonymously.