Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  The smoker invades our premises with every exhalation. There can be no privacy for him. We pass smokers on street corners and we ostentatiously wave our hands, clearing the landscape of pathology.

  Many stores, restaurants, curiously, will blast music at us without permission and we make no objection, we do not wave our arms. Though I know a man from Berkeley who describes Dolby Sound as “intrusive,” and regularly complains to theater managers about it.

  We feel surrounded, that’s the thing. Our borders do not hold. National borders do not hold. Ethnic borders. Religious borders. Aesthetic borders, certainly. Sexual borders. Allergenic borders. We live in the “Age of Diversity,” in a city of diversity—I do, anyway—so we see what we do not necessarily choose to see: People listing according to internal weathers. We hear what we do not want to hear: Confessions we refuse to absolve.

  Biology! That is what Franz Schurmann would call the bunch of us aboard the 38 Geary. I am on my way home from lunch with Franz at our favorite dim sum restaurant, the aforementioned Mayflower—“no MSG.” There we talked about our usual subjects: Islam, China, the French Enlightenment. And we talked about what Franz calls “biology.”

  In the Franz Schurmann lexicon (as, indeed, in his most recent book, American Soul), biology is a metaphor for life at the bottom, or undifferentiated life: the crowd in the aisle, the woman with her bag of tangerines, the girl with pure, I imagine warm by this time, mountain water in a shipless plastic bottle under her arm. All those school kids who won’t slip off their bulging backpacks and who stand in the aisles. The stew of humanity in Tokyo or Helsinki or aboard a San Francisco bus. And, every once in a while, Americans are dragged to the bottom. The jury room. The army physical. The department of motor vehicles. The emergency room. The United Airlines ticket counter. The Last Judgment. Undifferentiated life is a test of the American I, whereby each must figure out “the system” and seek her own advantage—must figure a way to get the fuck out of here.

  The “South” is another of Franz’s metaphors—related to biology—in counterdistinction to the “North” (settled nations of the Northern Hemisphere, the First World, where pale, reasonable people speak quietly in large rooms about overpopulation). First Class. Business Class. The North is dependent upon borders, restrictions, added tariffs, availability. The North is also the State, all those who are on top—government planners, boards of directors, academicians, the politicians, managers, Founding Fathers, people with views, BMWs. Franz also refers to the North as “physics.”

  The epic civilizations of Asia preoccupied Franz for most of his academic career—an august, a northerly career, it must be said—the vast movements of peoples preoccupied him; peasant revolutions, intricacies of aesthetic trod in the dust, the expendability of the single life, the disposition to eat anything that moves.

  Now the famous sinologist, retired, spins the world over dim sum on a cold spring afternoon. Within his person Franz carries fifteen languages, tasselated literatures; memories of peasants, luminaries, terrains: The end of Ramadan and a mule ride through a mountain pass; volumes of yellow dust; a meal taken with dark, bearded men who squat to pluck gobbets of meat from a common platter while watchful women watch.

  Franz’s superiority over Francis Parkman is that Franz will attempt to answer any question put to him.

  It is sometimes Franz’s conceit that he is himself a peasant, of peasant mentality. “Where would the world be without peasants? Where would Chekhov be without peasants?” (. . . The trees and their gracious silence.)

  Franz grew up in a working-class immigrant family in Hart-ford, Connecticut. As a boy he taped maps of the world to the walls of his bedroom to represent his heart’s desire, which I take to be a desire for escape. The U.S. Army made Franz a translator, first-class, in Japan after the Second World War. The GI Bill sent him to Harvard.

  Franz says he loved going to Harvard but he never really cared for academia; could not refrain from casting a peasant’s eye upon the proceedings there; felt himself a sort of confidence man. Perhaps that is why, amid the steam and fishy roil of the Mayflower restaurant, Franz shares with me his intuition that the world is following his own inclination, or that his path partakes of a nose-diving zeitgeist: “The world is entering an era governed by biology, not the State.” Borders are being trampled.

  Before long, Franz has turned his regard from the round tables of Chinese families and from the waitress pushing her trolley of pork buns to consider the autocracy of his younger son, Peter, whose avocado must be pure. Enigmatic Peter lives harmlessly, delicately, behind a screen; is scrupulous; the seminarian son. In Peter’s case, moral scruple has become dietary scruple. But what is it Peter will not swallow? Or what is the sacrament he seeks?

  Peter yearns for cleansing. Where is the contaminant? Is it the great world Franz longed to join? In some sense Peter follows in his father’s footsteps; sets off to see the world; displays a facility for languages. In some sense Peter considers himself to be a contaminant; seeks most the Zenish non-virtue of doing no harm. Though Franz can provide an approximate translation of Peter’s behavior, its moment remains inexplicable to him. Despite Peter’s care that his body not be defiled, his body is tattooed. Despite the impulse to live outside time, his mundane impulse to customize himself, to paint indelible bracelets on his arm, to embarrass some future version of himself with this illustration.

  On the 38 Geary, a man sits picking his nose and rolls the gleaning between thumb and index finger into a pellet which he then examines. A young woman who sits opposite him stares with disbelief, involuntarily says out loud, “Eeeeeww.” If she expects anyone to second her disgust, she is disappointed. The other passengers assume the man to be in his privacy or, at any rate, they maintain their own.

  In the absence of morality agreed upon, in the absence of behavior agreed upon, we have streetlights, stop signs, cross-walks, courts of law, restraining orders. In the absence of streetlights, stop signs, courts of law, borders, morality agreed upon—all disregarded—Americans have decided we are surrounded, since we feel surrounded, by moral “space.” Personal space. (The American version of an aura is not a superabundance of essence but is proscriptive, legal.) An inviolate space. A border. My space should not be violated by smoke or scent or chemical fume, by sound or sight or touch or sexual innuendo or prayer or immigrant. My space, moreover, should not be violated by authority—by parents, doctors, clergy, teachers.

  A friend of mine, an English teacher at a local university, says he feels an obligation to point out to his students that the cigars in the canister on the mantelpiece in the Edith Wharton story are phallic symbols. But he is forbidden by his university to sit on the desk facing his students—a pose regarded by school governors as provocative. He could be charged with sexual harassment.

  Against Christ’s dictum that uncleanness does not come from without, but from within, there is this, from the program of a Shakespeare festival I attended last summer: At the request of many audience members with environmental allergies, we ask you to be sparing in your use of scents.

  The local papers have run ads over the last few years for a housecleaning service that promises to rid one’s home environment—draperies, furnace flues, carpets—of dust mites. The ads include a photograph of a microscopic dust mite, blown up to a proportion that puts one in mind of a balloon in the Macy’s parade. The dust mite, an unfortunate airborne sprite, is crab-like or toadlike; most resembles a smooth spread hand in a latex glove.

  At the same time Americans have most come to mistrust, at least to joke about, spiritual guilt—to disregard the moral residue of behavior—we have come to internalize our mistrust of the environment in forms of paint chips, asbestos, food additives, sewage, corporate cynicism, arsenic, dust mites. The equanimity of environment to ourselves we call health. Our ability to match a nice day we call health, or to overmaster a gloomy day; our ability to handle our jobs and our chores and our money and our families we call health.


  Ah, we are deeply impure! Because our environment is impure. Our religion concerns health more than morality—long life, and the dignity of the death we choose. But our bowels are impure. Our breasts. In the newspaper this morning, an op-ed: “Surely it is no coincidence that breast cancer rates have tripled since 1940. . . . We now know we can’t trust anything the chemical companies tell us.”

  We are depressed. There is no “we” to that assertion, either. I am depressed. I feel impure. I feel that something is lost or wrong. Moreover, an ad on TV: “Get the buns you’ve always wanted!”

  This would be laughable if there weren’t, indeed, buns I’ve always wanted.

  We perhaps no longer consider our bodies to be prisons of the spirit, temples, but microtechnology has displayed to us our bodies as ancient tablets or cave paintings—the genomes—hieroglyphics incised on the walls of cells, multicolored jump ropes, hangman’s knots. Our irreducible element is not “I,” as it turns out, but some ghostly “we,” cumulative, remote—instructions that can be traced across the plains of Africa, all the way back to the finger of God.

  Professor Faustus submits to a newsmaker interview on the “NewsHour”; assures us the Book of Life has been unlocked. But his smirk disquiets us.

  As much as we are in thrall to health, we mistrust the clergy of that business. You know as well as I do that as soon as scientists can do something they will. They will clone. They will play knick-knack on your bones. We mistrust the liturgy of science: paper chasubles, disposable gloves, animal and human sacrifice, and all the pardons and plenary indulgences of HMOs. But even now, in the twenty-first century, scientists must eventually turn from the computer screen, from the Book of Life; must pull on latex gloves, must say “Let’s just have a look.” Science, even now, comes down to the digestive tract, to a finger inserted into your anus, to the triumph of biology, which is deeply humiliating to the American “I,” and which is not, incidentally, sodomy, because there is no kindness to it, but only disgust.

  This is the opposite of confession.

  Christ, we notice, never said anything about a Book of Life. He did say the hairs on our heads were counted. He was easy enough in His skin to derive an illustration of morality from His familiarity with the human digestive tract.

  I noticed the woman withdraw from the reception line. She waited to be the last to approach me after a lecture I gave in a Congregational church in Pasadena. Her face, at one angle, described a Toltec carving. Then, a slight shift of her chin transported the eye to Kyoto. I had been speaking of brown—still, in truth, testing my own use of the term. The Japanese-Mexican woman had a brown story as well. She grew up feeling herself neither Japanese nor Mexican (because both), in a black neighborhood of Southern California.

  But it was of her brother she needed to tell. Her brother went to jail because he was literally a misfit. Her brother felt himself culturally black, by which he meant in his gut, in his ear, in his soul, in his eye, in everything beyond and beneath his skin, but not in his skin. “The brothers,” however, who were not his brothers, wanted nothing to do with him. Neither did the Asian gangs or the norteños who were preoccupied with fighting their own shadows. So he acted out, alone; tried to prove himself a reliable something by becoming an outlaw. In prison, the Mexican-Japanese brother became a reader, became a writer, entered the society of disembodied voices; sought, that way, to overmaster the competing claims of an impure ancestry by writing, at last, “I.”

  There is an aspect of symmetry we call loneliness. Two columns support an arch, creating emptiness. Leonardo’s naked cartwheel of a man with hourly arms and legs and who describes an arc also describes loneliness. Wherever he puts his arms, they are empty. Do we derive our restlessness for symmetry from Nature—from outside ourselves—from geometry, from trees reflected in pools, or from our own bodies? There is a mystery of plurality about our bodies. The way we are constructed persuades us of duality, for we are halved, left, right.

  We have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils. Nipples, arms, hands, legs, lungs, feet, testicles, ovaries. Parents. Where is the “I” in that? Language gives us the ability to address our selves. We have one brain (albeit when shelled as halved as walnut meats), mouth, throat, spinal cord, stomach, digestive tract, heart, navel, liver, sexual organ, anus. One memory. One stalk. It is the stalk that seems to yearn for complement. In E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, the hero has a dream: “Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, ‘that is your friend,’ and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. . . .”

  I meet teenagers—like the “Blaxican” in Riverside or the “Baptist Buddhist” in Atlanta—I meet them everywhere, at every gathering I attend, people who tell me they grew up alone. Because they didn’t belong. Because they belong to too many. (The way we are constructed constructs introspection since we feel ourselves plural. Mirrors will cut us in two.) An African-American woman I met at a wedding told me that when she was a girl in Texas her best friend demanded of her, who was that white woman I saw you walking with? The white woman was her grandmother.

  Then there is the forthright humor of my correspondent, the aforementioned Jewish-Muslim in San Jose, who by way of summation deadpans: “Most people I meet think I must be a frugal terrorist.” My correspondent indirectly refers to the American Joke Book, which has a category devoted to miscegenation, to “crossing,” as in: What do you get when you cross a Jew with a gay?

  (A musical.) I understand. I sympathize, though I tend to withhold my brownest commiseration so as not to give offense.

  A high school student, precocious, the most winning combination of Huck and Kerouac, visited me the other day for an interview. (I am his senior essay.) The kid was unshy and unsophisticated both. Unblinking. Seventeen and he had hitched solo across the continent. He said it was cool with him that I was gay but he wanted to know how I measured the influence of homosexuality . . . on your writing, since you never say.

  (I remember my father regularly remarking—I hadn’t realized I was listening—how in Mexico a person is guilty until proven innocent; whereas in the United States, the opposite faith prevails. I’ve never met a more law-abiding man than my father so I don’t know why this legal inversion interested him so much. To this day, I believe both, more or less, because one is more than one. One embodies contradiction through time. And though the man may turn against an earlier number—the old man, for example, regretting an adolescent kiss or a rock thrown or a blue tattoo—that regret is also a kind of reconciliation because it is an acknowledgment of linkage. What makes me brown is that I live with both Napoleonic and Anglo-Saxon notions of guilt and innocence, not my skin. I do not reconcile.)

  It’s true, I never say. I replied to the young man’s request for candor cryptically. Walt Whitman, I said. Whitman’s advantage was that—prohibited from admitting the specific—he learned to speak of the many. Or. In order to disguise his love of the singular Other, he had to compose an anthem to an entire nation. Of every hue and caste am I, he sang, while the heterosexual nation tore itself asunder as blue or gray.

  The young man said something wonderful in response. He said his father worked for a corporation that had transported his family from one identical suburb to another across America, north to south, to Marietta, Georgia: “When our family lived in Georgia, whenever I’d see a black man and a white man walking down the street together, I’d always assume they were gay.”

  We sometimes confuse ourselves with outcome and call history “destiny.” If a man dies on the gallows, we may cross ourselves and say to ourselves he was born to die. So are we all.

  If a man dies unhappily, we are likely to say he had an unhappy life. That is not necessarily so.

  Or, we may say of someone, she made her bed, now she must lie in it, which is not necessarily true. She did not, perhaps, choose the life she lies in. Perhaps she chose a smile.

  Perhaps the American “I” is not truly individualistic, as Paolo
noticed. But the American “I” is predicated upon the astonishing “pursuit of happiness,” truly an American invention. But what if one “I” is Roman Catholic and one “I” is gay? Down which path is happiness pursued?

  I never say. I am often enough asked how it is I call myself a gay Catholic. A paradox? Does the question betray a misunderstanding of both states? No, not really. What you are asking is how can I be an upstanding one and the other. When you slice an avocado, the pit has to go with one side or the other, doesn’t it? Weighting one side or the other. A question about the authenticity of the soul, I suppose. Or the wishbone—some little tug-of-war; some tension.

  The tension I have come to depend upon. That is what I mean by brown. The answer is that I cannot reconcile. I was born a Catholic. Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay. Is Catholicism ever a choice? Yes.

  No. Not at first. I embraced Catholicism without question. It was the air, it was the light. Years later, I came to Catholicism in deliberation, defeat—satirically, perhaps—nevertheless on my knees. How else to approach a church established for losers, for a kingdom not of this world, a kingdom of fools? Whatever faith I confess is based upon my certainty that I can do nothing. I can save no one. I do not wish to live beyond a crucifix. The crucifix does not represent guilt to me, but love.

  I well understand the wish to be quit of the church. Those old men sitting in a row through centuries—back, back, to a roomful of frightened men, of purposes varied and apprehensions varied. Their paper hats. Do they wish me harm? Some do. Some rescue. I kiss their hands for they do not relinquish what they hold, what they pass forward. That which is homosexual in me most trusts the durability of this non-blood lineage. Trees and their gracious silence. Though I scorn them sometimes too and I ask forgiveness for my scorn. For none of us has made flesh.