Recess Appointment
By arc or by whole, the rainbow reveals refracted truth. Nearby rain and distant mist have equal power to vaporize visible light into bands of color. A single sheet of water, slicing through sunlight, projects the full spectrum against the sky's inverted bowl. If you are lucky enough to be standing far enough from the point where solar brilliance meets suspended water, you will see sunlight scattered into a full ring of color.
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Like metaphorical truth, visible light rarely reveals its constituent parts so regularly and so predictably. Depart ever so modestly from the axis on which truth or light turns, and your eyes will no longer honor one focus. And if you should look instead at an object propelled through the sky, gravity's rainbow will no longer appear to you in closed form. It will rise — and fall — according to a trajectory that will never connect the beginning of truth with its end.Pivotal events therefore mark the sections of our lives, slicing at particular points of time through the whole of the truth and leaving us no more enlightened than the objects we trace across our field of vision at speeds well below that of light. Catch them, and you will be rewarded momentarily by the mirage of control. Miss them altogether, and you will rue forever the path that both of you, protagonist and projectile, must follow.
Read the rest of this chapter . . . .
Sunrise brought an abrupt end to my Roman holiday. Having failed to reach Gubbio by a circuitous route, I set straight for home. Morning overrode my memory of Reena Harrelson long enough for me to order a cab for the airport. The well rehearsed ritual of international travel detained me no longer than usual, and I boarded a plane for Atlanta.My plane retreated from its gate just far enough to deny boarding to late-arriving passengers. The pilot, evidently awaiting instructions from the control tower, held the plane still. After sprinting half the length of Italy, I had come to rest, however briefly, on the tarmac at Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino.
I found myself at a point of eerie stillness in the river of time. At Dante's proverbial mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, I had traveled to Italy in search of the line between the dead and the quick. My quest, so I had believed, would lead directly to Gubbio's iridium exposure. But no reach back into ancient natural history can resist the temptation of the near emotional future. You will believe in that orgiastic future no matter how badly the recent personal past distorts your view of current global reality. It eluded you then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow you will run faster, stretch out your arms further. And if you are lucky enough to have noticed the trompe-l'œil of your own creation, you will realize this truth: No amount of traversing the ancient and the modern, the personal and the global, will separate fear from desire. At any scale the topology of anxiety and longing dictates an invariable outcome. Such is the manifold destiny of the searching soul. Equal and opposite emotions, one and inseparable, comprise a single surface in the Klein bottle of the human heart in conflict with itself.
My quest that summer, as the union of love and lust inevitably commands, slipped along the Möbius strip of ancient regret and present ambition. The slightest hint of something alive, the palpable stir of sex and salvation in Reena's voice, diverted me from the frontier of the Cenozoic to the relics of ancient Rome. That shift from geologic modernity to human antiquity exposed me to the most treacherous trick of light and sound, the double deception that awaits time's pilgrim.No less than their sensory counterparts, the waves of personal remembrance obey Doppler's law. The mind in motion never quite perceives what passes before the mind at rest. Emotional recall obeys the forces that bend the peal of a passing bell and warp the color of distant stars. Race toward the past if you will; yesterday recedes faster than your memory can recall. As you reel backward, redshift stretches memory beyond your field of perception, till truth dissipates in spasms of invisible heat. Race instead toward the future, and impatient anticipation crashes against the the invariant pace at which tomorrow arrives. Against that blackness you will see no more than purple tendrils not quite taking full form, the fleeting projections of things yet to come.
Takeoff and thrust gave way to the drone of engines at cruising altitude, and through scattered clouds I saw the curvature of the earth.
Though I cannot remember the precise moment, the fundamental theorem of the calculus dictates that some point — multiple points, perhaps, but in no event fewer than one — on my flight path would reflect precisely the trajectory of the flight as a whole. World enough and time fell in equal hemispheres on either side of my plane's pursuit of the sun. The Great Circle gave rise to the Great Sleep. Westward travel between continents creates the illusion of suspended time. Conventional aircraft can approach the linear speed of earth's rotation, especially on great circle routes skirting the Arctic. Near 64 degrees north, roughly the latitude of Reykjavík, a commercial airliner effectively matches the speed at which that strip of the world spins. Traveling at 540 miles per hour carries real, practical consequences. An airplane passenger from Europe to America feels as though the day of transit has been extended by five, six, eight hours. Despite most airlines' best efforts to disrupt the trip with food service and in-flight entertainment, a sufficiently determined or exhausted passenger can squeeze the equivalent of an extra night's sleep from a transatlantic crossing.
And so I slept.
My mind's eye in slumber at once retreated and remembered. As my plane tracked the geodesic connecting FCO to ATL, my memory retraced two decades. Eight to ten hours aloft offer the willing mind ample opportunity to retrace twenty elliptical revolutions of the earth. Memory, so poets would have us believe, is both misty and mystical. It resembles nothing so much as the arc of contrails left by a plane in flight, diffuse from its inception and easily dispersed by the wind. The jetliner's drone eased me into a deep sleep. I do not recall with any precision what I dreamed. I shall never forget what I saw when I awoke.
Its agrarian history notwithstanding, Georgia is not particularly blessed with rich soil. If anything, the state's poor soil nursed slavery and fed the curse that struck the American Republic in its infancy. Farmers saddled with poor soil need more of it to make a living. The cheaper the eyes assigned to work those acres, the greater the profit. Southern farmers historically favored cotton and tobacco — crops much more readily traded for cash than consumed on the farm or fed to animals — over field crops and other edible commodities.
Clay reaches its reddest in the southern Piedmont of northern Georgia. Outcroppings of granite and gneiss paint in vivid grayscale the history of the state's natural infertility. Unrelenting heat and water strip those rocks of alkalais and organic matter. The material that remains expresses a siderophilia of a sort altogether different from that of iridium and its kindred metals. Iron, plentiful and pedestrian and practical, rivals gold in its historic impact on Georgia. To be sure, gold in them thar hills ended one nation and built the empire that replaced it. Unlike gold, iron rarely meets the human eye in its pure metallic form; it reacts too readily in the presence of water and air. The same reaction that ignites the God of War in the evening sky also produces the signature color of Georgia's native soil. Iron in its refined form upholds the arrogant edifices of Atlanta. As hemoglobin it courses in the veins of mortal Georgians. But most of all iron permeates north Georgia's soil in the form of unhydrated oxides. The chromatic tone struck by those compounds is red.
A native of Eatonton once said that it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. That same God must have set out to stupefy Alice Walker's fellow Georgians. Spend enough summers in Georgia, and you will forget — assuming you ever learned in the first place — that few landscapes elsewhere resemble the ruddy landscape of Mars, capped by blue skies instead of pink and interrupted by streaks and stalks of green. But I had trekked far enough afield, in search of iridium, to forget the look of iron in my native soil.
From my plane I stepped into the airport's freon-conditioned interior. I decided to end my flight in Atlanta and forfeit the final leg of my itinerary. Having failed to reach Gubbio and its iridium exposure, I chose instead to revisit the figurative Chicxulub of my childhood. Passport control, customs, and the rental car counter detained me just long enough for me to frame my plan. I would find by car and by foot what I had only glimpsed by air. The eyes of bureaucrats, vendors, and other strangers passed as meaninglessly as airport gates and their numbers. No, I don't need a map — I know exactly where I'm going. I paused only when the metallic chill of the key in my hand met the incandescent orange heat of Georgia summer.
I had found my designated car in the rental lot. The searing afternoon sun played yet another trick of the light. Though water hung palpably in the air, it had been suspended in particles too small to refract the passing light. My eyes, which I had averted to avoid the blinding glare, traced instead a distended, featureless projection of myself. My body as gnomon, cast as translucent black on speckled gray, aligned in that moment with the compass I longed most to follow. My shadow divined the way home, and I followed.
I de dager var kjempene på jorden. The land of one's childhood, no matter its physical location, marks the same place on every person's emotional map. In those days there were giants in the earth, and the sons of God came unto the daughters of men. And in turn those daughters bore children who became mighty men of old, men of renown. If asked to find the land of giants, my memory will reply: 34 north, 84 west, give or take a few minutes. There the warriors stood taller, whether they swung bats or wore plastic armor beneath their jerseys. The preachers spoke with greater authority, sometimes of heaven but mostly of hell. And above all the daughters of men have no greater beauty than those you first meet in that never-forgotten land. So struck will you be by your realization, your terrible and thrilling discovery that you want one and all of them at once and forever, that you will spend the balance of your days searching for one to compare with the girls you recall from the founding of the kingdom of giants.
For every sacred place there is a ritual; for every territory, the faith of its founders and the creed of the land. Georgia is said to lie squarely within America's Bible Belt. This I will not deny, as long as you confess that the region's deepest spiritual commitment is football. The Baptist revival tent is not without passion, and Southerners have consummated the marriage of politics and religion in ways too grotesque for their fellow Americans to imagine. But true belief, manifested through the disposal of disposal income as through personal presence at weekly services, is reserved for sport. And among pursuits commanding athletic allegiance in the South, football reigns supreme. Though baseball claims its own cadre of adherents, those believers live inside a single cathedral. The Church of Baseball is an orderly, patient congregation whose members commit standings, statistics, and even individual strikes and balls to loving memory.
Football, by contrast, is far more visceral and democratic. It does not depend on repeated head-to-head struggles between masters of two physically improbable skills. For young men not quite prepared to hurl dozens of pitches on demand, or to lay good wood on those pitches, football awaits. The sheer number and variety of positions entice a far deeper pool of aspiring players.By early evening I reached my intended destination. On the silent grounds of Canaan High School I would conduct my private vespers and feel again the power and the terror of youth. Twenty summers before, I had spent each afternoon of a single week at the beginning of the school year in fruitless pursuit of a place on the junior varsity. In later years I would pursue many other weeklong quests, with no greater success. As a college senior, I would learn that a single week separates tantalizing anticipation from agonizing defeat before the committee that chooses Rhodes Scholars. And one week — most recently the days between my first encounter with Reena Harrelson in Corniglia to our dinner in Rome — marks the typical distance between initial infatuation and emotional disconnect. Academic encomium, incipient romance, and athletic victory share this much: in the same handful of days during which winners emerge, the eventual losers enjoy an equal opportunity to be tantalized by the prospect of success. Until the fateful week ends, every suitor imagines himself in the arms of his intended. Every warrior imagines himself the victory of his struggle.
At age 15, I wanted nothing more fervently than a chance to wear the gold and green of Canaan High's Rams. Junior varsity football tryouts gave me the chance to wear at least the gold practice apron, on alternate drills, before the coach announced his first round of cuts. Two decades later, I had taken pains to return to Canaan, primarily to remember the last of those drills, and perhaps to glimpse some way that I might recover from that fateful day's final collision.
Within the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light represents a mere snippet. The human eye naturally privileges this band of radiation, and perhaps the most soothing of the colors in that expanse lies at dead center. Modern culture, alas, has cheapened the ancient currency inherent in the color of chlorophyll. The civilized eye, having lost its innate love of diversity, has come to treat the monoculture of grass as the emblem of pastoral or athletic idyll. Green, uniform in hue and texture as far as the eye can see, has become in some corners of urban society the aesthetic standard of outdoor bliss.
In truth the practice fields at Canaan High, during the summer I tried to make the junior varsity, displayed no hint of green. Georgia summers abuse high school fields coming and going. The weather is hotter and drier, and no one is around to turn on the sprinklers. Canaan's practice fields had become a graveyard of flaxen, almost ghostly white clumps. Collectively those clumps barely concealed a bed of cracked red clay. Football drills stripped the few remaining blades of living grass. Vultures passing overhead offered fleeting shade.
Visions of glory in green and gold nevertheless persisted. The Rams' uniforms, by coincidence rather than design, exaggerated the dominant colors of our town's central athletic ritual. Our kelly green jerseys shone bright, even against the lushest grass carpets of richer schools' stadiums. Our golden pants reflected gametime sun. In the mind of an aspiring athlete, the realistic chances of making the team have never mattered. The very act of trying out for the junior varsity effects a transformation in the mind of the high school freshman. The practice fields, no matter how scorched, how stripped by cleats and blocking gear, looked no less glamorous than County Stadium itself. Rivals in reality, teammates in a collective fantasy, my classmates joined me in viewing late summer through glasses of gold and green, colors reserved for the real Rams. Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.
The more primitive senses of smell and taste, however, were not so readily fooled. By the fifth day of drills, my beaten body knew that it could not possibly keep pace with stronger, faster players. The taste of iron and acid and animal exhaustion flooded my mouth. I had never imagined breathing that hard. Pride prevented me from quitting, though, and I drove myself to show enough will on the final day to earn my way onto the team. Deep on the bench and deeper still on the coach's chart, but a spot in the roster and in uniform regardless.
Coach Haynes Yeager followed a tradition of his own making. On the fifth and final afternoon of tryouts, he relaxed his otherwise religious devotion to raw athleticism. Catechisms forged in speed and strength gave way to a few final hours devoted instead to cunning, craft, and exploited hope. The coach divided some players into a makeshift defense and offense. We would run a few plays and thereby enjoy the illusion of gametime significance. Years later I learned that Coach Yeager had no intention of letting potential starters run those mock plays. He had already seen enough of our strength, speed, and conditioning to make most of his athletic judgments. But he did not hesitate to give marginal players a final glimmer of hope, in exchange for a standout performance that warranted at least another week on the squad.
Chief among the emotional hallmarks of youth is the irrepressible ability to weave even a shred of hope into an elaborate tapestry of future fantasy made present reality. Coach Yeager ordered twenty-two players to form one squad each, offense and defense, for the purpose of emulating a goal line stand. First and goal from the nine, time expiring, and a deficit of five. Score and win; fail and lose. "Kuo, fullback!"
I confess that I remember almost nothing of first, second, and third downs, except that I surged as quickly off the snap as I could, the better to block any defensive player who slipped past the offensive line. My task was simple: make clear the path of the halfback, sparing no effort to stop any defensive player who was lunging in the opposite direction. Each play ended with a crush of bodies and the body of a halfback stopped well short of paydirt.
With each down the fantasy grew in its intensity and perceived reality. Players at rest gathered on three sides of the end zone. At the very frontiers of my field of vision, a glint of gold suddenly appeared. The presence of girls, absent all week, had suddenly become plausible. The mere suggestion of the sweep of skirts completed the fantastic circle: the squad on the field, for all that mattered in that moment, was playing in a real game at County Stadium. Everything hinged on a single play. From the huddle I looked past my provisional teammates and contemplated the glory of scoring an actual touchdown.
The defensemen came down like the wolf on the fold, and their jerseys were gleaming in kelly and gold; and the sheen of their eyes was like stars on the sea, when the crowd and its passion blow cheers through the trees. And the daughters of Canaan are loud in their wail, for the tackles and guards have fulfilled their detail, and the rush of the Rams, the team's sack-seeking horde, has scattered like raindrops along a taut cord.
Fourth and goal from the five. Three halfback dives had covered less than half the distance to the goal. Coach Yeager had given us no plays; he left us to improvise anything that would get the ball over for six. In our huddle we scraped together a play that had, in retrospect, no realistic chance of success. The quarterback would fake an apparent fourth halfback dive. The tight end, lined up on the right, would run a quick out toward the near pylon. The flanker and the split end would each run slants from left to right. The entire flow of the play favored the right side of the field, the better to allow our right-handed quarterback to roll in that direction off the play-action fake.
My task was simple. I was to cover the quarterback's blind side, in case a rusher slipped past the left tackle.
In later years I would dwell on the oddity of the fullback's function in that play-action sequence. Everyone else on the team would have committed to a right-flowing sequence designed to give a complete set of options to the quarterback on a rollout. True, the halfback was but a decoy — though quite useful in that role, given how he had carried the ball on first, second, and third downs. But I alone had been assigned to face left, on the remote chance that the defense would flood the weak side with rushers. I alone had been asked to hold my ground, to level any intruders who might trail the play.
But the defense fully anticipated our offensive treachery. All three layers — line, linebackers, and secondary — anticipated the play-action. Ignoring the empty-handed halfback, the entire defense shuffled along with the quarterback. I followed my orders: I spun left and awaited a rush that never came.
Though I had shuffled in precisely the opposite direction from the rest of the offensive squad, I became suddenly and sharply aware of my teammates' movement. I noticed a slowing in the quarterback's gait. He had glided toward the right half of our offensive line, and the entire play had moved with him.
I decided in that moment to sprint hard in the opposite direction. If only the ball could find me — in my mind's eye nothing stood between my and the pylon but a smooth green carpet of grass. The quarterback likewise saw the opportunity. He tossed a fade as I begin sprinting left.
[Strobe-light vision.]
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Labels: Part I: Iridium
©2008 by Iridescent Novelist. » Permalink «
3 Comments:
wow. I don't know what else to say. Very lovely prose.
Nice work.
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