Shortly after seven in the evening a plume of boiling pink stuff cut a cleft into the firmament. Sheared it in two. And I was there to see it. I’m talking about a sunset, employing a bit of purple prose because it was that magnificent. The way it paused the day, hanging there, pouring out in ripples like a spilled electric smoothie; how could it be? I thanked God.
And beneath it (and Him), in the dark, cars are pulling into driveways, neighbors are cooking and laughing, a dog is barking. My stomach is full of food. It is a Tuesday. Judith Hearne, in the Brian Moore novel on my nightstand, is forever off “to the last [bus] stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.”
I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to express about this sunset, or how, when I began typing tonight. But it was remarkable; that I knew. It merited a recording, if only a reminder that it happened, that an ordinary moment was penetrated by a scene so captivating it warranted my explicit attention. Vox audita perit litera scripta manet, as the Romans would say. “The heard voice perishes, but the written letter remains.”
More than its obvious beauty I was struck by the sunset’s unexpectedness. Like locking eyes with a smiling stranger, it was the kind of event that obliterates time and, subsequently, the petty doubts and errant wants that animate so many of our waking hours. Mine, at least. Achtung! “Pay attention,” it seemed to command, but with fantastic hues and billowing forms instead of words. Imagine that–a sky made of words. Nature as a sloganeering word processor. Shudder to think of that kind of mouth; it would never shut-up.
Much to the chagrin of physicists (and despots), the cosmos are mute, and rightly so. What wonder spelled out, literally, for ease of interpretation and clarity would ever stoke the imagination or turn the heart of some “lonely watcher on the hills”? Take three giants of such visionary inspiration: Ulysses, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and the Panasonic NN-ST776SQPQ Inverter Microwave Oven operation manual. Do you see what I mean? There must be some sensual incoherence, some inherent ambivalence, in a work for it to assert any kind of dominion over the psyche.
Take, say, a sunset.
Or a prayer. It’s no coincidence, the devout tell us, the most effective and humble way to God’s presence is through the mantra, or in the case of Christianity the repetition–aloud or silent–of the short “Jesus prayer” (“Lord Jesus, have mercy on me”). Forget “Lord, thank you for the promotion and for yesterday’s victory in the ball game and forgive me for my impatience at the gas pump and” ad nauseam. Forget prayer as billboard and prayer as epistolary solitaire. The point is to lose yourself, to, paradoxically, silence yourself. To shut-up and focus.
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” observed the French philosopher Simone Weil. Distraction, then, is what? Anxiety? Indifference? Our age is rife with it. Nothing sinister per se, but it demonstrates a kind of prideful bondage to helplessness. And yet we live in an Age of Perceived Certainty. In our abilities, in our superiorities, in ourselves. Perhaps we’d benefit from a dose of humility, the kind dispensed via sunset, to recall our true place on the cosmic ladder. To see anew our limitations and, in essence, our humanity. For, “Impossibility,” Weil argued, “is the door of the supernatural. We can only knock at it. Someone else opens it.”
Is this not the formula for adventure? The word descends from the Latin advenire, to arrive, which implies a leaving and, of course, a risk. Flight. It requires an Other and an encounter. It asks for submission. It is the beginning of faith.
Modernity, on the other hand, increasingly resembles the end of adventure, the proverbial Panasonic instruction manual. Safety is paramount. Perhaps that is why I am so enamored with Tuesday’s sunset. Because it was such a surprise, pregnant with possibility, the unknown and the strange. Modernity demands conformity and eschews risk for the sake of economy and, alas, at the expense of life, of bewilderment and majesty. Of adventure. My sunset is its triumph, the redemption of the baroque, the frilly and weird, over the banal. It’s Mario Irarrázabal’s Mano del Desierto reaching through the sand, the flower on the tarmac. Glorious is the word that comes to mind.
I think it’s Christ, too, overcoming the world.
Photo: Escalier, Marcos. Desert’s Hand. Flickr.
Impolitic 