Brown: The Last Discovery of America (26 page)

The way we are constructed constructs the violin. The violin constructs music. But what of the dulcimer? What of the harp? What of the device that held Bob Dylan’s harmonica? What of the French horn? What of the French kiss?

I assure you, music comes first. Or accident. Bones. Spoons. Rubber bands. Boredom creates music. We adapt the physical world to our innate liking—but what is innate? Whatever is music. Love comes first. The first principle comes first. God’s love comes first and is not changed, cannot be diminished or turned away by the instrument. Though the symphony, of course, is an invention, a dream of resolution worked out by someone sitting alone.

The way we are constructed constructs love? Limits love? (We die.) The making of love? No. That is a heresy. God so loved the world that the Word became incarnate, condescended to mortal clay. God became brown. True God and true man.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. Sodomy is among the brownest of thoughts. Even practitioners find it a disagreeable subject. Theological condemnations of sodomy have scrolled into a pillar of negation rising from a small, hometown passage in Genesis wherein some redneck rowdies of Sodom—heterosexuals all, I’d be willing to bet—make obscene remarks about a couple of hunky angels they see passing through town.
Nice suit.

In an earlier America, some churches, forgetting themselves, pronounced black-and-white love sinful. Churchmen surfed the Scriptures for any phrase that might pose as an injunction against miscegenation. Most churches still unite in the opinion that homosexuality is a grave moral offense and a vanity. A priest visiting my parish preached a sermon wherein he referred to homosexuality as a “lifestyle.” By which he meant a choice. So, too, my beloved Father O’Neill (to whom I confessed as a child) said to my sister, a few months before he died, that he disapproved of “Richard’s lifestyle.”

Homosexuality requires cubism to illustrate itself, perhaps. But homosexuality is not a lifestyle. Homosexuality is an emotion—a physiological departure from homeostasis, which roughly translates as:

Do not say “I love him” before a convention of Anglican educators at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, though, as I did (when they thought they had engaged me to speak about “diversity”). Not a few Anglican educators will jump up, as they did; disinclined to consider my particular diversity. Accept the invitation to the small Baptist college or the yeshiva or the Jesuit university, talk about separate races and distinct ethnic ities and the divisions in American social life, talk about literature, talk about God. (But do not speak about love.)

I passed many adolescent hours at the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, looking—I couldn’t have said what I was looking for—I was looking for a brown history of America, I was looking for the precedent that made me possible. I became an amateur student of photographs, of crowds, of the swarming of history, people converging upon the moment. I became a connoisseur of American parades and train stations, drugstores, Armistice Days, state funerals, Fourths of July. Any evidence of exception. What is that lone black man doing in the Irish saloon in New York? I noted black faces at FDR’s funeral. I remember an earlier photograph from a book on California—Los Angeles in the 1920s—what looks like a Filipino or Mexican family is standing on the front steps of a small wooden church, within a congregation of African-American women and children. However hard I peered into that long-forgotten day there was no answer. What are they doing there?

Or Francis Parkman’s
Oregon Trail.
In 1846, young Parkman left behind the known world to survey the Far West. On his way out, he would meet Mormons, mountain men, Indians. But it was in St. Louis—the first portal of the narrative—that my cubist eye lingered.
What is it you want to know, Richard?
Parkman boards a boat on the sluggish Missouri along with representatives from four corners of history:

Were such encounters so mundane in this fresh landscape as to require no explanation? What were their smells and seating arrangements; what were the mutterings of uncommon voices? Several races and continents converging in the suspicious glance of eyes. Did I read such proximity as erotic? Indeed, I did. I had no other way to read. I was looking for physical inclusion in the world. I was amassing an encyclopedia of exceptionalism for my own use. What did Negroes infer from the whiny, fiddlelike intonations of mountain men? What, in God’s name, had the Kanzas Indians been doing in St. Louis? Were some naked? Were all armed? Blanketed? Beaded? Braided? Painted? Tattooed? Were the smells sordid? Tallow-lit? Shit-smeared? Tobacco-stained? Did all drink from one barrel? Was there danger in every glance? Every nonchalance? As upon the 38 Geary bus in San Francisco?

Parkman does not say.

Sitting beside me on the 38 Geary bus, a young man, likely seventeen, stares straight ahead, his eyes apparently concentrating upon what he is listening to, as
tssch, tssch
—the drum and the cymbal—bleed from the earphones of his Sony Walkman. I imagine the young man’s privacy as a sunless cave of heavy metal. The expression on his face might pass for gladness.

The 38 Geary Municipal bus line in San Francisco (excluding buses designated “Express”) carries roughly 47,000 passengers on an average weekday. The bus runs from the old Transbay Terminal downtown, past Union Square, the Tenderloin, Japan Town, the Western Addition, the Inner Richmond, the Outer Richmond, and on out to sea. Because it is a crosstown line, one commonly overhears Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, Taga log, Japanese, Russian, English. The route from Mission Street to Ocean Beach, moreover, is traveled by many Homeless (an imprecise appellation); downtown for mendicancy; the beach for anonymity. The 38 is not a Missouri riverboat, but is descriptive of diversity as I know it.

Two decades ago, I first noticed Sony Walkmans wrapped around American heads. Surely the Japanese had misconstrued the American market? Tokyo is a city that expresses a peculiarly native talent for the small space—a Japanese discretion for living upon an island and within the confines of a congested city with walls sometimes still constructed of paper. Whereas the hoisted boom box—demanding, thumping, parting the crowd, proclaiming one’s existence—on the teenager’s shoulder along Market Street, for example, seemed, at the time, more truly an expression of the American capacity for rudeness; something worth deploring.

I will now admit the Japanese were prescient. Congestion aboard the 38 Geary turns the American toward Tokyo for civility. Headsets provide aural Nicorette for the duration; headsets provide alleviation from introspection or misanthropy. On the bus, the teenager and I sit so tightly packed our thighs touch. And yet we are transported as though separately, invisibly. I owe my solitude to Johannes Gutenberg (well, as does my seatmate; the Walkman is an extenuation of the book).

One does not relinquish one’s identity for the duration of a ride on the 38, but one does allow one’s purpose to slip its leash, to merge with the idea of civic order, which in this case is the idea of arriving safely at one’s destination. Those who insist upon their identities, even on the 38 Geary, are cautiously regarded by other passengers as potentially dangerous.

But there are spires to observe and clouds, coats, briefcase interiors, flashes of privacy as potent as leitmotivs in an Edith Wharton story; eyes to avoid. There are conversations to overhear, newspapers, books to read:

Silencing Philip Larkin, a phone tweedles in someone’s purse or pocket. And now it is Scandinavia’s turn to chart a course for this crowded 38. Finland, a nation famous for sardines and suicide and short winter days, uses more cell phones, per capita, than any other country in the world. Everyone in the flaxen-haired capital of despair is on the phone, one hears.

And here, too, advertisements assure us of “connection,” of never missing the call, of not wasting the moment, of being alive if only because the phone rings in the forest. To watch people on their phones in a crowd is to notice how disconnected they seem; how unprepared for solitude they seem. Neurosis, yes. Novelty is the American neurosis.

But to be forced to overhear the diary of a twit is still considered a foul. The other day in the elevator at the 450 Sutter Medical Building, a woman, oblivious of our overhearing, snarled to the mouthpiece of her cell phone that she was going to get an abortion and that was that.

Americans do not grant privacy to cell phone users. For one thing, the cell phoner insists on maintaining an “I” in situations where Americans have largely resigned themselves to taking their places in crowds and waiting to reemerge as singular.

I’m sure you have noticed joggers still do occupy private space in public America. Joggers can spit on the sidewalk, they run nearly nude, they pant, sweat, snort like dray horses. They are private, they are invisible. We understand they are
in ristauro
and in relation only to themselves, to their bodies, to “healthy activity.” We do not stare.

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.
)