A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes,
and the sound waves,
all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds
between language and the world.
They are all constructed according to a common logical plan.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uncle Kev’s marveling at the stone-turned-spirit around us, vaunting in his most annoying manner, “Engineered when an understanding of the advanced languages of physics and math that made its creation possible had not yet been formulated,” as if he had personally supervised the chapel’s construction.
We’re at Sainte Chapelle, 1984.
I’m not really listening. I don’t care. I’m fourteen.
I’m writing from more than forty years ago.
I’m writing from the present tense of memory.
I’m writing from the now inside of the then.
His glowing cigarette tip casts a wavering penumbra over the chapel’s stones: an omen of a disastrous eclipse that comes to pass when he takes his last bath later that year, which is where I find him—the evening summer light broken into a crown of rainbow shards above his head, his hands dangling over the sides of the bathtub like wisps of gold coral, the light pouring down from his head into spaces so deep inside him I know it’s impossible he’s really died.
Which might be another way of saying it’s strange sometimes how colors seep through the mind like dreams and yet still keep their original hues. Or how light preserves the images of the surfaces it involuntarily marries until it dissolves in our eyes and gifts us sight. Or how someone we’ve forgotten about dreams about us and sees something we’ve yet to do.
Uncle Kev points up to the stained-glass window.
It’s a scene from the story of Cain and Abel.
Cain’s holding a rock above Abel’s head. Cain’s hand seems shaky.
Will he or he won’t he?
But, it may have been a trick of light. Or a blur of memory. The glass shimmers like a mirage in the afternoon glow.
Uncle Kev says, “You know what their story means, right?”
I don’t. I just know Cain killed his brother Abel.
The first murderer.
*
Twenty years from that day I picked up a magazine off the floor of a bus and read an article that claimed we did not domesticate wheat; rather, wheat domesticated us. I saw outside estranged light glimmering in the puddles on the street, my vagabond reflection in the window by my seat. I thought of all the dead and their lost shadows and their lost photos in search of memories to bring them back to life.
I thought about Cain’s envy at how God chose Abel’s sacrificial burnt offerings over the produce from his fields. I wondered if what Uncle Kev was really trying to tell me was, We should have remained shepherds and nomads like Abel…We should never have let wheat subjugate us—you see, becoming settled creatures was our undoing, but back then Uncle Kev’s cigarette’s tip was all I could see, the smart of autumn in the scent of the smoke all I could smell, as I was thinking how cool I would look if I could smoke one, too, for then no one would think I was fourteen and maybe girls would like me.
*
A few months after Saint Chapelle, Uncle Kev and I went swimming in Keeley Bay. Rainbows blossomed on his cheeks in a carnival of colors that would stain my dreams for many years. He took my hand and said, as if he knew what I was seeing, “You know, there’s a point in each moment where a feather bears the weight of the world and a silver thread weaves the minerals to the stars.”
Actually, no. I didn’t know that, but I tasted something pleasing in the metaphor’s breath, glimpsed some benign spirit winking behind its absurdity that reminded me of the way he’d pointed to the winding caravans of tourists at Sainte Chapelle, their cameras flashing away at the ribbed ceiling—after we’d padded past forlorn pews, past discarded sweet wrappers and sandwich bags on the floor, past indulgences of souvenirs and postcards at every turn, following some unseen spoor of forgotten sermons and unanswered prayers—when he’d said, “Look, look at them, they’ve come here for the wrong kind of awe, Christ, the child’s stone-dead inside them…can’t they see the ceiling’s really an ark’s hull trying to float back to the stars?”
And now, more than forty years on, as I look out the barred window of my cell, a different vision surprises me. Though it shouldn’t. For it, too, springs from a common design: a moving picture of a man far off in the future excavating Sainte Chapelle deep within the earth, his pick scraping along the rocks and grooved stones releasing a lost hymn, a weak signal finding at last my broken antenna: a forgotten knowledge I’ve struggled my entire life to remember (or perhaps receive).
Which is when I press my hand through the bars of the window seeking that point where I can flick aside the feather that carries the weight of the world, push my fingers through the resulting darkness, and pull Uncle Kev back to that day we visited Sainte Chapelle to tell him everything I now understand—because in this padded room and in this moment all I hear are the echoes of my own screams.