Friday, May 13, 2005

glass all empty

Some of the regulars in my ‘hood are casting-room perfect.  We have a few cautionary examples of the “there but for the grace of god” variety, some consumptive walking coughs that have wheezed their red-eyed way to dawn after chilly dawn for more than a decade, and even some tragic remnants of expired glamor or greatness.  The ones that really get to me, though, are the scholars and the monks.

I have no reason to think that any of these guys are particularly intelligent, much less well-educated, but something about their gaze, their hoary beards and bookish aspect, makes me think of them as a sort of humanities faculty of the street.  They just look wise, even when they huddle against a wet wind in a litter-strewn doorway.  As they shake their coffee cups and ‘baccy tins at me in search of spare change, they still retain an air of lofty intellectualism.  Even in shredded dungarees, even with long untended fingernails and rheumy eyes, even lying out on a park bench or slumped over a garbage can, these guys look like they know something the rest of us do not.

My image of them wasn’t much sullied when I saw one, the one I consider most monklike in appearance, stretched on his back in the thick ivy, perusing a tattered, soggy edition of a “gentleman’s” periodical, his grimy hand thrust down into his equally grimy pants.  So he was groping for a fistful of pleasure in this sullied world he inhabits.  So what.  I was just sorry to see him driven to such extremities. 

And then a few weeks ago I saw the frozen moment that really put it all in perspective for me - made the situation, despite my wish to see it through rosy glasses, coldly crystal clear. 

The one I call Shakespeare was on the low grassy slope of the greenbelt, wearing his usual motley and rags.  I call him Shakespeare because of his fine, delicate features, his tragical expression, and his theatrically long white hair and beard, which fall in gentle cascades over, respectively, his shoulders and chest.  He’s a small man - lightboned, slim, and below average in height, delicate in appearance, verging on frail.  The late afternoon light seemed almost to pass right through the parchment of his weathered skin.

Beside him on the lawn lay his bags - shopping, garbage, and duffle, stuffed with whatever he didn’t want to be without that particular day.  He reclined on one elbow, slim legs curled beneath him, raising a small, incongruous drinking glass beween the dying sun and his bleary eye.  Against the filth of his delicate fingers, the tumbler gleamed with preternatural brightness.  Light penetrated its limpid surface, magnified and multiplied; he held it up before his face so the golden sunlight coursed through it and shed its illumination on his weary brow.  The glass was dry, a veritable metaphor realized in the palm of his hand.  He turned it back and forth a few degrees, drinking in the changes in the patterns of light that spangled his retinas.  He looked to be in his own little world, one in which water was served cold in fragile goblets and tables groaned with delicacies. 

In the meantime, though, he was just a soiled, hungry old man, lying on the turf, staring at an empty glass.  I took such things so much for granted, but my wise friend was teaching me well to appreciate anew how precious can be even the transit of light through clean clear glass, and the cool kiss of something, anything, pure and unbroken.