Night Vision
For unto us a child is born.
It is early Christmas morning, and I am fifteen years old. The big brick Episcopal church where we worship every Sunday is lit by candles, ivory candles on tall wooden masts tied to the ends of pews with red ribbons and adorned with pine sprigs. The midnight service has just ended, and we are filing out: mother and father, aunt and grandmother, brother and sister. I am wearing a dark blue corduroy pantsuit I sewed myself, with wide legs, short sleeves, a tailored bodice. Tonight, in my dark blue pantsuit, I’ve given a reading from one of Paul’s letters to the early Christians, a passage about God’s choosing to speak to us through a Son. I’ve become a regular reader at church. I have a decent voice and a theatrical presence, and I’m not afraid to get up in front of people. The older members of my family beam with pride, or at least I imagine they do. My aunt, especially, is prone to tears at moments like this. She is unmarried and solitary, a banker whose life is circumscribed by train schedules and the call of the evening cocktail. Whenever she comes to Christmas Eve service, her one church outing of the year, she sings “O Come All Ye Faithful” in her high-school Latin and weeps. She’s done it again tonight. Venite adoremus.
But we’ve moved beyond that now, from the call to the faithful through the heralding angels and toward the world’s joy, nearing the doorway where the minister waits in the spectral light to shake our hands, when I turn and suddenly see my sister with a clarity I have never before experienced. She is behind me in her wheelchair—Heidi’s Clara, the crippled Tiny Tim, peg-leg, you name it—rolling slowly up the brick aisle, and for the first time in my life I see how easily I could have been her. How with a toss of the genetic or circumstantial dice we could have been reversed, and I would be the one in the chair low to the ground, with the spastic body and pointless legs, the wandering eye, the deformed hand from which even now, forty years later, I recoil.Anything that we think we’ve learned, we’ve learned in the dark. —Charles WrightThose creatures that see well by night—cats, bats, possum, rats, owls, among others—do so for a variety of anatomical reasons. They may possess a larger eyeball, a larger lens, a larger optical aperture. They may be able to control the opening of their eyes both vertically and horizontally. Their pupils may be capable of expanding to the physical limits of their eyelids. Years ago, I had a cat who used to wake me in the dark with her frenzied batting at things I could not perceive. One night I got up to investigate and found her on the bathroom windowsill, jabbing at a picture on the wall. I turned on the light and saw, above the frame, a translucent spider no bigger than a fingernail. My cat’s eyes were all pupil. Some night-seeing animals have more rods than cones in the retina, or have rods alone, which pick up motion and so facilitate predation. Most night-seers are endowed with a tapetum lucidum, an iridescent substance that coats the rear interior of the eye and catches and amplifies light, allowing those who hunt or are hunted to see and move in the dark. In photographs of dissected eyeballs, the tapetum lucidum is an unexpectedly beautiful substance, a luminous pool, the source of the glowing blue-green light you often see in an animal’s eyes in the dark. We humans, creatures of daylight and logic, lack this optical gemstone. Our eyes look directly ahead of us. Their proximity to one another enhances three-dimensional vision (an indispensable tool by day) but renders us largely blind by night. Shadows lengthen, the sun glides below the horizon, objects flatten and blur. We seek and squint, rub our eyeballs, blink. Say our prayers, trust in morning. Hurry past shuttered buildings and dark lanes, at the mercy of goblins and spooks, as dazzled by the change in our surroundings as the poor raccoon I once encountered outside my house in the middle of the afternoon, trying to tunnel back into the drainage system with her children, wandering blind. My neighbour, an optometrist, reminds me that vision takes place not in the eye but in the brain. The eye is nothing more than a video camera that captures information and relays it to the mind for interpretation. Perhaps that explains the footage I keep running through my head: perhaps I am trying to see my sister whole.
CredoAccording to Matthew, the birth of Jesus coincided with the rising of a great star. Such was the power of this nocturnal vision that astrologers from the east—possibly Zoroastrians from Iran, who believed in the possibility of a mediator from God—were drawn to the scene to bear witness to the radiant child. What does an infant see, ripped from the night of the womb into light? My sister arrived two months early. In my mother’s telling, she and my father were visiting my grandmother in Philadelphia when my mother’s water broke, and they phoned the obstetrician at home for advice. This enigmatic man (was he inept, or just unafraid of lawsuits?) instructed my mother not to worry or hurry, let the fluid drain, drive home the next morning and check herself into the hospital. And so she did, and the fetus, seven months young, starved of amniotic fluid, traveled more than an hour by car and eventually found an inn, where my mother was delivered. But there were no shepherds, no harps, no spectacle in the sky. The infant was rushed to an incubator and kept there for two months. A year or two later, when it began to be clear that my sister could not function as other children did, a doctor evaluated her by folding her into a seated position and watching to see if her head and neck automatically sprang up. They did not. The doctor then told my mother to put my sister into an institution “and forget you ever had her.” (Or at least this is how my mother tells it.) The miracle story follows: “I came home and tried the same experiment, and her head and neck sprang up. Again and again. Damn it, I said, you’re going to be all right.” The gospel according to Mom.
KyrieMy sister was named for our maternal grandmother, Mary, who doted on the child she called her little crippled one. Sewed special clothes for her, sat indoors with her when my brother and I raced out into the yard to play. Watched my sister’s eyes sink to the ground, and buoyed her. It’s OK. You can chase butterflies with your mind. Cerebral palsy begins in the brain. In my sister’s case, it was likely the result of oxygen deprivation during the long process of her birth. Starved of air, the nerves in her mind shut down, muscles went spastic, legs refused to function. The condition is neither congenital nor contagious. If she were to have them, my sister’s children would not be doomed to share her disability. But she is incapable of having children. Another roll of the dice: not long after I had my midnight vision, my sister began to experience uncontrollable menstrual bleeding, and after a year or two of this, was persuaded to undergo a hysterectomy. She was sixteen years old.
Your birth, O Christ our God, dawned the light of knowledge upon the earth. —Eastern Orthodox PrayerOn Christmas Eve, we gather in the dark to celebrate the coming of one who is described as the “light of the world.” It is one of the great Christian vigils, a time of purposeful sleeplessness, of devotional watching. We walk into the church before midnight and emerge an hour or two later into a luminous world, reborn. Scientists have long wondered whether the star that hovered over Bethlehem was a true phenomenon, an astronomical blip—a comet or nova, possibly a planet or a confluence of planets, maybe even a supernova in a neighbouring galaxy. Whatever it was, it conveyed the kind of inchoate and instinctual information one receives and perceives at night, when what is typically invisible becomes suddenly visible. A translucent spider, the presence of God, a singular truth about a sibling’s fate. In Eastern Orthodox iconography, the star of Bethlehem is portrayed as a dark semicircle from which a single ray of light streams down to illuminate the child. This seems apt to me: wisdom, or in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, grace, emanating from a black hole. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva prayed to the night, “the first mother of songs.” Monks-in-training in the Ethiopian Christian church memorize their chants after the sun sets, when it is too dark to glean data from books. This undertaking is called “night studies.” As light fades, the human eye moves from photopic to scotopic vision. The latter is soft, blurred, more sensitive to movement than to resolution. Thus, as night comes on, one’s ability to resolve things diminishes, while one’s ability to perceive movement grows. I am less able to think clearly in the dark but more able to glimpse what moves around me. A pair of wheels advancing on a candlelit aisle. What if God—whom I take to mean, at least in part, knowledge—is not light but darkness, the one who, as the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas proposes, “keeps the interstices / in our knowledge, the darkness / between stars”? What if we perceive God’s truths not by day, but by night?
SanctusImages of my sister: on an Amtrak platform, being loaded onto a train after a weekend visit, like so much luggage. Sobbing in my bedroom, snot on the chair; sobbing in the car on our way to the boarding school outside Baltimore where she was institutionalized from the age of five to the age of ten in the hope that separation from family, coupled with intensive physical therapy—no schooling of the intellect—would yield something approaching a normal life. My sister in high school, being carried up and down the stairs by football players. My sister in college, riding the geek van to class; at her ordination a half-dozen years later, blood on her white robe because she tried to shave her legs that morning. The sacrificial body. She suffers so that others—my brother and I—might live. Is that how it works? The world’s cruelty gets poured into a single individual, who dutifully takes it on? Growing up, we envied her. She never got spanked. Never had a talking-to. When friends of my parents visited they invariably came bearing gifts for Mary. One day we stole a batch of them from her room (easy enough to do) and locked them inside a cupboard in my bedroom with a sign tacked to the door: Do Not Open. I Will Clean Everything. Of course, my mother looked inside immediately and made us return the purloined goods, with an apology. We called our sister It. We told her how horrible It was. We got her to agree with us. I was crushed and then gleeful one day when my sister scribbled all over a drawing I’d painstakingly made—a copy, from my child’s Bible, of an illustration showing Daniel in the lion’s den—and was spanked for her misdeed. Daniel, the incorruptible one, chosen by God to accomplish divine ends. Daniel, who was taken at night and thrown into a pit with lions—predators endowed with a tapetum lucidum in each eye, hunters uniquely able to kill at night. At daybreak he was found, miraculously, to have survived, thanks to an intervention by an angel from God. Does my sister believe in angels? Do I? At what point do the chromosomes divide sufficiently to create a personality, to differentiate one sibling from another, to generate a messiah? Is this activity random or divine? Behold the child in a manger. Behold the girl in a wheelchair, the gimp, the goon, the little crippled one. My whole life, it sometimes seems, has been wrapped up in the effort to understand the miracle of my own birth. Of hers.
Novarium te, novarium me. May I know you, may I know myself. —St. AugustineThe sanctuary is full of people in pretty wools, candlelit. All is beautiful, happy, for the birth is here, we’ve ended the penitential season of Advent and entered the dawn of a Christ-filled world. Adeste fideles. We are stuffed full of Christmas Eve dinner—beef fondue, salad, wine, cake. The memory itself is shrouded in a kind of fog. Scotopic. I turn in the flickering candlelight, and there is Mary. Not in blue, kneeling by the child, but in some colour I can’t make out, wrapped in a coat that doesn’t quite fit her misshapen body, pushing the wheels of the chair that is her inseparable companion, and it strikes me, as if a shaft of light had come down from the dark above, this could be me. Why my luck? Why her prenatal catastrophe, the twenty-four hours leaking amniotic fluid, the obstetrician who said not get yourself to a hospital as fast as you can but wait, take your time, be not afraid. Why the years in a boarding school with drooling classmates? Here was my epiphany, two weeks early. (Epiphany: the “shining through” of Christ.) Or was this a vision of the Christ child himself, of all he supposedly came to save and repair? And what do I do with it? A dark church, figures in silhouette, the altar lit but no one there. Nothing but shadow and sound. In the fading light, we move up the aisle and toward one another; we meld. What I glimpse this Christmas morning is the earth’s suffering channeled into the twisted body of my sister. Why worship Christ when I’ve got my own Pietà? Soror dolorosa. “O Key of David, Scepter of the house of Israel: Come and deliver us from the chains of prison, we who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”
Agnus DeiIn the dark surrounding the birth of a deformed child, God vanishes. The Bible is no help. The Old Testament, and parts of the New, suggest that God makes us suffer in order to test our faith, or to strengthen it, or to punish us for our misdeeds, or because humans have free will and abuse it. Because suffering is redemptive. Paul holds out the promise of an afterlife where the trials of this world will magically evaporate and my sister will be made new. Christ is the living embodiment of her earthly and innocent pain. How do I feel about all this? Blessed. Brimming with opportunity. I dip into Mary’s world by choice, leave it with relief. Watch her ascend the lift onto the Amtrak train and run pell-mell back to my life. The Body is gone. Take, eat, do this in remembrance of me. Maybe for this reason, I have stayed away from church for years. Ignored its promises, distrusted its facile joys. Lately I’ve gone back, drawn, especially, to the penumbral services—compline, evensong—as if at the moment the world turns blue I might understand. Stille Nacht. O come all ye faithful. And how does she—she who graduated from seminary and for a time worked as a hospital chaplain until she was laid off in another twist of circumstance—how does my sister reconcile herself to the roll of her dice? Not just cerebral palsy, but a wandering eye, an overbite, ovarian cysts, a deformed hand, a dysfunctional bladder, edema, scoliosis, bedsores, spasms, seizures, pain so agonizing only morphine will stop the moaning. I have been with my sister before surgery, after surgery, during a spinal tap, during X-rays, emptying the catheter, waiting for doctors, waiting in the rain, in the snow, trying to hail a cab in Manhattan, in Chicago, after job loss, with caregiver after caregiver. Crying and crying and crying. I don’t cry. Can’t. Hate her, hate it. When she calls in tears, desperate, uncomprehending, cursing her body, I have no response. Night vision: the ability, possessed by certain creatures, to see in the absence of light. “It is in the deepest darkness,” Thomas Merton writes, “that we most fully possess God on earth.” “And in our sleep,” Aeschylus suggests,
pain, which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.I lack the necessary apparatus to see in the darkness of my sister’s night. The interior of my eye is not a luminous blue-green catcher of light but an endless black orb. I can only perceive the motion, over and over and over, of her hands on the wheels of the chair, of the chair on the aisle, rolling toward a God who promises every year to descend from the shadows above and redeem us.
