Or marveling at the bull’s-eye patterns in a malachite cross section, or the dystopian blots in burled wood, or a dragon fruit’s Dalmatian-speckled insides. All these things temporize me. It’s what Annie Dillard describes in her memoir, An American Childhood. Parents who experience pause from “the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating trees,” while their kids—who “bewilder well,” she writes—are simply looking for something to throw. Like when I zone out to cake batter marbling with food coloring in the mixer and my friend’s children whom I’m baking with are only concerned with licking the bowl.
Being wowed by fruit or cake batter, I should add, yet fairly sure I’m okay with never seeing the Grand Canyon in person, ought to disqualify me from ever writing about wonder. Then again, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.
Before I was old enough to discover it was myth, I assumed goldfish were, over time, the architects of their alleged short-term memory. That they’d tailored their recall to fight the tedious circumference of a fishbowl—preserving their sense of wonder by forgetting they were swimming in circles. No matter how lackluster its surroundings, within seconds, all was new again for a goldfish because it had figured out how to repair its sense of spectacle.
There should be a word for the first listen of a new album that is perhaps not great, but good. It’s catchy, carries pathos, is mood modifying. It’s destined to hasten you out the door or score your next cab ride as you cross the bridge. It prompts texts after last call. It resuscitates teenage residue and threatens emotional relapse. An album that, upon first listen, discovers a new, hallucinatory wilderness: a pink desert, pewter trees, emerald skies, clouds that sprint by. Or conversely, an album that singes your periphery. What’s left is what’s in front. Your frame of reference is shot and you are temporarily the most suggestible person alive. An operative.
Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms? Unsophisticated idolatry. A brief devotion to pop songs with nowhere lyrics that repeat one word over and over like a hymn written in neon-tube lighting.
There are movies like that too. So many. Wherein I leave the theater thinking I’ve just been privy to a masterpiece, and the next day perceive all of its holes, or worse, all of its recycled wiles. I deserve the disappointment. I’m a chump for voice-over and montage, Crewdson-lit suburbs, and all the women in the history of film who’ve flopped facedown onto beds like possessed slats of wood. I am duped by eye contact in a bar that cuts to the morning after. By odd, intensive but unthinking dance moves that approximate aerobics and clinch, for me, what’s charming about a character’s nature. I can’t help it. Follow shots at a house party, where two tertiary characters are having sex in the bathroom and the lead is a lost boy, barely nodding hellos because he’s looking for, not the nearest exit, but the balcony, the girl. These movies in which the characters are so caught up and submerged, they may as well be living underwater where the glow is bleary—where sound gurgles and the world recedes.
Despite everything the movies accomplish, despite these bouts of wonder and alarm, when my heart races, dimples, is weary and deflates, it never exhausts. How is that possible? How does it maintain? Stays going. On and on. It’s percussive. It refuses to emote with me because it’s uniformly at it.
I am—if it’s not already clear—disinterested in actually remembering, since I last learned in school, how the heart does what it does. How it pumps blood, carries blood, effects that lub-dub sound. I’m in no hurry to understand its inner workings. To wrap my head around how it keeps us alive. To do so would require that I render obsolete all those microscopic people who live inside my heart, for instance. Who blow bubbles into soda and set up homes inside our TVs—seeing what we’re seeing, only backward. Who build cozy homes under floorboards. Those guys who, of course, don’t exist. Those tiny people who, as a child, I elaborated on in my mind because it was far easier to make sense of how stuff worked if a thumb-sized human was at the helm. These tiny people turned me on to ingenuity—the essence of awe, or at least my relationship to it. They kept the world feasible.
They were, for example, the characters in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers; a series of books I don’t remember reading but on whose illustrated covers I imparted my own stories. If I recall, the Borrowers used matchboxes as kitchen benches, a spool of thread as a chair, a postage stamp as decorative art. The Borrowers were, I made myself believe, living among us: snatching up my spare buttons and refashioning them as tabletops or winter sleds. I presumed they made bouquets out of broccoli and laid brick with my brother’s Legos, and savored the smell of nail polish just as I did with fresh paint or gasoline. They repurposed our excess was the point.
They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness. In having to arch my neck and fall in with whatever celluloid projection might scoop me up. Like Fantasia’s candy-colored bucolic scape. Flirty, fun Centaurettes. The scherzo humor of meddlesome cupids. Pegasus and his family of winged stallions sailing through clouds and diving into crayon waters. A choreography of mushrooms. Of spinning-top bellflowers and heavy-lidded, red, puckered fish. The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position. Or Mickey’s broom. How it splintered into a nightmarish army of brooms. How the crash of cymbals, rolling waves, and buckets of water sent me into a panic. Fantasia was, in hindsight, my first experience of art’s all-overs. Of feeling like a casualty to cartoons. Still today, those eight animated segments reify the blunt noise of my childhood anxieties.
There were the characters too. Like Leo’s Romeo, lovesick in a split second. His nose pushed against that fish tank like he’d never seen a real-life Claire Danes.
There was Marisa Tomei’s squeak. Her stomp. Her invention. In My Cousin Vinny, as if contriving a new hybrid of Bambi from Brooklyn, she pronounced deer as dia. Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito was a woman with demands who could disqualify you by merely raising the ridge of her brow. Her eyes semaphore. I was mesmerized.
There was the rattling, rotisserie cook of reentry scenes in space movies. There was the Empire State Building: decisive to Romance. Diners: decisive to killers, insomniacs, to fugitives, to prom dates. To Jack Nicholson and his plain omelet, no potatoes on the plate, a cup of coffee, and a side order of wheat toast.
There was sex before the camera panned away. Or when the camera panned away: sex.