Miracle No. 1: Light
March 2002 – March 2019
I am going to be broken again and again by miracles. I know this. I think I’ve known this from the moment I met the first puzzle of my life: light. So much light that the air was thick with it. I imagine that then, new and swaddled, I was thoughtless — wordless, too — completely lost in a puzzle with no boundaries or betrayals. I didn’t believe in anything then: milk, maybe. Maybe, warmth. Each moment of early life was new, each object seen exclusively for its form — the model around which meaning would one day be built. It was a time ripe with the instinct of pattern-finding. Only later would I grow into the suspicion that light might have been my first encounter with the miraculous.
Not much is a miracle anymore. The most powerful drug in the world is negative bias: the chemical high rise of everything is wrong and just as I expected. We hit play again and again: newsreel, argument, red pen, hot face. There’s a whole international world of misery waiting in the news. There’s a whole international world of misery waiting in the house down the street, in the county government, in your favorite painting. Pain in volumes that the human brain — adapted to operate within the bounds of a small living group — has no mechanism to process. And this pain, accessible at a global scale through any iPhone, is easier, by far, to point to than the things which make it worth living through. My father, for instance, is an artist. This means that he is a master of peeling back beauty and showing you the blood beneath. There always has to be something under the skin. And he’ll dig for it, if only for the satisfaction of proving how each thing I love is part of the aesthetic conspiracy upheld by all things: to hide corruption. It can’t just be light. We can’t let it be that simple.
Curled up during the winter of 2021, I read through US policy papers outlining how much our government ‘allows’ itself to violate people’s bodies. They can tell you, they promise, how much torture is humane. By humane they mean good: characterized by sympathy with and consideration for others (Oxford English Dictionary). And so the reader assumes that the actions, taken under that condition of personhood, always result in kindness. We never consider that they might not, and how we live with ourselves if they don’t. I read the hearings, then the decisions. There was no trace of kindness. I did not believe that the people whose lives those documents dictated were ever considered human by the authors. And so I was left with only the question: of how to preserve hope in a world where I could no longer rely on mutual personhood as grounds for sympathy.
I never cease to be surprised by the scope of human violence: plastic combat shields in the front garden, bullets undrenched by petals or peace offerings. The same winter, dazed from the riots, my friend calls to tell me he’s safe. But I am no longer a child. I understand now that by safe, he means not dead; by safe, he means aching and bruised and blinking peppery tears down his nose. But safe. It is an evolved indication of comfort, no longer the promise of a whole hurt-less world — instead a proof of survival. I don’t get why you’re surprised, he says. He, like my father, believes that my unwillingness to look for violence is a sign of negligence. One that each day tilts closer to unforgivable. I can’t explain that it’s because I can’t bear living in a world where I expect it.
I think the reason I could be friends with this boy is that the first time I met him he said he wanted to be a child again. That he couldn’t stand the homesickness. Because to be a child is to say war and mean a game where no-one gets hurt. I’ll lie here and Ava will lie there and in five minutes, when she starts to fidget, she’ll stop being dead and we’ll go get lunch together.
Hiding at the library after school in fifth grade, just beginning the fight with acne, I flipped through the reference section to look for pictures. In the section for m I discovered the history of the word miracle. It comes from the Latin root miraculum meaning ‘object of wonder.’ So, I looked up wondering. Wonder is from the old English wundor which is a marvelous thing, a miracle, an object of astonishment. Astonishment is where miracles start to fall apart. In the early 16th century the word was still astonish, maybe newly astonished. It came from the obsolete French verb astone, from older French estoner, to stupify, to stun, dismay, bewilder, Latin: to thunder. And so it goes that there is a miracle, an object of wonder, where wonder is astonishment and astonishment is dismay, and so many people believe that sadness is the root of everything. That if you keep digging there’s no choice but to discover one more way we’ve hurt each other beyond forgiving.
When I was little I loved the word liminal — loved it for its song and bumping rhythm. Like anemone, or terrible. Words which, cut away from their meaning by youth, existed only as a game of sound. Liminal and miracle share a common classification: puzzles of words, where even with the history, I can’t quite say what they mean. In anthropology, liminality comes from threshold. The hesitant vampire or shy lover, forever lingering in the doorway and forgetting permission; always leaving, finding an excuse to return. Miracles are built in that cradle of non-definition, standing in that doorway, waiting for the storm to come in. Their beauty, rather than direct, is an emergent phenomenon, a vestigial sense, an instinct to grasp for patterns even, and perhaps most especially when patterns cannot be found.
The truth is I wasn’t a miracle. But I wanted to be. God, did I want to be. And everyone would like to know why, but I don’t think there is anything so mysterious about the fact that sometimes there is a hole in a heart like the hole in an atom — chargeless, aching. And I thought, at sixteen, that if I could just pin down one more word, one more pattern, that I could find a place, an idea, perfect enough to fill that hole. Also, less consciously, I probably believed that if I could find such an object I might be able to prove to the world, to my father, to myself who desperately needed it, that there were still things left which could not be corrupted by human desire. And because the action of searching — of finding patterns and looking at the world through them — became the object I was looking for, I named it: miracle.
It must have been around then, around sixteen that I started collecting them. On burger wrappers, bank envelopes, pink lined post-it squares. In the back of my head, caught, looping: Blue is such an insignificant word to describe the color of the sky. It was around seventeen that I finally started looking, looking and seeing: the shuddering light of a monarch in the storm clouds, the breathless crush of rain; the quiet miracles everywhere. Unthinkingly they became a kind of fortification, a skin against the corrosion of expecting corruption and finding it every time. They became a quiet and intentional reminder that there were, everywhere, things which pushed against the human instinct to see only catastrophe. It was, in a way, a desperate grasping, a false feather on a falser scale. I did not believe that they would ever balance: the pain and the miraculous, but I was certain that I couldn’t survive living in a world where I only ever saw one.
In fourth grade they asked my mother, What’s one word you’d use to describe the future you want? And she said, Beautiful. I think I would too, because to this day I’m not sure I can be John Lennon, and say happy.
Miracle No. 2: Color
February 12, 2019
There is an interview where retired US agents sworn to secrecy finally talk about what it is to be trained to kill other people and then lie about it. They’re all old; one has sharp, sparrow-like eyes that peel back the camera pixels. Another has assumed the form and texture of his leather recliner. It’s hidden somewhere deep in the New York Times website. It’s got some streams, less traction, and little to no thought.
The first soldiers who experienced the violation of atoms were in the United States during a testing campaign in July of 1945. They said it was the most beautiful color they’d ever seen. The War of Light, the War of My Skin Turning to Powder If I Touch You. They said first you were deaf, and you could see through your body like an X-ray, the brightest light, the brightest day you’d ever see. So bright you could see your bones glowing through your arms, so bright you couldn’t see at all. And then there was the pain. One thousand capillaries and crimson vessels busted out in miniature supernovas, or the milk glass I dropped when I was a baby. But, what they talked about most was the color. The way it was the purest loveliest lilac: perfect eyelashes and blushes and deep indigo. The green of old wine bottles and the pale yellow of a baby shoe. They did not know that the colors were atoms shedding energy, barium and nitrogen lighting up sapphire in a choking atmosphere. They did not know that this was one of the only ways to see a molecule, stuffed with energy to the point of burning, to the point of color. Where else but the surface of a star can we see such a transformation of states?
They said it was more beautiful than any sunset, than the culmination of every sunset which had ever touched the sky, before it went dark. Presented with armageddon — liminality — some instinct in the body had transcended fear in the search for meaning. Huddled in fresh trenches, dug the previous day without justification, by some slip of reality those men did not think of ash or radio waves or cellular degeneration. They only thought of light and noise and color.
In the early 20th century, Arnold van Gennep published a book on rites of passage that was supposed to talk about a theory he had developed: when you change, you change in threes. First you break with who you are, second you step through a door into a space that is not a hallway and you are not a person: you’re a puzzle with no solution. Liminal was the word he used. Boundless. Third: eyes, teeth, lock jaw are pulled, agonizingly, into redefinition.
When I go to find it in the basement of Widener Library, the book is hidden at the very bottom, wrapped up like a present. No-one knows what his life was like, van Gennep; the job changing every couple of years, the family that must have followed him to Algeria and France. The way he always lived on the edges of other people’s success with a half-punched misbehavior card and a footnote of brilliance. The night before my first college math test I read van Gennep’s Rites de Passage, upside down on the floor of my coffin room. I expected it to be packed with miracles. I was unpleasantly surprised when the scanned section on my laptop gave me six pages of circumcision rituals instead.
The Ashiwi, or Zuni, people have spent hundreds of years in the flatlands of New Mexico, where the earth is red, and the sky is bigger than anything. There is a specific part of Ko’tikili coming-of-age ritual that makes me want to cry or laugh or flip over and bury my face in my hands. Those who have chosen to enter manhood are blinded. They have four rugs placed on their backs, each folded four times. It is part of the ritual, van Gennep explains, to be numbed: the separated person from the sensory experience. The Sithaya Gods come to the novitiate — men in masks carrying swords of green-formed yucca leaves — and beat him on the back, four times each. Then the blindfold is removed, and the not-boy-not-man is given eagle feathers to tie into his hair. He stands before the Gods, who unmask themselves. Wood and paint dropping away, and behind the color and awe are men. Are humans. Humans, as awful or beautiful as they may be. Often neither, often both. The novitiate is then given the carved face of the Gods. He slides them over his cheekbones — another moment of darkened vision — and takes up the yucca branches. He beats the once-Gods one time on each shoulder, one time, each ankle. He goes still. The masks are returned. The liminality ends.
When you’re in transition, most rituals say you’re dead. You’re dead and everything is special. My parents don’t have many friends, so I have only been to a couple funerals and no weddings. The first funeral I attended was on Long Island. We were so late we missed the ceremony stuck on the I-495. I remember getting there in time for the reception. There was a pineapple tree made of little squares of fruit on toothpicks. The urn was sitting on the mantle. We played giant jenga until four in the morning. It was fun. Everything was special. Special food was eaten, special words became a litany of regular repetition: loss, loss, sorry, sorry.
In rituals anesthesia is often injected to numb novitiates: pipes smoked, wines ingested. Steps are taken, to honor the construction of a doorway to and from the realm of the undefinable. In the day-to-day, we don’t get the option of being numbed as we move through a contorting period of change. We have to stay awake for the dying. We fail, every time, to forget our life before, and instead collect the discarded selves in a ventricle. Voices that remind us, every heart-pulse: you were once so stupid you thought you’d never die. You were once so happy, you thought you’d never die.
Miracle No. 3: Salt
May 5, 2021
By the time I’m nineteen, three years after the collecting began, I’ve driven halfway across the continental United States. I’m not certified to be driving that far, or that early in the morning in any of the states I drive through, so I follow speed limits meticulously. There are four other people in the car who talk all the time. Sometimes I enjoy the talking. Sometimes my head pounds. Most of the time I listen and feel like I’m not in a position to say anything. In Death Valley it’s so hot I learn that hairless cats sweat. We laugh at my friend, the damp marks her legs leave on the stone wall near the gas station.
In the middle of the Mojave desert there are over 282 miles of natural salt and borax deposited at the bottom of a well of silence. It is a white crust of flatland carved from the mountains, the bones of a series of Pleistocene lakes that the heat had trapped and wrung for minerals. Light diffuses oddly, as though the quiet is so long and deep that it carries sound and color differently than other places in the universe. Death Valley is the driest, lowest, hottest place in the continental United States; and that gives it something. It makes it a place I’ll sit nine hours on the road to get to, just to bury my hands in a cleaning supply I could buy from CVS for less than $3.75.
The salt comes up in these tiny perfect collections of cubes. That’s a miracle, that it knows to form that way. Always building itself to have four corners and a place in the middle to catch light. Sodium and chlorine ions bond in groups of seven, six of one surrounding a singlet of the other. A complete accident: that before we could observe salts and see their internal symmetry, we conceived the cube, gave it six faces, and designed a system of solids where it represented the element of Earth. We wanted to give the world order. The world, in turn, seems filled with confluences, shapes to name and draw meaning from. I was not able to answer — palms overflowing with fused crystals — whether seeing patterns in something means they’re there. To be a Greek philosopher was to be an artist. I think that if there was a God they would be a mathematician, a physicist, a dancer. Someone who is familiar with the forms of things.
They say your body knows the ocean you were born in. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to fall in love with the Atlantic. Me, a fish person half-transformed: the Cambrian Explosion of growing up, that unparalleled emergence of organisms, where we all fight to forget how much we used to know about happiness — stupidity, now. When humans evolved from the deep sea trout, we had no hooks in our lips yet, and we couldn’t leave the ocean. We dragged the waves on our shoulders, in the salty cyanide of hair, hidden in eardrums, percussive and eternal. Each skull is a home to small oceans, hidden in the cochlea, smuggling the perfection of salts from the sea and into the body. Salt and death come together so frequently. The Dead Sea, so saline that swimming is the same as being suspended. The Death Valley bright and deadly as a dropped case of oil pints. Lake Natron where Prometheus turns animals back into images of stone, where flamingos go to dance until every one has found love or sex or both.
There’s a thought experiment in the recesses of the Internet that posits: You and a super intelligent snail both get 1 million dollars, and you both become immortal. However, you die if the snail touches you. It always knows where you are and slowly crawls toward you. What do you do?
You build a house in Death Valley, or on that giant salt crust in Utah where things are so flat for so long that you can see the curvature of the earth shucking away from the sky. But the snail will come anyway. Through the pain, its soft body reading each hexahedron like a braille cell. It will read the whole history of silence on its way to find you. It will see what you try to ignore: that violence has always held a pattern. As if there were a universal document dictating cruelty, which the snail discovers no matter where you bury it. But somehow it will move past suffering, to find you. The snail, after all, knows what it wants. It is free. It knows that pattern breaks down at the point of individual experience. That pattern without liminality is a heartless body. And in that body, nothing, least of all emergence, is guaranteed. The snail does not look to suffering for a miracle, a pattern, a lock to pick. It will tell you this, if only you would come close enough to hear.
In the middle world, I push my hands forward into darkness and feel for the forms that linger there. I’m following an old instinct, a human insanity — the need to order. Sightless, I’ll do it by touch: build a pattern, see the world through it as new, call that beauty. Except for moments like this, months even, where I reach forward into liminality and find nothing but the savage and senseless panic of I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
A bomb has detonated behind my eyes. There’s this white, bright sense of chalk-dirt, kicked up, falling over my eyelids. Every limb is full of venom. There’s an ache between my legs that tells me there is blood there. The world goes: swim, chlorine in my eyes, fingerprints of dark and light. My breath stutters. My abdomen aches. Someone is holding my hand. There’s an oxygen mask steaming up with breath, and nothing has ever tasted sweeter than it — like stevia, almost sickly.
“She’s getting too much.” And they take it away. I cough, wanting back the high that was buzzing the hair off my arms. My first thought when I open my eyes — doctors’ faces hovering over me — is: Where’s the baby?
My whole body is hot and angry and bleeding. I never wanted to have a child. Where’s the baby?
“We’re going to need you to breathe.” They tell me. But, it keeps stuttering on the way in. And no one will tell me where she is; I’m not even sure I asked.
“You’re okay.” I’m safe, and how much comfort is that really, when you’re no longer a child? Proof of survival, at least. Which is when I realize where I am. The dentist’s name is Dr. Wilson; his hands are bigger than my face. He tells me that he doesn’t think I’m crazy, he just thinks I have a phobia of dentists. He tells me that he’s a good dentist because he accepts this and doesn’t remove my teeth while I’m conveniently unconscious. I’m not sure how to tell him I don’t care about him in a polite way. I don’t even care about the needle — it’s causative. I care about the phrase ‘going under,’ and the other one, ‘blacking out.’ I care about the fact that I’d woken up that morning with blood staining my underwear like a cigar burn, unexpected and vivid against the printed begonias. So, when he pulls my head back and sticks the needle into my cheek, I start buzzing. I become the moment of delay before a fluorescent flicks on. My face goes dead. My vision has always been a follower and goes with it, the TV: on but not playing anything.
I close my eyes, make it dark so it can’t get darker. Blink them open and the world reforms. My dad is holding my hand. He’ll stop doing this after the first time, when the fainting ceases to be new and begins to be a hassle, for him, for me.
Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, van Gennep writes, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. I read this and believe he, too, was desperately lonely. The truth is that most days I am on one side or the other: elbow-deep in chaos, unable to find any beauty in the panic of searching. That very little feels miraculous when I’m half-conscious and bleeding. There are times when I wear down my library of miracles. When all I can seem to see is the terror at the center of everything I have chosen to care about. And I lose hope that there is a way to write liminality into the space of the bright, the important, the desired. Still, I choose to believe that miracles are like lightning. Once you’re stuck, it’s more likely to happen again.
It takes me five minutes of hyperventilation to realize that there is no baby, there’s never been a baby. It’s just me, passing out in the dentist’s office because I can’t count steel on the guest list of things I let enter my body. Latching on to sitcom imagery because, half-conscious, there was nothing else to build meaning off of: not vision and not memory. It takes space, time, and a good amount of chance to encounter miracles, and even then nothing is assured. I was convinced that such an overwhelming encounter with the in-between must have some meaning. I was wrong.
Half alive, I had grasped at pattern, looking for significance. Without the capacity to create my own, I had turned to those I’d seen repeated most: medical dramas, the evening news, teen tragedy. They all culminated in pregnancy. How else could I be bleeding in a chair surrounded by doctors? There was no other way for my numbed mind to explain the cleaned out feeling of moving, however briefly, within liminality. No other way I could think of to begin with blood and come out alive.
Miracle No. 4: Orbital Sunrise
March 1965
There’s a human drawing of the sunrise penciled in from somewhere just outside the atmosphere. It was drawn in a space so small it barely had enough room for two Russian men to slot in, knees to chin. In places like those you learn to breathe small breaths. One of them wanted to be an artist. I think that’s got to be a miracle, when you don’t have enough money to be an artist so instead you go to the moon.
The thing is that there’s no reason we should have a drawing from space. No reason a tiny case of colors should be kept strapped to the body three thousand miles from Earth. An anomaly: that their carrier survived at all. One of the Cosmonauts’ suits inflated between the stars, trapping him outside his ship to die. But he got back in. The rockets’ auto-controls broke and the astronauts had to fire it back into the thermosphere manually. And in the hours plummeting towards Earth, why would one engineer, keen on staying alive, take the time to draw this sketchy, pockmarked rainbow of the sunrise he saw from space?
They crashed in the middle of the Siberian wilderness and were stranded for two days. I wonder how they spent the time waiting, readjusting to gravity? After my roommate (college, spring) mentions it to me, I also devote a lot of time to thinking about his partner — the one who wasn’t the artist, and whether he loved color, too. What it must have been like: the sudden moment of being a person on the ground again, not an engineer or an artist, just a body with a box of colored pencils and not enough heat to keep itself alive.
There are moments when I can only think about the way salts burn different colors. How magnesium burns white, and sodium yellow. How the sweet smell of burning in my nose is just a remnant of the little fires getting bigger all across the world. Moments when I realize I’m sad, and I’ve been sad, and I can’t remember what it’s like to not be that way. What I’m trying to say is that there’s work in life, and part of that work is being sad, but sometimes it’s being happy, and sometimes it is so beautiful, I have to believe that it is. That what matters in miracle-making is that undefined, and the act of seeking pattern in it.
I have to believe that in such a state of searching I’m more likely to be struck again. Hope that if miracles do come, they’ll come like meteors: slowly, then all at once in a great shower of light. That it is possible to be transformed endlessly and completely by accident. Like the little girl who ran up to me in Bryant Park on a Summer Sunday, and crashed, laughing, into my kneecaps. Her mouth was sticky and her cheeks were sticky, and she said,
“I think one day I’ll trip and break my neck staring at the sky!” And I fell in love with life all over again. After all, the sky is never the same color twice but it is always blue: its own impossible tapestry of scattering. It superimposes, in the instant of viewing, over every sunset ever seen, every feeling felt beneath those sunsets, every light, every noise, every color. I throw my head back: in the desert, flat on my back in the parking lot, wrist-deep in darkness, looking. And I hope that if I can’t stop grief, I can at least stop it from erasing my capacity to see the things which transcend it. There are always new thresholds to cross, Van Gennep writes. The threshold of summer and winter, of season or a year, of a month, of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife — for those who believe in it.
2025