City of God Page 10
—The planet earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoffs, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle, and mineral crust. We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granules salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life. Dead cellular matter flung up from the seas fertilized the rock soil. We are a blue oasis in black space, cocooned in our atmosphere of nutrient gases. We look peaceful but we are not. We are a planet of water and rock, sand and silt and soil. The tectonic plates under the earth’s crust move and shift about, breaking the landmass into continents that float and change their shape over eons. The plates collide, ride one over another, crack, and great upheavals of the sea floor rise gasping into mountain ranges, enormous volcanoes in the seafloor create islands that bob up in the oceans, the earth’s crust quakes, shivers us into different shapes, we buckle and cleave, storms assail our heavens, our mountains shake thunderous avalanches of snow down upon our valleys, our Arctic and Antarctic ice floes crack like the bones of God, our wind-worn dunes of desert pile up to bury us, maniac tornadoes fling us about and thump us against the ground like rag dolls, great floods of viscous burning lava bury our villages, and in all this fury of planetary self-fulfillment, we spin about an axis and roll around the sun, and our oceans are pulled and pushed by lunar tides, our oceans roll in waves which exist apart from the water they pass through, our atmospheres are shot through with electromagnetic frequencies, and we stand abroad our terrains totally magnetized by the iron core at our center, with our skies at night tumbling with asteroids and flashing with the inflamed boreal particles of solar winds that flare like the luminous eyes of saber-toothed tigers circling the darkness beyond our fire.
What a merry planet, everything said and done. For isn’t it, after all, livable?
—belted kingfisher, a small diving bird with an overlarge, probably swelled, head and an absurd regal bearing conferred by the black band around his neck: he has beaked a baby bluefish and now whaps it several times on the piling. Whap whap. Kills it dead. Tosses it in the air and catches it on the vertical so that it slides down his gullet smoothly. Given his competence, the little kingfisher has a right to be self-important. Certainly not disposed to make invidious comparisons with diving birds five times his size, the osprey, for example, who can hover high up, wing-beating in place, and, seeing a shadow in the water, drop out of the sky like a stone.
—Of course there can be no secular Amphitryon. The credible impersonation of the husband can be possible only via a species of magic given to a mischievous, horny god like Zeus. To attribute such ambition to a man, even one as malign and talented as this fellow is, is to grind your way into a tank story clumsy, top-heavy with armament, and clanking forward on the treads of its plot. That’s why it’s a movie. It concludes something like this: Our seducer-usurper during the course of his life of covert adventure had spent some time with the Jivaro tribe of headhunters in the upper Amazon country near the Peruvian-Ecuadoran border. He had learned their ways from one of the elders. Now, with the unseated husband a constant annoyance, a vengeful fighter, unwilling to accept his defeat, having among other things found the means to buy a secondhand van to live in which he parks on the street in front of the dark-hearted couple’s estate, and successfully representing himself in court as having that right as a citizen of parking on a public street in daylight hours, and having legally argued his further right to picket the house with placards and handbills explaining his unjust fate, and in all ways having managed to promote a continuation of the story, even to the point of getting a feature article written about himself as an interesting eccentric in the local suburban newspaper. . . he summons forth from the imposturing husband a degree of retribution inconceivable from someone who had not spent time off the edges of civilization.
The generous usurper invites the aggrieved and beggared CEO into the great house and without ceremony kills him. He decapitates the corpse and discards the body. Never mind the details of that. The details of what he does with the head are more interesting.
You don’t want the skull, of course. You run your knife up the back of the neck to the crown and then you peel off the face and scalp, a time-consuming process when done right, because you don’t want to pull the features out of shape. The skull, including teeth and eyes, discarded, you are left with your basic material.
You turn the face skin inside-out and sew up the eyelids. Then you stitch the lips together and, last, after turning the skin right-side-out, sew up the incision you made up the back of the head until you have a pouch about as big as the original head. You drop this into boiling water, to which some herbs I cannot name lest this become an instruction manual for some idiot. . . are added to keep the hair from falling out. After several hours the pouch is approximately one third its former size.
And in this shrunken manner the beggared CEO is presented on an outstretched palm as a trophy to his stolen and enslaved wife, who, just before committing suicide, calls the police to tell them her husband has murdered the derelict camped outside their house and that they will have all the evidence they need hanging from a string of beads around her neck. Ironically enough, the shrunken head now resembles the dark-hearted impostor as he was before his cosmetic surgery, more than the husband before his shrinking, so as if God is an épée of irony, this sharpest of points is delivered posthumously to the impostor, who, having been established as a missing person since his cosmetic crossover, is now brought to trial as the murderer of himself.
And what was proposed as a tale of subtle existential horror turns out after all to be a simple waxworks melodrama, wherein the author, like his villain, gets his just deserts. And if it is true that a sociopath can never show restraint but must go on and on in ever greater amplification of his evil until he is destroyed, so must an author honor the character of his idea and allow it to express itself in all its wretched insufficiency until it too reaches its miserable
end.
—1. I number my thoughts for the sake of clarity so that each thought rings clearly and in its own distinct pitch, like a bell.
1.01. In other words I propose to think only in facts. (This in itself is not a fact.)
2. I have the name Ludwig Wittgenstein.
3. Ludwig is a common German name.
4. I believe, however, I was named after Ludwig van Beethoven.
5. While the truth of (4.) cannot be verified, my belief that it is true is a fact.
5.01. My belief is a reasonable inference from the fact that my mother was a pianist and believed it a fact that music was essential to life. . .
5.11.. . . and that my older brother Paul became a concert pianist. . .
5.21.. . . and that my older and suicidal brother Hans was a musical prodigy. . .
5.31.. . . and that my sisters Hermine, Helene, and Margarete were all gifted or musically literate. . .
5.41.. . . and that Brahms and Mahler were friends of my parents and came to play music in our home.
5.51. Brahms, Mahler, my parents, and everyone I knew believed it to be a fact that Beethoven was the greatest of all musical geniuses.
5.61. I believed that in being named after a genius, I myself was a designated genius.
6. It is a fact that my parents and siblings did not share my belief.
6.01. They were led to their conclusion by the fact that I did not speak until I was four years old.
7. I was able to speak long before this but was so appalled by the world in which I found myself that I chose silence.
7.02. Ever since, in all the philosophy I have done, I have argued that the truths of silence, when spoken, are no longer true.
8. My first memory is of the grand staircase in my home in the Alleegasse, Vienna.
8.01. It rose on thirty-four marble steps ten feet wide.
8.02. It was carpeted in a luxurious red, green, and white nap—the colors of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
8.03. The carpet was held to the bottom of each riser by a shining brass rod.
8.1. Railings with alabaster balusters in the shape of slender vases lined each landing.
8.12. Side walls of pink Carrara marble provided reflections, to infinity, of a person ascending to the great foyer.
8.2. The ceilings were framed in carved and gilded cove moldings.
8.21. They were frescoed in patterns of Persian elements.
8.3. At the top of the staircase hung an immense tapestry of gentlemen in silk tights and ladies in broad-brimmed hats and hoop skirts and parasols posed before a woods, with thick pink clouds and a pale blue sky over them.
8.4. Before this, on a pedestal, stood a large Dresden urn with flowers that were changed every morning.
8.5. Crouched on the floor on either side of the urn was a Chinese brass dog.
9. The baroque splendor of that palatial home in the Alleegasse nauseated me then and nauseates me now to think of it.
9.01. Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up.
9.02. Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.
9.03. After the peristaltic crisis, the feeling of illness or weakness is generalized through the system.
9.04. The memory of the grand staircase in the palatial home in the Alleegasse produces in me a generalized despair of the fin de siècle culture of my youth.
10. My parents gave over their lives to the climbing of such stairs.
10.01. Their grandparents were Jews who had converted to Catholicism.
10.02. At the technical school I was sent to, Adolf Hitler was a student two grades below mine.
11. When I came home from the Great War, I immediately signed over to my siblings the immense wealth of my inheritance.
12. I designed on the principle of the cube a severely simple, unadorned, unembellished, unornamented home in the Kundmanngasse for my sister for whose soul I feared.
13. I went off to live poor and work with my hands in the country.
13.01. I taught elementary school arithmetic to the children of peasants.
14. I was drawn to philosophy.
14.01. I realized that the language of Western philosophical thought was choked with pretentious baroque tchotchkes, like my ancestral home in the Alleegasse.
15. I bought a notebook with ruled lines.
16. I retired to a cabin on a Norwegian fjord and was more desolately alone than I could endure.
17. I wept in order to hear a human sound.
18. I looked into the endless Norwegian night and considered the new physics of Einstein.
19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.
—At the Knickerbocker with Pem:
I’ve got the tape on, is that okay?
Whynot.
Has anything else happened?
Am I still in, you mean? Hanging by a thread. As far as they’re concerned, how can they not show charity to one of their own, or their once own? And I won’t quit, I’m afraid to quit. My office, however meaningless, I think of as staving off dereliction. This crucifix dangling from my neck protects me from myself.
Come on. . .
Don’t laugh. Even when I had a family and lived on Park Avenue I was never that far. My vagrant nature shadows me. Always has. My real home is the city streets. I walk them. There is something in the streets for me, some secret, not necessarily in the interest of my well-being.. . . Another reason I won’t quit is I still pray. I find myself still doing that. Do you pray?
No.
You should try it. As an act of self-dramatization, it can’t be beat. You get a hum, a reverberant hum of the possibility of your own consequential voice. Like singing in the shower. [laughs]. . . I shouldn’t talk this way. Why can’t I have a feeling without crapping all over it? The truth is I still have hope for myself. . . the long shot that I’ll convert myself to an associated conviction. Catholicism, say, or Lutheranism. Like the great Bishop Pike, who moved around, a Catholic, then a Protestant, a dabbler in spiritualism.. . . Ah well, maybe he’s not the best example, being another good mind gone to ruin.
What about the big cross, Pem, the one from St. Tim’s?
What about it?
Last time you hinted at another explanation. Something I missed in the Heist chapter.
Did I say that?
You did.
Well you may have it in there somewhere, you know, you just don’t know it.
Come on, Pem, this is important.
[inaudible]. . . Let me pay for the dinner this time.
Why?
I’m not destitute. Besides, I can’t be bought that cheaply. I’m worth more.
You think I’m taking advantage?
No, no, you know that’s not it. We’ve had that out. I said I didn’t want a royalty, and so on. All that is firm. But I get nervous. These are the substantive matters of my life.
Gentlemen?
What are we drinking?
Absolut on the rocks.
A Stoli Cristall for me. . .
So?
I may want to write my own book. [laughs] Look, he’s turning pale.
No, why not, you should.
Not what you do. Nonfiction. Nonfiction about fiction. The opposite of what you do.
You think so? I’ll give you my research.
[laughter]
I do like the attention, I’ll admit that. If you do your job, I expect the demand on me to write my own story will be fierce. Horse’s mouth kind of thing. Big publisher’s advance. Oh boy.
Then we’d better get back to work. May we?
Stoli for you, Absolut. . .
L’chaim.. . . Point is, they may not have been the mindless creeps I thought they were who lifted the cross. And it may not have been anti-Semites, or Jewish ultras, who brought it to the roof of the EJ synagogue. Poor Joshua was beginning to think so too.
Then who? I don’t understand. And anyway it was an affront whoever put it there.
Maybe, maybe not.
What else could it have been?
That is Sarah’s view. She remains the superb rationalist.
Well I’m on her side. Don’t you guys teach that Christianity is the successor religion? So where would Evolutionary Judaism evolve according to the belief of a militant Christian if not to the cross? And where was this errant little synagogue headed according to an ultra-Orthodox Jew if not to apostasy? Either way it was vicious.
I remind you that the later Wittgenstein says there is meaning after all in propositions that can’t be verified.
Wittgenstein? How did he get into this?
You know, of course, Christianity was originally a Jewish sect. Everybody knows that.
So. What does that have to do—
Please. Am I or am I not your Divinity Detective?
Okay, okay.
Just bear with me. Paul—you know, Paul. Fellow had that stroke on the road to Damascus?
A stroke? [laughs]
Why not? I mean it knocked him out, and left him weak and wobbly. A vision stroke. We don’t have those anymore. Strokes today, you just lose capacity. His turned him. He’d been fairly contemptuous of Jesus before that. You following this?
I am trying.
He was fervent, Paul, he’d found their Messiah. That’s what he preached. Mostly
they weren’t buying it. Meanwhile there were these gentiles who were listening in the back. He got a better reception there. But the gentiles were scared of circumcision, as who could blame a grown man. So he told them they didn’t have to be circumcised, they could still become Jews. Did you know that? That was it, right there.
That was what?
. . . [inaudible]. . . and out he went, bag and baggage. And the gentiles with him. I mean, there were circumstances working, in-history circumstances. You can have a revelation, fine, but then what? In this case, a new religion. In all cases. New visions spring from old, sects break away from churches and become churches, ideas of God bloom like viruses. Over and over. . . [inaudible]. . . react to the his-toricizing of God, saying, No that’s not it, that’s not it. Because God is not historical. God is ahistorical. In fact probably God and religion are incompatible propositions.
The God of the Bible operates in history.
Sure He does.
You deny the validity of all revelation?
All revelation is countermanded. Let me ask you one: Do you believe God gave Moses the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai?
Well it’s a great story. I think I’m a judge of stories and that’s a great story.
They’re all great stories. The Decalogue structurally, generically, is modeled on the ancient Mesopotamian lord-and-vassal treaties. Did you know that?
No.
Do you believe Jesus was the son of God, resurrected? Do you know the predominant culture of his life and times was Greek? The predominant language was Greek, all through the Roman empire? So how many Greek mystery cults told of resurrections?
I have trouble remembering the Greek myths.
Dozens. The Gospelers were writers. What is it you said writers do? Make the composition? Put things in, leave things out. To a secular fellow like you this may not be news, or even bad news. But if you’re a religious guy like me and you’re not a fundamentalist, you’ve got trouble. Do you turn the truths of your faith into a kind of edifying poetry? Then you’re a religious schizoid, your right brain believes, your left can only relish the sentiment of believing. And Jesus as the chosen son is no more valid than Jews as the chosen people. And what has happened to God in all this?