The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (10 page)

WITNESS: Perhaps he’s a bit of both. My guess is that he’s the Golden Ass, bright (if not brilliant) in his loopy fashion. Rather like King James I, the fellow they called the wisest fool in Christendom.

COUNSEL: I’m informed that the Devil has a higher IQ than any other angel — and if you read it as Idiocy Quotient, that’s all right by me... Have you anything to say about the Accused’s lunatic pretensions to divinity?

JUDGE: That’s a grossly leading question.

COUNSEL: Delete ‘lunatic’.

WITNESS: I do have a query. Why should God be in Mr Noke’s head (or
instead
of his head, or
in his no-head
- have it any way you like) and not in his heart, for example, where religious folk profess to find Him? Why this fixation on the human head, I ask, with its seemingly unlimited potential for confusion and delusion, leading on occasion to blasphemy trials? Why, with all His Creation to choose from, should the Creator settle for and settle in such a crowded and crime-infested slum? Or such a poky hideout or hide-in as any organ of the human body? Or the whole of it, for that matter? Surely He could have found less congested and dingy lodgings somewhere in all the real estate of His universe?

COUNSEL, sitting himself down with the air of one who has said the last word: Over to the Accused

Defence:
Taking the Rough with the Smooth

I continue the Witness’s examination.

‘As a prelude to deflating the Prosecution, and answering the very pertinent questions you have raised, I would like to put one to you. To you, who know about such matters. What is this very, very peculiar finial or knob or headpiece, this problematic something-or-other that tops off a human body?’

Counsel begs his Honour to dismiss my question as yet another red herring, a false trail the court shouldn’t waste time following.

The Judge fails to see why I want a definition of something that all sane persons are agreed about.

I claim the right to conduct my Defence in my own fashion, but to save time I’m willing to rephrase my question to the Witness:

‘Do you agree that a human head is an opaque, multicoloured, roughly eight-inch, hairy bone-box, jam-packed at the top with knobbly grey stuff, and furnished with a pair of shuttered portholes and a hinged lower section for letting sounds out and food in?’

The Witness agrees, reluctantly, that will do.

I have no further questions. He stands down.

MYSELF, addressing the Jury: While that picture of a human top is fresh in our minds, let me assure you cross-my-heart that I’m topless, a head short, and can find nothing like that lurking on these shoulders. What about your shoulders? Are they a dish for serving up that very fancy meatball on, or for serving up everything but that meatball? For serving up a world? What’s on your plate, right now? At this moment can you think of anything less like what you’re looking out of, either in detail or overall, than that very grotesque and very knotted topknot? Than that very meaty meatball?

I shall be coming back to exactly what you and I do have here in place of that meatball or topknot. Meanwhile I want to address the question which the Witness put to me at the end of his testimony. It could hardly be more germane to my Defence.

Why do I pick on the head? The reason’s simple. I don’t: it picks on itself. It’s an oddity, a joker. The joke is that what I took to be most me is least me. It’s the only part of my body (I mean of the whole of it, which is the Whole) that consistently plays truant, the only part I never come across here, that’s
permanently
AWOL. The rest goes and comes back, much as it pleases and as I please. Thus when I look
down
it’s just my head that’s missing; when I look
out
(as I’m doing now) the rest of my human body’s missing; if I were to climb on to the roof of this court and gaze
up
at the sky, my Earth-body would be missing; if I did so at night my Star-body — nearly all my Solar-System body — would be missing; and finally, if I were to close my eyes, my Universe-body would be missing. What’s constant throughout is the missing head. The essential feature of this topknot of mine is that it’s featureless. And not only featureless but a nonsense, an absurdity. I’m shoulder-high, or rather shoulder-low. There I stop.

Or put it this way: the reason for picking on my no-head, rather than (say) my no-torso, is that it’s
central
to me throughout — whereas my no-torso often isn’t. Do I have to explain further? Be serious! If This that’s forever where I’m coming from, This that’s the Root of the root of my life and the Being of my being and the indispensable Core of the Mystery of Me — if This isn’t worth fastening on to and looking into hard and long, tell me what is. To be wrong about This — and what could be more perverse than bunging it up with that peripheral and hugely complicated bag of tricks which is our agreed definition of a human head? — to be wrong about This is to be wrong about everything else. If there’s anything more sure to sink me than a millstone around my neck, it is this fictitious millstone on my neck.

No, it’s not my man’s head that I pick on and make such a fuss about. It’s the absence of it here, and the presence of... Well, of something very, very different. Which brings me to the question of what, exactly, I’m touching when I finger the thing (or no-thing) that I’m living from here, that I’m looking out of. How far is it like, and how far is it unlike, the intangible thing that those other ten fingers are simultaneously exploring in my mirror? The question is: what, when I attend, does touch disclose about what’s right here at the hub of my world? Not about what’s there, in the realm of light-switches and cups etc., but here, in the realm of their user?

Over there, touch tests and complements sight, and vice versa. They fit nicely. And so they do here (as we shall presently see) but combine to tell a vastly different story. Here they come together most beautifully to reveal What I really am, in sharp contrast to what I appear to be, what I look like to you now.

But what’s the good of just talking about this contrast? I must ask you, all you Jury members and Your Honour as well, to conduct along with me a little experiment. It’s so easy to do, so revolutionary in what it comes up with, so destructive of the lies we live by, that we all ought to do it daily along with our physical jerks and hair-combing and teeth-brushing. If you are too embarrassed, or too lazy, or too prejudiced to do what I’m now doing, or to take seriously what you find when you do so, you’ll be turning this place into a court of injustice, a kangaroo court. To say nothing of the entertainment and the revelation you’ll be missing out on, personally. So
please…
Yes, you, Sir Gerald, too! And your Junior, Mr Atkinson… Well, have it your own way. No surprise that the Crown denies it crowns thin air.

The rest of you all set? I’ll tell you what I’m doing and what I’m finding, so that you can then do the same, and check whether you get the same results as I get. Don’t believe me. Look for yourself.

You see me now stopping my ears, pressing a finger into each ear-hole…

Well, that’s your story. Mine isn’t a bit like that.

What I’m finding here is a
mélange
of sensation of touch, of sustained sound, of pressure, of discomfort and a little pain – with no things, no solid, opaque, coloured objects whatever to attach these sensations to. Attending carefully, I sort this
mélange
out into two parts, with a space intervening.

How wide is this gap between the ears I don’t have here?
On present evidence, how distant are these two sensation-groups, one on my far right and the other on my far left?

Now it’s your turn to repeat the experiment, asking the same questions... Please!...

Instead of sticking his forefingers in his ears, Counsel applies them to his forehead, twisting them screwdriver fashion. His Junior nods and winks at the Jury, most of whom are following my instructions, hesitatingly.

MYSELF: What I find here never ceases to astound and delight me. I don’t know about you, but this between-ears gap of mine is Universe-wide at the very least! I’m hugely tickled (should I say the World’s hugely tickled?) to find I’ve come to the World’s End, where I’m simultaneously fondling its quite rough extremities and seeing how vast is the interval between them. Yes, seeing it: I’m no more imagining or thinking that gap than I’m smelling it or tasting it. I’m taking the world by the ears. It’s a kindly and gentle taking, the way one handles a pet rabbit, and the contrary of setting the world by the ears.

And what is it that fills to capacity this huge between-ears gap right now? Why, the whole scene, the world as it’s presenting itself. Yes, it’s you — you the Judge and Jury, and the Prosecution Lawyers, and the Clerk to the Court, and the Court Usher, and all the rest of you in the setting of this courtroom — who are currently tenanting this immense Accommodation that I have to let. You lot, plus all sorts of thoughts and feelings about you, plus all those sensations I’ve just described and many more, plus God knows what. And all that between-ear filling is changing continually. What never changes is this Aware Accommodation for it all, for you all. THIS I AM. The pot that looked so narrow can take the world-joint, and its ears are poles apart.

In one of his more lucid moments Bertie Wooster says of some character, ‘Between the collar and the hair-parting nothing stirred.’ They say of a fool that there’s nothing between his ears. I say, bully for him. For me, too, that’s a good half of the truth. The other is that there’s everything. Nothing and Everything. I ask you, what could be more unlike that dead-to-the-world head-thing, that man-head as we have defined it, than this wide-awake Emptiness—Fullness? What could be more like the God-head — as, precisely, Nothing-and-Everything, alive to Itself as just that? Yes, the awesome, blissful, glorious fact is that what we are now exploring, this between-ears Immensity we tried so hard to bung up with our man-head, is our God-head. Blasphemy it was and blasphemy it is to desecrate this Holy of Holies with any human thing, any thing at all. Blasphemy and damnation.

Counsel startles the court by suddenly pulling a face, sticking his thumbs in his ears, and waggling his fingers. Has his lunch been a rather convivial one? His Honour seems too taken aback to comment...

‘Is this a court of law?’ Sir Gerald wants to know. ‘Anyone peeping in would think it’s a circus, or a nursery, or a loony-bin... Let’s all play Ring a ring o’roses! Better still, Johnny shall have a new bonnet! Ha, ha, ha!’

MYSELF: The joke’s on the joker who can’t tell the childlike from the childish...

I want now seriously to address the Witness’s question about why the King should so demean Himself as to occupy such poky and unregal premises as the human body, setting up His throne in the coal cellar.

Poky and unregal? Nonsense! Just look and see: could this throne-room, into which you and I tried so hard to smuggle a human head — could it be any wider, any deeper or loftier, any grander than it now so obviously is? Let’s not fool ourselves that, if we searched the universe of galaxies and stars for an age of ages, we would ever alight on a more palatial residence for Him — one more heavenly yet more homely, more empty yet more gloriously filled, more lived-in yet more bright and fresh and dust-free — than this home He’s being provided with right here. Or, for that matter, a home more safe against any alien invasion at all? More untroubled by outsiders? What outsiders?

The plain fact is that, no matter how we resist and lie about it, we are all living from What and Who we really are, not from our man-head but our God-head. Fortunately we have no choice. Besides, at some level and in some strange way, we aren’t just living from but
awake
to our God-head. For who of us, inside as well as outside mental hospitals, believes that we are shut up in eight-inch spherical containers, in bone-boxes stuck over with hair outside and packed with offal inside? Who of us doesn’t feel at large, no matter what we’ve been told
ad nauseam
to the contrary? Who of us (even before we dare or care to look) fails to find our outer space continuous with our inner space, with no perimeter fence between them? Who of us can even imagine what it would be like to be plunged and stuffed into the dark, sticky, wet, congested goo which is alleged to befoul the very Centre of our universe? In truth, though all our lives we are taught to blaspheme by superimposing man’s opacity on God’s transparency, none of us begins to learn the lesson. None of us takes it seriously for a moment. In the last resort, blasphemy is no more than a black knight’s move in the Grand Master’s great game of pretending. We are all guilty, and none of us is guilty, of this impossible offence.

Well, members of the jury, I guess that’s enough...

COUNSEL, rising to his feet quite steadily: No, it isn’t! I’ve two or three awkward questions to put to you, Mr a-dash-Nokes. Explain why, when you finger the unseen thingumabob on your shoulders, you always feel the head of a man. And not a head of celery or lettuce, or — painfully — a head of steam? And explain why, when you stand before a mirror, the movements of your hand over the felt but unseen contours of the thingumabob correspond so closely with its movements over that unfelt but clearly seen head? Isn’t the obvious explanation (obvious to all but the very sick or the very thick) that on the near side of the mirror is your invisible but real human head, while on the far side is your visible but unreal human head, its mere reflection?