The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (18 page)

This Aware Nothing or Zero is indeed no shivering cold, toothless, pale abstraction. It is the Parent, the Mother-Father, infinitely robust and flamboyant in its expression, infinitely still and silent and mysterious in its essence, inscrutable to the point of being incredible. For no reason It
is,
and for no reason It is the inexhaustible Source of everything. To imagine you are living independently of It, living from Number One - no matter how godlike Number One may seem - is nightmarish. And so daft. As if you could, for a split second!

Finally, a little experiment. Surprise the Divine Mathematician at His sums! To catch the One red-handed, in the very act of coming from the None, unpocket and show a fist. To catch the Many coming from the One, spread your fingers. To catch the Many returning to the One, close your fist again. To catch the One red-handed in the very act of returning to the None, the Zero, pocket your fist again. This is not a symbol or a moving picture of Him who truly counts. It’s the real Thing, and the real No-thing.

And here’s the sort of thing the wise have to say about the No-one who heads every queue in His universe:

Tao gave birth to the One. The One gave birth to two things, three things, up to ten thousand.

Tao Te Ching

The Many return to the One. To what does the One return?

Kao-feng Tuan-miao

O is the source of all speech, a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to every wise man, a blessing and a joy to every knight.

Anglo Saxon Runic Poem

Wise Master Eckhart wills

To teach us Nothing’s lore,

And he who sees it not

May wail to God therefor.

The true and heavenly light

On him hath never shone.

Medieval Convent Song

COUNSEL, making a great show of resetting his stopwatch: Your Honour, I’ve been very quiet throughout these ingenious and long-drawn-out manoeuvres, with their smokescreens and feints and diversionary tactics. I think that this time I deserve the last word - if only to bring us back to the simple issue before this court.

JUDGE: lt’s up to the Accused.

MYSELF: Go right ahead. There’ll be no comeback from me.

COUNSEL: Members of the Jury, in her pub the Witness wrote down these words: ‘I am that I AM. I AM is my first and real and permanent name: and you know Whose name that is. John and Nokes are just my temporary names, my nicknames.’

He accepts, without a blush or a tremor, that those were his very words. Greater blasphemy than this no man has ever breathed. Not all the twists and turns of his Defence, right up to the end of this Trial and your retiring to consider your verdict, will begin to purge one syllable of that blasphemy. Or deter you from bringing in a verdict of Guilty.

Don’t be put off by his gamesmanship. I shouldn’t be surprised if, though not yet halfway through this Trial, you felt that Nokes has already scored some impressive goals. Lots of them. I do so agree. His nimble footwork, his dash, the accuracy of his shooting have often (I confess) left me wonder-struck. All the more so because every one of his goals has been an own goal. He seems to imagine that he can clear himself of blasphemy by blaspheming ever more shamelessly.

Prosecution Witness No. I2

THE STORE MANAGER

The Witness remembers me vaguely as one of his customers. He can think of nothing special about me - except that there was a bit of a fuss on one occasion when I returned some potatoes which had gone partly bad. He said it was my fault because I waited a week before unsealing the plastic bag they were packed in. Though slightly irritated, he stuck to the rule that the customer is always right, and replaced the goods.

COUNSEL: Would it surprise you to learn that this humble purchaser of spuds is some sort of divinity, heavily disguised? Divinity in his own eyes, I mean?

WITNESS: It certainly did startle me when I was told as much, at the time of the subpoena to appear in this court.

COUNSEL: I take it that you aren’t aware of the strange opinions he’s published about advertising, and their connection with his still stranger opinions about himself. He claims that advertising is of two very different sorts - one directed at us common folk, the other at him. Both are effective within their limits, he says.

WITNESS: I do have some rather funny customers, but I mind my own business. Treating them all in the same manner, and I hope with equal courtesy, seems to work out all right. To interest the gentleman there in my merchandise I doubt we need to dream up any special posters, newspaper ads, or TV commercials - designs that would appeal to him, in contrast to other (shall I say
normal?)
people. Again, when he comes shopping, the standard sales techniques are (I’m pretty sure) effective, and what he buys is normal enough, even predictable. Anyway, my job is sufficiently demanding without having to cater for two species of customers.To do that I would need to be a superman, as well as run a supermarket.

COUNSEL, to Jury: I think this Witness’s testimony speaks for itself and needs little comment from me. All I’ll say just now is: he knows his job. Which means, for all business and practical purposes, he knows his John a-Nokes, the customer who’s no more divine than the potatoes he forgot to de-bag.

I have no questions to put to the Witness. He stands down.

Defence:
The Birds of God

MYSELF: The Witness underestimates himself - or should I say his firm? More accommodating than he realizes, he caters specially for me, in addition to his normal customers. Very considerate of him, I say. Let me explain.

M. & S. Sainsbury, the worldwide chain of stores - of which his is the latest and swishest - relies heavily on advertising. It’s only to be expected that most of its publicity, since it’s aimed at human beings, should portray human beings. Hence countless pictures of astoundingly healthy and good-looking men, women, children and babies rapturously eating this and drinking that and wearing the other, and getting up to most of the things that real humans get up to. Whether in the press or on hoardings or on the screen, or in the mere labelling of goods, most advertising is obviously directed at
Homo sapiens.

But there remains a type of advertising which neither depicts people nor is aimed at people, but does its best to depict me - with a view to selling me something, I presume. For example, there is the tilted and brimming beer-mug held by a loose hand floating in mid-air, about to pour itself into the Void here, into the no-mouth of this no-drinker. (More accurately, of this
real
Drinker, the one who actually tastes the brew.) Or a pair of hands, equally innocent of any connecting body, busy handling a packet of cigarettes and conveying one of them to this absence-of-lips. Or a car evidently designed for me since it’s driven by no human driver, but instead by loose hands and feet mysteriously working at the controls - rather as if they were a quartet of superbly trained circus animals at their tricks.

Please turn to Diagram No. 12, which is a sample of the sort of advert I mean. Just one of hundreds.

Diagram No. 12

Look at your hands now. Wave them about frantically, as if you were conducting an orchestra and playing the harp... Go on... Let them go...

These airborne attendants upon the First Person are surely more like birds than earthbound animals. Birds that combine the incredible skills of the swooping swallow, the hovering humming-bird and the grasping eagle - and never a failed take-off or mid-air collision or crash landing among them. Birds of God they are -
uccelli di Dio
- which is what Dante called the angels, God’s messengers and servitors. To each of you, then, two questions and a warning. Can you deny you are so served? Conceding that you are, can you deny that your attendants - your
uccelli di Dio
- are in fact
God’s? God’s,
I say! To claim them for Jack, for any human, wouldn’t be just mock humility. It would be blasphemy.

Back, then, to M. & S. Sainsbury, PLC.

Naturally, such tailor-made advertisements have special impact on me. Taking full account of how different I am, they speak to my condition. lt‘s the same with drama on the large and the small screens. Nearly all of it is about and for humans. But now and then the cast includes a headless and other-way-up actor. I hear his voice, his breathing, his footfall, and occasionally catch sight of hands and feet and vestiges of a trunk. And naturally (other things being equal) I’m involved. He’s the character I identify with. He’s my kind. He’s not a man, he's Me.

By the same token, a canny insurance-agent knows how to handle my mounting sales resistance. Instead of confronting a man across the table, he comes round to my side where there’s no man. Here, no longer handing over documents for me to look at, he looks at them with me. Merging points of view, his humanness vanishes into my non-humanness. His voice and his gesturing hands - now loosed from their trunk, coming from here and no longer from there - are now so truly mine that I could well become the pushover he hopes for.

The simple fact, to me so obvious and so amusing and so awesomely significant, is that there are
two
immensely different sorts of limbs - the ordinary and tied-down sort that stick out of human and animal bodies at various angles, and the extraordinary and unattached sort that stick out of No-thing, branch from No-trunk, belong to No-body, operate from No-where. Unique in their looseness, they are also unique in their sensitivity, and in the miraculous ease and speed and fittingness of their responses to one’s every need. They are exceptionally serviceable offshoots, making the attached kind look like so many orthopaedic devices, wonderfully constructed and operated, but unresponsive and wooden by comparison. And no wonder! These loose limbs belong to the Looselimbed God, and just have to be very special. They come straight from Him, like bright angels from heaven, intent on His business.

No, Sir Gerald, this isn’t some newfangled and trumped-up conceit of mine, with no precedent. You can find the hand of God curiously depicted in many early medieval paintings and mosaics of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, and the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and so on. God’s pointing hand (lace-cuffed and neatly sleeved, like his Honour’s over there) with long and delicate and well-manicured fingers, emerges from a cloud at the top of the picture. It comes, I assure you, from that very same Cloud of Unknowing as
this
inelegantly sleeved hand - the one that I’m now extending to the court - is coming from.

Turn, please, to diagram 13 in your booklet, where you’ll find a copy of one of these pictures.

Diagram No. 13

In this picture, from a ninth-century Roman codex, a sleeping St John receives the Revelation of the Apocalypse at the hand of God. From around the twelfth century onwards, artists depicted not just the hand but the whole of God - as a well-preserved septuagenarian! Unreality at its most ridiculous, with more than a smidgen of blasphemy about it!

COUNSEL, with a great flourish of his brief: Members of the Jury, in the course of this Trial the Accused has produced many arguments - ingenious in their pseudo-naivety and absurdity, and some of them perverse to the point of madness - in support of his boasted divinity. But the one we are now listening to is the limit. Or rather, it exceeds even his limits, is really
too
much. If I have now to put to him some questions which aren’t just embarrassing to this court and an offence to its dignity, but blasphemous in the very asking - why, he’s to blame. His filthy insults to the Almighty can’t be countered without some contamination, some descent to their level. For which I crave the court’s indulgence.