The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (37 page)

Hinged about myself here - about my Bottom Line -
the high places of my childhood have become the far places of my manhood.
Without my noticing, my world has been fed a Mickey Finn and laid out flat. No question of bowing now. I don’t kowtow to gods who are on my level, still less to a subhuman cosmos.

Here I have a confession to make. For fifteen years and more I had been drawing - less as a meditational exercise than as a visual aid to self-discovery - countless mandala patterns, or nests of concentric circles, for arranging my First-person universe in, region by region. And all along I had thought of the pattern as horizontal. The galaxies and stars in it were
out there,
not
up here.
It’s true that my universe soon slept off its knockout drop and opened an eye, but it still lay on its back. It was a dazed and prostrate world, stretching into the far distance.

And then it got up. The far became high. As recently as two years ago it happened. The world-door, hinged right here, suddenly opened and swung through 90°. Here was
my
world at last, all of it
here.
It had come back to me. Yet it was now
God’s
world again, infinitely awesome, a tall world for bowing to. It was at once more me and less me. If that’s paradoxical, I say God bless His lovely paradoxes!

However vast the floor and luxurious the carpet, you don’t bow to it - it’s for walking on. But tack the carpet to the wall, and it’s for looking at - it’s God’s tapestry, displaying the magnificent hierarchy of heaven and earth, and all of it given right here. The world’s lofty and deep, God’s in His heaven and I’m His child again on Earth. Once more heaven’s above the bright blue sky, and Jackie’s down here gazing up at it, wonderstruck. The real and given world’s an upstanding world, nearer than near yet more awesome than awesome.

COUNSEL, springing to his feet in great excitement, feigned or real: Hold on! If I can believe my ears you’re coolly abandoning - just like that! - the basic contention of the Defence, which is that God’s throne is set up at your very Centre. Now you’re locating it at your circumference, the very outside edge of your world. A bigger turn-around can’t be imagined. In which event - given such abject apologies to offended parties as His Honour may determine, and to the court for this shocking waste of its time - the Prosecution has no case against you. No case, I mean, that a fine or a shortish prison sentence wouldn’t atone for.

MYSELF: I fear you won’t be so ready to let me off when I piece together and fill out the tale I’ve been telling you about myself - with the help of Diagram No. 23, which the Jury should please now turn to.

1 - Infant’s Vertical World

High is high

2 - Adult’s Prostrate World

High is far

3 Seer’s Vertical World

Far is high

Diagram No. 23

Let me quickly run through the three-part story:

Chapter One
is about myself the infant. I haven’t yet learned to push away and distance my world, either in space or in time. It’s two-dimensional, all of it here and all of it now. An upright world, an up-and-down world, immensely high, wide and handsome. All of it mine. All of it alive with my life.

Chapter Two
is about myself the adult - the grown-up whose world has grown down. Or rather, fallen down. Hinged about myself here and now, it has collapsed into there and then and is mine no longer. I’m all at once desperately poor. And, with it, desperately proud. Now I experience myself as a superior but frightened stranger in an alien and lifeless world, as a minute oasis in that immense cosmic Sahara. I alone am worshipful. That prostrate expanse invites and urges me to commit the crime of Mansur. All that’s left to bow to is myself.

In
Chapter Three
I come to my senses. Encouraged by any competent artist, I look to see. His painting or photograph helps to show me what enchantment there is in the
collapse
of distance: it rubs my nose in the up-ended scene. I see that knocked-flat world wake up, and get up, and stay up. The well-oiled hinge works all the time, in little things as in great. The long gradient of the hill in front of me becomes short and steep, a step and not a slope at all, and I’m right up to it. The mountain, now two-dimensional - triangular instead of pyramidal - keeps its slopes on either side, but ahead is sheer. The sky - though as wide as ever - is immensely higher. The bright blue lid of the universe is halved and set up on edge. From top to bottom the world is charged with the glory of God and His grandeur. The charm and mystery of this truly brave new world is that it is all here and now and mine, yet indescribably worshipful. At once infinitely humbled and infinitely exalted, the last thing I’m interested in is, like Mansur, taking possession of God. Echoing Job, I exclaim, ‘Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!’

This is what I see, this is how I feel, this is the way I want to live.

I should like now to re-call the Witness. [The Mullah returns to the box. I address him.] Well, Reverend Sir, I hope this account of the up-ending of God’s world has done something to clear me, in your eyes, of that unbridled and unbalanced immanentism which cost poor Mansur so dear.

WITNESS: To some extent it has. I’m happy to admit that your incursions into Islamic spirituality appear less one-sided (and therefore less heretical) than I had supposed. And that if you were to convert to Islam I wouldn’t pursue you with charges of blasphemy. Provided, of course, you stick to what you’ve been telling us.

COUNSEL: I’m utterly baffled! How is it, Nokes, that in your writings (which I’ve made it my business to know pretty well) there’s no mention of this hinging and up-ending of the universe? It looks to me - and, I expect, to the jury - like panic stations, a last-minute effort to buy a favourable verdict, and by no means a change of heart. Only if you will now explicitly and without hedging withdraw all those blasphemous statements made during and before this Trial - to the effect that you are the very One that Christians and Jews and Muslims worship as the Highest - will the Crown consider withdrawing its charge against you.

Well, what have you got to say?

MYSELF: I don’t take back a word of it.

Members of the Jury, to understand why I won’t give an inch and don’t need to, please turn to Diagram No. 24. Look at the difference between that little, tiny-armed, other-way-up, paper-thin, framed-and-glazed third person who has no room for God - and this immense First Person who is the opposite of all that and brim-full of God, and whose God’s-arms visibly reach (as if up-lifted in Muslim prayer) beyond the Stars.
lt's not that little one who bows before this Big One. As Angelus Silesius says, ‘God bends and bows to Himself, and to Himself doth pray’.

Diagram No. 24

The truth - so simple and obvious, yet so astounding - is that the prostrate world is man’s and the upright world is God’s. Why? Because (as I’ve already demonstrated in this court) God is omnipresent, and for Him alone far is near and high. He, and not John a-Nokes, draws the Bottom Line and oils and operates the Hinge about which His world swings vertical and magnificent.

It’s as this unique First Person who is Himself that I truly revere Him as higher than the highest. That jackass Jack is much too conceited, much too stuck-up, to begin to do so.

Only
as
Him am I lowly enough - and deep enough - to
be
Him.

I call six in support, out of scores that stand ready to testify:

He who knows about depth knows about God.

Paul Tillich

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep [in which he’d dreamed about a ladder set up between Earth and Heaven] and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not... this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

Genesis

One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all... Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.

St Paul

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide...

And he whose soul is flat - the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

Edna St Vincent Millay

The outward man is the swinging door, the Inner Man is the still hinge. When I am one with that wherein are all things, past and present and to come, and all the same distance... then they are all in God and all in me.

Eckhart

My final Witness is Judy Taylor, author of
As I See It,
who lost her sight as a child. Regaining it forty years later, she asked:

‘What is that white thing sticking straight up in the air beside the house opposite? It turned out to be the drive. She got it to lie down in due course.

Prosecution Witness No. 24

THE REGISTRAR