The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (7 page)

Diagram No. 5

In Diagram No. 5 I’ve drawn the general shape of my findings. No longer so damned cocksure I know what it’s like being me, I dare to start all over again and
bow before the evidence
— actually as well as metaphorically. I bend and bow so deeply that I come to the very edge of me and my world, to the
Bottom Line
it all arises from. A frontier that doesn’t prevent me from gazing past it and in to the infinite Source of All, brilliantly on display yet awesomely mysterious. Next, slowly straightening up, I gaze
down
at this headless trunk and these foreshortened legs and tiny feet. Then
out
at all those people and their gear, among them that special fellow who stares at me fixedly from behind his window. There he is, that Jack-in-the-mirror third person who’s as human as the rest, inasmuch as he’s the same way up as they are, and topped with the same sort of headpiece, and pees the way they pee. And then I look
up
at the teeming countryside, the forest covered hills, low clouds and high mountains (I leave you to picture these in my picture); and finally at the wide sky with its Moon and planets and Sun and solar systems and galaxies.

Such is the magnificent shape of the First Person Singular. Its crucial feature is its Bottom Line — the Fringe of this shirt, of this true cutty sark. Here, where man’s extremity
visibly
lines up with God’s opportunity, where what’s so generously given is so rarely taken, I come to the World’s End (completing the down-sweep of my bow before the evidence), the World’s Beginning (the launching pad that gives rise to the many-levelled scene as I straighten up again) and, back of both, the World’s Source (the below-Line World without end, amen). Here is my Triune Home, the fringe benefits of which are endless.

COUNSEL, in a stage whisper that threatens to shatter the court’s light-bulbs: Lunatic fringe!

MYSELF, ignoring the jibe: I come to sweeter-than-sweet Home God’s Home, in fact, where all that the Light lights up gives place to the Light itself. Home, where the One Light, bodying forth its own magnificent Embodiment,
is
all it shines on. The 360⁰ wraparound Home of the Divine Humorist, whose smile is so broad it meets at the back.

Such, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, is my cosmic constitution. This is me when I’m interested enough to look, and honest and unhurried enough to take myself as I find myself. This is what I naturally
am,
before rushing to twist and trim and denature it into what I’m told I am. Such is my Body, my marvellous Incarnation. And yours too, I guess, just as soon as you care to glance up, and out, and down, and in at the Unique Glancer, and What lies back of Him.

And every time I look down and pee I’m reminded of His condescension, His delicious sense of humour, His mystery. Long live micturition!

JUDGE: Do you
have
to go on and on about micturition, as you call it? This muckraking is provocative and does your case no good.

MYSELF: I’ve no choice, Your Honour. The topic’s forced on me by the Prosecution. But also, more importantly and persistently, by the Highest Authority, who has deliberately chosen the low things of the world to confound its Pecksniffs, its moral prigs and spiritual snobs.

Of course for purposes of inspection and description this great Body has to be dismembered notionally, differentiated into a hierarchy of organs. But in fact it is always an organic whole. Or rather, it’s the one and only Organic Whole, the only true Organism that includes all it needs to be itself, the only true Individual that’s independent and strictly indivisible. Every layer and every member of it (whether honoured or neglected or despised, whether overlooked or looked at or underlooked, whether labelled ‘decent’ or ‘common and unclean’ or ‘foul’) - every least itsy-bitsy fragment of it is holy: by which I mean wholly cleansed and made good and sanctified in the Whole. Not on the whole and partially, but
as
the Whole and absolutely. Rightly viewed by its Proprietor, no part is a mere part. Or even a hologram of the Whole. It is godly. It is God.

And, of course, all this applies to peeing as well, with its associated anatomy. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, to the whole urino-genital-excretory works. Dare you - can you - amputate or expurgate from the Body of God those members which Mrs Grundy would like to expurgate from the body of man?

JUDGE: Surely you’ve made your point - and are now in danger of running it into the ground.

MYSELF: My point, Your Honour,
is
the Ground! Let’s dare to be as grounded as God, as low. It may help us to take kindly to the facts in all their earthiness, and the necessity as well as the depth of the divine descent into their midst, if we recall how many have found hope and comfort in that descent. I’m thinking of the Christian tradition whose Deity is, to put it mildly, no toffee-nosed snob: of the faith that has for substance and centre-piece the coming-down of the King of Glory to be born in a shed reserved for beasts, and to die on a dump reserved for criminals judged lower than beasts. According to this faith, such is the world’s Top Liner that He becomes its Bottom Liner, thereby saving and sanctifying all between. What I’m saying is that, if so many have valued so highly and for so long this incomparable Comedown, the very minor part of it which is the Witness’s specialty is worthy of your sympathetic reconsideration. For you must agree that the Witness’s Convenience is a lot more convenient and respectable and salubrious than that stable in Bethlehem which (according to this great tradition) was not despised by Almighty God. Far from it: He moved right in. ‘Love,’ says William Butler Yeats, ‘has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.’ Here is the God of St Paul, who has ‘chosen... [the] base things of the world, and things which are despised.’ Here is indeed the Highest who looks down on no creature.
However low that creature, He’s lower, He’s lower.

I find it touching and beautiful that Who I really, really am should be great enough and humble enough to play the part of one of the Witness’s regulars, and witty and humorous enough to be his one Irregular. He’s nearer to a man than his jocular vein.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and God a dull God. It’s not Him but the world of men in general (and of Counsel in particular) which takes itself so seriously, and
gets down
to things with furrowed brow. But at the Earth’s centre, where gravity’s zero, all ways out are ways up. So also at the Centre of the universe (which is where you are Who you really are), at its lowest point, gravity bottoms out and levity takes its rise. Here, God has great fun
getting up
to things, and forging the link between spirituality and humour. It’s no accident that the holy has its comic side, and the comic its holy side: the connection’s built-in from the start. The Creator’s marvellously lacking in
gravitas.
He’s
Light
- Light fantastic. P. G. Wodehouse is unlikely to be canonized just yet; but, as the future St Plum might put it, the shot’s on the board.

It’s not only the banana-skin type of humour which up-ends things. ‘The whole of human life,’ as Plato observed, ‘is turned upside-down.’ This is where the divine comes in. ‘In the way of search for God,’ Rumi tells us, ‘everything is reversed.’

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I call the great Robert Browning, who will both sum up and light up (if not clean up) my response to the Crown Prosecutor and his somewhat tacky Witness:

I but open my eyes, - and perfection, no more and no less,

In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God

In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew

(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)

The submission of man’s nothing-perfect to God’s all-complete,

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.

Prosecution Witness No. 5

THE PASSENGER

Counsel begins by reminding the Witness that, though she is in court sub poena, she is on oath. The Prosecution requires her to outline the circumstance and the extent of her knowledge of me.

She replies that we first met two years ago. She and I were members of a party of four who toured Europe by car for a month, so we got to know each other pretty well. Since then we have met occasionally and more or less by accident.

COUNSEL: Is it a fact that the Accused did most of the driving, about which he made strange claims? If so, what were those claims? And did you find that his performance at the wheel of the car justified them?

WITNESS: We went about four hundred miles, and he did all the driving. This was because he liked driving, and it was his car – a Rover – which he handled very well. Yes, he was a smooth driver, who knew instinctively how much faster than the speed limit he could drive and get away with it. Also, just when to overtake, and so on. As for his claims to be a very special sort of driver, one with an extraordinary secret, I never quite understood them or took them too seriously. If they help him to improve his performance, so much the better, say I. They’re his business, not mine or anybody else’s, and I think it’s outrageous that this court –

His Honour and Counsel simultaneously intervene to warn the Witness of the consequence of questioning the authority of the court. She is advised to continue her evidence more circumspectly, confining it to what’s called for.

In response to Counsel’s further questioning, Witness agrees, reluctantly, there was nothing special about my driving; and further, that nothing happened during the trip to suggest that one of the foursome was unique, or wielded superhuman powers of any kind, at the wheel or away from it. The car did, in fact, break down once, and the party lost its way more than once, and these difficulties were overcome by quite normal means.

WITNESS adds: All the same, my impression is that Jack’s efficiency at the wheel, and his liveliness and sense of humour, had something to do with his strange views about himself. So, I say good luck to him and them. What works that well can’t be altogether off-beam.

COUNSEL: That’s enough of your opinions. To come back to the facts: is it true that nothing happened during that tour, or has happened since, to convince you that the Accused exercises divine powers, let alone that he is himself a divine Being? Is that right?

WITNESS: Yes, but surely it’s his -

COUNSEL: No buts. Yes, or no?

WITNESS: Yes
and
no.

JUDGE: The court requires a straight answer.

WITNESS: All right then. Yes.

MYSELF, to the Witness: I have no questions for you at the moment, so please leave the box. But stay in court. I may have some for you presently.

Defence:
The Car Driver and the World Driver

MYSELF: While I accept that the Witness’s account of the trip was sincere, I have to tell the court that mine, though equally sincere, could hardly be more different.

I say we never exceeded the speed limit, and never came near it. I say we never got lost, and never broke down, and never drove four miles all told — let alone four thousand. I say we got many, many times more power out of a litre of petrol than any other car on the road. I say —

JUDGE, angrily: Did you or didn’t you go on the same tour as the Witness? And please do not waste any more of the court’s time with fantasies or riddle-me-rees.

MYSELF: Well, it was and it wasn’t the same tour. And what I just told the court happens to be a model of understatement: all gospel truth, but pitching the driver’s claim to extraordinary powers as low as possible, and couching it in the soberest language. Apparently the Witness didn’t share my breathtaking experience. I understand that. Everything depends, you see, on Who is driving.

Yes, Your Honour, I did the driving. But
Who
was this I? That’s the big question, the question
sub judice.

Look:
I’ll tell you what I did, you tell me Who did it.
I’ll describe the astounding things that happened on that trip, if you’ll explain Who’s capable of such things — a human being, or a superhuman being, or the Divine Being. I can’t speak fairer than that, can I?

My story is of a driver that you would swear was in no condition, legally or medically, to be in charge of a push-bike. There he was, slouched in the driving seat, upside down and literally off his rocker. Dangerous driving at its most lethal, you would think, made worse by the unroadworthy state of his car, with most of the rear missing. As it turned out, however, none of this mattered very much, for the car was as handicapped as the driver. In fact, it was paralytic and incapable of moving an inch. Incapable even of coasting downhill in neutral with brakes off and three pushing.

But neither my strangely dilapidated condition nor my car’s presented any difficulty, so far as transport was concerned. The countryside took care of that, and did all the moving necessary. And much, much more. The whole world was in turmoil, convulsed by quakes infinitely beyond the Richter scale. It was as if some giant troll were stirring the cosmos like a maniac, before gobbling it all up for his dinner.