On God: An Uncommon Conversation Read online

  Jean Malaquais once made a splendid remark—at least for me—during the course of a lecture. He was a brilliant lecturer, and in the middle of a verbal flight—this was at the New School—some kid said bitterly, “You never give us answers. You only pose questions.” And Jean stopped in the full flight of his rhetoric and replied, “There are no answers. There are only questions.”

  The point is that the purpose of life may be to find higher and better questions. Why? Because what I believe—this is wholly speculative but important to me—is that we are here as God’s work, here to influence His future as well as ours. We are God’s expression, and not all artworks are successful. But we are here because God has a vision of existence that is at odds with other visions of existence in the universe. There we get into the real question of cosmic hegemonies. There may be a majordomo at the core, maybe not. There may be gods—the heavens may be analogous to pagan times. These gods are fighting for dominance over one another.

  So we come back once more to “Where is the ethic?” And again I return to trusting the authority of our senses. What now do I mean by that? Isn’t it true that as we free ourselves of false conceptions of what life might be, as we free ourselves of the maxims and injunctions other people have put into us from childhood, as we come to have a better sense of “whatever I am, I am beginning to have my own ideas,” you can also develop some instinct that one is doing the right thing or one is not. Or, all too often, one is not doing much. As we get older, “Not much at all” can take over most of our lives. If I am doing a crossword puzzle, there is no high motive necessarily involved. Instead, the activity might be to some most modest degree on the side of evil—I’m consuming time that could be spent in better ways. Or, to the contrary, I might be preparing my system to get ready for something worthwhile. It’s not a large question: I do the crossword puzzle, and I don’t think about it as good or evil. And I don’t think of myself as good or evil so much as probably leaning slightly in the right direction or the wrong one when it comes down to how I am exercising my time.

  So if you ask where the ethic is at any moment, it can be no more than that one is the resultant of all the forces that are in you as that vector confronts all the forces supporting you and opposing you. It’s as if we live in a triangular relationship with God and the Devil, trying to sense the best thing to do at a given moment, be it a good thing or a bad thing. Let me go back to what might have been my lone visitation from the Lord. What God might have been trying to tell me was, “Get over this notion of good, right, proper. Because very often when you’re moving in a direction you think improper, you might be helping Me more than when you’re trying to be proper. Because when you’re trying to be proper, you could be poisoning yourself with frustrated annoyance that makes you a colder person and of less use to Me.”

  What I’m offering to people as an ethic is to have the honor to live with confusion. Live in the depths of confusion with the knowledge back of that, the certainty back of that—or the belief, the hope, the faith, whatever you wish to call it—that there is a purpose to it all, that it is not absurd, that we are all engaged in a vast cosmic war and God needs us. That doesn’t mean we can help God by establishing a set of principles to live by. We can’t. Why not? Because the principles vary. The cruelest obstacle to creating one’s own ethic is that no principle is incorruptible. Indeed, to cleave to a principle is to corrupt oneself. To shift from one principle to another can, however, be promiscuous. Life is not simple. Ethics are almost incomprehensible, but they exist. There is a substratum of moderate, quiet, good feeling. Generally, if I’m doing things in such a way that the sum of all my actions at the moment seems to be feasible and responsible and decent, that certainly gives me a better feeling than if I am uneasy, dissatisfied with myself, and not liking myself.

  Now, obviously, there is room for error. We all know about vanity. There are people who, when they like themselves, are dangerous. When they think they are extraordinary and fabulous, they can be awful.

  So it isn’t so much that you have no ethical system but one that cannot be abstracted nor carved on tablets for people to carry around and consult whenever they have to make a decision. Life is always more complicated than any rule that can be laid down.

  What I’m asking for…. This is an odd analogy, but not entirely. There are certain people who worship sex, good sex. I might be one of them. What I’ve noticed about good sex, when it’s really good, is the extreme sensitivity with which you proceed. At a given moment, it’s a creative dance. There is such a thing as a pure act of love when every moment is distinctive and lovely and fine. That does happen. For most people, it happens so rarely that they remember it—and then remember it and remember it. A sense of perfection does live in our concept of sex.

  In the same way, sometimes, for short periods in our lives, I think there’s an analogous sense of perfection to all sorts of basic emotions—in love, in nurture, in caring for people, in grieving, in mourning. It’s very hard to mourn, mourn openly and honestly. Mourning is an element in people’s lives that can be duplicitous, even ugly. Take a wife who’s been married to a man for forty years—and in her mourning, what if she detects a secret spot of glee? “That selfish bastard is finally gone.” So mourning can be shocking for people because they discover sides of themselves they never knew existed—or the reverse. Sometimes people die whom you thought you didn’t care that much about, and you discover you have lost something or someone valuable to you. So there is the constant element of discovering yourself—not in the time-consuming way people do in psychoanalysis, where every little act has to be analyzed and reanalyzed until the air in the room is stale. Rather, just like making love, it’s a matter of being sensitive to the moment, reflecting the moment as best you can. And that is not an easy matter. You want a few general ethical principles from me? Remarks I’d even offer to a stranger? Well, then, if possible, I would say to the stranger, “Give up smoking.” Because that tends to block a good deal of sensitivity in yourself. It serves the will. I used to smoke two packs a day—why? Because it served my will, particularly when it came to writing. Took me a year to learn how to begin writing again once I did give it up. Perhaps I became a better writer. My point is, anything that will enable you to get closer to yourself, good or bad…in other words, being close to oneself can be much more unpleasant than being at a distance from oneself. That is why most people do choose, indeed, to be a bit removed from themselves. And so often—here’s the dirty little secret—that’s why they smoke.

  But you know, I remember something else you said about getting close to yourself. It’s stuck with me. I don’t even remember where you said it—you might have brought it up in conversation—but you declared: “If you dig deep enough into yourself, you’re going to come out your asshole.”

  [N.M. laughs]

  In other words, yes, there are doors, and you must open many of those doors, and the ensuing doors within doors, but every once in a while you want to be careful about what you open.

  Well, of course, you have to be careful about certain doors. Anyone who flings everything ajar at once would be blown away. A mighty change could rage through all the rooms in your psyche. One of the most jealously self-protective elements in human nature may be to protect oneself from one’s own dark and barricaded corners.

  So I don’t think it’s a real problem that we’re going to open, by mistake, all the doors at once—we don’t. We can’t. What I meant by the closer you get to yourself, the closer you are to coming out of your own asshole has to do with something I’d like to attach to this discussion concerning the nature of defecation, shit, and waste. It may be worth getting into. As a small premise, think of people who are terribly prudish about evacuation. They don’t want to think about it, don’t talk about it, it’s beneath them, they hope it is terribly far away from them. I’d say, ethically speaking, that’s not a comfortable way to be. Far better that when you’re sitting on the throne—parenthetically, it’s int
eresting that we have that metaphor, “the throne,” precisely for the toilet—when you’re sitting on the throne, you do well to be regal about it and enjoy the sniffs of your own waste. Smell your own shit and decide for yourself if you’re a little more healthy or a little more unhealthy than you thought you were the last time you sat down. That’s part of being close to yourself. You take this notion that what comes out of you may be unpleasant, but it is certainly real. It can be the nearest we come to a fact. It’s like hearing your own voice unexpectedly—so often it’s too shrill, too arrogant, too peremptory, too spoiled, or harsh. To the degree we can hear our own voice, we improve our relations with other people. Because if we find our own voice unpleasant at times, then if the other person starts shrieking at us, we don’t have to think, “How unstable is the other.” Not if we can recognize that our own voice was ugly enough to incite the response.

  That’s one of the elements in a decent marriage.

  This being attuned and listening and paying attention to the self…as you were speaking, I kept thinking, “This is positively Jamesian.” James would sense the tiniest shifts in perception. Now, he probably wasn’t interested in smelling shit very much—not at all.

  That may have been his one major deficiency. [Laughter]

  A while ago, you were hammering on Revelation as something to be rejected by human experience. In your view, is there any merit or value in the holy books of the great religions, or do you think they should be seen as historical artifacts, quaint, useless curiosities?

  No, no.

  What is their use then?

  Well, if they’re seen as general principles rather than as absolute dicta, they can be of great use. The Ten Commandments—most of us do react within the framework of those ten injunctions. The point is not to build up an inner sense of self-righteousness—“I obey the Ten Commandments, and therefore I am nearer to God.” No, they are crude guides. “Do not kill.” Well, yes, do not kill. Does that mean you have to piss in your pants if you have a gun in your hand and you’re face-to-face with Adolf Hitler in 1941? No, you kill him. At that point, I would not consider “Do not kill” an absolute command.

  Let’s go through the Ten Commandments: Most of them are so simple they apply to 90 percent of the cases. But you have some…Do not commit adultery.” Well, there it can become more complex. Because when people are engaged in miserable marriages, their lives are foul; their children’s lives are poisoned. And at a given moment, there’s an impulse to escape, to commit adultery in order to avoid doing worse things, like screaming too much at the kids.

  Where the Ten Commandments fall down is that there are times you have to do something deemed worse than what you’re supposed to do. Because if you don’t do that something worse, you’re going to get into actions even more destructive, more evil, more unhappy, more toxic to others.

  So you’re not interested in jettisoning the great holy books of the world; you just want to qualify them.

  Not qualify. I want us to cease looking upon them slavishly. Once one becomes a peon to any part of one’s mind, one is then open to the dark side of the moon, which is mass destruction.

  Your position is very much like Emerson’s. He revered Jesus, he was interested in all the holy books, but he certainly wasn’t going to be bound by them. His own quest for his inner self, very much like yours, precluded that.

  I’ve read Emerson but only in passing, and that for a simple reason. One, I think he’s a great writer, and two, I did feel close enough to him to think, “If I study him, I could end up trying to write wonderful pieces about Emerson.” My arrogance, my vanity, if you will, is that I am out on my own explorations. I’ve had that rare experience, probably analogous to Emerson’s, of being successful enough at an early age not to worry about making a living the way other people do. In return for that blessing, the least I could do was spend my time thinking. I have had such an advantage, and it’s an enormous one, and I’m aware of it. I’m happy I’m aware of it because it keeps me modest rather than vain. There were years when I was much too vain, and I have paid for that. Vanity is corrosive.

  There are a few generalities you can count on—vanity is immensely dangerous. But nothing is absolute. Vanity may be terribly important for people who don’t have enough of it, even as it’s injurious to people who have too much. But then the notion of moderation that comes to us from the Greeks can also be stultifying. If you apply it to dangerous activities, however, it becomes interesting. What is moderation for a top-notch race-car driver? What’s moderation to a libertine? Well, you don’t have to pursue every last fuck that’s open to you. What’s the mark of moderation in a womanizer, a groper? He doesn’t have to feel every woman’s ass he’s inclined to explore. He looks to be discriminating. When action is high, the road back to balance is discrimination.

  A phrase comes to mind—I’m sure you won’t like it—that, crudely speaking, applies to a lot of what you’ve been saying, and that’s “situation ethics.”

  You mean: “Do the right thing.” It’s a maxim often used by black kids. First, what does “do the right thing” mean? The kids are talking then about situations fewer whites have considered in their full complexity. You’re a drug dealer, and you’re cutting your stuff, and there’s a customer who, on the one hand, is a fool—you can take him completely and give him something close to plain talcum powder. On the other hand, you can see he really needs a drug at that moment. So “do the right thing”—don’t cut his stuff to a ridiculous level. Lose a little of the profit.

  At every level of human existence, no matter how evil certain activities may seem to others, there is a caution present along with the ugly impulse (except, of course, for those rare occasions when the unholy impulse takes over entirely). But short of such moments, I would say that even very unpleasant people will hold back on certain occasions because we all do have this sense of “do the right thing.”

  My basic argument is that ethics is not a system of rules—as you said, not something you can etch in stone. Ethics is a sensitivity to the moment and the thought: “This is probably better to do than that.” It could even come down to calculation: You’re bilking someone in a deal. But if you’re going to bilk him, better not to do it in too ugly a manner, or you’ll increase his desire to take advantage of others. So what’s your ethos at that moment? It’s to reduce ugliness in the world system—by a little.

  In one of our earlier conversations, you spoke of a time in the distant future when, after some “definitive metamorphosis of existence,” human vision would join God’s vision—perhaps—and travel across the heavens.

  When did I say that?

  In one of our earlier conversations.

  Was that toward the end of Ancient Evenings or in Of a Fire on the Moon?

  Elements of that were there. You were looking around the corner, so to speak; you were anticipating, rare for you, how things might possibly turn out. A “definitive metamorphosis of existence” was part of the phrase, as I recall. Human nature would shift into a completely different level; human vision would become married with God’s and, I assume, would then split off from the demonic. At that point, something would happen—we would “travel across the heavens.”

  Well, that’s apocalyptic. I do not see any way we’re going to separate drastically or quickly from the Devil as well as from God.

  So you would not see—

  At present, I am more concerned that we do not destroy ourselves.

  What would be the necessary conditions for this metamorphosis of existence to happen? What would human beings have to become?

  Some of it may be obvious: more and then even more self-awareness. More freedom from Fundamentalism. More readiness for humans to accept the heroic demand that they stop leaning on God, stop relying on God, and start realizing that God’s needs could be greater than ours, God’s woes more profound than our own. God’s sense of failure may be so deep as to mock our sense of failure. God, I believe, is, at present, far fr
om fulfilling His own vision. He is mired in our corporate promotions all over the globe, our superhighways, our plastic, our threats of nuclear warfare, our heartless, arrogant, ethnic wars, our terrorism, our spread of pollution all over His environment. How can God’s sorrow not be immeasurably greater than ours?

  Before we can approach any thoughts of apocalypse, we have to become human enough, brave enough, to recognize that we cannot rely on God. Rely too much on God, and we are comparable to a tremendously selfish child who drives a parent into exhaustion, deadens the parent through endless demands. “Save me! God, please, can I have that beautiful dress I want for the high school prom? Thank you, God, deliver it to me, God.” [Pause] “If you don’t, God, I’ll be angry at you,” is the underlying element in so many of the prayers. Or the abject beseechment—“God, have pity on me, I’m a poor worm.”

  I think we become a hint more heroic if we recognize that we do have to stand on our own. So I can feel a certain respect for atheists. I have huge disagreements with them—the first might be the absolute refusal of a majority to consider the notion of karma for even a moment. Or any kind of Hereafter—their determined intensity that there will be nothing after life. This creates its own sort of trouble. It fortifies the liberal notions that we have to take care of people we know nothing about and enter strange countries and provide them with democracy, whether they desire it or not. Needless to say, Christians have been doing the same for a long time.

  I have a tremendous distrust of what people think is the good. At any given moment, 90 percent of that is fashion. The war in Iraq is a perfect example of fashion—the bright idea that we are there to inject democracy into any country that needs it. That was a political fashion; it had no real basis in political reality. Of course, it can be done, you can always inject some warped form of democracy into a country if you have enough troops and are ready to ignore the cost.