Our year in New York had started quietly but ended violently. As well as waging an unjust war abroad in Vietnam, America was fighting a just war at home to give African Americans the civil rights they had been denied for centuries. On 4 April Martin Luther King was assassinated. City after city went up in smoke. The explosion of rioting provoked an eruption in America’s universities and colleges, and one of its epicentres was at Columbia. A tamer version of Columbia’s sit-in was staged at Union, though it was violent enough to catapult a number of professors into nervous breakdowns. I took part in the debates that convulsed the community, but I was more dismayed than stimulated by what I witnessed. I was surprised at how suddenly sane and rational people could resort to verbal and physical violence. The revolt seemed more like a bout of religious apocalyptic fever than a movement for planned reform. It had the manic energy but none of the poignancy of the Ghost Dance religion that swept American Indian reservations in 1889. The ghost dancers believed that if they danced long and hard enough all white people would be submerged under a deep layer of new earth, the buffalo would return to the great plains, and all the Indians who had ever lived would come back to life, and the land would become a paradise.57 Tragically, the dancers achieved nothing but more sorrow for their suffering people. Just as tragically, the apocalyptic extremists of 1968 only succeeded in stoking up the boilers of hate that are never exactly cool in America anyway. When the protests finally ended, their leader wrote an open letter to the President of Columbia in which he quoted from a piece of graffiti that had been scrawled in the mathematics department during the occupation: ‘Up against the wall motherfucker, this is a stick-up!’
My love of the movies had caused me to romanticise American violence. The events of 1968 made me realise how ugly it was, yet how intrinsic to the America way and how quickly Americans turned to the gun to resolve disagreements. I started collecting stories about their love of firearms. One of them haunts me still. Throughout that year the New York Times ran a series of stories about the culture wars that were convulsing the nation. In one story they reported how a girl in Arizona had spent a night with a married serviceman at the local airbase. To punish her, her father drove her and her pet dog into the desert. When they got out of the car, he pulled a shotgun from the trunk and ordered her to shoot the dog through the head. She wept and begged for mercy. She was sorry. She would never do it again. He was without pity. ‘Take the gun and shoot the goddamn dog!’ She took the gun and blew her own brains out.
The violence that swept America in 1968 provoked a change in Robert Kennedy. A normally combative and divisive politician, he travelled the country calling for a healing of the nation. Wherever he went in his campaign, he recalled how the US had uprooted and corrupted the original inhabitants of the land it had stolen. Quoting from Greek tragedy, he pleaded with his listeners ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.’ It looked like he might win. He took the California Primary. ‘On to Chicago,’ he cried, as he left the Embassy Room to be led out of the Ambassador Hotel through the kitchen. That’s where they shot him. That’s why we were weeping in the cathedral that afternoon, weeping for our failure to make gentle the life of the world.
And that’s why, sitting on the train drawing out of San Francisco the following morning, I’d had it with the human lust for paradises. Humanity’s longing for them was its most dangerous drug. Why couldn’t we settle for making the world not perfect, but less savage and more gentle?
I know the things I’ve lost are so many that I could not begin to count them
and that those losses
now, are all I have . . .
Only those who have died are ours, only what we have lost is ours . . . There are no paradises other than lost paradises.58
I settled myself in my seat as the train trundled out of the station. For a while I looked out of the window, enjoying the melancholy reverie train travel always induces in me. Then I picked up one of the books I had brought along for the ride, Arthur Koestler’s novel about purges and persecutions in Soviet Russia, Darkness at Noon. The epigraph was from Dostoevsky: ‘Man, man, one cannot live quite without pity.’ I put the book down and looked out of the window again. One cannot live quite without pity. Surely that was the key to understanding human hatred. Hatred was an absence of pity. Graham Greene had said something like it. When you looked at other men and women, ‘you could always begin to feel pity. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination’.59 That is true, but it is pity that does the imagining. Pity is sorrow at another’s sorrow, pain at another’s pain. To feel another’s sorrow! That has to be the way out of the predicament of human hatred. Pity! Yet it is a word some despise. And not just revolutionaries and ideologues for whom pity is always treason, because it blunts the edge of cruelty, their chosen weapon. Pity is despised because it is seen as demeaning to the one pitied. Poor little sufferer! How I pity her! But that is not the tone of real pity. Pity is an identification with the other so profound that you enter her sorrow, even if she is someone you have been taught to despise. It is this that makes pity the antidote to evil. In spite of its colourful reputation, evil is an absence, a deprivation, the lack of something, a great emptiness. What the evil person lacks is the ability to identify with the other’s humanity. It is a lack of imagination. In order to hurt others we have to rob them of their humanity, refuse to see them as like ourselves, refuse to notice the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth. We have to make them objects not selves, otherise them! We have to do the precise opposite of what pity does, which is to humanise them, make us, almost helplessly, feel what they feel, grieve when they grieve, sorrow over their sorrow. Dostoevsky was right. We cannot live without pity. The more I thought about it, the more amazing was the revolutionary energy behind that beautiful little word. It even sounded lovely. I liked the way Hopkins used it: ‘My own heart let me more have pity on.’60
And that was my second thought. That maybe we had to pity ourselves in order to pity others. Did that follow? Was it another clue? That hatred of others begins in hatred of ourselves? That felt right too. What we hate in others is often what we refuse to pity in ourselves. Was that behind the story of the angry man in the Arizona desert? Wanting to destroy the dog of his own desires, he kills pity instead? I’d noticed this reversal in myself while I lived in Accra. Dismayed by my own sexual longings, ashamed of them, I’d been critical of Africa’s relaxed attitude to sex and its humorous indifference to white hang-ups on the subject. Longing for that freedom for myself and lacking the courage to embrace it, I had condemned it in others. That was an old song. One cannot live quite without pity for ourselves! There was a theme in the Bible along the same line. It had been quoted to me by gentle confessors to whom I had taken my struggles. They would get me to read Psalm 103:
The Lord is full of compassion and mercy: long-suffering and of great goodness. He will not always be chiding: neither keepeth he his anger forever.
For he knoweth whereof we are made: he remembereth that we are but dust.
He remembereth that we are but dust. Those were the words that always got me. Conjured out of nothing, as we are, mere dust, how can we expect much of ourselves? Well, maybe we can, in time, but we must first remember whereof we are made. Dust, but knowing dust, aware of our own complex finitude. It kept coming back to pity, the ability to identify with the other, especially the despised other. There didn’t seem to be enough pity in America, I thought, as I looked out of the window. That’s probably why they’d been able to settle this vast continent so ruthlessly. Could they have done it any other way? Maybe.
Maybe? That was another disarming word, another word that dampened the kindling of hate. Maybe! It’s not a punishing kind of word, like Conviction or Certainty or Right or Wrong or Infidel or Enemy or Truth or Creed or Inquisition or Empire or Revolution or Purge or Motherfucker. Peo
ple have killed with those words on their lips. In the name of the great demand that has taken possession of their souls, they have descended upon the affections and eccentricities of others and obliterated the frail habitations they sheltered in. Always they have done this through the violence of the word before the violence of the deed. The word has to come first. In the beginning is always the word. The violent word always precedes the violent act. Get the word right and we’ll do anything in its name. The fixed and certain word is lethally effective. This is why the people of the Maybe are ineffective. They lack persecutory certainty, because they are too aware of their own weaknesses and confusions to punish others for theirs. Maybe the compulsion to impose their values on others has been undermined by the pity they feel for them, even as they feel it for themselves. And maybe things go wrong with us as often as they do because we try to live quite without pity. Maybe we should try to build our politics and religions on pliant and yielding words not on hard and killing words. Words like pity and maybe. It’s a pity the people of the maybe are so few. Pity-maybe-pity-maybe-pity-maybe-pity-maybe went the descant of the wheels as the train rolled on.
I am a reader, especially in trains, but I spent most of that journey looking out of the window in a dazed reverie. Moodily, I got off the train at Flagstaff and into my rented Pontiac. I found my way to Highway 163 and the Navajo Nation Reservation and Monument Valley. I did not intend to take one of the guided tours. Nor did I plan to spend the night in the guest house in the reservation. All I wanted to do was stand and look. I wanted the sense of distance. At the agency office I took the deal that let me drive further into the great space for about fifteen miles. Then I got out of the car and looked across the vivid red emptiness to those spectacular eruptions away in the distance. The startling thing about them is the way they suddenly lift themselves out of the desert as if they’ve just punched themselves through the surface – yet they look as if they’ve been there for ever. But they were hard for me to connect with, apart from the images of stage coaches and cavalry forts my Bank Street memories conjured up.
The impossibility of uniting yourself to a landscape was a sorrow I well understood. I had felt it often in the hills of Scotland, though there I could at least move my feet across the mystery and possess it in that way. I knew I could never do that here. It was not the sort of terrain I could ever feel at home in. The dryness. The heat. The hallucinatory power of the distances. The otherness of it all stunned me. I have always loved the American word lonesome. There’s more to it than the English lonely. A deeper undertow of sadness to it. I felt lonesome out there at the edge of the trail in Monument Valley. A beautiful American word for the human condition. I was homesick for Jean and the girls. My train to Chicago was three days away in Santa Fe. I got back in the car and headed for Santa Fe. When I got there, the town was too glossy for my mood, but it gave me the song that still carries the memories of that trip. The night before the train back to Chicago I went to the movies. A nice old-fashioned picture house, the Regal. Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair. It was a slick, enjoyable thriller, but it was the Legrand and Bergman theme song that stayed with me.
Round,
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever-spinning reel . . .
Like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind!
On the train back to Chicago, looking out the window of the elegant Santa Fe Railway car, I was contemplating another departure, making another circle in the windmill of my mind.
Early in 1968, well installed at Union, living with Jean and the girls a block from Broadway in an apartment at 49 Claremont Avenue, with frequent weekend visits to the Kennedys in South Orange in a tough old car Jean’s father had bought for us to make the visits easier, I got a letter from Ken Carey, the Bishop of Edinburgh. He wondered if I’d be interested in becoming Rector of Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh. If so, could I get away for a few days to meet the Vestry, the management committee of the congregation.
I knew Old Saint Paul’s a bit. When I was sixteen, at the beginning of one Easter vacation, travelling overnight with Aeneas Mackintosh – my fellow Scot at Kelham – we got off the train at Waverley at seven in the morning. We had a couple of hours to kill before his train to Inverness and mine to the Vale of Leven. There’s an interesting church up there, he said, pointing to the cliff of buildings that rose outside the station above platform 11. It’s called Old Saint Paul’s, and they should be starting the early mass soon. Want to come? We checked our cases at Left Luggage and made our way out of the Market Street exit and walked under North Bridge into Jeffrey Street. Aeneas challenged me to a race up the steep dirty steps of Carrubber’s Close. He won. Out of breath, we opened a little side door halfway up the close and stepped into the gloomy building. I’d never been in the church before, but I knew it was a homecoming. It was dark. An expectant darkness, a darkness that held something back even as it welcomed me. I saw seven white lights glinting in the distance, but we turned immediately under a small archway, through a dusty curtain, into a little chapel to the left of the side door. The chapel was in darkness, except for the glow of a golden reredos behind the altar, where a server was lighting the candles for mass. We were in the Lady Chapel, which sat a few steps above the nave of the church like a lifeboat strapped to a liner. A tall white-haired priest celebrated the mass. He invited us back to the rectory for breakfast. Lauder House was just along Jeffrey Street. We had porridge in a dining room shadowed by the tenements that crowded against the side of the house. I said little, but Aeneas charmed Father Lockhart and his curates with stories of Kelham eccentrics. It remained a potent memory in which the colours were smoky grey and black, like the platform scene in Brief Encounter.
This was where Ken Carey hoped to establish me on our return from America that autumn. It would mean leaving Gorbals, but the idea of Old Saint Paul’s excited me. I flew back from New York for a brief visit that March, and was interviewed by the Vestry in the Clerk’s apartment in Chessel’s Court. I was offered and accepted the parish. It was agreed that I’d start in September when we were due back in Scotland. The Bishop was happy. We’ll have to do something about the house, he said, the worst rectory in the diocese, ice cold, and in the coldest street in the city. They’re talking about selling it and finding somewhere else. I didn’t say anything. I already liked the house and thought it liked me. I brought some books about Edinburgh back to Jean, who would be coming to a city she did not know and a house she had never inspected, all twenty ice-cold rooms of it.
But that was not all that was going through my mind on the train back to Chicago. I was thinking about writing a book. My scepticism towards the revolutionaries at Columbia, and my dismay at the violence that had disfigured America that summer, had provoked contradictory responses in me. In spite of my threnody on pity and uncertainty on the train between Los Angeles and Flagstaff, the conservative bit of me was reaching back to a more settled and certain theology. The conservative mind believes that the only way to contain the unruly wills and affections of sinful men is through strong, stable and ruthless institutions that are prepared to sacrifice the individual for the greater and more enduring good of the community. And the Church was one of the most important of these restraining structures. Its pessimism about human nature, balanced by the offer of a redeemed and perfected life beyond death which, to a limited but real degree, could be foreshadowed and experienced here and now, gave it a great story to tell a humanity perplexed by its own fears and longings. I began to worry that the liberal theology that had destabilised me and others in the early Sixties would only succeed in dismantling the walls that had been carefully built to protect us against our own inner chaos.
The fundamental difficulty is that all religious systems and the claims they make for themselves are as fragile – and sometimes as beautiful – as the floating villages of the S
outh China Sea. The word faith is the giveaway. The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty. Where you have certainty, you don’t need faith. I am certain that 2+2=4. I can do the two-times table on my desk with paper clips. Faith never comes into it. But if I ever require heart surgery I’ll need faith to enter the operating theatre, faith in the surgeon who will cut me open and do things to my heart. Inevitably there will be some doubt in me when I submit to the knife. Will I be one of the tiny percentage who do not survive the operation? There’s a chance of that, but I’ll trust the surgeon to get it right, and I’ll go under the anaesthetic expecting to wake up again in a few hours. But I cannot be certain. Ordinary living is full of these acts of faith, and most of them are, to some extent, quantifiable. We can figure the odds by checking the background of the person we are putting our trust in. In the case of the surgeon I must have faith in, I can check his success record for open-heart surgery before submitting to his knife.
Unlike those everyday acts of faith, religious faith is based on a massive, unquantifiable hunch. But it is not the existence of God. You can get somewhere with that hypothesis by thinking about it, as I have already tried to show, and deciding to take the leap or not. Christianity and other revealed religions go much, much further than that. They claim that the God so hypothesised has intervened in history and done things that we are called upon to believe. We have shifted from a probable or improbable hypothesis – the existence of God – to hard historic claims about God’s actions in time. The fact that these claims are endlessly disputed within religion itself shows that even believers are far from possessing certainty – which is why they still need faith or trust. Say we decide to make the necessary act of trust: we are still like the man on the trolley being wheeled into the theatre – we cannot be certain. Faith, by definition, always implies doubt. There can be something admirable, something worth doing, in the decision to believe – but it never gives us certainty! And here’s the catch. Revealed religions tend to blow a smokescreen round the living reality of the faith–doubt experience and out of the smoke emerges – doctrinal certainty! Behind a great clatter of mirrors and a great fog of smoke they move from faith to certainty. Believers are not encouraged to take the plunge of faith, they are invited to swear to the certainty of a series of historic claims that come in propositional form. That is why religious history is so full of disputes over competing interpretations of the certainties contained in the faith package. I have already mentioned the diary of Edward VI who noted the execution of Joan Bocher, precisely because she refused to accept one of these claims – the Virgin Birth – as a historical fact. Once we get to this stage in the evolution of religious institutions we are no longer playing the ancient game of faith. We are no longer saying, let us suppose that God exists and Jesus is his revealed meaning and live in faith as though it were true. We cannot know any of this for certain, but there is beauty in the choice and it will give our lives a purpose, and maybe pay the universe a compliment it does not deserve. Care to join the experiment? Care to do the insane and lovely thing? That bracing approach disappears, and is replaced with oaths sworn upon the truth package of absolute religion.
Leaving Alexandria Page 16
