by Gore Vidal
Messiah
Vidal, Gore
Penguin (1998)
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SUMMARY:
When John Cave, a mortician by trade, appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Aided by a relentless public-relations campaign and supported by a "theology" whipped into existence by a historian besotted with love for one of Cave's alluring disciples, Cave's message proves irresistible. Things really start to get out of hand, however, when the notion of "voluntary death" creeps into the doctrine and the world's population is invited to depart from life in "pleasant establishments". A deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy first published in 1954, Messiah eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and "Do", the guru of Heaven's Gate.
Messiah
by
Gore Vidal
[Dedication]
For
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
[Epigraph]
I sometimes think the day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been a man that lived on earth and about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica kerchief, but established, fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.
On that day civilization will have reached its peak and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.
November, 1861: The Goncourt Journals
Messiah
1
I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: "I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus." Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life, no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection . . . if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body's dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the west where all the kings lie buried in their pride.
I am also conscious that I lack the passion for the business of familiar life which is the central preoccupation of our race while, worse still, I have never acquired the habit of judging the usual deeds of men . . . two inconvenient characteristics which render me uncertain whenever I attempt to recall the past, confounding me sadly with the knowledge that my recollections are, after all, tentative and private and only true in part.
Then, finally, I have never found it easy to tell the truth, a temperamental infirmity due not so much to any wish or compulsion to distort reality that I might be reckoned virtuous but, rather, to a conception of the inconsequence of human activity which is ever in conflict with a profound love of those essential powers which result in human action, a paradox certainly, a dual vision which restrains me from easy judgments.
I am tempted to affirm that historic truth is quite impossible, although I am willing to accept the philosophic notion that it may exist abstractly, perfect and remote in the imagination. A windy attic filled with lovely objects has always been my personal image of those absolutes Aristotle conceived with such mellifluous optimism . . . and I have always liked the conceits of philosophy, the more extravagant the better. I am especially devoted to Parmenides who was so strenuously obsessed with the idea of totality that he was capable, finally, of declaring that nothing ever changed, that what has been must still exist if it is yet remembered and named, a metaphysical conception which will, I suspect, be of some use to me as I journey in memory back to that original crisis from which I have for so long traveled and to which, despite the peril, I must return.
I do not say, then, that what I remember is all true but I can declare that what I shall recall is a relative truth as opposed to that monstrous testament the one-half world believes, entrenching deep thereby a mission at whose birth I officiated and one whose polished legend has since become the substantial illusion of a desperate race. That both mission and illusion were false, I alone can say with certainty, with sorrow, such being the unsuspected and terrible resolution of brave days. Only the crisis, which I shall record, was real.
I have said I am not given to making judgments. That is not precise. It is true that in most "wicked" acts I have been able, with a little effort, to perceive the possibilities for good either in actual intention or (and to me more important) in uncalculated result; yet, ultimately, problems in ethics have never much concerned me: possibly because they have been the vital interest of so many others who, through custom, rule society, more agreeably than not. On that useful moral level I have been seldom, if ever, seriously engaged but once on another, more arduous plane I was forced to make a choice, to judge, to act: and act I did in such a way that I am still startled by the implications of my choice, of my life's one judgment.
I chose the light in preference to the dreamless dark, destroying my own place in the world, and then, more painful still, I chose the light in preference to that twilight region of indeterminate visions and ambiguities which most suited my nature, a realm where decision was impossible and where the potentialities of choice were endless and exquisite to contemplate. To desert these beloved ghosts and incalculable powers was the greater pain, but I have lived on, observing with ever-increasing intensity that blazing disk of fire which is the symbol as well as material source of the reality I have accepted entirely, despite the sure dominion in eternity of the dark other.
But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert gathers in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at last through ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe in man, that solemn idea which is yet called by its resonant and antique name, god.
2
Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light and, where they fell, monsters were born, hideous and blind.
The first dozen years after the second of the modern wars were indeed "a time of divination," as one religious writer unctuously described them. Not a day passed but that some omen or portent was remarked by an anxious race, suspecting war. At first, the newspapers delightedly reported these marvels, getting the details all wrong but communicating that sense of awfulness which was to increase as the years of peace uneasily lengthened until a frightened people demanded government action, the ultimate recourse in those innocent times.
Yet these omens, obsessive and ubiquitous as they were, would not yield their secret order to any known system. For instance, much of the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky was never entirely explained. And explanation, in the end, was all that the people required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was, if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet . . . if only this much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have felt secure, able in a few weeks' time to turn their attention to other problems, the visitors from farther space
forgotten. It made little difference whether these mysterious blobs of light were hallucinations, inter-galactic visitors or military weapons, the important thing was to explain them.
To behold the inexplicable was perhaps the most unpleasant experience a human being of that age could know, and during that gaudy decade many wild phenomena were sighted and recorded.
In daylight, glittering objects of bright silver maneuvered at unearthly speed over Washington, D. C., observed by hundreds, some few reliable. The government, with an air of spurious calm, mentioned weather balloons, atmospheric rejections, tricks-of-eye, hinting, to, as broadly as it dared, that a sizable minority of its citizens were probably subject to delusions and mass hysteria. This cynical view was prevalent inside the administration though it could not of course propound such a theory publicly since its own tenure was based, more or less solidly, on the franchise of those same hysterics and irresponsibles.
Shortly after the mid-point of the century, the wonders increased, becoming daily more bizarre. The recent advance in atomic research and in jet-propulsion had made the Western world disagreeably aware of other planets and galaxies and the thought that we would soon be making expeditions into space was disquieting, if splendid, giving rise to the not illogical thought that life might be developing on other worlds somewhat more brilliantly than here at home and, further, that it was quite conceivable that we ourselves might receive visitors long before our own adventuring had begun in the starry blackness which contains our life, like a speck of phosphorus in a quiet sea. And since our people were (and no doubt still are) barbarous and drenched in superstition, like the dripping "Saved" at an old-time Texas baptism, it was generally felt that these odd creatures whose shining cars flashed through our poor heavens at such speed must, of necessity, be hostile and cruel and bent on world dominion, just like ourselves or at least our geographic neighbors.
The evidence was horrific and plentiful: In Berlin a flying object of unfamiliar design was seen to land by an old farmer who was so close to it that he could make out several little men twinkling behind an arc of windows. He fled, however, before they could eat him. Shortly after his breathless announcement to the newspapers, he was absorbed by an Asiatic government whose destiny it was at that time to regularize the part of humanity fortunate enough to live within its curiously elastic boundaries, both temporal and spiritual.
In West Virginia, a creature ten feet tall, green with a red face and exuding a ghastly odor, was seen to stagger out of a luminous globe, temporarily grounded. He was observed by a woman and four boys, all of unquestionable probity; they fled before he could eat them. Later, in the company of sheriff and well-armed posse, they returned to the scene of horror only to find both monster and conveyance gone: but even the skeptical sheriff and his men could detect, quite plainly, an unfamiliar odor, sharp and sickening among the clean pines.
This particular story was unique because it was the first to describe a visitor as being larger instead of smaller than a man, a significant proof of the growing anxiety: we could handle even the cleverest little creature but something huge, and green, with an awful odor . . . it was too much.
I myself, late one night in July of the mid-century, saw quite plainly from the eastern bank of the Hudson River where I lived, two red globes flickering in a cloudless sky. As I watched, one moved to a higher point at a forty-five-degree angle above the original plane which had contained them both. For several nights I watched these eccentric twins but then, carried away by enthusiasm, I began to confuse Mars and Saturn with my magic lights until at last I thought it wise to remain indoors, except for those brief days at summer's end when I watched, as I always used to do, the lovely sudden silver arcs meteors plunging make.
In later years, I learned that, concurrently with the celestial marvels, farm communities were reporting an unusual number of calves born two-headed, chickens hatched three-legged, and lambs born with human faces; but since the somewhat vague laws of mutation were more or less well understood by the farmers these curiosities did not alarm them: an earlier generation, however, would have known, instinctively, that so many irregularities forecast an ill future, full of spite.
Eventually, all was satisfactorily explained or, quite as good, forgotten. Yet the real significance of these portents was not so much in the fact of their mysterious reality as in the profound effect they had upon a people who, despite their emphatic materialism, were as easily shattered by the unexpected as their ancestors who had, on other occasions, beheld eagles circling Capitoline Hill, observed the sky grow leaden on Golgotha, shivered in loud storms when the rain was red as blood and the wind full of toads, while in our own century, attended by a statesman-Pope, the sun did a dance over Portugal.
Considering the unmistakable nature of these signs, it is curious how few suspected the truth: that a new mission had been conceived out of the race's need, the hour of its birth already determined by a conjunction of terrible new stars. It is true of course that the established churches duly noted these spectacular happenings and, rather slyly, used them to enhance that abstract power from which their own mystical but vigorous authority was descended. The more secular, if no less mystical, dogmas . . . descended variously from an ill-tempered social philosopher of the nineteenth century and an energetic, unreasonably confident mental therapist, also a product of that century's decline . . . maintained, in the one case, that fireworks had been set off by vindictive employers to bedazzle the poor workers for undefined but patently wicked ends, and, in the other case, that the fiery objects represented a kind of atavistic recessional to the childish world of marvels; a theory which was developed even further in a widely quoted paper by an ingenious disciple of the dead therapist. According to this worthy, the universe was the womb in symbol and the blazing lights which many people thought they saw were only a form of hallucination, harking back to some prenatal memory of ovaries bursting with a hostile potential life which would, in time, become sibling rivals. The writer demanded that the government place all who had seen flying objects under three years' close observation to determine to what extent sibling rivalry, or the absence of it (the proposition worked equally well either way) had affected them in life.
Although this bold synthesis was universally admired and subsequently read into the Congressional Record by a lady Representative who had herself undergone nine years' analysis with striking results, the government refused to act.
3
But although nearly every human institution took cognizance of these signs and auguries, none guessed the truth, and those few individuals who had begun to suspect what might be happening preferred not to speak out; if only because, despite much private analysis and self-questioning, it was not a time in which to circulate ideas which might prove disagreeable to any minority, no matter how lunatic. The body politic was more than usually upset by signs of non-conformity. The atmosphere was not unlike that of Britain during the mad hour of Titus Oates.
Precisely why my countrymen behaved so frantically is a problem for those historians used to the grand, eternal view of human events. I have often thought, though, that much of our national irritability was closely related to the unexpected and reluctant custody of the world the second war had pressed upon the confused grandchildren of a proud, agrarian, isolated people, both indifferent and strange to the ways of other cultures.
More to the point, however, was the attitude of our intellectuals who constituted at this time a small, militantly undistinguished minority, directly descended in spirit if not in fact from that rhetorical eighteenth-century Swiss whose romantic and mystical love for humanity was magically achieved through a somewhat obsessive preoccupation with himself. His passion for self-analysis flourished in our mid-century, at least among the articulate few who were capable of analysis and who, in time, like their great ancestor, chose the ear of the world for their confessional.
Men of letters lugubriously described their own deviations (usually political or sexual, seldom aest
hetic), -while 'painters worked devotedly at depicting unique inner worlds which were not accessible to others except in a state of purest empathy hardly to be achieved without a little fakery in a selfish world. It was, finally, the accepted criterion that art's single function was the fullest expression of a private vision . . . which was true enough though the visions of men lacking genius are not without a certain gloom. Genius, in this time, was quite as rare as in any other and, to its credit, it was not a self-admiring age . . . critics found merit only in criticism, a singular approach which was to amuse the serious for several decades. Led by artists, the intellectuals voiced their guilt at innumerable cocktail parties where it was accepted as an article of faith that each had a burden of guilt which could, once recognized, be exorcised; the means of recognition were expensive but rewarding: a trained and sympathetic listener would give the malaise a name and reveal its genesis; then, through confession (and occasionally "reliving") the guilt would vanish along with asthma, impotence and eczema. The process, of course, was not easy. To facilitate therapy, it became the custom among the cleverer people to set aside all the traditional artifices of society so that both friends and strangers could confess to one another their worst deeds, their most squalid fantasies in a series of competitive monologues conducted with arduous sincerity and surprisingly successful on every level but that of communication.
I am sure that this sort of catharsis was not entirely valueless: many of the self-obsessed undoubtedly experienced relief when dispensing secrets . . . it was certainly an instructive shock for them to find that even their most repellent aberrations were accepted quite perfunctorily by strangers too intent on their own problems to be outraged, or even very interested. This discovery was not always cheering. There is a certain dignity and excitement in possessing a dangerous secret life. To lose it in maturity is hard . . . and once promiscuously shared, it does become ordinary, no more troublesome than obvious dentures.
