by Arthur Japin
Finally, He decides the time is ripe to make mankind equal to the gods once and for all. He gives them ten commandments reducing everything to good and bad. For one, He tells them, they will be rewarded; for the other, punished. To make absolutely certain, He writes them down clearly, so that they can be referred to for all eternity without any room for misunderstanding.
The narrow constriction of everything human gives rise to humanity’s realization of sin. Suddenly, people have a name for the things it has been their nature to feel. Now that emotions are no longer free, humanity is forced to think, and human nature is forevermore limited by reason. Dammed by the mind, the human heart will never overflow again.
And so, with disease, famine, and tyranny, He drives his creatures forward, according to the time-honored principle of the American action movie, in which each obstacle forces the fleeing hero to new feats that he never otherwise would have achieved. Our hero discovers new possibilities in himself and, after a messy adventure, sees the error of his ways, and stands on the threshold of a new existence, a happy ending that until then had been clouded in deep gloom.
Humanity does not shape its history from freedom, but by accepting each new challenge in order to shake off the fetters of the previous chapter.
He confines us in the smallest possible space in the hope that there, finally, immobile as Joseph in his cell, we will finally understand what we are dreaming of.
Man Limits God
Reason is what finally did Him in. Maybe God shouldn’t have entrusted His commandments to stone. By recording His ideas, He gave mankind one for himself.
As soon as people became convinced that sin emerged from a contained, irrational part of their nature, a region not governed by the rules God had established, they started attempting to rationalize everything their mind couldn’t grasp. Whatever was beyond their limited intelligence, they tried to cut down to size.
Of all the things that are all but incomprehensible to the human mind, the divine is undoubtedly the least tangible. Intangible is irrational, and the irrational leads to sin. So they tried to capture God in words.
His miracles, which they first heard in the sighing of the wind and saw in every budding tree, they tried to comprehend, a procedure akin to insisting on knowing the structure of the chemicals in which it was developed before sitting down to enjoy the film. First, in the heavens, they fix the hitherto mysterious stars, linking one to the other with lines that stretch like ropes and bind objects, one near, one far, that once floated free in infinity, compressing them into a constellation. Then, with these lines, they draw signs: no longer intangible, the stars now resemble animals, familiar objects. In this way, people appropriate the universe for themselves, as something that belongs to them, and no longer to another world.
But the signs of the zodiac still move too freely across the skies. They attempt to determine their paths and, like a tracker who has studied the habits of his prey, they capture the celestial bodies just as they snare wild animals with nets and lassos to tame them for farmwork. Finally, and for all time, they ascertain the paths the stars trace through the skies, interpreting them and believing that this is a way to read their future.
They treat all phenomena that arouse their curiosity just as they minimize heavenly wonders, reducing everything to proportions they can grasp. Even the birds of the air can no longer fly where they will. Unable to bear this reminder of their own former unboundedness, people cage them and gut them in the hope of reducing the incomprehensible to something that can be divined from a handful of innards.
Around this time, painters in the churches around Emilia Romagna reduce the features of the majestic Christ above the altar to those of a man in the throes of death. They change the radiant Madonna into a Mater Dolorosa. Now saints are saddled with the mug of the butcher or the baker up the street.
Yet the more they try to increase their understanding of themselves by reducing life to human proportions, ever smaller and ever more complicated, the less they see of the divine as they remember it, which was simple and overwhelming. Afraid perhaps that the memory of their own creation might elude them, they begin to reduce to words everything they can recall of the miraculous.
First, they describe their origin as they remember it, a smooth procession from chaos to order. Then, when that divine territory has been neatly contained in story, chapter, and verse, they are horrified to discover that nothing about it makes any sense whatsoever and that the rationale for everything is about to escape them like butterflies darting out of a cupped hand that is weary of chasing their capricious fluttering for so long and carelessly relaxes its grip.
They begin to interpret their writings, hoping to establish beyond a doubt the meaning of each word; but as they struggle to comprehend the unfathomable, diverse opinions arise. Discussion only makes meaning more elusive. They are terrified to discover that, unlike the stars or the entrails of birds, their own deepest wishes hold no clues to the future, and that everything is doomed to end without disclosing its meaning.
Though death means the ultimate reduction for the body, captured forever in the smallest imaginable space, scene of an ultimately glorious subdivision of the whole into increasingly digestible parts, the spirit, at the last moment, seems to escape after all, regaining its freedom. Mankind finds this unbearable. It would reduce the path of man’s life to a channel through which everything is painstakingly squeezed, one that grows narrower and narrower, like the pipes under a fountain. And it would turn man into nothing more than a fisherman with a torn net, one whose prey, at the last moment, slips away, leaving him behind empty-handed to curse his fate.
So the wise men begin to determine the meaning of the writings. They resolve to split faith up into religions, and religions into movements, though all the faithful strive alike for a more precise image of their Creator. No longer simply present everywhere, He is reduced to representations that over the years grow more and more similar, until finally He’s no more than a pair of eyes above a long white beard and an identical robe.
This process takes place more or less simultaneously among all the peoples of the world, each nation hacking its own portrait out of the rock of its faith, matching its own image. When His Essence, which just for the record is omnipresent, apparently resists capture by any of these images, they all choose a substitute to render the divine as visible as possible.
Once God’s in the bag, they agree to cut the world down to size. It is, after all, too free, too big, for comfort. Just as they formed an image of Him, they now chart the world, initially dividing it along lines nature has provided, things like rivers and mountain chains, then according to grids of their own devising, ever finer, until finally borders become so precise that they pass straight through houses and over breakfast tables. At the same time, people learn how to decimate themselves. Life was a gift from God, but once they’ve loosened the festive bow and torn off the shiny wrapping paper, they decide it’s not as valuable as all that and start perfecting weaponry and cooking up ingenious methods of mass destruction. They realize that they need to drastically reduce their numbers at regular intervals, like lemmings hurling themselves off cliffs, if they are to make any progress.
Their next step is logical: to limit everything else about life in the same way. They assign the various elements and all of God’s living wonders to their greatest thinkers, inviting each to study them, to ceaselessly ascertain more, to divide their subject constantly into ever smaller and, they hope, ever more comprehensible sections.
This is how they try to tame the winds and the ocean currents, by measuring and naming them; they fail to master them, but they keep them in such tight check that they can use them to navigate the seas, bringing the different parts of the world closer, making the globe seem smaller.
In a similar fashion, they apply their knowledge to the land, dividing it into fields and meadows in order to limit the plants that grow there to ones they find useful. Plants that grow wild in God’s paradise
are uprooted or poisoned. Instead of falling every which way in the soil, seeds are now sown in straight rows, separate one from the other, each in a fixed place, to guarantee that the shoots will appear at regular intervals.
They categorize most of the ideas they have caught hold of according to similar, clarifying principles. They build beautiful cabinets for the things they gather with their hands, storing away everything from seashells to butterflies, beetles to minerals, feathers to gems, according to its own category, in small drawers with clear labels. For the things they have mastered with the word, things like their concept of God, they erect enormous buildings in which to store everything according to rigid systems. Each item is given a fixed position in its own row, in a particular aisle, on planks not unlike those they use to contain their dead.
The harder mankind searches, the easier it is for God to elude them. The more they try to contain Him, subdividing His Creation into ever smaller pieces, the less they comprehend of Him. Meanwhile they’re staring Him in the face, like the idiot Pazzotto, who tried to get a closer look at the film by pressing his nose against the screen during the matinee in the Folgor.
Man Limits Himself
The more you narrow the prism, the brighter the spectrum it casts. Maybe that’s how the philosophers got the idea to call the encircling of emotion with reason the Enlightenment. They always remind me of the final moments of a Keystone Kops movie, clinging to the back of a wayward paddy wagon, swerving left and right down the road, their only hope the dark frame that slowly closes around them just before THE END appears on the screen.
Just as humanity develops by crossing off its possibilities, so does the individual progress personally. At birth, he is like Pico della Mirandola’s Adam—beyond all limits. By exercising his own will, for he has nothing else, he must determine who he wants to be. He still has no fixed place in the world, no face, no talents. He must choose and master them himself. He has been placed at the center of the universe, the better to see everything it contains. He may shape his own mask freely, as he likes, inventing himself along the way.
There was a single perfect moment when all knowledge still lay within his reach. The uomo universale could, over the course of his lifetime, master every imaginable science and read and comprehend everything that was known. All things external to him were also within him. He was, very briefly, like God. They were both the same size. Being balanced knowledge. The created plumbed the depths of his creation and could look his Creator in the eye. As in a mirror, for a few seconds, they studied one another, the one more confused than the other, circling around, sizing each other up like equally matched boxers who prefer to avoid a fight doomed in any case to a draw. They went their separate ways, drunk with rage, heads spinning, unsure now who was who.
There is no strength without struggle. Perhaps because it’s too frightening to countenance the idea of being God’s equal, man decides to remove the arena to his inner self. He hopes eventually to produce the blueprint of a human, a single chart that explains and predicts everything, a precisely reproducible prototype that will confine all new humans to the limitations of their predecessors and banish the unexpected forever.
To expand his knowledge of himself, man starts making himself smaller.
First, he cuts others open to study their functions. Once he understands all the tissues, muscles, and organs, he cuts them into slices for viewing under a microscope, capturing ever smaller segments beneath the curve of the lens. Those who look through the microscope see an image round as a globe and animated as a carnival. You can keep zooming in on a part of the whole, over and over again, until you think it’s impossible to dissect the cell any further, at which point you discover a whole new circus, complete with fire-eaters, juggling bears, and dwarves peddling nougat. In less and less, man discovers more and more.
The more answers he finds, the more questions are raised. He cannot seize, for example, his spirit. He clearly senses its presence, but he can’t grasp it between tweezers or perform a biopsy on it. First, he tries to gauge personality from appearance, trying to read character from the shape of the head, and then he lifts the skull in the hope of discovering management behind a desk somewhere in the cerebral cortex.
Now, as always when he bumps against his limitations, a new branch of science blossoms: psychoanalysis. No need to explain that it immediately splits in half. One sage tries to reduce the mind’s every surprise to a simple reaction to something else. The other reduces everything to the genes, declaring that every cell contains within it a complete memory. Each part suggests the whole, rather as, to me, eternity looms in a lump of ancient concrete beside a Roman autostrada.
As scientists and intellectuals narrow their vision in order to see more, ordinary men limit their abilities too. When I was small, the mountains around San Marino were still home to peasants and tradesmen who not only knew how to till their own land and feed and butcher their animals before cooking them in exquisite sauces in copper pots they had made themselves, but could also build their own houses from materials they had prepared themselves, after which they altered the course of streams to flow through their farmyards. They knew how and where to drill for water, and could keep the fire they sparked off two rocks in October burning until March. They wove their own fabrics and sewed their own clothes, designed and built furniture, and taught their children, born in the upstairs room without outside assistance, how to read and trade, how to bake pots and carve works of art from a piece of wood. They drank wine from their own grapes, which they pressed and bottled themselves. They made music on homemade instruments and told stories that resounded with the culture of the Etruscans and Romans. They were the last bearers of a long tradition that had been handed down from Italy’s earliest inhabitants, but then they put their children to work in factories, where all their old skills were reduced to tightening a bolt or zipping up a bag. In less than a century, industrialization succeeded in reducing an autarkic man who conceived, built, and used his own machines to an interchangeable part in a production process, a cog in a machine. He forgot whether strawberries grew on bushes or trees, but was gratified to discover that he could produce more by working less.
They broke down their understanding of things as they lost their skills. The more knowledge a man acquires about something, the less he understands it. I remember a winter that was so cold that we had to go all the way to Verona to stay with my aunt Vitella, who had heating in her apartment. Her palazzo was one of the last in the old center to get electricity, after a concerted campaign by its residents. To entertain us, and only when we least expected it, Vitella would walk over to the switch by the door and turn her lights on and off and on and off again, eyes darting back and forth from the surprise on our faces to the miraculous lightbulb. It wasn’t long before everyone was completely dependent on electricity: more comfortable, less in control. As man lost his knowledge of the things that determined his life, he seemed to grow bigger, more monstrous. He once knew the origin and use of everything around him, but now, without a clue as to how they work, he surrounds himself with the most wide-ranging devices, continually inventing ever more complicated things, just to keep surprising himself.
During my life, for instance, the computer has developed from an enormous machine with rotating parts that filled entire floors, lumbering objects that couldn’t do very much. The memory took up many rooms. You could walk into a computer, wander around inside it. Now they are small and can do almost anything. They have become so minuscule that the day is not far off when they will be injected into your blood and wander around inside you.
Man now stores all his accumulated knowledge, far more now than could ever be gathered in libraries, on chips. For this, he reduces all the words he has ever spoken or written, all the sounds he has sung, played, and heard, every thought, every dream, all the images he has ever drawn or seen, everything he has felt and remembers to the numbers 1 and 0. The compression of energy sparks a new universe, just as this implosion of kn
owledge creates a new reality in which all this information will be accessible to everyone. His essence recorded on a bar code, his possessions on a cash card, man can withdraw behind the black hole of his monitor, where the last thing that still differentiates him, his unique facial characteristics, is reduced to grids and pixels on a screen on which everyone looks the same. Hidden behind it, reduced to no more than a name or, better still, its abbreviation, his possibilities for extending his range are unbounded. Thus limited, every person is linked to all others without ever needing to step outside, where it often can be a bit chilly.
Ultimately, I expect, man will order the last remnants of chaos by filing himself on a chip. Then he will be master over all humanity, with nothing more to fear than my aunt Vitella, who fiddled with the electric light switch to impress her guests in Verona. That last image will be the same as my earliest memory: I have something between my thumb and index finger, but I can’t really hold it. I feel that it is everything and nothing at the same time.
As this whole show is being performed, God sits on His throne watching men, patient as Father Time in the cartoon, until Little Nemo rolls out of bed and wakes up with a start, because however big man grows by narrowing his perspective, he’ll never manage to cut his dreams down to size.
PART FOUR
Roman Siege
Take a close-up. Zoom in on someone. You see less and less of him, yet he grows bigger, ever bigger, until all that’s left of him is a single pore. It’s nothing. You could spend a lifetime looking at that face without ever noticing that one tiny hole. That’s how small it is, but you’ve made it enormous. The actor has hundreds of thousands of these pores. His dimensions seem dizzying. An ordinary person, but by showing less, by gradually making him disappear, you’ve turned him into a giant.
