36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Page 8
Cass had started at the beginning, with the transparent brilliance of the early works, including the groundbreaking Goethedämmerung, proceeded steadfastly onto the undisputed genius of the middle works, most notably The Perversity of Persuasion, and groped his way as best he could through the opaque splendor of the latter works, including Wandering Between Two Worlds, the last volume that Professor Klapper had published to date. Cass had conscientiously read it through to its very last sentence, even though the only thing he had truly understood had been the quote from Matthew Arnold, a poet whom Jonas Elijah Klapper did not revere— the professor gave out grades and Matthew Arnold had received an ignominious B-minus—but whose “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” had supplied him his title:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Cass’s mother did read The Perversity of Persuasion, though whether she ever explained it to his father Cass didn’t know.
“What do you think?” Cass had asked her, as she sat beside him on the deck, midway into the book.
“He’s quite oracular,” she had answered.
Cass had nodded and then smiled, pleased with her answer.
After a few more minutes of reading had passed for both of them, he looked up and asked, “When you say ‘oracular,’ do you mean that in a good way or a bad way?”
She had yielded one of her more inscrutable smiles.
“I couldn’t really say. I guess you’ll find out for yourself when you get to Frankfurter.”
Jonas Elijah Klapper’s sole course offering during this first year at Frankfurter was to be the two-semestered “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self,” a seminar that had a pre-registration of twenty-three students, which was high for a graduate seminar. There were the professor’s own graduate students, now down to seven. The departed five had ultimately decided, after passing through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, not to move to Massachusetts, which Klapper had made a non-negotiable condition for their continuing to be supervised by him. “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self” also had six graduate students from Frankfurter’s English Department, another six from Religion, one from Philosophy, and three undergraduates who had managed to garner the elusive permission of the instructor.
The three were all, Cass couldn’t help noticing, extremely comely girls, who entered the room that first day in a clutch of bosomy frolicsome-ness. But even they soon fell into the nervous silence that was de rigueur among the professor’s chosen students.
The tone was set by Gideon Raven, whose brilliance and intensity were disguised within the mien of a hyper-alert baby. His head was round, his face—especially in relation to his fleshless body—full. His eyes were circular as well, their shape enforcing an impression of innocence, no matter the conflagrations raging behind them. It was the gaunt jitteriness—the fingers gnawed to the quick, the dissent pooling in his philtrum—that gave him away. Although Gideon had been studying with Jonas Elijah Klapper for an apostolic twelve years, and was teaching his own courses at Frankfurter this semester on the metaphysical poets, still, here he was in attendance, just as he had attended every one of the professor’s Columbia classes, graduate and undergraduate, since becoming his student.
Jonas Elijah Klapper shuffled in and settled his heft into the chair with a soft sigh, while plopping his bulging satchel onto the gleaming oval of the table. Gathering himself together, he proceeded to go round the table, starting from his immediate left, to stare each of the twenty-three students full in the face, an excruciating exercise for the subjects. One girl, Asian, got up in the middle of her turn and wordlessly left. The professor, taking no notice, had simply let his eyes proceed to the next.
This first item of business concluded, Jonas Elijah Klapper cleared his throat and began to recite, from memory, in his beautiful Anglicized voice, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which had been assigned for this first meeting.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Professor Klapper’s voice, his smile, his entire being, embodied the becalmed stasis of the first stanza.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Klapper was personifying youthful vigor, a reckless bounding into hope. His shoulders even gave a bit of a jump.
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land …
An ominous warning was being sounded, the slightest shiver of the sinister disturbing the surface of sonority.
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
And the promise of joy that had flickered only a moment before in Klapper’s voice and playful shoulders, withdrew itself.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
He whispered in that charged hush that could rise to the rafters of a crowded undergraduate lecture hall, and had no difficulty now projecting to the farthest reaches of the seminar room.
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
It was such an astounding rendition, the last stanza recited at an accelerated pace, quickened with a kind of arcing, aching desperation. Just as the eternal note of sonorous sadness had always been there in the waves’ pounding, even before the poet had heard it, so, too, the rhetorical urgency of that last stanza had been in the poem, only Cass had been deaf until this moment.
Jonas Elijah Klapper himself seemed unspeakably moved, to the point of prostration, by his own performance. He placed his right elbow, swathed in the brown suede patch ornamenting the dusky tweed, onto the table and buried his furrowed brow into his fleshy open palm.
And from that forlorn posture, his face hidden from sight, he sent forth a query.
“‘Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’ Why the ‘melancholy’? Why the ‘long’? Why the ‘withdrawing roar’?”
His voice was so weakened that he could barely muster the rolling r’s that he had elocuted to perfection moments before.
A sustained and uneasy silence followed the withdrawing roar. The lack of a response stretched itself out, until the silence itself seemed like a metaphysical presence that had quietly crept in and taken a seat at the seminar table. Even Gideon Raven stared down at the gnawed fingers of his left hand, which were playing keyboard on the left thigh of his crossed legs.
Cass was amazed by the vacancy that had suddenly invaded the room. Though Cass’s understanding of the poem
had been immeasurably deepened by the professor’s recitation, no great insight was required to answer the question on the table. Obviously, Professor Klapper had thrown it out just to get the ball rolling.
And there sat Jonas Elijah Klapper, his outspread palm still cushioning his mighty brow. The very sunbeams splattering on the grainy wooden table seemed to tremble with the tension. They were all, even the sunbeams, letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down; and in letting Jonas Elijah Klapper down, they were doing nothing less than disappointing the whole of Western civilization, its faith, its literature, its values.
Could Cass, callow as he was, allow this to happen? He knew that, among all the people in that breathlessly strained room, he was, without a doubt, the least qualified to speak. He included here the toothsome undergraduates, who had probably been studying poetry longer than he, who was, after all, only an importunate petitioner from pre-med.
Cass felt physically incapable of maintaining his silence, not only because of Jonas Elijah Klapper, and all he stood for, but also because of how “Dover Beach” had laid its palpating finger on the something soft and inchoate inside him, the thing he hardly dared to call his soul. Just like the lyrical narrator, he, too, had been paddling around oblivious on the surface of a sea of faith that he had presumed was infinitely benign, only to submerge his ears below the waves and hear the eternal note of sadness, like the mermaids singing each to each that Alfred Prufrock says he had heard once—no, maybe not like Prufrock’s mermaids—and to wonder, along with the poet, what’s left to believe in? and to grasp at the same answer that the poet had seized on: love and love alone. Love is the only solace. Not just any love, of course, not an easy, superficial love, but the love of the like-minded, the like-souled, the one who hears the eternal note of sadness in the same key and register as you. Together with such a love, clasping each other tightly round for dear life, you can gaze out the window at the dream-stripped harshness and bear the awful sight of it.
Jonas Elijah Klapper, sunk in his blinded pose, didn’t see the lone hand raised aloft. And so, in service to the poet, to the seminar, to Faith and Literature and Values, but, first and foremost, to Jonas Elijah Klapper himself, Cass tentatively began to speak into the void, of how the absolute faith of the childhood of man, in both the individual and the species, “which I guess would be the Middle Ages, when belief in an ultimate divine presence was full and calm and sweet, was wrenched away in a long, withdrawing roar, as we grow up and discover the way the world really is, through science and most especially the theory of evolution.
“Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem. The Origin of Species had been published just a few years before ‘Dover Beach’ was published.”
Cass had done his homework, not only perusing the poem at least thirty times—he himself had it memorized by the eighth or ninth read— but going to the Lipschitz Library and reading everything about the poem he could get his hands on.
“The central metaphor in ‘Dover Beach’ is the ocean, and the poem itself is like a bridge passing from lush Romanticism to the brave new world of Modernism, where we aren’t shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That’s all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our own self.”
Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self—what this whole seminar was about!—had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.
Professor Klapper’s eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker’s pose.
There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.
“No, no, no! That’s not what I was talking about at all!” He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. “Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature”—he pronounced it, as always, “lit-er-a-toor”—“not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold’s. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist”—the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis— “let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and 1852. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You’d have been better off citing the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical journalist. But do, please, have a care for my suffering sensibilities! Now it is Darwinism with which I must contend.” He turned his head away so that his mournful countenance fell upon the non-Darwinians in the room. “As I have oft warned those of you who have any proclivity to receive my instruction, most of what passes for science is merest scientism.”
The moments while Klapper spoke had at first borne the true marker of a nightmare: too perfect a realization of one’s worst fears not to be a dream delivered sizzling from hell. Horrible disbelief was followed by far more horrible belief, and for the remaining hours of this first meeting of “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self,” as Jonas Elijah Klapper’s voice continued without interruption, not even Gideon Raven hazarding a comment, Cass sat unmoving, unhearing, almost unexisting, deliquescing into a numbness that approached the state of being nothing at all.
The two-and-a-half-hour seminar was drawing to a close. Professor Klapper was speaking of next week’s assignment, Aristotle’s Poetics.
“… answering the challenge that his discarded teacher, Plato, issued after he had symbolically, if not diabolically, banished the poet from his city of reason. As Plato wrote in his Republic”—Klapper was staring off into the inscribed distance—“‘Let us, then, conclude our return to the topic of poetry and affirm that we really had good grounds then for dismissing her from our city, … for reason constrained us. And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ I skip over a few lines here, not from lack of recall but lack of relevance, and proceed: ‘But nevertheless let it be declared that, if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell.’
“Now, my creatures of sweetness and light”—this was one of his endearments for his students—“it is in the context of this gauntlet flung down by Plato that Aristotle’s Poetics must be read. Aristotle is answering the older philosopher’s challenge by pragmatically—I use the word in the sense of William James, which is my own as well—connecting it to psychopoiesis.”
Cass recognized the word from his summer studies of the twenty-eight tomes. Psychopoiesis. Soul-making. The coinage was, so far as Cass knew, Klapper’s own, struck out of the ancient Greek.
“Poetry is in the business of psychopoiesis at least as much as philosophy is. And if I might be permitted, humbly, to stand between Plato and Aristotle and offer my emendation, you will hear me fervently whispering ‘oh more, far more!’
Cass was suddenly called back into himself by the pain squeezing his heart as he contemplated that all but he and the girl who had voluntarily departed under the professor’s gaze would be returning next week to hear the dialogue betwe
en Plato, Aristotle, and Jonas Elijah Klapper. Even those three undergraduate lovelies, who had managed, over the course of the seminar, to progress from chattering neophytes to wide-eyed acolytes, would be allowed to attend. He alone was to be cast out for the sin of his unclothed ignorance and arrogance.
And then, suddenly, Jonas Elijah Klapper was addressing him again, all vestiges of vexation vanished.
“Mr. Seltzer, I would like you most especially to pay keen attention to Aristotle’s concept of peripeteia. Would you, by blind chance or happy happenstance, happen to know what peripeteia means?”
“Reversal of fortune.” Cass’s hoarse voice sounded unfamiliar to him. It sounded older, the voice of an ancient knowing that the best has been and will be no more.
“Excellent! Peripeteia! Reversal of fortune! Exceedingly excellent! It’s a most un-Darwinian concept, wouldn’t you say, my dear boy? Now you are thinking! Yes, until next week’s peripeteia, my creatures, my delights!”