In nations.
Yes, as nations. But that is far more complicated.
God must be thinking a lot about China, with one billion–plus people.
God learns. I keep coming back to my fundamental mnemonic—God learns. This is why I’m so opposed to those religions which assume that God is in command of everything.
Last time we spoke, you said that God was developing evolution as He went along.
Yes. God learns.
Then in those early periods of time, when land had just been created, you indicated that God was in the slime of early Creation, yes, in there evolving with everything else. Yet you also said with great assurance that God is the Creator of the world and the solar system. I have trouble reconciling God-in-the-slime and God-as-Creator—
Suppose God is the lord of the solar system but at the same time had to learn how to develop the system from the slime on up.
Yes, but when did God put the souls into Creation?
The key to the notion is that it’s all been a huge experiment, an ongoing, developing experiment with countless results, good and bad, but most of them were good enough so that evolution continued despite its failures. God learns. And so God invests Himself or Herself in all sorts of creatures en route—not only animals but flora as well.
Once again, I don’t subscribe to the iron declarations of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Both were written by committee. The Old Testament was put together over a long period by a series of very talented committees, much more talented than the latter-day Bible builders who composed the New Testament. On the other hand, the people who wrote the New Testament were good enough scholars to be familiar with the best remarks that had been made up to that point in the Old Testament and by many a sage, prophet, and mystic. So they used that as well. They were also attached to a concept that may or may not be true, which is that Jesus was the son of God. They were serious men, but they were also a committee. So as literary works, the Old Testament has some faults, and the New Testament a good many. But to accept them as the absolute map of our spiritual universe is comparable to using the kind of charts Christopher Columbus had to look at before he set out for the West. For instance, even our current idea of the Beginning, as it is presented in English in the first three sentences of Genesis, is a false concept.
In fact, one summer I studied classical Hebrew on my own, and the first sentence of Genesis—have we discussed that?
No.
Well, as you know: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Or so it goes in English. Actually, the first word of the Old Testament—in the original—is most singular. It’s only existence is as the first word of the Old Testament, “barashith.” The second word is “bora.” There are many interpretations of “barashith,” but I came up with “out of the pits” or “out of the depths.” “Bora” is “being” or “creating.” So the first two words might say, “out of the depths came being.” The next words are not “the heavens and the earth” but “the firmament above” and “the firmament below,” as if to declare that there are two species of existence out there from the commencement. And then the next sentence? “The breath of God moved upon the waters”—
“The breath of God upon the waters.”
It’s not “breath of God” at all. The word used here for breath is “ruach.” In classical Hebrew, there are three varieties of breath to signify God’s presence. There’s “ruach,” “nefesh,” and “neshamah.” “Neshamah,” if I recall correctly, is the gentle breath. And “nefesh” is a normal wind. “Ruach” is the fierce breath, the angry breath, God’s rage. So the line really says, “and the rage of God roared over the waters.” So to go back, the first two sentences can well be translated as, “Out of the depths came being, and God created the firmament above and the firmament below. And God’s fierce breath roared over the waters.”
Much different.
Yes, I’m suspicious of committees. Even the great one that gave us the King James Bible.
We’ve spoken a bit about technology. I’d like to go back to that. Most of humanity sees technology as a way to free us from drudgery and give us leisure time to read and think and travel, and so forth. Why shouldn’t it be seen on balance, on balance—I understand all the bad things about it, but why shouldn’t technology be seen as largely salutary?
I have four words to describe technology, which I’ve used several times now: more power, less pleasure. I think there’s no getting around it: We can’t pretend more pleasure comes to us from technology. It tends to crimp our senses and reduce us to people who are able to live in a closed environment. My notion—it’s a sentimental notion, doubtless—is that God would have preferred us to be able to do the things we now achieve through technology by means of our spirit alone. In other words, instead of having television, we could reach into our dream life and enjoy organized and marvelous dramas that we could create for ourselves or send by telepathy to our friends. The ultimate aim was for every human being to be immensely creative. Being psychic as well, we would not have needed electronic communications. If I wanted to talk to you, I would be able to put my mind in contact with yours, even if you were in a far-off place. We all have small intimations of that possibility. It seems to me such mental powers are grievously reduced with every advance in technology.
As a specific example, I now use hearing aids, and I can’t hear without them, not with most people. But my own small remaining ability to hear gets reduced further by using these hearing aids. In parallel, I think technology tends to curtail our possibilities and accelerate our dependencies.
After all, the great strides that have been made in technology came from previous generations. Maxwell discovered some of the differences between electricity and magnetism. He and Faraday took imaginative, metaphorical leaps. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill didn’t have to study previous speeches to come up with the Gettysburg Address or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” They came out of a past that depended on independent human beings rising up to exceptional thoughts at incredible moments. They were not dependent on electronic machines they did not really understand. As a small example, I don’t know anyone with a computer who doesn’t talk about the glitches.
Look, the first person to use a wheel after the drudgery of dragging things must have felt great pleasure. I don’t see—
Wait a moment; there are crucial turning points in the advent of modern technology. The center of all that is electronics, whereas the first wheel was made of wood, and sharp stones were used to shape it. These were things people could comprehend, they came out of the earth. Then people began to learn how to smelt ore. Dangerous business, tricky, but they found the means to get fire to melt the ore and so could separate the slag from the molten metal. The Iron Age began.
I say there’s a profound difference between early and later technology. Early technology, lasting through to the nineteenth century, consisted of dealing with very powerful and explosive elements in nature and mastering them, so there was awe and excitement to it. Huge excitement for the railroad when it was developed—people loved to travel on trains. They might be cramped and reek of their own foul coal smoke, but they were exciting. Now, traveling on airplanes is not agreeable. Everyone thought it’d be immensely exciting, but it isn’t. It’s reductive. You don’t feel like a voyager so much as a piece of trussed-up, transported goods. Electronics is the great divide—the watershed between what I would call good technology and bad. Because no one knows what electronics is. I defy a physicist to reach my mind with an explanation I can comprehend. For that matter, we don’t even know what electricity is. A current of electrons, yes, but do we know anything about the makeup of an electron? Does it possess its own consciousness, or does it not?
So that’s the pivot point, then? That’s when technology becomes a miserable activity? But when you were a boy, the radio—you must remember the radio, the crystal set and all that.
You had to
be able to solder, yes. But even then, you had to buy your vacuum tubes. People assemble computers today out of factory parts. I did model airplanes when they were made of balsa with glue. Then plastic came along. In my childhood, plastic was not common. Bakelite was the nearest you got to it. Now plastic is omnipresent. And it’s inert. It doesn’t bring on any sense of the uncanny. It offers an inkling of nonexistence. I’m just paranoid enough to believe it’s the Devil who loves plastic because it’s going to deaden God’s sensibilities before it’s all over. God won’t be able to get to us through shields of plastic. About the time, oh, thirty years ago when women began to wear plastic clothing—the stuff stank, you remember, the awful smell of plastic clothes?—I began to think that may be the point where the ballgame was lost. Women, with their finer sensibilities, were adopting plastic.
My last question: Great religious ideas have great followings, and they last for millennia—some do fade, some die, but the greatest last for millennia. And I’m assuming there’s a reason for that. Your faith in the theological and intellectual efficacy of your system is strong. I’ve observed it for many years, and it’s deep-rooted inside you. But you have also said your system is not going to be adopted by many other people.
Not in a hurry. No. There’s no immediate solace offered for our fears, only an appeal to our human pride.
Does this bother you?
I suppose that if I had developed these ideas when I was thirty or forty, I would have wanted to become a religious leader. But that is not in my capacity. If there’s any validity to any of these thoughts, if they take root in people to some extent, then, yes, these notions may yet be adopted by some. Because I do believe that there are two elements now on the horizon that can yet destroy the world as we know it. One of them is technology and the other is organized religion. The second drives people into stupidity. It can take intelligent children and deprive them of their ability to look at existence. They’re obliged to force their thoughts to fit a mold that may never have existed and certainly doesn’t exist now. That drives people to extremes. So I do feel that my existential sense of God as a Being who needs us as much as we need Him could yet reach many. But I feel no inner directive to convince people right away. I am just centered enough to recognize how far that is beyond my means.
VI
Ritual and Telepathy
MICHAEL LENNON: We have not spoken of ritual as part of religion. Recently, my wife and I went to the ordination of an Episcopal priest. It was an extraordinary event. Thirty or forty priests and bishops and deacons stood over the kneeling aspirant, touching a shoulder or back—or, if they could not reach the person, they touched the shoulder of someone who could. All the while, a chorus in the background was chanting “Veni, Sancte Spiritu, Veni, Sancte Spiritu” (Come, Holy Ghost), while another singer, the lead singer, was singing a cappella verses about the glories of being a priest, of the holy responsibilities and obligations, the special status that a priest has among believers, ending with the ancient pronouncement from the ordaining bishop, “Thou art a priest forever.” It was a very moving, very powerful experience. It made me think of one of our earlier conversations in which you noted that Funda mentalists believe that if they keep their noses clean and observe ritual, they have a ticket to Heaven. Does ritual have any significant merit for you, or do you reject it completely?
NORMAN MAILER: I’ve thought about it a good deal. Put it this way: I have high suspicions about ritual. It seems to me that at best, it’s a mixed blessing. You know, one of my favorite remarks is that repetition kills the soul. Well, obviously that remark has to be explored before we go further. Any number of kinds of repetition are, I will admit, crucial to the human venture. It is, after all, one of the ways by which we learn. And there is such a thing as creative repetition. Nonetheless, I’m suspicious of ritual. Where, after all, does my theology start? What occasions it? What stimulates it? I would answer that it is because I have worked as a novelist all my life. I don’t want this to be misunderstood, but, in a certain sense, novelists are dealing with a few of God’s problems—judgment, particularly. If you’re any good at your work, you’ve spent your life thinking about human nature. Since few good novels can do without a villain, you are, of course, soon living with the notion of Evil.
Now, where in all this is the relation to ritual? Ritual is repetition, and in writing a novel you look to do the opposite. A fine novel does not keep repeating itself. That is exactly the hallmark of a dull work. So most good novelists are wary of repetition. Moreover, most people I don’t approve of tend to be masters or monsters of mediocre repetition. The politicians we despise are one example. So one develops an understanding that repetition can be dangerous when used as a tool for mediocre purposes. Unimaginative parents often know nothing better than to repeat what they say over and over. I confess that worries me about the nature of ritual. I think it looks to set human nature into a form. TV evangelists seem diabolically inspired to me when they cleave and cling to repetition. Earlier, as a child, synagogue services left me bored. Most of it washed over me. I might just as well have been a shell on the surf’s edge. But for a little wear and tear, I was the same shell at the end of the service as at the beginning, and this was true year after year.
I did experience one ritual that was interesting to me. It was my induction into Transcendental Meditation, which was in fashion thirty-five years ago. I remember that for my initiation ceremony, I was told to bring a flower to the initiator. He happened to be a gawky kid who was absolutely wild about Transcendental Meditation, which I had found no more than odd and a little boring. At the commencement of the practice each day, you were supposed to empty your head for twenty minutes. You did your best not to allow much thought to come through. I said to myself, “I’ve been doing this for years as a writer.” Every time one goes to work in the morning, the first thing to do is empty your head. I’ve been practicing Transcendental Meditation willy-nilly.
Now, during my initiatory ritual, they said a few words in an Asian language and then gave me a mnemonic to repeat. I forget what it was. It was something like Allen Ginsberg’s old “OMMMMM.” I kept repeating whatever the sound was in my head for twenty minutes. Whenever an errant thought came into my brain, I had to be ready to use the mnemonic to wash the thought away. It was a small ritual, but I did feel an effect. Something did take place. Obviously, then, in a deep and powerful ritual, a great deal happens. Let me move forward to make the point. Given my fundamental notion that God and the Devil are at war all the time, I would go so far as to suggest that ritual may well have been first created by the Devil. God, recognizing its efficacy, and determined not to lose any soul unnecessarily, entered ritual as well. I think ritual is composed then of the presence of God and the Devil. It does tend to have the demons and the saints marching in. There is a power to the repetitions—the music, the chanting, the ceremony, the concentration of the principals. So it may indeed be an important moment. One of my favorite notions is that the Lord and Satan are there when major events occur. A general, on the eve of a great battle, gets out of bed and finds it very important whether he stretches out his left foot first or his right.
A ritual?
No, but he has a sense that powers are present. Anyone who reads Homer will find nothing strange about this. So I think my answer would be that I don’t scoff at ritual, but I don’t trust it. I would be happier if we lived without it, yet I have to recognize that my upbringing, my tastes, my life have had little to do with rituals. Nonetheless, they are fascinating. Because there may be any number of occasions when God and the Devil have to cooperate—exactly because they each are trying to outwit the other. For that, they have, at times, to engage in formal contact. Wrestlers do have to grasp each other.
What about rituals concerning athletes? I’m sure professional boxers decide which glove is going to be laced on first, and how many minutes they want to be alone before the fight, and which jockstrap they will wear. I know professional baseball playe
rs have certain things they have to do. The center fielder has to step on second base when he runs in or, you know, the forces will be against him. So athletes are particularly superstitious, and they go through various rituals and preparations before and during the game. Soldiers do the same thing. When I was in the navy, I knew sailors who were tremendously ritualistic about how they tied a knot. It was a bad omen if you tied a knot the wrong way, or if something on the ship was not performed in exactly the right way. You felt like you were calling down evil things upon you. These are not religious rituals, but they are often done with the knowledge that there is something in the air.
Yes. I used to be susceptible to that when I was younger. I do know what you are talking about. Back in San Francisco, in 1963, I used to walk parapets which had sheer drops to the street below. (I felt as if it was an imperative from my soul to take such a chance.) I used to be full of dread every morning because I knew that before the day was done, I’d be walking a parapet. They varied between eight inches in width to so much as a foot and a half, so there was no great risk unless you lost your head. But I would suspect that the spirit world, if you will, does pay close attention to people engaged in unusual events. We started by talking about ritual. Now we are involved with rote. Whenever people engage in rote—in other words, express a superstitious fear by going in for repetitive moves when a good deal is at stake—that can draw the attention of the gods. So athletes who are going to be playing in games that will have a large emotional effect on many people are going to attract such attention. I think many have the feeling that one is not alone but is among accompanying spirits. At the least!
On God: An Uncommon Conversation Page 10
