The Old Religion

by David Mamet

  She came forward, the lawyer at her side. He watched them.

  He noticed he had stopped twisting the wedding band.

  He stood and caught the eye of a guard, who nodded to him.

  He walked the three paces forward to the wire mesh, and waited for his wife. His finger held the place in the grammar book.

  Songs

  He walks with me, and he talks with me

  He tells me that I am his own.

  And the joy we share, as we tarry there,

  None other has ever known.

  The words came to him on the breeze from down the prison yard, and they seemed sweet, like the breeze. The words seemed natural, as the discovery of some previously unsuspected force, some force which underlay the conscious world, and moved it.

  Like the force of love, as it’s discovered to an adolescent.

  Or the force of fatherhood, where one says, “Now. Ah. Now I understand”—Where so much unclear becomes clear, and we see understanding is not a reordering of opposites in the mind but the clarification of apparent contradiction into simplicity.

  “Yes,” he thought. “Clean as the breeze and fecund like the breeze. Like the spring field: the notion one is saved—that one has but to embrace salvation and one is saved.”

  But the fallacy—the Rabbi had said—lay in this: One cannot award oneself salvation. The joy one feels in doing so comes from usurpation of the power of God.

  In linking salvation—whatever that might be—to faith, one sets oneself the simplest of tasks and, upon its completion, awards oneself Godhood. Of course that feels good. “How could that feel otherwise than good?” the Rabbi said. To have illicit sex, or rape, or murder, sanctioned by Authority, that felt good too. “Any idolatry,” the Rabbi said, “that is the force which sent you here.”

  These saved folk have been convened these two thousand years to kill and hate and call it good.

  Of course they’re wedded to it. What savage ever denominated his barbarity other than Reason?

  “Of course it feels good,” the Rabbi said.

  “And tell the drunkard his vileness is a religion, and the dope fiend his lack of control is blessed. …” He paused.

  “We do not know what is right.” the Rabbi said. “We are incompetent to distinguish it. Our eyes lead us astray. Our heart leads us astray. That is why we are bonded to follow the mitzvot: what else do we have? The delusion of comprehension, which leads us to proclaim we are God.

  “We understand nothing.”

  “Of course you’re drawn to their songs,” Frank thought. “You fool.”

  “And so drawn to the singers of the songs, and their supposed ‘community.’

  “And do you think they would have you if you embraced them? You are an object of scorn. Why? Why? It is not for you to say. Do you hear? It is not for you to say.

  “Stand guiltless before God—to the extent you can—and let the Christians behave as they will. You cannot stop them.

  “You cannot join them. Why would you want to?

  “Study, live, and die.”

  But the song came through the window: “I walk in the Garden alone …”

  “To be a man,” the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked.

  “Now be a man …” the Rabbi said.

  The song came through the window. and as he denominated it strength to resist it, to that extent he felt strong.

  The dot

  Who would know that the dot had not been placed on the i at the time the word was written?

  What process, he wondered, what forensic magic, would reveal it?

  For he had no doubt that such methods existed; or, if they did not, that they would come into being at some future date.

  For it was on that most powerful entity he pinned his hopes—upon that benevolent God he knew: when he referred to it by name, it bore a name too simple and mundane to compass its clear awesome power. Its quotidian name, the Future.

  In the Future, methods would exist, he knew, to reveal all that had been hidden.

  Methods would exist—for, no, we could not feel that they existed now. (Would not their current being detract from any potential redemptive aspect of their discovery? Yes, he thought, it would.)

  Such methods would—though the groundwork might be allowed to have been laid (for what can build on nothing?)—have to come to light in years to come, brought into being for some other task; not, he knew, certainly, for the purpose of examination of his life, or of this letter; nor, perhaps, for the analysis of ink at all, but for some unconnected application. Then, he thought, at some point it would be discovered, as a matter of course, that such methods had a wider use, had many uses, one of which was the dating of ink.

  Then, when the arcane became the open; then, at that golden time, the time of the Future, of Progress, of Change, of Heaven, in fact; in that time, then, when the processes existed, when the black ignorance of the present had been cleansed through a simple perseverance … then, yes, the technology would—he could not doubt it—exist to date the ink.

  Then they would know that his confession bore a secret, different and, perhaps, in a way, more mysterious and deeper than the Simple Secret of his Soul—whatever that might be.

  He’d fought with it.

  Though driven by the urge to purify himself, though driven in each sentence, at each word, to speak the truth, he knew he lied. Every word, he thought, colored by the wish to defend, to extenuate, to distract. (“To distract whom?” he thought, but continued.)

  In any case, to attempt both to cleanse and to defend himself, he wrote of his pride, and of his arrogance, and of his dishonesty in social dealings. He wrote of his offhand treatment of his wife, and wrote and wrote. At all times thinking, “I could continue transcribing these ‘sins of character’ interminably. For I know them to be true as they are endless. My sins are endless. But I am not cruel.”

  And as he thought it, he wrote it:

  “… mistreatment of those around me. And sloth.” But I am not cruel.

  His written confession continued.

  As he wrote, he was troubled by the reference to sloth.

  For he knew himself to be hardworking. Not, certainly, like the factory hands, no. But hardworking. Dedicated, in fact. In the area, the administrative area, of his operations.

  And not cruel.

  Here, again, he was troubled, in a way different from that occasioned by his assertion of industry. For he knew he’d written the denial of cruelty for the eyes of some person or power in the future, which would have interest in him solely—he would have to admit it—as he was convicted of killing that girl.

  And they might interpret this, his freewill confession, as a sign of his guilt.

  They might—might they not?—magnify what he thought of and was ashamed to realize he thought of as his “flaws.”

  No, no, his disingenuousness, his candor in the frank confession of his sins, was, and he knew it was, an arrogance.

  And he might, he knew, in fact be guilty of those very sins the confession of which induced him to think he was pure of.

  But not of cruelty. No.

  And as he wrote it, he felt that he had transgressed. “I am not cruel,” he wrote, and felt that, here, the mechanism was inverted.

  For he felt, in the heart of himself, that he was, in fact, not cruel. He had known cruelty, and had seen it, and could not recognize it in himself. But as he wrote in his confession “I am not cruel,” he felt the mechanism thus: Yes, but I have transgressed in the transcription, and my assertion must mask a cruelty of which I am unconscious.

  He looked back up the page.

  He saw that the i of “insight” sloped into the n, and that he had not dotted the i.

  Though he knew that the word was clear enough from context, and was, in fact, most legible as it stood, he took the pen and put a dot over
the i, which, through the delicacy of his touch, achieved the character of a minute flowery rhombus.

  “Who would know,” he thought, “the dot was not placed on as I wrote the word?”

  As he raised the pen, he admired the apparent unity of the dot and the letter.

  He could not, “even in possession of ‘the facts,’” as he thought, see any inconsistency of color or form in the two.

  “Someday, however,” he thought, “the science will exist,” and sighed. “But what would induce one to apply it in this case?”

  He thought, “And what would it accomplish?”

  He sat up, his feet on the floor, sitting up straight on the bunk. His confession on a writing board on his knees.

  “Why would they ever be moved to examine it?” he thought; and, “The secret will die with me.”

  Punishment

  “It says throughout,” the Rabbi said, “that they are blessed who bless us, and cursed who curse us. I believe our history has shown this is true.”

  If there were a God, Frank thought, then that which has befallen me could not be random. If it were ordered, then, surely, I could determine a cause-and-effect relationship between my actions and my trouble.

  But here, he thought, he committed the error of an egocentric theology. For could not and must not God’s objectives be different from his own? “Must they not differ?” he thought; and, again, “If I assign a reason to my trials, such reason beyond my comprehension, do I not, again, suggest myself, in my very punishment, important to God?

  “But then, perhaps, I am important to God, but my happiness is not. Or, perhaps, my happiness is not, but my welfare is; and He, whatever power He is, construes the second more important than the first. Like a good father—or, for all that, like a bad father also.”

  “A man,” the Rabbi had said, “a poor man, found a fine horse upon the road. ‘How fortunate you are,’ his friends said. ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘well, you never know.’ His son took the horse out to ride, and was thrown, and was maimed. ‘How misfortunate you are,’ the friend said, and the man said ‘Well, you never know.’ But the next day the recruiting officers came round, to press the Jewish boys. Where they would go to the Czar’s army to serve twenty-five years. But the man’s son was maimed, and so he was spared. ‘How fortunate you are,’ his friend said, and the man …”

  “Yes,” Frank thought. “In fact, that is true.”

  Gematria

  The Hebrew dictionary was his passport to another land.

  “If I had a photographic memory,” he thought, “I’d have but to glance at it—but where would be the merit in that?”

  And he felt a kind of self-indulgence, a sumptuousness, in fact, reading through the words, knowing he could not retain them, that they were his for the moment only.

  “There is that of cultism, of the Mandarin, in the perusal of the ancient, accidental text,” he thought. “For though it has come down to us in this form, the form was, we would have to say, arbitrarily fixed, and errors in the typography have been canonized and studied.

  “On the one hand, could we not extrapolate truth from an error? Gregor Mendel did. And, on the other hand, might we not be as likely to arrive at nonsense, and, aha, are these two cases not in fact equally likely outcomes of the study of Scripture?

  “Having arrived at that, how have I spent my morning?

  “Might we not study any text? And where would that lead us?”

  He signed. He swung his legs down to the floor and looked at the floor, and then up at the bars. Cast into the bars was the manufacturer’s mark: “Ginnett and Hubbard. Penal Engineering. Booth, Ohio.”

  “Let us, then,” he thought, “lay this out upon a grid.”

  He counted the letters and found forty-two.

  “If we add in the punctuation marks, we arrive at fifty, which is five by ten, and may be arrayed thus:

  The word NALXE presented itself to him. Turning the first block through ninety degrees, he saw the word AGROO in the second square, and his mind caught upon the phrase “The letters of the First Square suggest themselves to me as more probably containing reason than those of the Second Square. But perhaps this is a trick played on me by the inevitable connotation of hierarchy in the terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ square.” He studied the squares, and rotated them to form diamonds, yielding:

  And he realized he had come to suppose and expect that the squares would resolve themselves, and that even this consciousness would not dispel a conviction that they would do so.

  He began to translate.

  “God, the (thy?)—xnn, ruae—Dobent? Dabent? …”

  It would require work and, obviously, dedication, but given both, meaning would, he was sure, be found.

  “But why,” said the voice of reason, or, as he thought of it, “a detractor,” “would a message be impressed into the bars of a cell.

  “There are two reasons,” he thought.

  “One: It seems that any science is the attempt to wrest meaning from the superficially random. All great advances in the fields of …,” he thought, “medicine, chemistry, and …” He was reluctant to include physics, as he was unsure of precisely in what it consisted. “Surely, physics, though, whatever it contains, must advance through the connection of previously unconnected facts, else what is the good of an equation?

  “Most of human thought, in fact,” he thought, “is the attempt to find a hidden meaning. My second assertion is this: If the meaning does not exist, then there is meaning in our attempts to create it.”

  “This assertion on my part is either very wise or foolish,” he thought. “What of a grain of sand? And what fool would be fool enough to study it? And yet. And yet … And yet there exists such things as crystals, and many have learned from them.

  “Now: four men went into the garden, we are told—Azai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba. One became mad, one took his own life, one became a heretic, and one, Akiba, went on to glory as a Teacher of the Soul. Now: Could that very garden be contained in these squares? Why not?

  “Or else, in what did it consist, save in the arbitrary arrangement of matter which they believed would hold a secret.

  “Will I say that these men, Hubbard and Ginnett, were put on the earth to place their names upon that bar to instruct me? No. I will not. Will I say I was not put upon the earth to find a meaning in their names? I cannot discount it. For is that not the enterprise in which I find myself? And, if it’s ludicrous, how much more so is my incarceration for a crime simple right reason knows me innocent of having done? And if I may assume that it is not ridiculous to state that there may be reason in the words on the bars, then may I not extrapolate that it is not beyond the realm of reason to assume that those men had been put upon earth in part to furnish the material of my investigations?

  “Now, I know that to be false, for I cannot fix myself as the center of a universe which, aeons ago, gave rise not only to the alphabet but to my disposition to reorder it in equilateral components. There is nothing in that—I cannot go that far.

  “But now I am lost, and to what must I cling in order to both navigate through and gain instruction in the Garden?

  “What if I were to look once again at the names in the bars, and to discover that I had misread them?

  “What if it pleased God to keep me in this cell for sixty years, and I employed the time to create a cosmology based on the meaning in those words, and after that time I looked once again and found I had mistranscribed them, and all of my elaborations were based upon error—would not that error have meaning? And if so, meaning sufficient to justify my—we must say—misguided efforts?

  “And if the error were not misguided, of what use the original words upon the bars? And if they have no worth, why do I find myself studying them?

  “Is it, then, the exercise of my capacity that pleases me, and the notion that it has significance merely the goad to that pleasure?

  “Perhaps it is our gift to reason merely to the extent wh
ich would outwit the beasts of the field, and any further or greater employ or elaboration of that gift must lead to evil.

  “And then, perhaps, it is the purpose of what we have come to call ‘pursuit of knowledge’ to countervail the exercise of that evil propensity. Could that be the case? And then, perhaps, it is the meaning of ‘knowledge,’ ‘to do no evil,’ and that is why it pleases.

  “For how can we posit an ultimate Good, or own an Improvement, as we know we are both bound to die and likely to inflict misery during our life?

  “But surely there are medical advances which have lessened pain and lengthened our lives.

  “But again, perhaps, if we would follow out thoughts to the end, it is a greater good to pass quickly and be done with it. Can we say that without demeaning that force which gave us our life?

  “Would it be better if those two deluded men, Ginnett and Hubbard, who divert themselves in what they choose to style ‘Penal Engineering’—would it be better if they had not lived? If they had not lived, I would not be drawn to this line of reasoning. Has this reasoning made me better, or worse?

  “Better or worse for what?

  “To what end?

  “Beth-Lechem,” he said. “House of bread. The breadhouse. Certainly the home of a baker. Elizabeth, God-is-my-pact. Daniel, God-is-my-judge. Bethel, the house of God. Salem, Peace.” He looked at the Hebrew primer in his hand.

  “‘Who rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered.’”

  Palestine

  Palestine, then, was a dream.

  Not peopled by Turks—who- and whatever they might be—but as in the days of the Bible, when tribes of white people, just like oneself—Westerners, in fact, he thought—roamed through a desert which might seem to us inhospitable, but which they found a comfortable home. The desert was home to them. Hot, but dry, during the day, cold at night, granted, but was not the one a welcome respite from the other? And could one, did one, not experience it as a comfort, wrapped in the rugs and hides, so warm, so light for transport, which made it home?