COUNSEL, rocketing to his feet: Your Honour, this is worse than contempt! It’s contempt not only of this court, but of Your Honour personally, and all of us here!
JUDGE: It’s vexatious. But this man is on trial for his life, and must be allowed to fight for it in his own fashion - within limits. However, I warn you - the Accused - not to abuse our tolerance. Insulting behaviour will do you no good at all. If you persist in it, I shall have to consider what can he done to put you in a more chastened mood, and purge your contempt.
MYSELF: Truly, Your Honour, I intend no disrespect. Quite the reverse, in fact. What I’m saying is that everyone in this court is really living from Stage Three, without realizing it. My point is that none of us, never mind how Satanic our ambition, no matter how colossal our chutzpah, can begin to oust God from the Centre of our lives. There’s no dislodging this Roger the lodger. Creatures are, willy-nilly, a mere dream apart from the Creator at their core, nothing at all without this central No-thing, Clarity, Transparency, Capacity, Essence, Reality, Aware Emptiness - whatever name you like to give this Zero. Even to blaspheme against This is to do so by virtue of This, empowered by This. In truth, the crime of blasphemy is all sound and fury signifying nothing, mere bombast and posturing. All the same, alas, it’s real enough to spoil our lives.
It just isn’t a practical proposition to stick at this Second Stage, betwixt and between, imagining we’re living from the infinitesimal resources of Number One, instead of from the infinite resources of Zero. It’s deadening, anxiety-producing, exhausting, absurd –
COUNSEL: Your Honour, does the court now have to endure a sermon from the dock on how to conduct our lives?
MYSELF: It’s no uncalled-for preachifying, but an appeal from the heart for justice and sanity. If I can show the Jury that what I’m claiming to be is natural and normal, sensible, healthy and immensely more efficient than the alternative - and in fact the way I am and each of them is already, whether we acknowledge or deny it - why then they must bring in a verdict of Not Guilty. For what is blasphemy but refusal to fit in with the Divine Plan, with God’s design for the world, with His status quo? And what is the antidote for blasphemy but obedience to that plan, and saying a hearty Yes! to His arrangements?
So, if I have the court’s kind permission, let me give some impression of what it means to live consciously from this Third Stage, from Zero instead of Number One, from life as I live it instead of life as I’m told I live it. [Counsel groans, and ostentatiously sets his stopwatch. I ignore the gesture, and continue.]
Zero is my lucky no-number. Zero is my Core, my ever-present refuge in time of trouble. At once the down-swoop of my freedom from all things and my soaring union with all things. At once my absolute detachment and my absolute attachment. As Number One I was a man and nothing else. I headed the queue of humans only, and was in no such commanding position as regards mice or Cats or dogs, or plants, or any other creatures. At the front of just one cosmic queue, I was shouldered out of all the others. I wasn’t made to feel at home there, or wanted. A stranger, an outsider everywhere. Not a happy life. But as Zero I head every queue and start every line in the universe. As the launching pad they all take off from, I’m shot of them all, but remain their Shooter. Here, as Who I really am, I originate all creatures from creepy-crawlies to seraphim. No longer the lone outsider, blackballed from every club but one, I’m the Sole Insider. This is no empty boast or gooey sentiment. To the degree that I see into and enter my natureless Nature, I see and enter into the Nature of all beings. The barriers fall, and I’ve no option but to love the world that I am. My score in this cosmic championship remains at love - love fifteen, love thirty, love forty, love game. Love means Zero, no score at all. Yet Love wins every time. Oh, yes, Love wins - game, set and match! It takes God’s Wimbledon by storm.
Everything is eloquent of the Zero, the Love, the Nothing at the Source of everything. Even the way I’m obliged to talk of it, in a marvellous and seemly double entendre, goes straight to the heart of the matter. I say I believe in Nothing, rely on Nothing, am fanatical about Nothing, see Nothing, know Nothing, want Nothing, have Nothing, am Nothing - and so on, ad infinitum. Here, the most negative of assertions reads as the most positive. The mere nothing that’s scarcely fit for the universe’s scrap heap suddenly becomes the very un-mere No-thing that originates everything! Zero is the rune, the magic word which, when lived as well as spoken, reconciles all life’s opposites - peripheral belief with central scepticism, peripheral commitment with central independence, peripheral wealth with central poverty, peripheral know-how with central cluelessness, peripheral excitement with central calm... As I say, this divine double entendre is no verbal accident or trick. It’s not even a way of life. It’s the way of life, for it’s the way life is.
This Aware Nothing or Zero is indeed no shivering cold, toothless, pale abstraction. It is the Parent, the Mother-Father, infinitely robust and flamboyant in its expression, infinitely still and silent and mysterious in its essence, inscrutable to the point of being incredible. For no reason It is, and for no reason It is the inexhaustible Source of everything. To imagine you are living independently of It, living from Number One - no matter how godlike Number One may seem - is nightmarish. And so daft. As if you could, for a split second!
Finally, a little experiment. Surprise the Divine Mathematician at His sums! To catch the One red-handed, in the very act of coming from the None, unpocket and show a fist. To catch the Many coming from the One, spread your fingers. To catch the Many returning to the One, close your fist again. To catch the One red-handed in the very act of returning to the None, the Zero, pocket your fist again. This is not a symbol or a moving picture of Him who truly counts. It’s the real Thing, and the real No-thing.
And here’s the sort of thing the wise have to say about the No-one who heads every queue in His universe:
Tao gave birth to the One. The One gave birth to two things, three things, up to ten thousand.
Tao Te Ching
The Many return to the One. To what does the One return?
Kao-feng Tuan-miao
O is the source of all speech, a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to every wise man, a blessing and a joy to every knight.
Anglo Saxon Runic Poem
Wise Master Eckhart wills
To teach us Nothing’s lore,
And he who sees it not
May wail to God therefor.
The true and heavenly light
On him hath never shone.
Medieval Convent Song
COUNSEL, making a great show of resetting his stopwatch: Your Honour, I’ve been very quiet throughout these ingenious and long-drawn-out manoeuvres, with their smokescreens and feints and diversionary tactics. I think that this time I deserve the last word - if only to bring us back to the simple issue before this court.
JUDGE: lt’s up to the Accused.
MYSELF: Go right ahead. There’ll be no comeback from me.
COUNSEL: Members of the Jury, in her pub the Witness wrote down these words: ‘I am that I AM. I AM is my first and real and permanent name: and you know Whose name that is. John and Nokes are just my temporary names, my nicknames.’
He accepts, without a blush or a tremor, that those were his very words. Greater blasphemy than this no man has ever breathed. Not all the twists and turns of his Defence, right up to the end of this Trial and your retiring to consider your verdict, will begin to purge one syllable of that blasphemy. Or deter you from bringing in a verdict of Guilty.
Don’t be put off by his gamesmanship. I shouldn’t be surprised if, though not yet halfway through this Trial, you felt that Nokes has already scored some impressive goals. Lots of them. I do so agree. His nimble footwork, his dash, the accuracy of his shooting have often (I confess) left me wonder-struck. All the more so because every one of his goals has been an own goal. He seems to imagine that he can clear himself of blasphemy by blaspheming ever more shamelessly.
Prosecution Wit
ness No. I2
THE STORE MANAGER
The Witness remembers me vaguely as one of his customers. He can think of nothing special about me - except that there was a bit of a fuss on one occasion when I returned some potatoes which had gone partly bad. He said it was my fault because I waited a week before unsealing the plastic bag they were packed in. Though slightly irritated, he stuck to the rule that the customer is always right, and replaced the goods.
COUNSEL: Would it surprise you to learn that this humble purchaser of spuds is some sort of divinity, heavily disguised? Divinity in his own eyes, I mean?
WITNESS: It certainly did startle me when I was told as much, at the time of the subpoena to appear in this court.
COUNSEL: I take it that you aren’t aware of the strange opinions he’s published about advertising, and their connection with his still stranger opinions about himself. He claims that advertising is of two very different sorts - one directed at us common folk, the other at him. Both are effective within their limits, he says.
WITNESS: I do have some rather funny customers, but I mind my own business. Treating them all in the same manner, and I hope with equal courtesy, seems to work out all right. To interest the gentleman there in my merchandise I doubt we need to dream up any special posters, newspaper ads, or TV commercials - designs that would appeal to him, in contrast to other (shall I say normal?) people. Again, when he comes shopping, the standard sales techniques are (I’m pretty sure) effective, and what he buys is normal enough, even predictable. Anyway, my job is sufficiently demanding without having to cater for two species of customers.To do that I would need to be a superman, as well as run a supermarket.
COUNSEL, to Jury: I think this Witness’s testimony speaks for itself and needs little comment from me. All I’ll say just now is: he knows his job. Which means, for all business and practical purposes, he knows his John a-Nokes, the customer who’s no more divine than the potatoes he forgot to de-bag.
I have no questions to put to the Witness. He stands down.
Defence: The Birds of God
MYSELF: The Witness underestimates himself - or should I say his firm? More accommodating than he realizes, he caters specially for me, in addition to his normal customers. Very considerate of him, I say. Let me explain.
M. & S. Sainsbury, the worldwide chain of stores - of which his is the latest and swishest - relies heavily on advertising. It’s only to be expected that most of its publicity, since it’s aimed at human beings, should portray human beings. Hence countless pictures of astoundingly healthy and good-looking men, women, children and babies rapturously eating this and drinking that and wearing the other, and getting up to most of the things that real humans get up to. Whether in the press or on hoardings or on the screen, or in the mere labelling of goods, most advertising is obviously directed at Homo sapiens.
But there remains a type of advertising which neither depicts people nor is aimed at people, but does its best to depict me - with a view to selling me something, I presume. For example, there is the tilted and brimming beer-mug held by a loose hand floating in mid-air, about to pour itself into the Void here, into the no-mouth of this no-drinker. (More accurately, of this real Drinker, the one who actually tastes the brew.) Or a pair of hands, equally innocent of any connecting body, busy handling a packet of cigarettes and conveying one of them to this absence-of-lips. Or a car evidently designed for me since it’s driven by no human driver, but instead by loose hands and feet mysteriously working at the controls - rather as if they were a quartet of superbly trained circus animals at their tricks.
Please turn to Diagram No. 12, which is a sample of the sort of advert I mean. Just one of hundreds.
Diagram No. 12
Look at your hands now. Wave them about frantically, as if you were conducting an orchestra and playing the harp... Go on... Let them go...
These airborne attendants upon the First Person are surely more like birds than earthbound animals. Birds that combine the incredible skills of the swooping swallow, the hovering humming-bird and the grasping eagle - and never a failed take-off or mid-air collision or crash landing among them. Birds of God they are - uccelli di Dio - which is what Dante called the angels, God’s messengers and servitors. To each of you, then, two questions and a warning. Can you deny you are so served? Conceding that you are, can you deny that your attendants - your uccelli di Dio - are in fact God’s? God’s, I say! To claim them for Jack, for any human, wouldn’t be just mock humility. It would be blasphemy.
Back, then, to M. & S. Sainsbury, PLC.
Naturally, such tailor-made advertisements have special impact on me. Taking full account of how different I am, they speak to my condition. lt‘s the same with drama on the large and the small screens. Nearly all of it is about and for humans. But now and then the cast includes a headless and other-way-up actor. I hear his voice, his breathing, his footfall, and occasionally catch sight of hands and feet and vestiges of a trunk. And naturally (other things being equal) I’m involved. He’s the character I identify with. He’s my kind. He’s not a man, he's Me.
By the same token, a canny insurance-agent knows how to handle my mounting sales resistance. Instead of confronting a man across the table, he comes round to my side where there’s no man. Here, no longer handing over documents for me to look at, he looks at them with me. Merging points of view, his humanness vanishes into my non-humanness. His voice and his gesturing hands - now loosed from their trunk, coming from here and no longer from there - are now so truly mine that I could well become the pushover he hopes for.
The simple fact, to me so obvious and so amusing and so awesomely significant, is that there are two immensely different sorts of limbs - the ordinary and tied-down sort that stick out of human and animal bodies at various angles, and the extraordinary and unattached sort that stick out of No-thing, branch from No-trunk, belong to No-body, operate from No-where. Unique in their looseness, they are also unique in their sensitivity, and in the miraculous ease and speed and fittingness of their responses to one’s every need. They are exceptionally serviceable offshoots, making the attached kind look like so many orthopaedic devices, wonderfully constructed and operated, but unresponsive and wooden by comparison. And no wonder! These loose limbs belong to the Looselimbed God, and just have to be very special. They come straight from Him, like bright angels from heaven, intent on His business.
No, Sir Gerald, this isn’t some newfangled and trumped-up conceit of mine, with no precedent. You can find the hand of God curiously depicted in many early medieval paintings and mosaics of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, and the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and so on. God’s pointing hand (lace-cuffed and neatly sleeved, like his Honour’s over there) with long and delicate and well-manicured fingers, emerges from a cloud at the top of the picture. It comes, I assure you, from that very same Cloud of Unknowing as this inelegantly sleeved hand - the one that I’m now extending to the court - is coming from.
Turn, please, to diagram 13 in your booklet, where you’ll find a copy of one of these pictures.
Diagram No. 13
In this picture, from a ninth-century Roman codex, a sleeping St John receives the Revelation of the Apocalypse at the hand of God. From around the twelfth century onwards, artists depicted not just the hand but the whole of God - as a well-preserved septuagenarian! Unreality at its most ridiculous, with more than a smidgen of blasphemy about it!
COUNSEL, with a great flourish of his brief: Members of the Jury, in the course of this Trial the Accused has produced many arguments - ingenious in their pseudo-naivety and absurdity, and some of them perverse to the point of madness - in support of his boasted divinity. But the one we are now listening to is the limit. Or rather, it exceeds even his limits, is really too much. If I have now to put to him some questions which aren’t just embarrassing to this court and an offence to its dignity, but blasphemous in the very asking - why, he’s to blame. His filthy insults to the Almighty can’t be countered without s
ome contamination, some descent to their level. For which I crave the court’s indulgence.
He maintains that his hands are God’s hands, seeing that they are loose and attached to no body. Whereas yours and mine, alas, seeing they are attached to human bodies, are merely human hands. I leave on one side without further comment the insufferable self-conceit and bumptiousness of the fellow, and confine myself to the bare facts. His hands look much the same as ours, don’t they? Compare those primitive pentadactylic appendages, much like those of a frog, resting on the rail of the dock over there, with the similar appendages resting on your laps, members of the Jury. What’s the difference? Why, his hands look to me rather more batrachian than some others I can see around the court. Does he mean to say that -
JUDGE: Need this aspect of the matter be pursued further? Aren’t you giving it far more attention than it deserves?
COUNSEL: As Your Honour pleases. I was about to come to the gravamen of my argument.
Reflect, members of the Jury, on what those hands of his (and yours and mine, no less) get up to out of court. Picture the things they did last night and this morning, and will do before the day is out. Some of them nice and clean things, some grubby, some foul. As foul as foul can be. Some of them acts so indecent that it’s a criminal offence to perform them in public. Is he telling the court that Almighty God (may He forgive me for mouthing such a notion!) is grubby and foul, indeed obscene? Or that He delegates His job of wiping bottoms to certain of His angels?... Very well, Your Honour, I won’t pursue the matter further... [The court simmers down.] I don’t need to. Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. In effect, the Accused is implying that the Almighty can sink to petty larceny. That He’s quite capable of the occasional flurry of shoplifting in the Witness’s store. No, I’m not accusing John a-Nokes of bagging from time to time a can of anchovies or dressed crab or Caspian caviare, and forgetting to produce it at the checkout. What I’m saying is that he could do so, using those very same loose and free-ranging hands which he says are the Almighty’s. To tell the truth, I shouldn’t be surprised if he does occasionally help himself to the Witness’s choicest goods; after all, the Divine Customer he pretends to be is certainly entitled to the lot, for free! The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. From which it follows that Sainsbury’s is the Nokes’s, and the dressed crab thereof!
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 12
