Some Notes on God

 

1. Is God vulnerable?

 

Apparently.  To feel is to be vulnerable, is it not?  To suffer?

The noise of humanity irritated the Mesopotamian gods so miserably that they wiped it out with a flood, the one on which the Genesis version is based.  Then they ran to their father Anu to shelter them from it.  Fraidy-cats.  Then they suffered remorse for having caused it.  They felt it all.

Isis was vulnerable to love and loss, and her brother-husband Osiris to deception, to assassination and—if you consider it a vulnerability—to rebirth.

The Greek gods, who Homer said "dwell in bliss," nevertheless suffered jealousy, envy, anger, fear, indignation, ugliness, deformity, lameness, castration, and ultimately death.  So much for bliss. 

And they suffered pleasure, if you consider that a vulnerability.

The Nordic gods were subject to the same things, and of course to twilight.

The Judaeo-Christian-Muslim God was notoriously jealous, and with some reason: scholars are telling us all those names of his were actually of other gods, lots of them.  He suffered anger, rage, vengefulness and, we can only conclude, a sense of obligation to put on our own vulnerability, sweat blood in terror, and submit to torture from which death could only be a relief.  It’s a beautiful story, “The notion,” as T.S. Eliot says, “of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing.”

If only it weren’t so mixed up with hellfire and sexual prohibition.  “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,” says William Blake, “so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”  Hence the hypocrisy of the diaper: the Romans didn’t nail anybody up in his underwear.  Even Salvador Dalí paints it on.  Only Michelangelo gives us a nude Christ.

It is debated whether Jesus spoke and read Greek, which had been the lingua franca of the Eastern Empire since Alexander; moreover, the flight into Egypt must have brought the Holy Family to the Jewish community in Alexandria, the world’s intellectual capital, and the logical place for Jesus to pick up enough to wow the Temple priests with at the age of twelve—not that logic has to be involved.  Certainly he talks more like Socrates than like Moses.

And like Socrates, he may just be a character in a book.  The four most important people in Western culture—Homer (for Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and Caesar wanted to be Alexander), Socrates, Jesus and Shakespeare—may never have existed.

"Homer"
May be as misnomer
For several otherwise out-of-work guys
Half his size.

Dalí once remarked that he adored weakness, which he found consonant with modern physics, and that he painted anti-matter angels.  Perhaps we could imagine an anti-matter God, who submits himself to his cosmos like any artist to his work, and then what happens happens.  The price for freedom, after all, is vulnerability.

But let’s not get carried away.  Ignorance—and here’s an adage I can sign—is bliss.  Who knows what's behind the curtain?  On Isis’s statue the inscription said, "I am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

  

2) Is God evil?

 

There’s a case for it.  The shadow side of our culture is Gnosticism, the belief that we ourselves are sparks of the original God, held prisoner here by a second-rate god, a Demiurge, psychotic and inferior, who split off from Godhead and trapped us.  Vulnerability again: apparently it’s eternal.

When you get the gnosis, the knowledge, from a redeemer or just by waking up, you can never lose the sense that you are God, and the sky-god isn’t.

It’s been with us since the first century, the idea that the Demiurge put us in a garden and told us we could do anything we wanted except eat the fruit of a certain tree.  Well, what else could we do?  Then he came looking for us—very creepy: “Who told you you were naked?”  In this version the serpent is the redeemer, the ancient symbol of wisdom.

Then "God" wiped us out with a flood, after which he promised he wouldn’t do that any more; next time he’d do it by fire.  Thanks a lot.  (Which Planet of the Apes movie is it where the people worship an atom bomb as a manifestation of God?  It's what James Baldwin called The Fire Next Time.)

But there are lots of versions.  The texts were suppressed, and until recently the only source we had on them was the Church Fathers, who summarized them to condemn them.  The thing went underground and spread to Islam, where the Sufis adopted it, and were horribly beaten down.  The great Persian poet Rumi was a Gnostic.

In the middle ages Gnosticism emerged in Kabbalah.  And from Islam it came, through both the Muslim-occupied Balkans and Muslim-occupied Spain, to northern Italy and the south of France, where it appeared as Catharism ("Purism"): the Cathars were vegetarians, egalitarians, feminists—the whole trip—and embodied a heresy so threatening that the Pope sent a crusade against them.

The leader of the crusade, Simon de Montfort (I’m quoting the Wikipedia) "ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 prisoners, cut off their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a prisoner with one remaining eye."  It didn’t work, so they slaughtered them and burned down their cities.  The Cistercian abbot who led the attack on Béziers was asked how to distinguish Cathars from Christians.  "Kill them all," he said.  "God will know his own."

Courtly love comes down to us from poems written at that time, and in that place, and imitated ever since.  We’re still in the habit of letting ladies go first, though we no longer hold their chairs while they sit or take our hats off in their presence, possibly because we’re not wearing hats.

And though the exaltation of women was a civilizing force in those barbaric times, it’s no exaggeration to say that the women’s revolution has been against courtly love.

The schism between the Orthodox east and the Catholic west happened before these events, so courtly love never took hold in Greece.  Here in anarchic Athens, where people park their cars on the sidewalk and there’s often room for only one person to pass at a time, women smile at me when I step back for them (I can’t help it): it tells them I'm from the West, and Greeks love foreigners.

But here’s the thing: many people believe that courtly-love literature was not about lovers and their high unattainable ladies, but about the poet yearning for his high unattainable self, his godhead.  Saying it in code is better than having your eyes gouged out.

Notice that the lover never "attains" his beloved—that’s one of the rules.  In the north of France, where it took the form of romance, Tristan and Isolde don’t have sex; they sleep with a sword between them: their job is to yearn.  And it’s that way down to Wagner, down to pop songs.

Dante seems to have sensed the spiritual meaning.  His sonnets to Beatrice are the strongest courtly-love poems I know; and it’s she who, in the Commedia, leads him up to the light.

God as gay

In Paradise Lost Milton, who knew the ancient languages—and the Fathers by heart—puts the Gnostic arguments in Satan’s mouth.  Milton, as Blake says, "was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it."  It’s Milton’s Satan who inspires English Romanticism.  In Byron’s Cain, Cain is a hero who defies the illegitimate God and commits murder, fuck you.  "I have a great mind to believe in Christianity," said Byron, "for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."  Shelley despises the world he finds himself in, and even gentle Wordsworth adapts Satan’s speeches to his own sense of self.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
          The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
              Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                And cometh from afar:
              Not in entire forgetfulness,
              And not in utter nakedness,
          But trailing clouds of glory do we come
              From God, who is our home.

Well, that’s the sweet way of saying it.  You get your sweet Gnostics, like Emerson, and you get your bitter Gnostics, like Samuel Beckett, who thinks even after we die the torture continues.  Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is not just the black guy in white society; he's the unseen self.

Blake wondered what kind of God could make the tiger: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?"  (I have lambs and tigers in my own heart, it doesn’t seem that remarkable.)  Queegueg says the same thing in Moby-Dick which, along with Peter Pan and Under the Volcano, is the great Gnostic novel: when a shark he thought dead snaps at him he says, "Queequeg no care what god made him shark, wedder Feejee God or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."  And we get it again with the enormous fat crocodile in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line: who made that thing?

Ingmar Bergman gave us a vision of God as a rapacious spider, and Stanley Kubrick had the Gnostic paranoia (see Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick).  David Lynch combines that with Presbyterianism, an easy fit: Romanticism is not only Gnosticism, it's post-Christian Presbyterianism; that is to say it's dualistic—it rejects the world.  (For more on dualism, see Catholics and Puritans.)

"That is God...a shout in the street."

Classicists like Joyce and Dalí don't care for that.  In 1943 Dalí wrote, "Hitler wants war, not in order to win, as most people think, but to lose.  He is romantic, and an integral masochist, and exactly as in Wagner’s operas it has to end for him, the hero, as tragically as possible.  The end to which Hitler aspires is to feel his enemy’s boot crushing his face, which for that matter is unmistakably marked by disaster."

I wonder what he'd say about Merkel.

Nevertheless our own time is heavy with Gnostics.  In Peter Weir’s Fearless Jeff Bridges looks up at the sky and says, "You want to kill me, but you can’t."  In Weir's Dead Poets Society those boys who stand up on their desks at the end are assuming their full stature by defying the Demiurge—who is really rather a nice guy, isn’t he?  And in his The Truman Show the Demiurge is a reality-TV producer who keeps Truman in a false world. 

For the young, of course, there’s The Matrix: God as computer.

The discovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945 had something to do with this mood: for the first time we had the real texts, and a different kind of Jesus, a stay-light-on-your-feet Jesus.  The Copts are the ancient guardians of this tradition.

But it's always with us, texts or no.  In its debased form it’s the content of all those Twitter messages, LinkedIn messages, inspiration messages, you-can-do-it messages.  Here’s a profile I just saw: "Beyond Your Fear Is A Whole New You!  We all have fear about something in our lives. Whether it is rejection, loss, failure or a number of any other emotions that are like anchors dragging behind us and holding us back from doing what...."  There are more redeemers out there than people who give a rat’s ass.

But that’s the way we see things these days.  Emersonianism is America.  "Yes we can!"  Harold Bloom says most Americans are Gnostics without knowing it. 

But what a paranoid vision!  And it’s a dogma!  I hate dogma.  There’s a difference, after all, between belief and faith. (See also Thinking about God, by Doctor Robert MacLean, PhD,)

Nor can I square it with my enjoyment of the world; Gnosticism is scarcely what you’d call earthy.  Mine is a precarious position, yes, but as my alter ego says in The Cad, "if you're not making a fool of yourself, you're not alive."  We speak from experience there, Toby and I.

And who says it has to be squared?  "Commonsense is square," said Vladimir Nabokov, "whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round."

Socrates, whether he existed or not, said "The best theory of the gods is no theory at all."   

Enigma, then, is God's real name.  And the world's.  And yours.

 

3) Are you God?

Probably.  But don’t think about that now, you’ve got the rent to pay.

Comments

A Comedy of Death

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

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What We Know, an Excursion into Unscience

Make that what you know.  (I address these remarks to the mirror.)

Not much.

Science is Latin for “knowledge,” and we walk around in a trance of confidence that “science” understands the things that we don’t, and can and will solve all the problems.  This attitude is called “scientism.”

What, then, do you really know?

Let’s start with what you see when you open your eyes: light.  “Everything that is,” said Duns Scotus, “is light.”  What is it?  Particles?  Of what?  Waves?  Vibrating what medium?  Much debated.  If it’s particles, how does it get through glass?   If it’s waves, how does it reach us through ninety-three million miles of vacuum?  

Maybe it's dark matter, the Darth Vader hidden behind appearances—sort of a Zoroastrian evil twin!

The Wikipedia says, “light can be expressed as both particles and waves. This paradox is known as the Wave–particle Duality Paradox.”

You see?  There are people who understand.  But they don’t want to talk to you.

Note the word “paradox,” the language of the medieval Church.

OK, what about real matter?  Substance.  Stuff.  The hand before your face.  What is it?

You feel certain, I know you do, that it’s made of molecules and atoms.  If you want to get real refined about it, it comes down to quarks (James Joyce be praised!) and other “subatomic particles.”

Hah! 

You’ve been sold the fifth-century-BC Greek atomic theory.  And it’s still a theory.  If that little solar system with electrons orbiting a nucleus did exist, the nucleus, I understand (there, I understand something!), would be like a baseball on the floor of a cathedral, the electrons flies in the upper reaches of the vault. 

If.

We live in a world of metaphor—“nuclear” power, “atomic” bombs, “electricity”—for what is electricity?  “A flow of electrons”!  A “current”!  Uh-huh.  Like a river: you can drink it, you can wade in it, you can pee in it, you can swim in it, you can boil pasta in it, but don’t ask what it is.  The information is not available.  Feels good though, as long as it doesn’t sweep you over the falls.

How about energy?  What is energy?  It’s the Greek word for “motion.”  That which moves has “energy.”  We fool ourselves with these words.

Gravity?  The force that holds it all together, keeps the moon in orbit around our own little ball, keeps us in orbit around the sun—what is it?  Gravity is Latin for “heaviness”: the apple falls because it’s “heavy.”  Heavy answer.  One feels, does one not, that one is being bullshat.

No, wait—gravity is electromagnetic!  If you wrap a wire around a piece of metal and send a “current” through it, the metal behaves like a magnet.  What’s a magnet?  It’s a stone the Greeks found in Magnesia that acts like that.  So gravity is an electric charge, because electric charges attract one another.  Why do electric charges attract one another?  Well, uh—

Here’s a shocking idea, but I’m afraid it’s true: no one has ever seen an atom, or even a molecule.  No one has ever photographed one.  That’s shocking because, in our imaginations, they’re what the world is made of.

What they really are, “atoms” and “molecules,” is numerical concepts that work. 

Paul Valéry, a poet much influenced by Francis Bacon, the inventor of scientific method, said, “Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful.  The rest is literature.”

But just because atoms are concepts doesn’t mean we can’t split one.  We can make a really big explosion (the first guys who did it stood much too close with their fingers in their ears, afraid they would set off a reaction that would destroy the world), but it doesn’t involve “atoms.”  Google how to make a nuclear device and what you’ll get is a chemical recipe.

Same for DNA: what Watson and Crick did was, not isolate a molecule, but construct a model of how such a molecule would look, and fit the data.  Search “DNA testing,” which gets so many innocent people out of jail, and you’ll find another chemical recipe.

Cultural icon as hood ornament

The molecule metaphor has been instrumental in persuading us that we know what we’re talking about.  So there’s another thing you don’t know—what you’re talking about.

OK, what about space?  Newton built his universe, the one we live in, in Euclid’s space, where the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the three angles of a triangle add up to a hundred and eighty degrees, and so forth.  Newton’s idea of inertia was that if something is moving and there’s no force to stop it, it will proceed in a straight line forever.  Ergo the universe is infinite, and has no boundary: if there were a boundary, what would be on the other side?

But when our telescopes became strong enough (I treated this idea briefly in Catholics and Puritans), and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, we saw that they did not obey Euclid’s laws.

Imagine three equidistant objects: easy. Imagine four: a pyramid on a triangular base. Imagine five: can’t be done. And yet it is so. Five hundred, five thousand galaxies where they shouldn’t be.  The assistant patent officer in Bern came up with a theory that would account for that, or at least describe it:

“Curved space” does not mean space is somehow bent; it’s a metaphor (always these metaphors!) taken from the curvature of the earth.  If you flatten the global earth into a two-dimensional chart, as sailors had to do, Nairobi and Mombasa are the proper distance apart, but not Moscow and Saint Petersburg; so you have to make a separate map of the north to take into account that the earth is curved.  So in space: we cannot construct a model of our universe in which the distances between the galaxies are in proportion: every perspective requires another model.

Typical understanding of curved space; the caption says, "Gravity causes space-time to curve around massive objects."  Oy.

Our universe is not Euclidian but skew; our imaginations, however, are Euclidian; we cannot think a non-Euclidian thought.  We cannot imagine our world.

And, get this, if this arrangement doubles the cosmos back on itself, it may, while having no boundary, be finite.

Hah!

The geneticist J.B.S. Haldane said, “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

And let us have Vladimir Nabokov (a true scientist, Nabokov: his work on butterfly migration is just now being appreciated) on Einstein: “While not having much physics, I reject Einstein’s slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist.”  (See Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls.)

We don’t know why the moon keeps her face to us always, as in a dance.

We don’t know why the sky is blue, though there are people who will try to tell you.

We don’t know what’s at the center of the earth.

So much for space.  What about time?  Those who are willing to accept the skewness of space are not always ready to accept corresponding discontinuities in time.  You need perfectly continuous time, for example, to buy the concept of evolution.

Now, I apologize for this.  I wrote a piece called The Accidental Monkey and announced it on a LinkedIn group devoted to “science” (permit me the quotation marks), where it was attacked with a religious furor.  And that’s what the so-called “Theory” of Evolution (it is not a theory; a theory is testable—ask Bacon) is: a religion.  It is the medieval Great Chain of Being turned on its side and extended in continuous time.  It is nineteenth-century laissez-faire economics.  It is what Karl Popper said it was, before they started leaning on him: metaphysics.  (Physics, in fact, is metaphysics; one should speak more properly of a physics—as we must, who hold Einstein in one hand and Heisenberg in the other.) 

But take away what people think they know and you can confront an angry mob.  (The furor of course was welcome.  You are aware of the game: get them onto my site where they buy my books and I don’t have to disappoint the landlord.  I can’t wait to see what happens when I post this.)

“That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere,” said Valéry, “is almost certain to be false.” 

In five millenia we’ve landed on the moon, put a vacuum cleaner on Mars and have a transmitter exiting the solar system, and you’re telling me that for two hundred and fifty thousand years we’ve been picking berries?  Please. 

To use the duc de Saint-Simon’s phrase, the Theory of Evolution is “supported by unanswerable reasons that do not convince.” 

My favorite line in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mycroft mocks his brother’s analytical powers by recalling that as a child he had deduced that babies came into the world in the satchels carried by the arriving midwives.  “As good an explanation as any,” smiles Watson, to  Mycroft’s scowl.

Popper’s ancestor David Hume, whom Einstein studied so carefully, and whose epistemology (the knowledge of knowledge) governs the approach in (forgive me if I call it) real science, forbids identification of one thing with another, forbids us to assume continuities—forbids metaphor.  Since Hume, philosophy has become mood music.  In the middle ages we were creatures of God; in the current mythos we are creatures of nature.  The possibility becomes distinct, in Hume’s light, that we’re not creatures at all.

But let’s not get cute.

Leave we, then, the subject of evolution, whatever the hell it means—it’s supposed to explain everything about us—with another remark from the butterfly chaser: “Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”

But then, if you’re not a neurotic monkey, what are you?  Who are you?

Hah!

“Our ignorance of our nature,” as Jean-Luc Godard said, “is total.”

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin

Speaking of addressing these remarks to the mirror, you don’t know what you look like, either.  Forget trying to find it in there, that’s not what other people see.  Same for photographs: even movie stars watching themselves on the screen can’t see what they look like, and, oh, they try.  Cary Grant said he quit making movies because he was afraid his double chin was showing.  Huh?

You don’t know what you sound like.  It’s a profoundly disturbing experience to hear your own voice.  Is that you?  Can’t be.

You don’t know your own style.  A compliment is always a surprise.

And you don’t know what it is to think.  I mean you do think—sometimes—but what is a thought? 

Your inner abyss, which the outer one reflects, is an illusion, but an illusion that plays its notes on your body.  Your memory distorts the past, you can’t see the future, and your ignorance of yourself, and of what life is, reduces you to a child.

Real science, like real art, is useless.  It’s not technology, or electronic expertise, which the vulgar regard as science.  It’s a personal pursuit, for personal pleasure, of an addition to what we know.

Between what we know—hah! what do I know?—and the dark matter we are forced to hypothesize, comes the sharp point of intelligence.

Now, look, all you scientists (let us for the moment dignify you with the name), you who elevate a few clues into a policy, I can see you coming already with your torches and pitchforks to spit your ill-considered trite-isms at me: I like to answer all comments individually, but forgive me if in this case I ignore a few.

“Since no man of aught he leaves knows,” says Hamlet, “what is’t to leave betimes?”  

But not just yet, my dear Prince, I'm enjoying this.
________________________

P.S.  Nabokov did agree with Einstein to this extent: “I confess, I do not believe in time.”  At his old friend's funeral Einstein said, “Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics ['believe in physics'? it's a faith?], know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

P.P.S. Mediterraneans count by their fingers; you can buy ten eggs here.  Nordics count by the moon: everything comes in dozens.  Why does the average menstrual cycle precisely match the moon's?  

P.P.P.S.  What is sex?  Is it electromagnetic too?

Steel Man, A Romance with a Robot:

The novel;

The play and the movie

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“Like all that is best in life I am quite useless.”

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews: Hillbilly Elegy

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

SOME VIDEOS:

In Bed with the Girls

Toby Gets Un-Stupid

Jaws

Trying It On

The Tipping Point

Shoot the Baby

Champagne and Ice Cream

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls

If it weren’t for Lolita we might never have heard of Nabokov, which would be a huge loss. Success is so often a matter of scandal.
 
I like P.G. Wodehouse best; no one else gets us so high. But when I descend into actual literature—an abrasive experience for my sensitive soul, but one that has allowed me to fiddle away my time unproductively—I cannot but acknowledge that the five great novels of the twentieth century are Ulysses, A la recherche, Gatsby, Under the Volcano and Lolita.

Nabokov's images fill me with awe; his phrases are tiny masterpieces; his sentences, galleries with their own exquisite shapes. But even in his most gorgeous stories he can be something of a stuffed shirt:

The snag with Vladimir Nabokov was
A dyspepsia almost as noisome as Waugh's.
Life offered neither
A very long breather
From constant unbearable irks.
Now I've wrung my enjoyment from both of these men
I need not be exposed to them ever again
But I suffer the scourge
Of a lingering urge
To pour Eno all over their works!
 
What gives Lolita that extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the American vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in love. Then too, one cannot but feel that it's a portrait of Nabokov’s own passion. And passion delivers.

It’s shameless of me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner life—but  lust for young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in Lolita he contributed the word “nymphet” to the English language. It's my intuition that his stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a firewall against an unseemly urge. In one of his essays he opines that if the criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it. Like Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll and J. D. Salinger, he converted the obsession into literature. Balthus did it in paint:

But no psychology can touch bottom, and VN would have agreed:

Nabokov was annoyed
By Freud,
Considered Eliot
Beneath yelling at
And Dali
Too far gone to rally;
Waugh regarded Eliot
As brelliot
But thought Picasso
Was an asso.

Nevertheless I will dare to say that his orientation was not a whim. Many people, for example, can be gay on a whim, myself included; but there are also people who can’t imagine any other way of doing it. The conclusion forces itself upon me that sexual preferences are hardwired. One might be grateful if one’s wiring isn't too inconvenient, though there’s nothing terribly convenient about heterosexuality; it can be as big a p. in the a. as the other thing.

It’s OK to like little boys if you’re a king, like Henry II or James I or William III (of William and Mary); or if you’re an aristocrat, like the Earl of Rochester (the Johnny Depp film about him was dreary, so unlike the merry Earl) or Lord Byron; or if you’re a famous novelist like Thomas Mann, or a celebrity poet like W.H. Auden:

Said the Queen to the King, we do frown on
Your choosing our page to go down on
When you meet on the stairs—
And it does give him airs
If you will do the job with your crown on!

But if you’re an average Joe they’ll throw you in the can with gorillas who are as repelled by the vice as church-goers, and will pick on you.

Ditto for little girls: in the literary world you’re somewhat protected. When he publishes his poems in a book Leonard Cohen can say, “The fifteen-year-old girls I wanted when I was fifteen, I have them now. I advise you all to become rich and famous.” But in the popular eye, like Polanski or Woody Allen, you have to watch it. Woody's mentor in Love and Death tells him, “I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is blonde twelve-year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible.”

Had Nabokov proceeded to his PhD,
Would he have to shake his polymathic rattles at me?
Had Woody Allen only finished his BA,
Where'd his undergradjut exercises be today?

In Lolita Humbert makes his own list: “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve…”

He might have mentioned Juliet, who was thirteen when she married Romeo, Edgar Poe, who married his cousin when she was thirteen, and that other southerner Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his cousin of thirteen—though Nabokov may not have been following Jerry Lee's career. (If a boy from Alabama marries a girl from Louisiana, are they still cousins?)

Poe
Is slow.
The diction is inflated
And the angst is overrated.

Indeed, one thinks of Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey, who tell us that there’s nothing inherently wrong with sex with the young, that it’s the adult hysteria that does the damage.

One thinks also of the pedophile priests in the Catholic Church—of the sheer number of them! Were Mead and Kinsey inspecting us as a tribe they might conclude that it was the norm.

It is a convention in our time to go on TV and say you were abused as a child. If you’re a politician in the Bible Belt, you oppose same-sex marriage and you get caught using a male escort service, you go on TV and say you were abused as a child. The etiology may be dubious, but it works with the public. 

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I've just seen, the heroine was abused as a child, the victim was abused as a child, the villain was abused as a child—it explains everything!

As for my own case (I can hear you asking), I’m a narcissist with a taste for older women. Now that I’ve reached a certain age there are no older women, and the guy in the mirror isn’t looking that good. But one presses on. (See In Praise of Older Women.)

Ours is a period of neo-Victorianism. Freud, whatever his ultimate merits, freed us, not only from nineteenth-century prudishness, but from the Christian prohibition that dates from Saint Paul. Freud’s influence took wide hold in the fifties and sixties, just as the birth-control pill was freeing us from the anxiety of getting “caught,” as people used to say, and penicillin was freeing us from the horrors of syphilis and gonorrhea. Oh, we had much too good a time! Then herpes and AIDS, stark parallels to the old scourges, pushed us back toward something more sentimental.

Lolita was written in the early fifties, another dryness of atmosphere, and by his own account Nabokov’s wife stopped him from burning the manuscript. Here is Humbert hating himself even as he possesses his dream:

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after  fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and "oh, no," Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered.

This, Nabokov insists, is not his remorse but Humbert's: "He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere." 

Harold Bloom introduces his study of Shakespeare, whom he regards as a god (and in his Gnostic parlance he means it), by arguing that Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, that we’ve been misreading The Merchant of Venice for four hundred years. “There’s a price for loving Shakespeare,” he says. Arthur Koestler once remarked that if he threw out his anti-Semitic books he’d be deprived of half his library. It's rather sad. In Moby Dick Ishmael, whose lover is a South-Sea islander, regards the whale's whiteness as the same mark of superiority that gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe." What shall we do with these texts?

Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semitic child-rapist and a hypocrite, who lied even to himself. The only erotic moment in Crime and Punishment is when ten-year-old Polina, step-sister to the Hallmark-Card heroine, comes down some stairs and kisses Raskalnikov. But any such enjoyment is pinned on the child-raping villain of the piece, whom we are encouraged to hate. Dostoyevsky himself was a loathsome man; one wouldn’t have wanted to meet him. But he is the greatest novelist in human memory, and there is no book as passionate, as thrilling or as psychologically intimate as Crime and Punishment.

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans,” said H.L. Mencken, “and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

Martin Amis, a writer of astounding mediocrity, is a better embodiment of our time. He is the son of Kingsley Amis, whose first novel was a hit, after which he collapsed into a lower-middle-class philistinism that dismayed his readers—but there he was, the author of Lucky Jim. And there was Martin—and he was a writer too!—sustaining his career on the same book.

Kingsley Amis
Is justly famous,
And his first book scored it!
But it’s one thing to attract attention, and another to reward it.

When Junior speaks of Nabokov he says, “you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature—Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade—to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.”

Good little man. Straight from the Y.

And English literature—we must have the courage to face it—is dead.

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.

“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

The Devil's Pleasure Garden