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.

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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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Cold Comfort: Notes on Canada

“For many are cold, but few are frozen.”—Matthew 22:46

Canadian pretending to like the cold

Canada is the center of the world. You didn’t know that? Oh, yeah.

See, your trouble (as always, I address the mirror) is you’ve got Mercator’s projection in your mind—which tells you nothing about the way things really are:

It was invented in 1569 for sailors, who couldn’t conveniently fit a globe—the very idea of a globe was new then—into the situation room. And despite the fact that it’s so distortive, it’s the icon of news programs, weather reports, travel agencies, Google Maps—it’s our image of the world.

But no. To see the shape of things you have to look at them with the North Pole in the middle:

See what I mean? Canada is between China, Japan, Russia, the United States and Europe. China is not “across the Pacific”; it’s just along the coast.

Unless you look at the world from the top, you can’t see how our Siberian ancestors found Sweden as convenient to raid into as India (see My Racial Profile); how Baffin is as short a Viking row-your-boat from Greenland, which is still Danish, as Greenland is from Iceland; how the Saint Lawrence River swallowed the French into the lake-and-river system that Canada is, and drew those white-water guys through the strait of (give it the French pronunciation) Detroit, all the way to the Rockies where they shot the rapids down to the coast—so many places en route are still called Portage, where you have to carry the canoe—and also down the Mississippi past (French, please) Saint-Louis and Baton Rouge to La Nouvelle-Orléans; how the Titanic could go down off Newfoundland. North America shows its Canadian face to Europe. Sail around it and you make land in Brazil.

A Greek friend of mine who was shooting a film in Alaska was surprised by all the Orthodox churches there; it’s still got the Russian flavor. Nabokov’s Ada (see Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls) gives us a world in which western Canada is Russian, and eastern Canada French—which might easily have happened—and would have made the 49th parallel a, what, interesting border.

During the Cold War people with the Mercator icon in their heads imagined there would be a trans-Atlantic exchange of missiles. Nonsense. We knew the Bear was coming over the top and it would happen in our sky; and the DEW Line—the Distant Early Warning radar system—is still there, waiting.

The Mongols arrived in Canada first. They like to come down from their mountains and conquer the world once in a while. Their cousins took over China, and then India, where they were known as Moguls, so we weren’t too far off calling them Indians. They pushed down through the Americas, founded this civilization and that, penetrated the Amazon jungle—wow!—and went all the way to land’s end, a people in love with the horizon.

Like the Vikings they’d go anywhere. And they managed to survive with dignity in this deep-freeze. I used to think that Ottawa was the coldest capital in the world, and resented Moscow. But no, Ottawa is number seven.

Canadian with a deeper sense of reality

A Toronto friend once dismissed my exotic residence as “in the Mediterranean glare.” “How,” I said, for I was not to be deglamorized, “does ‘the Mediterranean glare’ differ from the Toronto glare? Is not glare a matter of latitude? Toronto is slightly south of Florence, which puts the French Riviera well north of us.”

But she had a point. Why is it so God-damned cold there? I have friends who went unprepared on a fall day that was turning into winter—this was in downtown Montreal—and they feared death while waiting for a taxi. Cold, baby! It’s cold.

Almost certainly one's ancestors were stronger people, but why did they stop there? Other Scots went south, of course, but there was fever in those places, and the cold tends to mitigate that.

And we’re not macho about it. Those of us with the bread have hot tubs to slip into when we get home from the ice and snow. Upscale apartment buildings have them on the top floor by the pool. Nobody goes into the pool. We all sit there in our Felliniesque basin, heedless of exposure to viruses, warming ourselves together and otherwise respectful of the social norms. You can meet some good-looking women that way.

The great Canadian poem in English is “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” in which a Tennessean prospector in the Yukon just can’t get warm, and indeed freezes to death, but not before he makes his partner promise to cremate him. The Canadian is stuck with the corpse—where do you burn it in the snow?—and for days and nights eats with it staring at him, sleeps with it staring at him, till he finds an ice-bound ship, sets it on fire and throws the body in. He is already mushing his huskies away when he stops to go back and peek, at which Sam, sitting up in the flames, utters the great Canadian line: Close the door, you're letting the heat out.

In French the great Canadian poem is the splendidly solipsistic Mon Pays, which most of us know as a song: «Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver.» My country is not a country, it’s winter; My road is not a road, it’s the snow. (That’s what they play when they cut to Quebec.) Gilles Vigneault. He nailed it.

A legendary bank robbery in Montreal (the world capital of daring bank robberies) happened when the snowmobile was first invented. The culprits zoomed into town on Ski-Doos, cleaned out a savings-and-loan and shot off over the horizon while the cops were still digging out their cruisers.

“I don't even know what street Canada is on.”—Al Capone

Up north the Mounties don’t like snowmobiles; they prefer dog sleds. When you get stranded out there you can’t eat a snowmobile.

Robert Service, the “Sam McGee” poet, told a story about a man who had been trapped that way, and was found with his partner's half-eaten corpse and put on trial for cannibalism. But “I didn’t eat him,” he said. “I fed him to the dogs. Then I ate the dogs.”

(None of these remarks apply to Vancouver. When it snows an inch in Vancouver they abandon their cars in the streets.)

On the other hand the summers are sultry, especially in the eastern half. I remember one July when Margaret Thatcher got off a plane wearing a fur coat. We love that.

At a dinner party in New York a woman said to me with, well, sympathy, “So you're under the British,” taking a stab as it were at what a Canadian might be.

And yes, most Americans think of Canada as a monitoring device in their attic, a crew cut on their reality, an American park, just as Europe is an American museum. Canadians, they feel, are ersatz Americans, with goose bumps and visible breath. A thirty-foot dirty mirror surrounds the USA—Americans look out at their own image while the whole world looks in. Like everyone else, but at closer range, we suffer their disdain for people who are not American, one might almost say un-American. What could we be thinking of? (In France of course they spit on everybody. See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Ask an American where Calgary is, he thinks it’s where Christ was crucified.

The Calvary Stampede!

“Oh, we don't think of ourselves as under the British,” I told her. “We think of ourselves as the British.” Why was that a remarkable thing to say? My parents wouldn't have had any trouble with it, but I was astonished even as came out of my mouth—though as she later confessed on the pillow, it did give her the appropriate frisson.

“Canada is the linchpin of the English-speaking world.”—Winston Churchill

The first thing the American Revolutionary Army did was secure the Saint Lawrence and ask the French burghers of Quebec City and Montreal to join them. But no, after centuries of Parisian corruption they preferred administration from London. Then the Loyalists and their slaves left the thirteen new states for the Maritime provinces and Ontario—et voilà!

Quebec is an orphan. It was cut off from France by the British blockade against Napoleon, thereafter lost touch until De Gaul, and speaks the language in a medieval style and accent, somewhat as Middle English usages survive in the rural south. Quebec films (the best art in Canada) screen in Paris with subtitles.

Three things hold the country together: the cold, for misery loves company; hockey, the sport of the cold, the cold pretending to have fun; and a hatred for Toronto, which is universal in Canada except in the west island of Montreal (did you know Montreal was an island?), which plans to separate from Quebec and join Toronto.

As a kid in Canada, when you sit in the classroom not listening to the teacher, you daydream at the icons on the wall—the evolution chart with its gradually taller straighter squarer-chinned chimps (see The Accidental Monkey) and Mercator’s map of the world, the two diagrams of identity. The green U.S., big yellow Brazil, and the pink parts: Canada, Britain, India, Australia, pieces of Africa and Latin America, daubs and splatters here and there in the oceans.

That must be why, though Canada is a tiny country, with a smaller population than California’s, there seem to be as many Canadians living abroad as Americans. We grow up identifying with all that pink, and feel at home in the world. Proportionately speaking, twice as many Canadians as Americans own passports.

We would not make a good fifty-first state. Canadians don’t like to be too motivated, and that is un-American. The country was set up by the British civil service, which is to say by the aristocracy; and in Quebec the feudal order survived until 1960, when Jean Lesage led what he called la Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution. On both sides there’s an old-world horror of the motivation, the positive thinking, the compulsive optimism, the praise-the-Lordism you get south of the border.

Then too, though the tone in English Canada is predominantly WASPy and work-ethic, we are numerically a Catholic country—the French, the Irish, the Italians (Toronto is the largest Italian city in the world outside of Italy), the Ukrainians, the Highland Scots: Nova Scotia is known in the Church as “the holy land.” We often have French leaders, and are shaped by them. “Stay out of the bedroom,” Pierre Trudeau told his law-makers; in the States the law was, back then, all over the bedroom.

But most important, we have what is north of the Rio Grande otherwise unknown in America, a racial border between Ontario and Quebec, traced out by a river and stretching down Boulevard Saint-Laurent at mid-Montreal. French Canada spills over into New Brunswick and lives in pockets throughout the country, but between Ontario and Quebec the old European line is drawn—not at all appropriate for a land of abstract principles like “America.”

There is no question of assimilating French Canada into the usual model of a country. The meal is too big, too French, too full of onion soup and Breton crêpes and Normandy pastries. Too many arrogant waiters are unimpressed by our French lessons. No, we are the Disunited State of America, and have the British indolence about such arrangements.

Of course there are faults, I’m not saying there aren’t faults—the cold (did I mention that?), the Presbyterian sermons that pass for poetry there; and don’t try to actually do something, it’s considered obscene. The acme of cultural achievement is scoring from the blue line.

Growing up in Toronto I experienced Canada as a suburb of Buffalo. Sitting on the floor before the television watching Wild Bill Hickock I said, “Mom, why aren't we Americans?” She answered. I don't know what she said. The myth of a people on a mother's lips and I was too absorbed by CBS to hear.

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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.