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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The Accidental Monkey

The accidental monkey
‘S a metaphysics junkie
With bothersome abysses on his mind;

Preoccupied with dying,
Interminably trying
To turn around and glimpse his own behind.

His finger in his yin-yang
He contemplates the Big Bang,
The earliest ancestor he can find,

Unless it’s all that room
The Bang had to go boom—
Or does it create space as it unwinds,

A spreading dance of gravity
In a potential cavity
Like that in which his finger is entwined?

Reality extrudes him;
Its structure still eludes him,
His probing finger warmer but confined.

A cosmos so anonymous,
How can it but be ominous
That such vast masonry was left unsigned?

Enigma born of distances
And exquisite resistances—
Too seamless not to seem that way designed.

Theisms, whether mono
Or other sorts of guano,
Have left his spirit largely unaligned.

Perusing Darwin’s Theory
He feels a little leery
Of sepia-toned free-market states of mind.

Amino acid soup-erman
Whose wake-up call so overran
’S the one myth all the apes have not maligned;

But too unscientific
To offer much specific,
As willing as he is to be resigned.

The spiral strands of rubble
He surveys through the Hubble
May possibly bear others of his kind.

Would that be any better,
To get an email letter
From some strange breed of orphans just as blind?

Abject on a conveyor,
Hunched over as for prayer
He’s hummed through life bowed down by double bind.

The horizontal motion
Admits no meta-notion,
His view cut off both forward and behind.

A bas with this banality!
He opts for verticality—
His heart leaps up and stands in him star-high!

A fallen god no longer,
Already he feels stronger,
Astral banana peeling off the rind!

Abyss-wise up is down though
And starry heaven’s clown so
Has raised his head it’s lodged in his behind.

Divine but rather stupid,
Of Morpheus and Cupid,
And to this grosser matter self-consigned,

The accidental monkey
At least is his own flunky,
And buoyed by this he hop-turns to the grind.

 

"That which has always been accepted by

everyone, everywhere, is almost

certain to be false."

—Paul Valéry

Darwin was a Romantic. 

The Romantic is impatient with mystery. He must identify himself, and that means to identify with something, or someone—to be able to say, “That’s me”—which requires indulging in metaphysics, as who can help doing?

The usual Romantic choice is Nature. De Sade identified with a Nature that was bloody, murderous and, well, sadistic (see The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France); Byron, with the storm; Shelley, with the west wind—“Be thou me, impetuous one!” (perhaps he's punning; péter is French for fart); Marx, with history, which he thought behaved rationally; Darwin, with the orangutan; and Freud with Darwin: the id is the ape within.

For the Romantics, and for much of the nineteenth century, time was an absolute. The ancient Greek absolute was space, three-dimensional Euclidian space. The Greeks knew the diameter of the globe, and one idea moving behind appearances gives the parallax of rational thought.

This same enthusiasm was unearthed in the Renaissance. Three-dimensional painting became an optical science, Baroque perspective dominated everything from Versailles to the ruler-drawn borders of America, and Newton built his universe in Euclid’s space. 

The inward-looking Romantics were in love with one aspect of this space, infinite time. An object is inert in that it doesn’t move unless acted upon, and in motion continues forever unless it meets another force. That line describes infinite time. Space, said Kant, is our outer sense, time our inner sense. Likewise for Godard the shot is a glance, montage a heartbeat. 

In all of literature, said Northrop Frye, there are only two books that go from the beginning to the end, the bible and The Communist Manifesto. Darwin stopped in the present, but his time-line was infinite.

This absolute collapsed, however, in the 1870s and 80s, when our telescopes became strong enough, and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, and we saw that their placement doesn't fit three-dimensional space. Of this arrangement we cannot construct a model—cannot imagine it. Euclid’s laws, it turns out, are the laws of the mind, and we can’t think outside them. (See on this Catholics and Puritans.) 

We call intergalactic space “curved” as a metaphor derived from Mercator’s projection: if Moscow and Saint Petersburg are the right distance apart, Nairobi and Mombasa can’t be, and vice versa. (There’s more on this in What We Know.) But if space is skew, so is the now perhaps finite time-line. 

And the nineteenth-century view of things has survived. Is it therefore the fittest? That esteemed entomologist Vladimir Nabokov said, “Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”

Evolution is our myth, our default belief about ourselves. Ask any jerk walking down the street and he'll tell you the score. Have a banana. The “scientists” who publish daily base their speculations on it, as do the literary Naturalists, from Flaubert and Zola to Norman Mailer. Poor disappointed Strindberg wondered if men and women were not descended from different monkeys.

It's a version of the medieval Great Chain of Being, from God and the angels down to minerals, lain on its side and extended in time. Stanley Kubrick, that stern satirist, was having none of it. In a gesture of victory an ape throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of montage, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed—our myth, and therefore invisible. But if being the fittest were just a matter of incremental circuitry the computer HAL (read IBM) would win. (See also Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick.) 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in many ways an exemplary thinker, said, “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.” But it isn’t a “theory.” Scientific method requires of a theory that it be testable, “verifiable,” as Karl Popper put it. Nothing in the Theory can be tested. 

“Science,” said Paul Valéry, “means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. The rest is literature.” And there are other ways to read the fossil record. "Facts"? Turn a fact a little this way and a little that and it will show you a different face. The proper concern of science, as Edgar Poe said, is not with facts but with laws.

Why do I quote artists rather than scientists? Because they're better. Poe, with his take on Newton, and his understanding that physics is metaphysics, anticipated much that a later century found revolutionary. "Space and Duration are one," he said. Whereas scientists, so numerous, so earnest, are as guilty as the rest of us of scientism, the confidence that science knows it all, can know it all, will know it all.

Most of them are kids publishing or perishing, and have no time to think things all the way through—nor would they dare commit heresy. Sponsor spank. And so the Theory assumes the rigidity of religious dogma. Doubt "science" and you can go to the stake. Just look at the comments on this essay.

Must we be saddled with the effort to imagine one thing turning into another, and to explain the existence of “stuff,” that from which we “evolved”? Or was it always there? Always will be? Are we flirting with a model of God? Are we creationists?

Darwin was a creationist. And the pope is a Darwinist, no problem there. The Scopes monkey trial baffled literate onlookers. Only fundamentalists could insist that the world was created five thousand years ago like it says in the bible. In the movie, Spencer Tracy (marvelous man) shouts “I don’t give a damn about right and wrong!” “What do you give a damn about?” “TRUTH!” 

Well, truth is hard to come by, and overrated. We know how things behave, but what they are is a closed door.

Is our local Euclidian time-line long enough to accommodate the Theory? Godard, to come back to him, says no, it’s too short to get all the way from the amino-acid soup to us. “Our ignorance of our nature,” he says, “is total.”

And Valéry, to come back to him (he had what Nabokov calls “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”), says:

Humanity is very young and its memory short. Hence it is quite legitimate to surmise that the known physical laws are no more than hasty conclusions drawn from too brief observation and that the human race as we know it (Homo sapiens) has so far existed only between two manifestations of prodigious, discontinuous “laws,” between two gaps in the order of the universe. But a man who watches a church clock from five past to fifty-five past twelve cannot know that it strikes the hour; cannot even guess this. It is not impossible that certain inexplicable phenomena, such as the appearance of life on our planet, are the effects of intermittent laws, laws whose successive manifestations we have not yet had time enough to observe.

Of course that opens things up to uncomfortable speculation. (See Some Notes on God.)

Perhaps I’ve been living too long in Greece. These Mediterraneans are classicists, rock people, as Dalí says, and he evokes Mantegna to prove it. Romantics are Nordics, forest-and-fog people, music-and-flowers people, gazing inward at evanescent visions. “My moustache is the contrary of Nietzsche’s, which is depressive, with plenty of music. Mine is a pair of erect scissors, the rocks of this country.” 

And indeed, Romantic depth can usually be traced to indigestion.

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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.

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

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Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick died in 1999.

I love his work, cold though it is.

I love his crowd scene in Spartacus. They're hard. How do you use all those people? How do you photograph them? What do you have them do that they can do?

The 60's were the era of "A Cast of Thousands"— full of vagrant extras hanging out in Europe. I met some of them—waiters, deck hands, Roman soldiers.

Kubrick covered a hillside with a hundred of these hoboes dressed as rebel gladiators. Long shot. Olivier promises they'll go free if they tell him which one is Spartacus. So Kirk Douglas stands up and says, "I'm Spartacus." Pause. Another dude stands up and says, "I'm Spartacus." Third guy stands up: "I'm Spartacus." A fourth. A fifth. Then all rise as one and shout, "I AM SPARTACUS!" Brings tears to your eyes.

I know better, of course. It wasn't really his film. The voices were recorded at a Michigan State football game. But it's nice to associate Kubrick with that scrap of warmth. It's the only one we get.

And they were all Spartacus, those heroes, trapped in what Full Metal Jacket's soldier calls this "world of shit." Kubrick burned to be gone from it as hotly as Beckett did.

Like me (and this is the only possible comparison) Kubrick didn't buy Darwin's myth of evolution. People look at me like I'm from Mars when I say that (and perhaps I am). Nor do I have anything to replace it with. (See The Accidental Monkey.)

Kubrick was one of my few co-religionists on it. In 2001 David Bowman (half giant-slayer, half Odysseus—the one man who can string that bow) takes on the computer HAL (read IBM) who, if being the fittest were a matter of incremental brain circuitry, would win.

In a gesture of victory a monkey throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of editing, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed: our myth, and therefore invisible.

Kubrick had an allergy to this kind of b.s. Always in his films we are kept in the dark by an insidious paste of socio-corporate kaka. An executive arrives on the moon to inspect the monolith and gives his people a speech that is a model of this kind of thing, a speech we already know; then they all go out and have their pictures taken with it. (He was a funny man.) When the American president tries to get General Turgidson on the phone his mistress gives him the he's-in-a-meeting line and we hear the toilet flush. In Eyes Wide Shut young Bill must wade through this stuff even to get near the truth.

Close-up of the distress in the eyes of the prison guard who tyrannizes over Alex in A Clockwork Orange, when he must turn the kid over to the behaviorists. You never know who your enemies are in Kubrick till it's too late. He had more than his share of paranoia—but that in itself was an indictment of this existence: why should we be subject to paranoia?

That awful drill instructor in Full-Metal Jacket gave those marines what they needed to survive in the w.o.s., and was murdered for his trouble. I think the most crap-cutting remark I've heard on war was in Kubrick's Paths of Glory: "It's not death I fear—it’s mutilation."

You have your home thoughts, and then you have the ones you add on. And then you don't know which are yours any more. It's "strenuous" (to use a word Kubrick highlighted in Barry Lyndon) to rethink yourself. He had the look of a man who strained.

Kubrick on sex? The w.o.s. is sustained by sex. Sex gets us born into it and sex keeps us playing its game. From Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut he never stopped railing against the beauty of women—the demiurge's trick for keeping us trapped here. (And this from a father of daughters!)

For him it was automatism, mechanism—"the old in-out in-out" as Alex calls it, "the sperm bank upstairs" Jack calls his wife in The Shining. The docking of the space craft to waltz music is a coupling that will produce a star child. The mid-air refueling in Dr. Strangelove inseminates the plane that will give birth to the bomb.

General Jack D. Ripper knows the way out: "I deny women my essence." Then he just blows the world up!

And oh, how Kubrick wanted the world blown up! Did you think that was a protest movie? How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—did you think he was kidding? He wants us set free! We'll meet again.

Didn't work though. Dr. Strangelove stepped in and restarted the whole catastrophe.

Only David Bowman is shot out past it and the mean little god who rules it ("Jupiter and Beyond") to where he himself is what sees but is not seen. He watches an older Bowman eat, drop a glass on a glass floor, turn: is someone there?

To T.S. Eliot's question, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" Kubrick had an answer: you.

Coda: Speaking of "cold," here is Roger Avary telling Joe Rogan that Eyes Wide Shut is really about a pedophilia ring to which the Cruise and Kidman characters hand over their daughter in the last scene, which Avary shows us. Over Kubrick's strenuous objections the producers took it out of his hands and reedited it, and Kubrick died four days later.

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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.

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

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