City of God (16 page)

8.4. Before this, on a pedestal, stood a large Dresden urn with flowers that were changed every morning.

8.5. Crouched on the floor on either side of the urn was a Chinese brass dog.

9. The baroque splendor of that palatial home in the Alleegasse nauseated me then and nauseates me now to think of it.

9.01. Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up.

9.02. Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.

9.03. After the peristaltic crisis, the feeling of illness or weakness is generalized through the system.

9.04. The memory of the grand staircase in the palatial home in the Alleegasse produces in me a generalized despair of the
fin de siècle
culture of my youth.

10. My parents gave over their lives to the climbing of such stairs.

10.01. Their grandparents were Jews who had converted to Catholicism.

10.02. At the technical school I was sent to, Adolf Hitler was a student two grades below mine.

11. When I came home from the Great War, I immediately signed over to my siblings the immense wealth of my inheritance.

12. I designed on the principle of the cube a severely simple, unadorned, unembellished, unornamented home in the Kundmanngasse for my sister for whose soul I feared.

13. I went off to live poor and work with my hands in the country.

13.01. I taught elementary school arithmetic to the children of peasants.

14. I was drawn to philosophy.

14.01. I realized that the language of Western philosophical thought was choked with pretentious baroque tchotchkes, like my ancestral home in the Alleegasse.

15. I bought a notebook with ruled lines.

16. I retired to a cabin on a Norwegian fjord and was more desolately alone than I could endure.

17. I wept in order to hear a human sound.

18. I looked into the endless Norwegian night and considered the new physics of Einstein.

19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered,
our problem is still not touched at all.

—At the Knickerbocker with Pem:

I've got the tape on, is that okay?

Whynot.

Has anything else happened?

Am I still in, you mean? Hanging by a thread. As far as they're concerned, how can they not show charity to one of their own, or their once own? And I won't quit, I'm afraid to quit. My office, however meaningless, I think of as staving off dereliction. This crucifix dangling from my neck protects me from myself.

Come on. . .

Don't laugh. Even when I had a family and lived on Park Avenue I was never that far. My vagrant nature shadows me. Always has. My real home is the city streets. I walk them. There is something in the streets for me, some secret, not necessarily in the interest of my well-being.. . . Another reason I won't quit is I still pray. I find myself still doing that. Do you pray?

No.

You should try it. As an act of self-dramatization, it can't be beat. You get a hum, a reverberant hum of the possibility of your own consequential voice. Like singing in the shower. [laughs]. . . I shouldn't talk this way. Why can't I have a feeling without crapping all over it? The truth is I still have hope for myself. . . the long shot that I'll convert myself to an associated conviction. Catholicism, say, or Lutheranism. Like the great Bishop Pike, who moved around, a Catholic, then a Protestant, a dabbler in spiritualism.. . . Ah well, maybe he's not the best example, being another good mind gone to ruin.

What about the big cross, Pem, the one from St. Tim's?

What about it?

Last time you hinted at another explanation. Something I missed in the Heist chapter.

Did I say that?

You did.

Well you may have it in there somewhere, you know, you just don't know it.

Come on, Pem, this is important.

[inaudible]. . . Let me pay for the dinner this time.

Why?

I'm not destitute. Besides, I can't be bought that cheaply. I'm worth more.

You think I'm taking advantage?

No, no, you know that's not it. We've had that out. I said I didn't want a royalty, and so on. All that is firm. But I get nervous. These are the substantive matters of my life.

Gentlemen?

What are we drinking?

Absolut on the rocks.

A Stoli Cristall for me. . .

So?

I may want to write my own book. [laughs] Look, he's turning pale.

No, why not, you should.

Not what you do. Nonfiction. Nonfiction about fiction. The opposite of what you do.

You think so? I'll give you my research.

[laughter]

I do like the attention, I'll admit that. If you do your job, I expect the demand on me to write my own story will be fierce. Horse's mouth kind of thing. Big publisher's advance. Oh boy.

Then we'd better get back to work. May we?

Stoli for you, Absolut. . .

L'chaim.. . .
Point is, they may not have been the mindless creeps I thought they were who lifted the cross. And it may not have been anti-Semites, or Jewish ultras, who brought it to the roof of the EJ synagogue. Poor Joshua was beginning to think so too.

Then who? I don't understand. And anyway it was an affront whoever put it there.

Maybe, maybe not.

What else could it have been?

That is Sarah's view. She remains the superb rationalist.

Well I'm on her side. Don't you guys teach that Christianity is the successor religion? So where would Evolutionary Judaism evolve according to the belief of a militant Christian if not to the cross? And where was this errant little synagogue headed according to an ultra-Orthodox Jew if not to apostasy? Either way it was vicious.

I remind you that the later Wittgenstein says there is meaning after all in propositions that can't be verified.

Wittgenstein? How did he get into this?

You know, of course, Christianity was originally a Jewish sect. Everybody knows that.

So. What does that have to do—

Please. Am I or am I not your Divinity Detective?

Okay, okay.

Just bear with me. Paul—you know, Paul. Fellow had that stroke on the road to Damascus?

A stroke? [laughs]

Why not? I mean it knocked him out, and left him weak and wobbly. A vision stroke. We don't have those anymore. Strokes today, you just lose capacity. His turned him. He'd been fairly contemptuous of Jesus before that. You following this?

I am trying.

He was fervent, Paul, he'd found their Messiah. That's what he preached. Mostly they weren't buying it. Meanwhile there were these gentiles who were listening in the back. He got a better reception there. But the gentiles were scared of circumcision, as who could blame a grown man. So he told them they didn't have to be circumcised, they could still become Jews. Did you know that? That was it, right there.

That was what?

. . . [inaudible]. . . and out he went, bag and baggage. And the gentiles with him. I mean, there were circumstances working, in-history circumstances. You can have a revelation, fine, but then what? In this case, a new religion. In all cases. New visions spring from old, sects break away from churches and become churches, ideas of God bloom like viruses. Over and over. . . [inaudible]. . . react to the his-toricizing of God, saying, No that's not it, that's not it. Because God is not historical. God is ahistorical. In fact probably God and religion are incompatible propositions.

The God of the Bible operates in history.

Sure He does.

You deny the validity of all revelation?

All revelation is countermanded. Let me ask you one: Do you believe God gave Moses the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai?

Well it's a great story. I think I'm a judge of stories and that's a great story.

They're all great stories. The Decalogue structurally, generically, is
modeled on the ancient Mesopotamian lord-and-vassal treaties. Did you know that?

No.

Do you believe Jesus was the son of God, resurrected? Do you know the predominant culture of his life and times was Greek? The predominant language was Greek, all through the Roman empire? So how many Greek mystery cults told of resurrections?

I have trouble remembering the Greek myths.

Dozens. The Gospelers were writers. What is it you said writers do? Make the composition? Put things in, leave things out. To a secular fellow like you this may not be news, or even bad news. But if you're a religious guy like me and you're not a fundamentalist, you've got trouble. Do you turn the truths of your faith into a kind of edifying poetry? Then you're a religious schizoid, your right brain believes, your left can only relish the sentiment of believing. And Jesus as the chosen son is no more valid than Jews as the chosen people. And what has happened to God in all this?

You think human thought was a different mode then?

It was brilliant then as it is now among the cosmologists. It was sophisticated, it was politically astute, it brought order. It deferred terror. Mode? I don't know. They used what they had. Visions. Hallucinations. Just as science is using what it has. So. There it is. I've told you everything. Let's have another. Miss? Could we have another round?

Wait a minute, Pem.

Well, everything you can buy.

You never knew any of this before?

I always knew all of it. We all do. Divinity students read Nietzsche for immunization. Fact is, most of us make a decision and stick to it.. . . But if you want to speak of modalities, I'll tell you what I've kept. What I know in my heart and in my brain is the closest I'll ever get to a revelation of my own. I am still happily, thankfully vulnerable to one aspect of the ancient apprehension. I can recognize a sign when I see one.

What does that mean?

Not a stop sign, my secular good buddy.

Uh-oh. You mean after all you've been saying—

I know it's hard.

. . . like it was the Jews for Jesus? Is that what you're telling me?

Everett, goddamnit, give me a break.. . . It's not the Jews for Jesus or any other forlorn fucking thing you can think of! Why did I bring this up! Talking about it is ruinous, it turns it to shit, like everything else.

Well I can't [inaudible]. . .

Listen: It doesn't matter what maniacs put it there or why they did, don't you understand that? A sign is a sign. And when you know it's a sign, that's enough. That's how you know it's a sign. It is not something whose meaning is instantaneous. It doesn't light up on Broadway. And it's not something you go looking for, it has to come to you. That's what signs do, they come to you. There is moment to this thing, where you know something. . . has finally happened. It is a thunderous silent thing. I made a mistake even mentioning it.

Shall I tell you about our specials?

Not now, dear, we have some drinking to do.. . . I shouldn't talk about it and neither should you. Let's forget the whole thing.. . .

Come on, Father.

Listen, I'll just say this one thing. You place a big brass cross down on a synagogue roof, what could you be doing? Well, you could be doing with one brilliant stroke everything I've been translating into language for you.

—Joel, he was the littlest runner. . . Isaiah, Dov, Micah, who went to work in the city eventually. When a boy grew too tall, you see, and his voice changed and he was clearly then fit for factory labor, another identity would be found for him and off he would go. Daniel, Solomon. . . Maybe in some cases these were their adopted names, as Yehoshua was mine. I don't know. But all were the hope of the Jewish parents who had left them orphans, this covey of kings and prophets waiting up in the loft for their assignments.

I will say that there was not a great spirit of camaraderie among us. We had each suffered great losses and were depleted in spirit. Also we were hungry most of the time. As growing boys we did not have
enough to eat, and this made us lethargic. When we were not busy we tended to fall asleep. So there was never a problem of noise, none of the normally outlandish behavior of boys. We were quiet and kept our own counsel. And we were each privy to secret things we were taught to keep absolutely silent about, not even confiding in one another about where we went or what we had to do.