City of God (20 page)

“But I offer to you as evidence my own life, which has somehow attracted the attention of the movie creatures. as they apparently have you, and look at me sitting here on this set with you, and already you think I'm just an actor reading his lines, that's the role you're supposed to be playing, but whether I am or not, I can testify that I'm feeling myself losing dimension, losing moral substance, complexity, I'm going flat, I'm turning into a shadow, and it's a terrible feeling wherein even your most intimate passionate feelings are, you suspect, words on a page written for you to act out.

“And I can't even tell anymore if this is the first time I'm saying this or the second or the one hundredth. Can you tell? Am I the real person, or the film image? And you? I just don't know. And even when I finish this monologue and the director calls, ‘Cut,' I still won't know, because he too may be nothing more than an image, a shadow, an arrangement of downloaded ones and zeroes.”

Cut! a voice calls from the darkness. And he hears bravos and a scattering of applause from onlookers that may or may not be a sound track.

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

GOOD NIGHT SWEETHEART

Good night sweetheart,

Till we meet tomorrow,

(
applause
)

Good night sweetheart,

Sleep will banish sorrow,

Tears and parting may make us forlorn

But with the dawn, a new day is born.

So I'll say. . .

Good night sweetheart

Tho I'm not beside you

Good night sweetheart

Still my love will guide you

Dreams enfold you, in each one I'll hold you

Good night sweetheart, good night.

Good night sweet thing, good night little lady

I can't believe you sleep alone whatever lies you're telling me

So good night too to whoever's beside you

Hope he don't dissuade you from the dream I want you to have of me

I expect we'll meet in the a.m. as the new day comes up roses

Each of us lying, posing our poses

I won't tell you what I did with you at night in my drunk dreaming

if you don't tell me what you didn't do in that breathy voice of yours, and your eyes beaming and your heart streaming with happiness.

So good night, miss,

Good night, hurt so sweet,

My heartbeat, good night.

(
applause
)

Hey you're the one, you know, I've been around but this

is something new, holding off at night for the bright

of the day, and then suggesting it with all sorts of

wordplay, and the surroundings not a deep purple haze

But a white tile kitchen and toast and OJ. . . you are a

witty woman, sweetheart, and I love your games,

I love holding you with your hair still wet

and your terry robe half open and beads of the shower water on your breasts, I love your demands

that we be clean and rested to say nothing of sober when we make love

and that it be done only in the realm of this household.

Well then good night my dear fine funny face

I'll wake you from your dreams in the dawning day

and we'll have some clean and loving conversation

before we latch on to the day's obligation

to earn a little money each in our capable way

so we can pay the monthly cover for this place,

lay down a fresh new paint job

and make the bedroom over for a baby—

Oh Baby,

you know I just have to have another little sweetheart like you
to say good night to,
don't you, sweetheart?
Good night!

(
laughter, applause
)

I am on my knees to God, God is my sweetheart

But He's saying good night,

My sweetheart is leaving

He is telling me to sleep

He is putting me out to bleak pastures

Forlorn is hardly the word for the terror of my grieving

Weeping out of me, scalding my eyes.

Trouble in mind, God I'm blue

Must I be blue always?

Sun is rain, near is far, high is low, day is night

Nothing is right, nothing is right

Who is this sweet-talking God, what's He up to?

He knows sleep doesn't banish sorrow

but works it over, again and again,
in the drowsing brain
finding pictures for the pain.

And what happens when tomorrow dawns

with never nothing different in the next day's daylight?

Will Your love lead me, will Your dreams enfold me?

After You've gone and left me, God,

With only Your empty promises to guide me?

(
puzzled silence
)

She's gone. It's done.
You've got no one.
Tho dreams deceive

And sleep consoles you,
At dawn you'll find

No one beside you.
She's gone, it's done,

You're all alone.
The sorrow's yours
She's gone. It's done.

(
grumbling
)

—Good night, hurt so sweet, heartbeat, good night.

—Good night, my dear fine funny face.

—Will Your love lead me, Your dreams enfold me?

—She's gone. It's done. You're all alone.

Good night sweetheart,

Till we meet tomorrow,

Good night sweetheart,
Sleep will banish sorrow. . .

(
audience leaving
)

—Pem has taken to wearing his hair in a ponytail. I go with him on Friday evenings to Eighty-ninth Street, where, in fact, Sarah Blumenthal conducts the services of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. There are usually no more than ten or twelve people in attendance, less than half of the number when Joshua Gruen was the presiding rabbi.

As a result of study and discussion among the congregants, the Sabbath services are being redesigned to the basic and unarguable essentials, consisting so far of the Shema, the declaration of the oneness of God, the principle of abstract monotheism. . . a Kaddish, or ritual
prayer for the dead, because this gives comfort to mourners, and renews their memories and restores their gratitude. . . an acknowledgment of the idea of the Sabbath both in the fact of the timing of the services and as the occasion for reflection in a state of freedom. . . and, for the rest, a commitment to the study of the Torah in order to derive from it the imperatives that would complete the restructuring of the services and eventually provide the theoretical basis for the evolved faith.

Pem loves these evenings, and I am surprised myself to find them so fascinating. The members of the congregation include a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman studying at the Actors Studio, a married couple, both of whom are physicians, a Barnard junior, and, most touchingly, an elderly white-haired man whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs and retrieves him at the end of the evening.

Given his own scholarship, Pem finds much that is familiar from his days as a divinity student. I am in the different position of learning things for the first time. Little by little, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, have under the group's analysis become the collected texts of the different historical sources, J, E, P, and D. This doctoral candidate from Harvard one evening discussed the work of his eminent teacher J. L. Kugel, who has attended in detail to the distinction between the original texts and the interpretive commentary that sprang up in the three hundred years before and a hundred years into the Common Era that has created the Bible we read today under the illusion that we are reading the original Scriptures. The biblical texts from the beginning were seen as enigmatic, as why would they not be, having been written in a language without vowels or punctuation. And since they were supposed to be divine in their source, and therefore of a supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain the contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, unsavory passages, and less than noble acts of noble personages of the stories as well as whatever else could not be countenanced in righteousness. . . by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically, or changing their meaning by adding punctuation, or opportunistically applying syntactical emphases, or by otherwise reimagining whatever they felt needed improvement if it was to be truly theologically correct. I was happy that evening to
recognize the venerable ancestry of hermeneutics. Beyond that, as a writer, I am only fascinated by the power of this hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, relationships, laws of the universe, sins, and days of reckonings. . . this scissors-and-paste job that is in its original form so terse, inconsistent, defiant of common sense, and cryptically inattentive to the ordinary demands of narrative as to be attributed to a divine author.

Migod. What have I been doing wrong all these years?

But the Comp Religion guy from Columbia has this take on it: He says the interpreters knew what they were doing when they didn't try to erase the inconsistencies and neaten things up. The priests and the redactors left in the stuff of the earlier spinmeisters. You never come close to God, you only hope to achieve a refinement of your awareness. The very contradictions, the histories living side by side with their rewrites, manifest the same struggle described in the narratives—to apprehend and accept the awesome completeness and creative totality of the Unnameable.

After these sessions, Pem and I usually have dinner at a restaurant on Broadway, Amarillo. Less often, Sarah B. has joined us. It's not a matter of rabbinical decorum (kashruth is one of the inessentials)—she is as concerned about leaving Angelina alone with only the children to be with as she would be about leaving her children alone without Angelina. As if, dear thing, having lost her husband, what else is she going to lose?

But when Sarah consents to join us, I feel like a chaperon. Why should I feel this way except that something like a courtship is developing? In the candlelight and over the glasses of red wine, they regard each other with a degree of attention they are not even aware of. And when I have something to say, their shining attention to me in unison is clearly an effort of will. Yet they would not hear of my leaving them by themselves. They are afraid of that, both of them, Pem because he doesn't want to descend to importuning, and she because of the enduring presence in her mind of her husband, Joshua. Her mourning should last, formally, for one year, but this is another inessential according to EJ, on the theory that whatever it takes to remember and memorialize your dead must come naturally from the heart. These things must work out anyway with a psychological inevitability, is the idea. But Sarah may be wrong about this, insofar as such a custom
may be more for the sake of the living than for the dead. A closure. That they may go on. She is in her second year of the loss of her husband now.

But I do see a drawing together, slow as it is. And since both she and Pem live a life committed to explicit moral seriousness—that is the most abstract construction I can put upon it—their convergence will have to be more than personal. Last Friday night's study service at EJ dealt with Exodus 19–24, the giving to Moses of the Decalogue. On this evening Sarah led the discussion with great animation, her voice was strong, the consideration of this key episode seemed to lift her spirits, she was not worrying her way through the passages with her customary mien of skepticism and respect but with an assurance, even a sexiness of assurance. She lifted her head, ran her fingers through her hair, and a beautiful smile transformed her face, like the light of the sun breaking, her eyes shone, she has one of those smiles of total vulnerability that can so ambiguously be the moment before the onrush of tears. I'm quoting her from memory: “My sense here, what comes through to me, is the understanding these writers possessed of the morally immense human life. Do you see that? They were proposing an ethical configuration for human existence. Who before had done that in quite the same way? These Commandments were devised by human scriptural genius.. . . We could make the case then for God's presence after all in the humanly written Bible. The Lord, blessed be His name, as my Orthodox colleagues say [she smiles]. . . being what impels us to struggle for historical and theological comprehension. The biblical minds who created the Ten Commandments that have structured civilization. . . provided the possibility of an ethically conceived life, an awareness that we live in states of moral consequence that, if not yet, must someday bring us closer to a union of understanding with the Creator. What a gift, what a great and profound gift. . . and how worthy of reverence!”