On God: An Uncommon Conversation (12 page)

         

My last question: Great religious ideas have great followings, and they last for millennia—some do fade, some die, but the greatest last for millennia. And I'm assuming there's a reason for that. Your faith in the theological and intellectual efficacy of your system is strong. I've observed it for many years, and it's deep-rooted inside you. But you have also said your system is not going to be adopted by many other people.

Not in a hurry. No. There's no immediate solace offered for our fears, only an appeal to our human pride.

         

Does this bother you?

I suppose that if I had developed these ideas when I was thirty or forty, I would have wanted to become a religious leader. But that is not in my capacity. If there's any validity to any of these thoughts, if they take root in people to some extent, then, yes, these notions may yet be adopted by some. Because I do believe that there are two elements now on the horizon that can yet destroy the world as we know it. One of them is technology and the other is organized religion. The second drives people into stupidity. It can take intelligent children and deprive them of their ability to look at existence. They're obliged to force their thoughts to fit a mold that may never have existed and certainly doesn't exist now. That drives people to extremes. So I do feel that my existential sense of God as a Being who needs us as much as we need Him could yet reach many. But I feel no inner directive to convince people right away. I am just centered enough to recognize how far that is beyond my means.

VI

Ritual and Telepathy

MICHAEL LENNON:
We have not spoken of ritual as part of religion. Recently, my wife and I went to the ordination of an Episcopal priest. It was an extraordinary event. Thirty or forty priests and bishops and deacons stood over the kneeling aspirant, touching a shoulder or back—or, if they could not reach the person, they touched the shoulder of someone who could. All the while, a chorus in the background was chanting
“Veni, Sancte Spiritu, Veni, Sancte Spiritu”
(Come, Holy Ghost), while another singer, the lead singer, was singing a cappella verses about the glories of being a priest, of the holy responsibilities and obligations, the special status that a priest has among believers, ending with the ancient pronouncement from the ordaining bishop, “Thou art a priest forever.” It was a very moving, very powerful experience. It made me think of one of our earlier conversations in which you noted that Funda mentalists believe that if they keep their noses clean and observe ritual, they have a ticket to Heaven. Does ritual have any significant merit for you, or do you reject it completely?

         

NORMAN MAILER:
I've thought about it a good deal. Put it this way: I have high suspicions about ritual. It seems to me that at best, it's a mixed blessing. You know, one of my favorite remarks is that repetition kills the soul. Well, obviously that remark has to be explored before we go further. Any number of kinds of repetition are, I will admit, crucial to the human venture. It is, after all, one of the ways by which we learn. And there is such a thing as creative repetition. Nonetheless, I'm suspicious of ritual. Where, after all, does my theology start? What occasions it? What stimulates it? I would answer that it is because I have worked as a novelist all my life. I don't want this to be misunderstood, but, in a certain sense, novelists are dealing with a few of God's problems—judgment, particularly. If you're any good at your work, you've spent your life thinking about human nature. Since few good novels can do without a villain, you are, of course, soon living with the notion of Evil.

Now, where in all this is the relation to ritual? Ritual is repetition, and in writing a novel you look to do the opposite. A fine novel does not keep repeating itself. That is exactly the hallmark of a dull work. So most good novelists are wary of repetition. Moreover, most people I don't approve of tend to be masters or monsters of mediocre repetition. The politicians we despise are one example. So one develops an understanding that repetition can be dangerous when used as a tool for mediocre purposes. Unimaginative parents often know nothing better than to repeat what they say over and over. I confess that worries me about the nature of ritual. I think it looks to set human nature into a form. TV evangelists seem diabolically inspired to me when they cleave and cling to repetition. Earlier, as a child, synagogue services left me bored. Most of it washed over me. I might just as well have been a shell on the surf's edge. But for a little wear and tear, I was the same shell at the end of the service as at the beginning, and this was true year after year.

I did experience one ritual that was interesting to me. It was my induction into Transcendental Meditation, which was in fashion thirty-five years ago. I remember that for my initiation ceremony, I was told to bring a flower to the initiator. He happened to be a gawky kid who was absolutely wild about Transcendental Meditation, which I had found no more than odd and a little boring. At the commencement of the practice each day, you were supposed to empty your head for twenty minutes. You did your best not to allow much thought to come through. I said to myself, “I've been doing this for years as a writer.” Every time one goes to work in the morning, the first thing to do is empty your head. I've been practicing Transcendental Meditation willy-nilly.

Now, during my initiatory ritual, they said a few words in an Asian language and then gave me a mnemonic to repeat. I forget what it was. It was something like Allen Ginsberg's old “OMMMMM.” I kept repeating whatever the sound was in my head for twenty minutes. Whenever an errant thought came into my brain, I had to be ready to use the mnemonic to wash the thought away. It was a small ritual, but I did feel an effect. Something did take place. Obviously, then, in a deep and powerful ritual, a great deal happens. Let me move forward to make the point. Given my fundamental notion that God and the Devil are at war all the time, I would go so far as to suggest that ritual may well have been first created by the Devil. God, recognizing its efficacy, and determined not to lose any soul unnecessarily, entered ritual as well. I think ritual is composed then of the presence of God and the Devil. It does tend to have the demons and the saints marching in. There is a power to the repetitions—the music, the chanting, the ceremony, the concentration of the principals. So it may indeed be an important moment. One of my favorite notions is that the Lord and Satan are there when major events occur. A general, on the eve of a great battle, gets out of bed and finds it very important whether he stretches out his left foot first or his right.

         

A ritual?

No, but he has a sense that powers are present. Anyone who reads Homer will find nothing strange about this. So I think my answer would be that I don't scoff at ritual, but I don't trust it. I would be happier if we lived without it, yet I have to recognize that my upbringing, my tastes, my life have had little to do with rituals. Nonetheless, they are fascinating. Because there may be any number of occasions when God and the Devil have to cooperate—exactly because they each are trying to outwit the other. For that, they have, at times, to engage in formal contact. Wrestlers do have to grasp each other.

         

What about rituals concerning athletes? I'm sure professional boxers decide which glove is going to be laced on first, and how many minutes they want to be alone before the fight, and which jockstrap they will wear. I know professional baseball players have certain things they have to do. The center fielder has to step on second base when he runs in or, you know, the forces will be against him. So athletes are particularly superstitious, and they go through various rituals and preparations before and during the game. Soldiers do the same thing. When I was in the navy, I knew sailors who were tremendously ritualistic about how they tied a knot. It was a bad omen if you tied a knot the wrong way, or if something on the ship was not performed in exactly the right way. You felt like you were calling down evil things upon you. These are not religious rituals, but they are often done with the knowledge that there is something in the air.

Yes. I used to be susceptible to that when I was younger. I do know what you are talking about. Back in San Francisco, in 1963, I used to walk parapets which had sheer drops to the street below. (I felt as if it was an imperative from my soul to take such a chance.) I used to be full of dread every morning because I knew that before the day was done, I'd be walking a parapet. They varied between eight inches in width to so much as a foot and a half, so there was no great risk unless you lost your head. But I would suspect that the spirit world, if you will, does pay close attention to people engaged in unusual events. We started by talking about ritual. Now we are involved with rote. Whenever people engage in rote—in other words, express a superstitious fear by going in for repetitive moves when a good deal is at stake—that can draw the attention of the gods. So athletes who are going to be playing in games that will have a large emotional effect on many people are going to attract such attention. I think many have the feeling that one is not alone but is among accompanying spirits. At the least!

         

I never told you this story, but when I was writing my doctoral thesis on you, I had a chapter on your cosmology. I had to face two or three English professors plus a philosophy professor on the Ph.D. committee. He argued with me about it. Wrote me long letters.

Let me get this straight. While you were formulating the thesis, this happened?

         

Yes, he was reading drafts. He said that your system, as far as he could understand it, was terribly incomplete.

[N.M. laughs]

He said he could not find in it either a beginning, how the universe came into being, or how it ends—how the cosmic war would end at the end of time or even if there would be an end of time.

He sounds like a major-league ass.

         

Well, no, he was gentle with me. But he thought anybody who had a philosophical system, ought to have—let me finish—

Let me just stress one point: I've never heard of this before, that you have to have a beginning and an end to your philosophy. What about Logical Positivists? Do they have a beginning and an end?

         

Well, he was an Aristotelian. That probably explains a lot. But he also felt that you had no clear definition of Being—what he believed and what a lot of philosophers believe is the central question of philosophy: Being. What is Being? What is the ultimate nature of man? What is the ultimate nature of God? What is Being? When he confronted me, I kept saying existentialism, existentialism—as much as I knew about it, and I knew a little but not a great deal. One of my English professors on the committee said, “Look, Mailer is a literary man. He's not a systematic philosopher. He has ideas, he has feelings, but he isn't out to create a philosophical system.” And that's what finally got the philosopher to back down. He goes, “You're right. This is a literature Ph.D., not a philosophy Ph.D.” After all, you have written about Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Schopenhauer—it wasn't that you weren't familiar with some philosophy; you were clearly interested in philosophical questions. But finally, I guess, any philosopher who won't propose any ultimates is a very unusual philosopher. As I read it, you present no ultimate nature of God, no ultimate answer to any of these questions. And so, reading over everything that we have done so far, I keep coming to the same thing—we don't know, we can't be certain. Yet from most philosophical points of view, there's usually one rock somewhere.

What if the rock is in transit? In other words, when we say “rock,” we mean something that is eternal. What if eternity is in passage itself? The simplest response I could give is that no philosopher has ever come up with an answer to these questions that is satisfactory to us. No human, and I won't be the first either. What I will say is this. I have basic beliefs. I don't know what we've been talking about through these interviews. I thought I'd said it. God is not All-Powerful and not All-Good. God is comparable to a Greek god if you will—Zeus, if we need some model. I don't need one. In other words, God is a divine protagonist engaged in trying to shape some very large part of existence. How large is a question beyond our means. Of course! I have no notion at all whether our God is only a master of the solar system or commands galaxies. I have no notion whether God is in command of black holes in space or is terrified of them. My fundamental idea is that the cosmos is at war within itself and the God who created us is not the Emperor, but the Artist. This is my most basic notion: God—Being, if you will—is not a lawgiver but an artist. Being is doing the best that He or She can do to project a new notion of existence into the cosmos. There may be other notions out there as well—other concepts concerning which turn the cosmos should take. We humans are part of God's venture into the unknown. We humans are God's soldiers, God's ability to change the given in the cosmos. To ask, then, that the end be posited is philosophically misleading, since we commence with the notion that the end is as yet undetermined.

When I say that I am an existentialist, I mean that the purpose of existence is not known. It is the presence of life, not the definitive of it. God may often dwell in states of bewilderment. That makes more sense to me than that God knows clearly what He or She is doing and tells us how to do it. If that is the case, we are no more than extras in a huge opera. I've said this over and over. The end is open. Existence is open. The notion that there is a predetermined place we all will reach, that there is a single point to existence that we will achieve by fulfilling God's notion is, if you stop to think, no more than a personification of God as the director of an immense opera. There He stands, holding his full libretto in mind. But I am saying it is more complex, more difficult, more ennobling. And the libretto is not done. It is still being written. We are not just serfs, nor children drawn in to sing in the chorus. We are the base of this opera. So to demand a philosophical presentation where I must say where we are going is, given my point of view, not an answerable demand. All we can know, at best, is where we might be at the present. Everything in existence fortifies this concept for me. I know where I am at this moment, within reason. But do I know where I will be in a year? Will I still be alive? I don't know. If I should remain alive for twenty years, can I have any notion of how I will be then? Can I have a concept of where society will find itself in a hundred years? Hardly. We live in the present. That is what we are given. We do have instincts, and they can be far-reaching. I would go so far as to say that I would go along with Goethe's belief that these powerful instincts are God given. We are embodying God's plans, but such plans are subject to change because the storms of the cosmos are not all prerecorded; the future of the world is not yet written. The Devil, after all, warps human affairs.