The Sunlight Dialogues (52 page)

“Are
you?” the Sunlight Man asked sharply.

Only later, sitting bent over the tape recorder in his attic, would he know what had gone before.

CLUMLY:
So you came. (
Long pause.)
So you
came.

SUNLIGHT
(angrily):
What are you fiddling with, there inside your shirt?

Ah yes, of course. I might have known. Very well, just as you please.
(He laughs. Then, soberly, his anger suppressed now:)
As I said on the phone, we have problems to talk about. As you know, I let one of your prisoners out. I’m afraid I didn’t anticipate the complications his … enthusiasm … would introduce.
(Laughs grimly. Pause.)
We now have on our hands, you and I, two murders. I thought it might be helpful if we could come to an understanding of our rather different positions. I respect you, you see. But I’m in fundamental disagreement with your philosophy of life. I thought if our two stands were clearer, perhaps … Are you listening?
(Enraged:)—Are
you?

CLUMLY:
Yes yes! What?

SUNLIGHT
(after a long pause, in control again):
My feelings about murder are ambivalent. It’s antisocial, granted. But then, society itself can be murderous. I’m an authority on that. Let me tell you about ancient Mesopotamia.
CLUMLY:
What?

SUNLIGHT
(in the voice of a lecturer):
You’re familiar, I suppose, with the conflict of the Old Testament Jews and the Babylonians? Our whole culture is a product of the Jewish point of view, and we tend to take their side without bothering to reflect. But the Babylonians were an interesting people. Consider their ideas about the gods—”sticks and stones,” the Jews used to call them. What do
you
think of when you think of God?

CLUMLY:
Why, I think … (
Pause.)
This is very irregular!

SUNLIGHT:
Yes.

CLUMLY:
I think of
(pause)
a spirit.

SUNLIGHT:
Excellent! Exactly! That’s the
Jewish
point of view. But the Babylonians saw the matter quite differently, if I’m not mistaken. All the evidence we have—fragments, representations, clay replicas, even literary evidence—indicates that the Babylonian gods were conceived as actually residing in their images, effective only within the substance of their images. As ineffective without the physical image as a radio wave without a radio to receive it. You follow me, I take it. You see how clearly I explain things. A talent I have. Very well then. The images. Excuse me, but I must expand on this. You’ll soon see the reason. All right. The gods. They were made of rock or of precious wood and covered with fine garments and plated with gold. For eyes they had precious stones—sometimes really magnificent stones—huge rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires. Dressed very much, I might mention, in the style of Mesopotamian kings. Distinctly. A point which gains importance when we observe that their temples were arranged and adorned exactly in the manner of the kings’ palaces—with one significant exception, of which I may speak, if I remember, sometime later. They were not kings, however. To modern eyes some of them looked like artistic representations of certain human ideals—the dignity of old age, the innocence of youth, the technical struggles of the craftsman, and so forth—or sometimes they looked like representations of ideals beyond human understanding: Amu, the Sumerian sky god, for instance, was misanthropic, and Enlil (or Illil, as some texts say), the underworld god, was totally indifferent to man. Curious? As for gods reflecting aspects of the human condition, some were perfectly clear and reasonable in meaning—some were representative of the grace and majesty of femininity, for instance—but others were baffling, for example the bull-shaped son of Samas, with idiot’s eyes and a crown of unbelievable splendor. What were such creatures worshipped for? we ask. What the devil did they mean? But of course we don’t ask it very seriously, coming, as we do, from the Judeo-Christian line. We appreciate the noble mystery of whirlwind-voiced Jehovah, all-powerful, all-knowing, as irresistible and unknowable as the universe itself, a God in whom, as in the universe itself, the ends meet and all seeming contradictions form an order, or so we prayerfully trust—an order merely too vast for human understanding. He he he!
(Soberly:)
We appreciate even the Eastern Buddhas, in whom confusion is resolved to an unearthly smile, that is to say, a renunciation of substance and all the Manyness which clings to it—the exultant pale smile of victory that comes from withdrawal from this world of mutual conflict into the oneness of flawless spirit. The East and West come together at least in this: they are both of them rational, succinct with the dignity of mind’s separation from matter. But the ancient Middle, that’s something else!

Listen! Consider with your soft Judeo-Christian eyes the flat absurdity of the Mesopotamian gods. They’re
man-sized.
Think of it! Not huge and awe-inspiring, like the greatest of the Buddhas in China or the forests of India. And neither can we excuse them as we excuse the manettes, the household images, the icons of sensible societies: our small images of holiness are not worshipped as holy in themselves, they are symbolic reminders of the larger, grander Buddhas of the forest, or humble symbols of the unspeakable, itself by no means humble. The Mesopotamian gods, on the other hand, reside in their images, and the images are nothing more, nothing less, than dolls. Hacked out by men, dressed, painted, adorned by human hands. They play house. They eat breakfast, dinner, supper—served by their priests. They are undressed every night, put to bed with their wives, re-dressed in the morning. They go to parties, they ride into battle on gilded litters, they even ride horses and occasionally go out, with the help of priests, on hunts! Fantastic. Imbecilic! Surely the people who worship them must be insane! No wonder the Old Testament prophets pour out the acid of their derision on the idol and its maker. Who but a halfwit Mesopotamian, some blundering antique Arab, would believe it! And yet think of this: the religion survived for thousands of years, it was embraced by some of the greatest generals who have ever fought on the face of the earth, and some of the greatest poets, magicians, statesmen, artists, and, above all, architects. Were they all doubters? Were they all fools in one huge area of their experience? Unbelievable!

(A pause. He calms himself, then continues.)
Consider the feast of the gods. We have a number of cuneiform descriptions, luckily. A table was brought in and placed before the image, then water for washing was offered in a bowl. A number of liquid and semiliquid dishes in appropriate serving vessels were placed on the table in a prescribed arrangement, and containers with beverages were set out. Next, specific cuts of meat were served as a main dish. Finally, fruit was brought in in what one of the texts takes the trouble to describe as a beautiful arrangement, thus adding an aesthetic touch comparable to the Egyptian use of flowers on such occasions. Musicians performed, and the cella was fumigated. Fumigation was not to be considered a religious act but—an important detail—a table custom to dispel the odor of food. Eventually, the table was cleared and removed and water in a bowl again offered to the image for cleansing of the fingers. Having been presented to the image, the dishes from the god’s meal were sent to the king for his consumption. Always and only to the king, you understand—except in one case, as far as we know. Never mind. Clearly the food offered to the deity was considered blessed by contact with the divine and capable of transferring that blessing to the person who was to eat it. Baffling, isn’t it! Come now, you must admit that the whole thing’s incredible.

(No answer. On the foreground of the tape there is a sound of regular, heavy breathing. Chief of Police Fred Clumly is asleep.)

Very well then, baffling. And yet from all indications they were a serious people. The greatest mercantile civilization of ancient times, a profound influence on Greek and medieval thought, creators of the most beautiful cities—perhaps the only truly beautiful cities—the world has ever seen. Yet a spiritual civilization as well. Only in the short-lived Middle Ages—speaking relatively—was religion more central to the whole life of a people. They were the founders of astrology, and, indirectly, of astronomy. They were the cornerstone of alchemy, the fathers of all modern science. What gifted madmen, then. Yet their gods were wood and stone. How can we explain it?

Mercantile.
(Slyly:)
An important detail. They were lovers of substance—fine cloth, gold, precious stones, the very land itself. The first great agriculturists, remember. While the Hebrews moved from place to place with their sheep, turning green meadows into enormous deserts, indifferent as any intellectual to earth, the Mesopotamian peoples studied it, toyed with it, experimented with it as elaborately as they experimented with, for instance, sex.—They were also the inventors of all the great perversions. No doubt one can explain it geographically—the Mesopotamian peoples had better land than the Hebrews—but that misses the point. Whichever came first, the chickens or the egg, the Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians loved substance in every form—they explored their flesh, tabulated the movements of the planets, studied the chemical components of matter, followed the seasons and made the finest calendars of the ancient world. Became the first great jewellers, the first great goldsmiths, weaponsmiths, architects, artists. Cities of hanging gardens and magnificent towers, devoid of slums—compare miserable Jerusalem or Rome or Athens, or London and Paris in the fourteenth century!—not because they had any love for the poor but because they had a love for
things,
brute matter—unsullied cities, aesthetic creations. And yet they were lovers of spirit too. Their alchemy and astrology was religious to the core, a celebration of the essential holiness of matter itself. They bought and sold by the horoscope, fanned according to the omens, catalogued the organs of living things for their simultaneous physical and spiritual meanings. My God! In a word, with everything they did they asserted a fundamental coexistence, without conflict, of body and spirit, both of which were of ultimate worth. And as for the connection between body and spirit, they ignored it. It was by its very essence mysterious. They cared only that the health of one depended upon the health of the other, God knew how. When their battles went badly, they chopped their battle-gods to bits and made themselves new gods. Well might the Children of Israel mock!

Duality. Listen. Suppose an ancient Mesopotamian came to us now, having read all our books but remembering his own culture. What would he say to the problems that enrage us?

Sex. Think only of the usual case, as though there were not a vast Kloot’s Congress of sexual miseries in the modern world—as though there actually were, these days, such a thing as the usual case. A man falls in love, marries, has children, and so progresses through troublesome ages to the troublesome age of thirty. In the hypothetical usual case he feels a certain trifling longing for experience with women he is not married to—because a wife is a great responsibility, and that very sense of liberation, escape from parents, norms, old chains, which made sex an adventure when he married his wife, has become for him now a jailhouse. You’ll surely understand, married as you are to a blind woman, a skinny stick of a creature. How exciting it must have been for you at first, copulating with a lovely freak, a violation of Nature! But violations, like other people, have their heartaches, desires, requirements, and, with love or without, one must satisfy. That’s the law of the Jews. One must make the life one has imposed upon a woman not unbearable. Did you notice, at thirty, that all the women in the world are beautiful, Clumly? There are statistics on such things. It is not an unusual predicament. The answer of the ancient Jews was simple: Having made a vow, a commitment, one must live by it. One might marry more than one—it was the usual practice of ancient civilizations—but one did not leave any of one’s wives forlorn. One studiously did one’s job: one acted as though the love, once real, was real. Not Babylon! Marriage was a union of estates. In other words, the marriage vow was practical, it had nothing to do with love. Both husband and wife might experiment, flirt and, for that matter, copulate as they pleased. The whole culture was behind it. “Satisfaction” was left to mysterious instinct, and any lawlessness whatever was allowable. The only law was that husband and wife, estate and estate, should remain everlastingly allied. And so, for thousands of years, the Babylonians survived. And felt no great guilt. A Jewish product, guilt. You will say it’s against man’s grain, because, like any honest Jew, you are a capitalist: man’s pride, confidence, is a function of his knowledge that
this
and
this
he possesses. But I say, with the Babylonian, Faddle! One must possess—so Sholokhov tells us, the greatest of all Russian novelists. But it is not important that he actually possess exactly what he possesses on paper and not something else. What man needs to possess is what he actually possesses, whatever the paper may say.

Put case:

If a Don Cossack had exclusive possession of his horse in the sense that he alone was responsible for its care and feeding, it would be irrelevant to him who happened to carry the ownership papers. Yes! Sufficient that his actual possession is secure and perpetual. So with women. What does it matter that the woman you love is another man’s wife? What matters, in our culture, is that she cannot commit herself utterly to you. If the culture understood that marriage was convenience, that a wife’s sole responsibility to her husband was to give him her money and lands, and that her emotions were her own, her lover a matter of her own satisfaction, there would be no trouble—no problem from without. It’s the error of the culture which destroys. I see you understand me, since I speak, as usual, so clearly.

So the Babylonians understood that a man must be physically and spiritually prosperous, and that the two had no necessary relationship. What has this to do with the gods? you say. I say this: