The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (40 page)

Bankei

There is no death of anyone but only in appearance, even as there is no birth of anyone but only in appearance.

Apollonius of Tyana

Prosecution Witness No. 25

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

COUNSEL, to Witness: The Prosecution understands that at one time you knew the Accused rather well, and in fact worked with him. Please tell the court how you came to meet him, what you found out about his activities (so far as they relate to the crime he is charged with here), and why you parted company from him.

WITNESS: By chance I came across some of his books, which at the time impressed me. I went to see him, in his hideout in rural Suffolk. As a man he impressed me less than his writings, but his work seemed to have potential, and I volunteered to help him with it. My long and thorough experience of getting enterprises off the ground - plus my financial resources for doing just that - were what he needed. Or so I thought.

He wasn’t easy to get to know, and certainly not to work with. In some ways I was disappointed at his attitude, in others shocked. On the one hand this man seemed to me to be a dreamer who lacked all initiative. He was content to let everything drift, and to make no use of my marketing know-how. He had no push, no drive. On the other hand - and this is what must be of interest to the court - as time went on I found his activities to be more and more sinister, devilish you could say. Devilish secretive and cunning, underneath that lackadaisical camouflage. Here were ideas more blasphemous than anything I’d ever met, disseminated on the sly. Oh, he was sincere all right, but a sincere fraud - if there can be such an animal. I tell you, he’s an extraordinary mixture, an enigma. After a month I pulled out. None too soon! I was scared, to be honest.

COUNSEL: I must ask you to be more specific about what shocked and alarmed you. Give particular instances.

WITNESS: Well, he boasted that, because of Who he was, he could perform all sorts of miracles. He was very insistent that he continually turned the world upside down and inside out, as he put it. He had something going which he called the Shield and Sword of the Lord. The Shield protected him from all harm, while the Sword gave him power to inflict all harm. He said he did no harm. I know different. I see him as a black magician sending out two sorts of secret vibes, defensive and offensive. Very offensive indeed.

COUNSEL: In your opinion was the black magic real, or was it just mummery? A pretence?

WITNESS: It worked all right - up to a point. It didn’t succeed in fending off his arrest and trial, did it now? All the same, you don’t stamp out a movement as insidious as this one by stamping on its ringleader. But it helps. The Jury must bring in a verdict of Guilty.

COUNSEL: I think that first they would like to have an instance or two of the way the Accused’s black magic actually worked. On whom, and just how.

WITNESS: Well - since you insist - there was this nice young German who had the nerve to challenge one of Nokes’s pronouncements. Or perhaps it was the assumption that Nokes was the World-teacher of the Age. Anyway, that young man quarrelled with the boss and promptly went mad - was sent mad, I say - and carted off. He had no previous history of mental trouble. I happen to know he’s still in a psychiatric hospital, four years later.

JUDGE, banging away, to Counsel: This is appalling! Your request to the Witness has produced this unsubstantiated rumour for blackening the Accused’s character in the eyes of the Jury. They must ignore it.

COUNSEL: With great respect, Your Honour: according to my understanding of the Act, it’s no Defence to plead that the scandal you cause arises in part from people’s corruption or abuse of your teaching. I submit we’re not dealing here with hard objective facts so much as impressions on people’s minds, including rumours picked up and added to and passed on. The Witness has been deeply shocked by the Accused. Whether or not with good reason is, I suggest, not quite the point. He’s a sample case, one of many who have taken offence. Which is why I’ll conclude by asking him whether, during his association with the Accused and his colleagues, they were attacked, and whether there occurred any violence on account of their teaching.

WITNESS: There certainly did. Threatening letters arrived most days, and there were at least three raids on the office. Entirely justified, I would say.

JUDGE: Learned Counsel, I can only assume that, when you called this Witness today, you weren’t fully appraised of what his testimony would be.

COUNSEL: Again with great respect, Your Honour, I conceive that my duty as Prosecutor for the Crown is to bring to the Jury’s notice just the sort of opinions and feelings - the sort of reactions to the Accused’s activities - that we have been listening to. It’s for them to weigh what they hear.

JUDGE: And for them to weigh very carefully indeed what I have to say about the irrelevance and untrustworthiness of so much they are hearing in this court.

COUNSEL: As Your Honour pleases.

Defence:
Sword and Shield

MYSELF, to Witness: May I remind you there’s an offence called perjury?... It’s a fact (isn’t it?) that you own a string of popular magazines.

WITNESS: I’m chairman of a company that owns some magazines.

MYSELF: At the beginning of your association with me, you published a lavishly illustrated article praising my work - not that I approved the wording.

WITNESS: We all make mistakes.

MYSELF: The circulation of the magazine fell sharply?

WITNESS: It did.

MYSELF: Then, practically overnight, you discovered (without breathing a word to me and my friends) what sinister people we were, and the terrible things we got up to, and the good miracles we claim to do but don’t, and the bad miracles we disclaim doing but do. So began your time as a mole in our midst, followed by your sudden departure and a series of articles ‘exposing’ us, as you put it. Am I right?

WITNESS: It was our public duty.

MYSELF: And the circulation of the magazine in question trebled and quadrupled. And kept going up as you printed more and more interviews with people who knew nothing of our work, and whom we have never met - interviews which brought out how shocked and infuriated they were at your version of what we say and do. Including a lavishly illustrated conference with Miss United Kingdom in the most minimal of bikinis.

WITNESS: Those aren’t questions. They’re abuse.

MYSELF: Do you deny that the magazine’s circulation increased dramatically?

WITNESS: If it did, so what?

MYSELF: And did one particularly virulent article - quite incidentally giving my private address and a sketch-map of how to get there - lead directly to a well-organized arson attempt on my home?

WITNESS: I deny that. You can’t prove a thing. Blasphemy deserves all it gets, anyway.

MYSELF: Did another article assert rather than suggest that we send out some kind of secret radiation that drives people insane, making them blaspheme against the Almighty, and at the same time protects ourselves, the transmitters, from detection and destruction?

WITNESS: I appeal to the judge to stop this harassment.

JUDGE: Answer the question.

WITNESS: The article was in the public interest. Hidden menaces have to be brought out into the open.

MYSELF: Specially when they lead to exceptional profits, and when you are sure your victim won’t sue for damages.

COUNSEL: I’d like to chip in here to ask the Accused whether, when the sales of a book of his are doubled, its sincerity is halved.

MYSELF: Why of course it is – if in the second edition I’ve been careful to edit out the unpopular ideas of the first, and so more or less invert the message.

But this is getting us nowhere. Let’s look at the Witness’s specific allegations.

First, that young man who went mad. In fact, he was mentally ill long before he came to me. To prove it I have here a letter from his doctor in Bremen about his case. I doubt whether he began to cotton on to what I was saying, anyway. Agreed, I didn’t cure him. But I never claimed to dispense a remedy that all can stomach. Of this I’m sure: the undiluted medicine I prescribe can’t be tolerated till the patient is ripe and ready for it. Then he’s only got to open his mouth and down it goes, as smooth as syrup and as benign.

As for the idea that I’m responsible for the violence committed against me, while the gentleman there, whose gutter press whips up that violence, isn’t responsible - words continue to fail me! More and more I wonder which is the dock and which is the witness-box in this court of justice.

WITNESS: I’m beginning to wonder whether this court affords its witnesses any protection at all from insults by prisoners.

MYSELF: Don’t worry, I’ve finished with you. I have no more questions. Go!

I come now to the big issue, to those sinister waves I’m accused of sending out, as if from a more insidious and far-reaching and deadly Chernobyl. Working up this sort of mass paranoia does wonders for the Witness’s sales graphs and for the Prosecution’s case against me (if ‘case’ is the word I want), but it presents the Defence with a problem. How to counter these outrageous lies, which nevertheless have just a grain of truth in them? I’m left with no alternative but to try the court’s patience by putting before it in sufficient detail the facts which are being mangled and perverted. No alternative but to explain what it is that I’m up to which lends that scare story such basis as it has.

I’ll do this best with the help of Diagrams 27 and 28.

We start with Diagram 27. Let’s say you (A) attack me (B) by firing a bullet at me, throwing a spear, shooting an arrow, or whatever; and I’m wounded. That’s how the world - the onlookers, the police, the courts - view the event out there in my human region (h). They observe a transaction between a pair of third persons, an essentially symmetrical set-up, a case of what I call
circumferential causation.
(Sorry for the clumsy language, which I hope the diagram’s clarity atones for.) The point to notice is that, according to this reading of events, I (B) have no shield against you, my assailant (A). Equally you have no shield against me should I be able, though wounded, to shoot back at you. We are mutually vulnerable. And it’s this kind of symmetry in relationships that normally we take to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - and that’s that. And if, as a result, we go around scared stiff of one another, is it surprising?

Diagram No. 27

Diagram No. 28

But in fact, as Diagram 28 shows, the same event can be read very differently indeed. Let’s call this second reading a case of
radial causation,
of a human-divine transaction between you (A’) as that regional second/third person and me (C) as this central First Person, of a relationship so asymmetrical it’s not (strictly speaking) a relationship at all. This time, instead of viewing myself in imagination at (B’) - from
your
point of view, as that unprotected human target - I view myself as I really am at (C) from my point of view, as this fully protected divine target. Or rather, as this non-target, so shielded by layers (g), (f), (e), (d) of armour-plating that your missile never gets to me at all, and I’m absolutely safe against all attack from whatever quarter. For on the way to the real Me at the centre (C), every aggressor has to run the gauntlet of my regions cellular and molecular and atomic and subatomic - in which he’s progressively stripped of such qualities as humanness and life and colour and opacity and substantiality, till on arrival there’s nothing left of him or his weapons. Here I enjoy the unique security of First Personhood. I come under divine protection. I take refuge in the One who’s nearer than near and safer than safe, and more Me than I am. And that’s no more blasphemous or absurd or overconfident than the following: