The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (49 page)

‘I shall accordingly delay sentencing while you consider this matter. I shall expect to receive for examination a draft of your proposals within a reasonable time.

‘Meanwhile, I have to declare that the Trial of John a-Nokes is ended.’

All stand as the Judge, in slow motion, leaves the court.

A shaft of sunlight ignites for an instant a patch of his robe, to a scarlet fieriness never seen by mortal man. The buzzing and the banging of the fly at the court window is deafening...

GUILTY - guilty guilty guilty... The strange noise echoes round the court like a drumbeat that will go on till doomsday...

If ever there was a moment when a should-be-familiar word has no meaning for someone, this is that moment. This is that word. This is - I am - that someone.

Epilogue

Love is like this:

If you were to cut your head off,

and give it to someone else,

would that make any difference?

Kabir

It is now all of three months since the end of the Trial and the Jury’s verdict of Guilty. Apart from occasional sessions with Christopher, who is my solicitor and good friend, and a daily traipsing around the yard of this remand prison, I have sat it out alone here in this cell, awaiting sentence. A grey cell it is, with that penal-institution smell of stale cabbage soup and Dettol, and a faint suggestion of nearby sewage disposal. But I’ve had plenty to take my mind off conditions here and keep me very busy indeed.

Nearly all my time has been devoted to piecing together and writing up, from my fairly comprehensive diary and from my memory - which is good in spots - the Trial proceedings.

‘Why bother to do that,’ you might well ask, ‘when the official verbatim transcript of the proceedings would have been available directly you asked for it?’ The fact is that I hadn’t realized this. And that, by the time Christopher told me about it, I was so into my own reconstruction of events - and was finding the job so challenging and valuable and indeed necessary - that I decided to go on and complete it.

Thumbing through these manuscript pages, two things strike me forcibly - the first concerning the Prosecution, the second concerning the Defence.

(1) All sorts of questions about the underlying strategy of the Crown remain unsolved. Was Sir Gerald’s wide-ranging and curious choice of witnesses intended to spin out the proceedings and present to the public a show of thoroughness, while unobtrusively giving me rich opportunities to score Defence points? Were his bluster and bad temper, his obtuseness and impenetrable conventionality anything more than an attempt to impress and pacify the fundamentalist lobby? Where did the Judge (who seemed to come over to my side by degrees, discreetly) really stand from the beginning? What, for that matter, was the hope of the Government when it staged this show trial? Was it that I should be found Not Guilty, or Guilty but not (thanks to my abject apologies) of a capital offence? Or plain Guilty? In which case, how could anyone in his senses imagine that the execution of one ‘blasphemer’ would discourage others? Or that it would satisfy, and not whet, the heresy hunters’ thirst for blood?

About the answers to these questions your guess is as good as mine. Mine is that there existed no clear or consistent or settled policy behind the scenes, and that the wire-pullers there had widely different intentions and expectations. In fact, I suspect that the whole show was one of those cock-ups which are the product of a double (or multiple) bind or a choice between evils, and probably no worse than any feasible alternative would have been. But I’m not the one who’s complaining. Far otherwise! After all, I’ve been allowed to speak my mind to the world. Come to think of it, it’s just possible that I have a friend in high places, who so shares that mind that he’s determined to see it has an airing - come what may to poor old jack.

(2) My second reflection, to put it mildly, is that I do indeed have a case. Its design-motif, its essential stance and proposition, is so straightforward that it can be captured in a sentence.
Locating God at one’s Centre is nonsense and blasphemy in man’s eyes, good sense and the cure of blasphemy in God’s eyes.
It’s a proposition which rests fair and square on four pillars or arguments. I’ll take them in order of strength, as I estimate it.

(i) The first is the
logic
of the Defence, its reasoning in support of this basic proposition about the nature of blasphemy. I’m not thinking so much of the word-play, but rather of the variety of disciplines that were drawn upon, the uses they were put to and the facts they disclose. Were the Defence arguments fallacious, or did they on the whole have the ring of truth? Did they flout science, or lean on science? Did I cheat, pull the wool of casuistry over the court’s eyes? If I did, Counsel for the Crown was slow to bring it to the Jury’s notice. Was he slow, or was there little to bring?

I’m not suggesting, mind you, that there were no inconsistencies at all, no weaknesses in my Defence. I continue to spot new and juicier ones. Of course. All I can say is that they are God’s gracious reminders to me that He’s for seeing, not for thinking about, not for getting right. The precious thing about doing one’s very, very best to understand Him is that it leaves one flabbergasted. More dumbfounded than ever.

(ii) The second argument is put up by my witnesses, as I insist on calling them. Of course I selected them carefully, and edited their testimony for effect. So what? Didn’t Sir Gerald do just that with his lot? And what a job lot those twenty-seven were, in comparison with my world figures - well over a hundred of them! How confused his were, and how consistent mine were - in their testimony to the Creator who lies at the heart of all His creatures! Not lurking there playing Hide-and-seek, or Hard-to-get, or Sucks-to-you-Jack, but blazing away with a brilliance like no other.

(iii) The third is the Defence Diagram with its potentially unlimited applications and variations. Its versatility and power are due to the fact that it’s drawn to a sliding and not a fixed scale, so that it becomes a map of how things actually present themselves to the First Person. Here’s a chart that takes the cartographer’s perspective seriously for a change. It follows that, given a little ingenuity, what the map shows can be filmed, using the well-known first-person-camera technique in which the camera is held very near (or in place of) the head. Now I ask you: is this trickery? Or is it the exposure of trickery, and in particular of verbal trickery? By non-verbal means, at that? The fact is that this diagram speaks for itself. When, having shown it to a friend, I go on to explain it, he’s apt to say, ‘Oh, do shut up! Anything you say can only weaken its impact.’ Or words to that effect. For the last two or three years it has been my Psychopomp - dumb, brief, comprehensive, reliable and richly suggestive. My protection against what Coleridge called ‘the danger of thinking without images’.

Odd, that a mere scribble of a sketch should portray so much of God Almighty and His creation! Yet not so. He’s that sort of God, that humorous and that condescending. Besides, who actually weaves these airy patterns but one of His very own angel-messengers - one of those
uccelli di Dio
we surprised flying around the twelfth Witness’s supermarket? The same that I now surprise flying and fluttering over this sheet of paper and leaving this trail of words?

(iv) Finally, there’s the tool-kit of experiments. They include the Magic Forefinger for pointing in at the absence of the Pointed At, the Magic Battering-Ram for demolishing the stoutest prison walls, the Magic Mirror for relieving the First Person of the third person, the Magic Car for taking the world for a ride, the Magic Watch for telling the Timeless, the Magic Tape for pulling everything in, the Magic Peeler for stripping everything to its Core, the Magic Zipper at the World’s End for bottoming out and discharging the World’s excreta. And more. It was my failure to get most of the Jurors to carry out any of these tests sincerely which looks like costing me my life. Any one of them, done with attention, would infallibly have passed on the essential experience of the First Person upon which my whole case rests, the experience which has no parallel and for which there’s no substitute - the
direct
experience of the Experiencer.

Now abideth these four - reason, tradition, the map, the testing - and the greatest of these is the testing. Without its nourishment, the others, by merely whetting the appetite, leave one hungrier than ever. With it, what a satisfying four-course feast is spread for you and me!

Such a meal doesn’t come cheap. I suspect I’ll be charged the Earth, not because, throughout the festivities, I’ve desecrated the God of Heaven but the gods of the City - those pop-eyed, human-headed idols. Three times over I’ve sent them up: poked fun at them, hoicked and rousted them from the thrones they were sitting so ugly on, and sentenced them to life in glass-fronted prisons. Yes, and talked a lot of young people into doing likewise.

And now it seems I shall have to pay the penalty and wash down the banquet with a hemlock liqueur.

At the moment of writing I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen to me. My lawyer has been under constant pressure from the Attorney General’s office to get me to agree to one or another form of retraction and apology to offended parties. All the formulae require me to dilute the pure milk of my doctrine - and with dirty water, at that. This I will not do. Each proposed apology submitted to me is less apologetic than the last - but accompanied by broader hints of fatal consequences should I reject it. However, I will have none of them. The latest news is that, as a last resort, someone (it could be the Judge) is hunting through the transcript of the Trial in the slender hope of finding something I said which - torn from its context - could be construed as a retreat from my position.

Evidently the last thing the Government wants is my blood on its hands, followed almost inevitably by that of a succession of martyrs in the cause of free speech in religion, and
the basic right of humans to question their humanness.
On the other hand, I’m told, a crescendo of threatening noises has been coming from the more fanatical elements of the fundamentalist lobby, complaining of the delay in sentencing me. Death is what they demand, and it’s doubtful whether they could be bought off with life imprisonment. A dilemma for the Government, all right.

How desperately they are seeking a way out of the dilemma is shown by what I take to be their latest move. I was visited here in my cell this very morning by a stranger of conspiratorial mien, who refused to give his name. Suspecting that my cell was bugged, he whispered in my ear the good news, as he called it. Some unidentified friends of mine were arranging to spring me from prison in the next two days. Escape plans, including drugged or bent prison officers, a get-away helicopter and a safe country hide-out, were practically complete. All that was needed was my co-operation.

I admit that, seeing no compromise with the truth was involved, I was tempted. A few moments of reflection, however, and I had no hesitation at all in giving my mysterious visitor the bum’s rush. Christopher, my lawyer, says I was a fool not to seize the opportunity of a getaway, which would probably have succeeded because (he’s convinced) the plot had been hatched at a high Government level. Hatched by some optimist who saw this as a neat way out of an otherwise insoluble problem. Neat only, of course, in the rather unlikely event of the source and the beneficiary of the plot remaining undiscovered.

I can think of another explanation of the plot. Shooting me dead, while attempting to escape, would let the Government off the hook. It would ensure that I made my exit as a fugitive from the law and not a victim of the law. Martyr into criminal - what could be neater?

My suspicions are deepened by the fact that allowing anyone (other than my lawyer) to visit me in my cell - instead of in the visiting area with its wire screen - was a breach of prison regulations. In short, the whole episode was as fishy as could be.

My refusal to compromise - whether by toning down my message or by running away - has been made at gut level, not by taking thought. Which brings home to me a fact I hadn’t quite faced up to - the plain fact that I have
chosen death.

How do I feel about this? I ask myself.

There’s a sense, of course, in which I have the last laugh and the last word.
The Prosecution got the wrong man!
Nevertheless, the cord binding Jack, that wrong man, to this Right One, isn’t cut casually, or painlessly. There are pleasanter sensations than to find Death twitching at one’s ear.

A part of me is happy to die in this best of causes. A part isn’t. I’m reminded of a story about a young man called Hubert who went to Napoleon with a new religion. He listened with care, and in the end approved wholeheartedly. But, just as Hubert was leaving the imperial presence, he called him back.

‘There’s just one thing missing,” Napoleon said.

‘Yes, Sire?’ asked the young man, all eagerness.

‘You must get yourself crucified!’

Napoleon had the right idea, but put it too briefly. He should have added: ‘Or at least see that already you
are
the Crucified One.’

Like Hubert, unregenerate Jack has the strongest motive for sitting tight on God’s throne. But, unlike him, Jack has no option. He’s being packed off to where he belongs. He’s being decentralized for good and all, willy-nilly. And that fact, one way or another, means crucifixion, willy-nilly. And crucifixion hurts.