Another thing this book would point out is that vows are vows, and the priestly kind are neither more nor less serious than the marriage kind. Married folks don’t usually go all to pieces if they happen to break their vows, and to tell the naked truth, neither do priests—except in fiction. In fiction, having an affair presents a priest with a life-shattering crisis of conscience; in real life, having an affair usually just presents him with a hell of a mess. Again, I speak from observation of colleagues, not from personal experience. So far.
I thought about these things as I walked through the pleasant spring evening with a beautiful woman at my side. Far from home, where I would never dream of doing such a thing.
It was borne in on me: I’m not made of iron.
I said, “How do you happen to know sign language?”
“My parents were deaf.”
This was not much of a conversation, I thought, to be having in these romantic circumstances.
Leaden-footed, I droned on: “Is it the same in America and Germany?”
“No, actually it isn’t.”
I plodded on. “When you were signing on the stage with Charles, did you know whether anyone in the audience would understand you?”
“No. And if you’re planning to ask why I bothered, the answer is that it’s something I was doing for myself. It’s a different language.”
“I know that, but what’s that got to do with it?”
“When you’re signing, you have to think very differently. Very, very differently.” We walked in silence for a bit. “It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know the language,” she added finally. “Translating into sign isn’t like translating into another spoken language. You have to rethink it very fundamentally.”
“Charles could sign?”
“He could understand a lot, but he couldn’t sign a lot.” From a corner of my eye, I saw a small smile edge onto her lips. “But when he did sign, he had a wonderful style, all his own.”
My stomach sank under a tarry load of jealousy. I knew I was in big trouble here.
Borders
Shirin’s “small park” seemed pretty big to me, in the gathering darkness. I don’t know whether it was a park that had gone to seed or had been designed that way, as a miniature wilderness with sketchy paths, no lights, and an occasional bench. I’m not an expert on parks or on wildernesses. We trekked on for ten minutes or so, then settled on a bench. With the trees blocking out what little light was left in the sky, it might as well have been midnight.
“Borders are always tricky, intriguing things,” B said at last. “Feral children fascinate because they stand at the border of the animal world. Gorillas and dolphins fascinate because they stand at the border of the human world. Even though they’re only arbitrary consequences of the fact that we use a decimal numeration system, the borders between centuries and millennia fascinate. Shakespeare’s fools fascinate because they live at the border between sanity and madness. The heroes of tragedy fascinate because they walk the border between triumph and defeat. The borders between prehuman and human, between childhood and adulthood, between generations, between nations and peoples, between social and political paradigms—all of these are intensely fascinating.
“The border that Charles and I have been trying to focus your attention on is the border that was crossed when one group of people living in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago became us. You know that crossing this border brought us to a very special sort of agriculture that produces enormous food surpluses. You know that crossing this border brought us to the most laborious lifestyle ever practiced on this planet. But these are superficial perceptions. Charles wanted you to see that this border represents a profoundly important spiritual and mental crossing. Charles tried to lead you to an appreciation of this crossing by leading you back to it from this side, from the present moment, but I’m going to take the opposite tack. I’ll try to lead you to an appreciation of this crossing by leading you forward to it from the other side, from our origins in the community of life.”
I felt rather than saw her shiver. I think she must have felt my question in turn, for she said, “I’m not cold, I’m terrified.”
“Why?”
“Charles could have done this—would have done this next. But he hoped he wouldn’t have to. This is so much more … difficult.”
The words I’m sorry were halfway out of my mouth, but I managed to hold them back.
B stared into space for a few minutes, then said, “The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed—and therefore destined—to become us. This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. We would smile patronizingly if the Gebusi boasted that humanity was divinely destined to become Gebusi, but we’re perfectly satisfied that humanity was divinely destined to become us.”
“I think I’m beginning to see that, though I certainly didn’t see it the first time Charles said We are not humanity.”
B nodded distantly, as if holding on to a tenuous thought. “Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity’s ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don’t expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours.”
“Very true,” I said.
“To what development do we trace the beginnings of human religious thought?”
“I’d say we trace the beginnings of human religious thought to the practice of burying the dead, which began thirty or forty thousand years ago.”
B nodded. “This is just like tracing the beginning of human language to the practice of writing, which began about five thousand years ago.”
“I see what you mean—I think.”
“It would never occur to a linguist to search for the origins of human language in the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, would it?”
“Certainly not,” I said.
“Where would a linguist search for the origins of human language?”
“I think he’d go back to the origins of human life itself.”
“Because to be human is to have language.”
I’d say so.
“If Homo habilis didn’t have language, then he’s misnamed—doesn’t deserve to be called Homo”
“I would say so.”
“What is our hypothetical linguist’s method going to be?”
“I’d say it’s going to be more philosophical and speculative than linguistic. He doesn’t have an early human specimen whose language can be studied.”
“He’s going to be puttering around in one of those fascinating borderlands. On one side of the border, manlike creatures without language—tool-using (as even modern chimpanzees are), but lacking what we mean by language. On the other side of the border, people.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But he’s not going to study any clay tablets.”
“No, not even for a minute.”
“Good, because I don’t intend to spend even a minute on the burial practices of the Upper Paleolithic. They’re as irrelevant to the origins of religion as clay tablets are to the origins of language.”
“I understand.”
Bricolage
“The linguist and I must both practice bricolage, which is the craft of building with whatever comes to hand. It comes from the French bricoler, to putter about. We must both putter about in this strange borderland inhabited by almost-humans on one side and truly-humans on the other.”
“So you assume that being human means being religious, just as the linguist assumes that being human means being lingual.”
“Being a bricoleur, I don’t do anything as well defined as that, Jared. I poke around. I wonder if there’s a dimension of thought that is inherently religious. I say to myself that perhaps thought is like a musical tone, which (in nature) is never a single, pure tone but is always a composite of many harmonics—overtones and undertones. And I say to myself that perhaps, when mental process became human thought, it began to resound with one harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion, or, more fundamentally, awareness of the sacred. In other words, I wonder if awareness of the sacred is not so much a separate concept as it is an overtone of human thought itself. A conjecture of this sort can yield scientia, knowledge, but since it isn’t falsifiable, it can’t yield science in the modern sense. A work of bricolage is never science, Jared, but it can still astound, make sense, and stimulate thought. It can still impress with its veracity, validity, soundness, and cogency.”
“I see.” It seemed to me that, in all this talk, she was somehow trying to “screw her courage to the sticking-place.” I didn’t know why this was necessary or how to help, so I just kept nodding and saying, “I see, I see.”
Finally she lifted her eyes to the trees overhead and said, “The moon is up.” As if this were a signal, she got up and led me off the path into the woods. Several times in the next few minutes she paused to look around (at what, I don’t know), then moved on. Now and then she stopped to pick up something found in the grass. At last she came to a clearing that suited her, and we sat down.
She showed me the things she’d collected on the way—a nail, an old cartridge fuse, a 35mm film canister, a paper clip, a plastic comb, an acorn. At her request, I showed her what I had in my pockets, and she chose a key and a pen to add to the collection.
“This is what the universe has supplied me with tonight, Jared. We’ll have to see what I can make with it.”
Suddenly I remembered the fossil ammonite in my jacket pocket. She looked at it with evident surprise when I handed it to her, and I explained that Charles had given it to me to hold on to till we got around to it (which we never had).
“This will be the centerpiece of our work of bricolage,” she said, putting it down between us. “Charles had a different purpose in mind for it—I’m pretty sure I know what it was, and we’ll get around to that as well—but meanwhile it’ll serve as the piece to which all other pieces in our work must cling. It’s the community of life on this planet.”
“Okay.”
“A few minutes ago I said that perhaps, when mental process became human thought, it began to resound with one harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion or awareness of the sacred.”
“I remember.”
“I want you to think of this shell as the community of life. I want you to think that if you know just how to listen to it, this shell will ring out with that harmonic. Can you do that?”
“I can try.”
Animism
“There once was a universal religion on this planet, Jared,” B said. “Were you aware of that?”
I said I wasn’t.
“Audiences are almost always amazed by this news. Occasionally someone will think I’m referring to what is sometimes called the ‘Old Religion’—paganism, Wicca—but of course I’m not. In the first place, paganism isn’t old. It’s a farmer’s religion through and through, which means it’s just a few thousand years old, and of course it was never a universal religion, for the simple reason that farming was never universal. Very often—almost invariably, in fact—no one will even recognize the name of the religion I’m talking about, which of course is animism. They’ve literally never heard of it.”
“I can believe it,” I said.
“Do you know animism?”
“I think you’d better assume I don’t. Most people in my position, with my training, are aware of animism the way modern-day chemists are aware of alchemy.”
“You mean you’re aware of animism as a crude and simpleminded precursor of religion the way chemists are aware of alchemy as a crude and simpleminded precursor of chemistry. Not really religion in the proper sense any more than alchemy is chemistry in the proper sense.”
“That’s right.”
She pawed through her collection of oddments and selected the film canister. “This is animism,” she said, holding it up for my consideration. “An empty container as far as you’re concerned.” Then she dived into her purse and came up with a travelers sewing kit, from which she extracted a bit of thread long enough to bind film canister and ammonite together.
“Here, hold on to this,” she said, and I took it from her. “Tell me about the shell.”
“What do you mean?”
“What is it?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s the community of life on this planet.”
“And what did I just say to you about it?”
“You said that when mental process became human thought, perhaps this community began to resound with one harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion or awareness of the sacred. If I learn how to listen to it, it’ll ring out with that harmonic.”
“Good. But it occurs to me that I’ve introduced a puzzle here. I said that when mental process (a common phenomenon in the animal kingdom) became human thought, it began to ring out with a harmonic that I’ve identified as awareness of the sacred. But now I’m saying that the community of life rings with that harmonic. Which is it, human thought or the community of life?”
“I don’t find this too puzzling,” I told her. “I think the community of life began to ring with that harmonic when human thought began to ring with it.”
“Yes, that’s what I had in mind. And when this shell begins to resonate with that harmonic, this hollow canister that I’ve called animism will also begin to resonate, because it’s in contact with the shell.”
“Okay,” I said. “This is what you mean by bricolage?”
“This is what I mean by bricolage.”
Regarding the number of the gods
“Someone inevitably asks why I speak of gods rather than one God, as if I simply hadn’t been informed on this matter and was speaking in error, and I ask them how they happen to know the number of the gods. Sometimes I’m told this is just something ‘everyone’ knows, the way everyone knows there are twenty-four hours in a day. Sometimes I’m told God must be one, because this seems to us the most ‘enlightened’ number for God to be—as if the facts don’t count in this particular case. This is like reasoning that the earth must be the center of the universe, because no other place makes as much sense. Most often, of course, I’m told this is an undoubtable number, since it’s the number given in monotheistic scriptures. Needless to say, I have a rather different take on the whole matter.
“The number of the gods is written nowhere in the universe, Jared, so there’s really no way to decide whether that number is zero (as atheists believe) or one (as monotheists believe) or many (as polytheists believe). The matter is one of complete indifference to me. I don’t care whether the number of the gods is one, zero, or nine billion. If it turned out that the number of the gods is zero, this wouldn’t cause me to alter a single syllable of what I’ve said to you.”
She seemed to want a reaction to this, so I said okay.
“To speak of gods instead of God has this additional advantage, that I’m spared the embarrassing necessity of forever playing stupid gender games with them. I never have to decide between he and she, him and her. For me, they’re just they and them!”
“A not inconsiderable advantage,” I observed.
She picked up the plastic comb and ran a thumbnail down its teeth. “Is it one thing or many?”
“You mean the comb? I don’t know. Depends on how you look at it.”
“This comb is the number of the gods, Jared. Not something to be added to our work of bricolage, but rather something to be discussed and dismissed.” She tossed the comb over her shoulder and out of sight.
Where the gods write what they write
“The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that.”
“Your gods have done better?”
“Good heavens, yes, Jared. Immeasurably better—infinitely better! Just look out there!” She waved her hand at the world in front of us. “What do you see?”
“I see the universe.”
“That’s it, Jared. That’s where the real gods of the universe write what they write. Your God writes in words. The gods I’m talking about write in galaxies and star systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats.”
“And what do they write?”
“Well, they write physics and chemistry and biology and astronomy and aerodynamics and meteorology and geology—all that, of course, but that isn’t what you’re after, is it?”