The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (27 page)

121

If no solid conclusions ever come forward on the why, what, and how of consciousness, one thing is well known: it is the cause of our greatest misgivings. Among these is the horror that we are only as real as we imagine ourselves to be. In the course of our disillusionments, we have made the admission that we are not entirely segregated from the animate and inanimate world in which we walk. But we must stop short of any tidings that would turn us into talking trees or stones that dream. That would be to skyrocket disillusionment to the highest power, leaving us without a particle of our delusional selves. Thus, to ensure that we will not get lost in the scenery around us, and to advance ourselves to center stage, we have invented a hierarchy of players among whom we are of the highest order within the earthly domain. This existential jugglery can have eerie consequences. One is that even the Creators (Supreme Beings) we create, and who do us the favor of creating us in return, serve a de facto role as characters inferior to ourselves, since they exist only in stories. We say that they are superior beings, but this is only part of the confidence game of fiction: we must believe that they are the absolute reality if their story is to be convincing because Creators cannot write themselves into existence and the only words they speak are those which we put into their mouths. You could search every inch of the universe and not ferret out a single Creator.3 Ask a Christian theologian, who will tell you that his god exists outside of space-time and would not be caught dead hanging from a cross without a resurrection and ascension as part of the deal.

Outside the pages written by the hand of humanity, Creators do not make personal appearances, even to those who believe in them (not counting stories and hallucinations).

They are no-shows at the party, where the other guests can only burble rumors about what they are really like. A Creator may be portrayed in a book as omniscient, but, all told, these characters do not outpace the knowledge and intelligence of their creators.

(Writers cannot dream up characters smarter than themselves, but they can make them seem that way.) From the wallflower Brahma to the lame-brained Yahweh to a menagerie of prime movers who spawned the earth and its denizens through unreasoning verve or groaning defecation, Creators come off as a rather sorry bunch. Their products are so shoddy that they are constantly dying out or blowing up or breaking apart right out of the box. And their antics remind one of toddlers who are playing with their toys one moment and smashing them the next. For pure brainpower, Creators are unqualified to carry the deerstalker hat of Sherlock Holmes, a construct that outshines any star set to explode in this spilt-milk of a universe.4 Nature herself began as a fictional character who was superior, which is to say inferior, to us. Later in the narrative of her adventures, she was reduced to playing a supporting role to the gods. Most recently, nature has been busted down to the rank of a concept in the history of human imagination. Not the first to suffer this fate, she was preceded by the older, less credible divinities of world mythology, the ones who long ago lost their eminence and devolved into apparitions of a minor symbology. No one except characters in horror stories goes into conniptions of panic at the idea of the Great God Pan, not even pantheists.

As multitudinous beholders of Christendom have noted, the character we have been most enraptured with creating and recreating is not God but his antagonist Lucifer. The former has no shape, no definite features, and has been idle or unresponsive for thousands of years. The latter has been vividly drawn in literature and dramatized on stage, screen, and 122

television. His name and image have been licensed to makers of household products. He is alive and among us; he is mobilized. The Other is long past His prime, a stiff who, even in the form He borrowed from us, has lost all dynamism. Perhaps He is rehearsing for an apocalypse that is ever being moved back by those to whom He speaks on the sly.

During His active years, as chronicled in the Old Testament, He could not get His rules and regulations taken seriously. Almost none of His commands and commandments were followed except by certain people, God knows why. Perhaps he did not make much of an impression because he farmed out His ultimatums to intermediaries such as Elijah and Jeremiah, whose words were laughed off before He choked off the laughter by doing what he does best—execute His doubters. Even when God spoke in His own voice, He was not always forthcoming in making the consequences of disobedience to Him known to those whom he liked to order about, beginning with Adam and Eve. Patsies in paradise, their compliance with the Almighty’s orders to eat from one tree and not some other would have been the kiss of death for humanity. (If the answer is “humanity,” the question must be, “What two-bit vaudeville act got its start either in a bath of one-celled organisms or through the offices of famed talent agent God the Father?”) As luck would have it, Adam and Eve could no more choose not to do what they did than they could choose not to choose not to choose. . . . And their Master was no help, choosing to keep His own counsel about the booby traps he had strung between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After they tripped the wire, He had his excuse to throw the recalcitrant twosome out on their ear from Eden, so that they might become the first family of a race of inbreds. As fall guys go, so they went. Lucifer, of course, had inside information, being a longtime acquaintance of the Creator and knowing full well what He was capable of. When paradise was lost, those two people in the Garden of Eden played second fiddle to the Tempter, who also upstaged his former boss and took over the puppet show. It is Lucifer, rather than the Elohim—in singular, plural, or Trinitarian format—who would sustain us, or rather sustain our imagination of ourselves. The Gnostics’ biggest mistake was their attempt to rehabilitate this figure as one of truth and knowledge in opposition to the Old Testament imposter, whom they disparaged as an evil demiurge. Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if he did not exist, then neither would we.

God may have created humanity in his image, as the story goes, but we created the Evil One in ours. In a universe that was already rife with built-in torments, Lucifer, following our lead, chose to complement this standard hell with an optional one of his own making.

God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one has yet written the obituary of the Devil. He must endure to represent us to ourselves as the fiendish miscreations of this world—so tortured, so deceiving, so real. He is the true hero of the race, and as long as we keep him breathing, as long as we outrank him and any other beasts of our invention, then we are the immortal, the deathless, the superior, if not literally then at least in literature. The hope of answering to our satisfaction whether or not we exist as selves is a fruitless one. Patterning ourselves after Lucifer, we spurn the 123

self, the selfless, and any heaven that may be real. Instead, we act out a destiny with a beginning, middle, and an end and inhabit a hell in which we are the regnant characters.

PLOT

In his Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1917), the German theologian Rudolph Otto describes an encounter with the “numinous,” the wholly Other (in other words, God) as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“a terrifying and fascinating mystery”). Such experiences are uncommon outside the lives of religious mystics, who may be terrified by their supernatural assignations but are never undone by them. For them, the supernatural is a terror of the divine, not a demonic horror. And it is the absolute reality. After conjuring up the wholly Other through prayer and meditation, these cultists of the sacred feel themselves to be nothing in its presence, only a bit of crud stuck to the shoe of the numinous. Eventually, according to Otto, they make common cause with the numinous and are able to feel good about themselves. On Otto’s say-so, these experiences are what the supernatural is about: any others, including those evoked by the plots of supernatural horror stories, are primitive or perverted. What else can a theologian say? What other kind of supernatural story would he have to tell? While The Idea of the Holy has some thrilling moments when things are touch and go, the ending is all blessedness and no harm done. But this is not what readers expect when the supernatural is the featured element. They expect death, good or not so good, and will feel swindled if they do not get it. Because death is what really terrifies and fascinates them. In the midst of their lives, they are deep in death . . . and they know it. They do not know the numinous, which hangs back from life and welcomes very few into its midst. Why this should be the way things are is the real mystery.

The context of Otto’s tract is the nature and origins of religion. Ghost-chasers and paranormal investigators have written with as much conviction and hearsay evidence about their own hobby-horse; they, too, have tales to tell of the terrifying and fascinating, as if anyone could have a monopoly on these emotions or reserve their copyright for true believers only. The supernatural is in public domain, and, whatever the ontological angle, it is packaged with plots that are missing from the natural world. When we and our prototypes were part of that world, our lives had about as much plot to them as those of the birds and the bees. We had no heads for stories about anything beyond our senses. As our heads began to grow, we also grew away from the natural. Our bodies stayed behind, but our minds searched for stories with a better plot than survival, procreation, and death as such, without narrative embellishments. But these stories could not be set in the natural world, where there are no stories—where things just happen willy-nilly and events have no meaning outside of practicality. These stories had to have plots at a distance from biology.

Say what we like, we do not believe ourselves to be just organisms. Ask any atheistic biologist in his home-sweet-home if he thinks of himself and his wife and kids in the same way he does the animals he left back in the lab. That we are critters is a verdict decided on a technicality. What we see in our mirrors are human beings, and what we need in our diet is the sustenance of stories telling us that we are more than the sum of 124

our creaturely parts. And our supply of this provender comes from only one source—our consciousness, which dramatizes survival into storied conflicts between humans and humans (less often between humans and nature) and tricks up procreation into tales of courtly love, bedroom farces, and romantic fictions with or without laughs. But such stories are distanced just so far from nature. Have a good look at narratives of physical or psychological conflict. Are they really so removed from survival in the natural kingdom?

No, they are not. They are still nature, red in tooth and claw. Bedecked by our consciousness and its illusions to seem humanized, our war stories, street stories, success stories, and other bio-dramas are not qualitatively different from their analogues in the wilderness. The same goes for romance yarns, those dolled-up variations on mating rituals as seen in nature documentaries. They are not detached from the procreative dog and pony show as observed by zoologists and would be dramatically senseless without a sexual climax as their central motive. Properly considered, they are an ornate pornography, with oft-repeated plots having their only denouement in a release of biological tension and their falling action in what cinematic pornographers term a

“money shot,” which in conventional filmic or fictional products is replaced by a kiss or a marriage by way of consummating the piece.

As survivors and procreators, we compose stories which are set at a distance from nature but which are not at their root dissimilar from its habitual behaviors. However—and this is one pregnant “however”—as beings who will die and who know they will die, we are indisputably dissociated from the natural world, thrown out on our ear from nature’s home. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, weigh anchor away from its shores, and sublimate it as a subject for our stories, but at no time and in no place are we protected from being touched on the shoulder and reminded, “You’re going to die, you know.” However we have tried to ignore it or transform it into benign shapes, consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are drenched with the horror of our moribundity.

Death—do we really believe it is part of the order of our lives? We say that we do. But when it becomes lucent to our imagination, how natural does it feel? Death is not like survival and procreation, which almost no one seems to mind very much. It is more like a visitation from another world, one to which we are connected by our consciousness. No consciousness, no death. No death, no uniquely human stories—their value dribbling backward from the end, with a beginning and a middle that is headed nowhere besides endness, deadness. Animal stories of survival and procreation have no comparable structure because animals have no consciousness of death . . . and without consciousness of death there can be no story to come to an end. Not all plots end in death, only those which walk a character right to the end, just as every plot in real life does. When the end is revealed, the story is over. If we could be conscious of the way each of our stories will end, that would be the end the story. That would be the end of us. Without this knowledge, we can keep going, because we do not know how or when our story will end.

We remain in suspense about these details. Who could live through a story whose end they knew in advance—not in a general sense but as to the how and when? Who could produce another person whose ending they knew to its closing excruciations? Such a plot would decompose before it got going. One cannot begin a story at its end and go 125