The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (8 page)

Thinker
. It did this by signaling its origins in infantile zoology and
storybook illustration, and its resemblance to a toy with moving parts. Using only
the obligatory material (the little paper napkin), the priest, by means of ten
cunning folds, had made a kangaroo. A mother kangaroo, with a joey’s head emerging
from the ventral fold. Before handing it over, he gave the girl instructions, or
just the one, which was very simple and required no words since it took the form of
a practical demonstration: by pulling on the kangaroo’s long, curved tail, he made
the joey’s head pop out of the pouch and pop back in again. It can’t have been the
first time the priest’s white hand had tugged on a kangaroo’s tail. The little girl
was charmed by the joey’s shy peeping, and ran off at once to show it to her mother.
The priestly origin of this ingenious folding was lost along the way, as the fragile
mechanism was destroyed by the girl’s clumsy jerks. But didn’t this gift allude to
the higher Maternity and the Child who appeared and disappeared at the miraculous
edges of the world? That priest had practiced with communion wafers, so similar to
the napkins in their texture and fineness. No one really knows what a wafer looks
like before the ceremony in which it plays the leading role. The origins of the host
are surrounded by a multitude of legends. For example, the legend of the tenth fold.
There was no time to repair the tail-lever because the girl’s mother was already
standing up, along with her friend, and looking around, not realizing at first that
her daughter was right there beside her, then taking her by the hand to go. Suddenly
she was in a big rush: there’d been so much to say, they’d talked so long; time had
flown, and the hairdresser was about to close. At the last minute the little girl
let go of her mother’s hand and ran a few steps to take something that was being
held out to her. Her mother called her impatiently, holding the door open, and it
was only when they were out on the sidewalk that she saw what her daughter was
holding: a polyhedron made by folding a little paper napkin.

JUNE 12, 2011

God’s Tea Party

I

ACCORDING TO AN OLD AND
immutable tradition in the
Universe, God celebrates His birthday with a magnificent and lavish Tea Party, to
which only the apes are invited. Nobody knows or could know, in those timeless
regions, when this custom began, but it has become a fixture in the great year of
the All: it seems that the patiently anticipated day will never come, but come it
does, precisely on time, and the Tea Party takes place. It is said, plausibly
enough, that the original reason for the ceremony was negative: the idea was not so
much to invite apes as to not invite humans. Apes are a sarcastic joke, a kind of
deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed
at a human race that has disappointed Him. It may well have begun like that. But as
soon as the arrangement was in place, it was accepted as an ancestral tradition,
without a clear meaning, but saved from blatant absurdity by the hefty weight of
precedent.

Traditions cannot be separated from the societies that created them. A community’s
traditions function like a sympathetic nervous system. They tend to be rather
irrational, because their historical components were produced by an intricate web of
causes that not even the most careful study would be able to disentangle. The case
of God’s Tea Party, however, should be simpler, because it’s a tradition of the
Universe, so there was nothing particular or historical about its origin; instead of
a causal network, there was the gong of the absolute, no less. Yet, whether simple
or difficult to grasp, its origin and reason for being remain obscure, perhaps just
because the theologians never took the ceremony seriously, or were afraid of
compromising their reputations by attending to something so grotesquely silly.

Nevertheless, to clarify, it can be said that it’s not a natural occurrence like the
spring thaw or an eclipse or the migration of ducks. It’s a social event. It doesn’t
have to happen, should the Master of the house decide that He doesn’t feel like
having a Tea Party. Up until now, the custom has been observed and will, most
likely, continue for all eternity. Even He respects the old established traditions,
perhaps simply out of habit.

Like every social occasion, this one has its formalities. The first, which is really
a sine qua non, is the issuing and distribution of the invitations. (This too could
be different. Were the judgment to be rescinded or the sentence commuted one day,
the guests might be human.) The invitations, addressed “To Evolution,” are
automatically transmitted to the ape’s instincts, like the sound of a doorbell. They
are sent out all at once, en masse, and the operation may consist of no more than
the divine enunciation of the word “apes.” That is enough for all concerned to know
that the day has arrived.

But what day is it? When does the uncreated Creator celebrate His birthday? Any
time at all. It could be today. Except that “today” could be a lapse of countless
eons or a slice of a microsecond—it depends what plane you’re on—since His
universe is a puzzle of days, hours, months, and centuries, all of different shapes
and sizes, locked together in a polyhedron without end, on whose faces dawns and
midnights, emptiness and plenitude, ends and beginnings coexist. Naturally, He who
created time has the right to celebrate His birthday if He so desires. All the same,
“God’s birthday” has an odd ring to it, and the slight surprise provoked by the
expression is the reason why the whole thing is so odd.

II

MORE THAN ODD, IMPOSSIBLE: a five o’clock tea
impossibly happening outside of time, in a realm of pure fantastic invention. Were a
witness present, he’d see a sheer frenzy of senseless movement. The apes can’t keep
still. They leap up and down as if possessed, on their own chairs and those of the
others. Incapable of staying put, after barely a moment in one place, they’re
looking for somewhere new. They squeeze in wherever they can, and there’s always a
space, because the others keep shifting too. They are possessed, truly possessed, by
an enthusiasm without object, as if they knew that, just for a while, eternity was
theirs to play havoc in, and were determined not to waste the opportunity. With
their giddy diagonal leaps across the table, they knock over cups, send the spoons
and forks flying; their stamping feet scatter the pastries, their tails swipe at the
cream-laden cakes and come away spotted with white. What do they care! Their faces,
hands, and chests are sticky with cake, tea, crumbs, and chocolate. The cups of fine
porcelain implode in their clumsy grips, and to counteract the scalding tea they
splash themselves with cold milk. They’re constantly fighting; there’s always some
pretext, and if they can’t find one they go ahead and fight all the same. Sometimes
it looks like a battlefield: they bombard one another with sugar cubes, spit
marmalade, hurl trays of scones. Inevitably one of them rises above the melee by
swinging from the chandelier, until he gets distracted, lets go, and comes crashing
down in the middle of the table, devastating the china and scattering the
confectionery. And how they scream! The racket is so deafening, a fire truck’s siren
would be inaudible.

Exercising His omnipotence, God pours tea into all the cups at once. And while He’s
at it, He repairs some of the breakages. In a circus like this, of course, His good
intentions only aggravate the chaos, giving it a velocity it wouldn’t have in the
natural order of causes and effects. The cataclysm becomes as inextricable as a
tangled-up thread a million light years long.

And yet it’s as if there were an order of ceremony, because every time God has a Tea
Party, the same things happen. Every leap, every stain on the tablecloth, the
trajectory of every slice of strawberry tart thrown from one end of the table to the
other, exactly repeats what happened the time before and anticipates what will
happen next time. The whole thing is identical. But there’s really no reason to be
amazed, because, after all, every event is identical to itself.

This identity explains why the party is repeated over and over. Without it, God may
well have decided not to invite the apes to tea again, having seen what an awful
mess they can make and just how badly they can behave. But yielding the initiative
to the automaticity of the same takes all the risk out of repetition. The bad
manners of the guests become a given configuration of reality, like a landscape.
Nonetheless, the question of whether manners are subject to evolution does arise.
Detached one by one from the apocalyptic block in which they manifest themselves at
God’s Tea Party, and isolated like signs, perhaps they could develop, becoming part
of a story, and after a great many centuries or millennia, we would arrive at a
divine, unprecedented spectacle: a gathering of apes sitting quietly around a table,
lifting their teacups in one hand, their little fingers pointing at the surrounding
void, dabbing at the corners of their mouths with napkins, perfectly demure and
genteel.

III

THE PROBLEM OF THE BAD behavior might be due to the fact that God
doesn’t preside. Or rather, He does and He doesn’t. As we know, God is omnipresent,
which turns out to be very handy for carrying out His functions, but it has the
drawback of preventing Him from being visibly present in a particular place, for
example sitting at the head of the table, keeping things under control. His absence
(if His omnipresence can be counted as an absence) could be regarded as a
discourtesy that legitimates all the subsequent discourtesies of his guests: a host
who fails to turn up to his own party thereby authorizes his guests to behave as
they like (this is the household version of the well-known saying “If God does not
exist, everything is allowed.”) But taking a wider view should allow us to see that
His behavior is the transcendental form of the solicitude that characterizes the
perfect host, who “thinks of everything” in order to guarantee the well-being of his
guests, ensuring that plates, cups, and glasses are never left empty, all the
provisions are of the finest quality, sweet and savory, hot and cold are balanced,
the lighting and the temperature are just right, the tablecloth is well ironed and
doesn’t smell of mothballs, and the conversation never languishes or strays toward
inappropriate topics. There are so many details to attend to! Only God could keep
track of them all.

By making an appearance He could put a stop to the uproar, but if He were to be in
one place He would cease to be in others and would thus betray His essence. So one
of the apes stands in for Him. This King of the Apes is a legendary personage.
Nobody believes in his real existence, for good reason: he exists only for the
duration of God’s Tea Party. He does what God would do were He to take a fleshly
form, but he does it as the misshapen caricature that he is. Standing on the chair
at the head of the table, frantic and raucous, intoxicated by his own impatient and
capricious majesty, he distributes punches and kicks, yells his head off, hurls
everything within his reach, and in his determination to impose order ends up being
the most disorderly of all. Sometimes he is so maddened by his own energy that he is
the one who starts a new brawl or launches a new campaign of destruction, which he
then insists on quashing with renewed violence. The other apes, displaying an
atavistic respect that seems to have been instilled in them by the light of divine
reason, refrain from challenging the king’s authority (not that it has much effect
on their behavior). Indeed, if Supreme Command is diffusely present everywhere, it
follows that it must be present in the King of the Apes, and it could even be argued
that, while remaining evenly distributed, it is, in a sense, more present in him
than elsewhere. However mechanically or automatically God’s representative is
designated, a Will is involved, and Will is beyond the reach of calculation and
conjecture.

The king is the one who shouts the most, and who shouts the loudest. He prefigures
the invention of the loudspeaker. He would like to have a thousand arms, so he could
slap all the guests at the same time. Still, he manages pretty well with the two he
has by leaping about unpredictably and keeping on the move. Apes are naturally
endowed with exceptional agility, but he surpasses his physical limits. It’s as if
he were pure mind, and his mind is twisted and perverse, bitter and sadistic, sick
with power. Like so many others, “he thinks he’s God.” He persecutes the slowest and
most vulnerable apes, and especially the timid ones, at the bottom of the pile; he
sprays lemon juice in their eyes, dips their fingertips into the boiling tea, plugs
their ears with candy and their noses with marmalade, pushes silver spoons into
their anuses . . . In the breaks, he downs gallons of tea, to fuel his causeless
fury. There must be something in that tea.

IV

ON ONE OCCASION A CURIOUS being interrupted God’s famous Tea Party.
As a rule, people who join a gathering to which they have not been invited try to go
unnoticed; they don’t draw attention to themselves; they keep a low profile and try
to blend in. That’s the interloper’s logic. It doesn’t always work, and some adopt
the opposite strategy: assuming they’ll be found out sooner or later, they decide to
make it sooner and justify their presence by being “the life of the party.”

In this case, the intruder apparently chose the first approach, for which she was
unsurpassably equipped by her natural attributes. For a start, she couldn’t have
been smaller, because she was a subatomic particle. One of those pieces of a part of
an atom that were left over when the Universe was formed and have been floating
about ever since. To her the Void and the All were one; she roamed them both, in
free fall, idle and unattached.

Millions of galaxies had seen her go by; or hadn’t, but she’d gone by all the same. A
well-informed observer would have been able to recognize her as an archaeological
trace of the dimensions that had ceased to exist, or one of time’s wandering
milestones, or a messenger from the origin. Her tiny little body, on which not even
the finest brush could have inscribed a single letter, nonetheless contained a long
history. The most advanced cyclotrons would have been required to decipher that
diminutive hieroglyph, but the eminent scientists who operated those costly
instruments were busy with more important and beneficial projects. In any case, it
would have been hard for them to capture or even locate her, because there were no
maps showing her trajectory, and she didn’t draw attention to herself. Discreet to
the point of stealth, she slipped away quietly; before she’d finished arriving she
was gone. She was there and not there.

The same was true of her path. It couldn’t really be called capricious because all
things obey the laws according to which they were created, but when a thing is as
small as she was, literally off the scale (when, that is, it exists on a plane that
is prior to measurement), there’s no predicting which way it will go, or when. To
give an idea of her size (although it’s an inconceivable idea), if you took as many
of those particles as there are atoms in the Universe and stuck them together, they
still wouldn’t make up the volume of an atom.

This intensified tininess gave her a quality that would have been extraordinary in a
normal-size being: she didn’t need to change course and never bumped into anything
because she went right through whatever happened to be in her way. It would be
misleading to liken this to a bullet’s trajectory because she made no holes; she
didn’t need to. From her point of view, solid bodies were not solid. The atoms of a
stone, which to us seem so tightly packed, were, for her, as far apart as the sun
and the moon. So she glided through a meteorite of nickel and iron as a bird crosses
the blue sky on a spring morning. She traversed a planet without even noticing. With
the same oblivious fluidity, she passed through an atom. Or a sheet of paper, a
flower, a boat, a dog, a brain, a hair.