The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (8 page)

COUNSEL,
sotto voce:
The maniac who’s now in the dock?

MYSELF: Let’s put it differently, and do belated justice to that inverted and abbreviated Driver. He was, in fact, so fit, so skiIful, so powerful, so unhandicapped, and — yes! — so unhuman that,
instead of driving a car, he drove the world,
without himself budging an inch!

COUNSEL: Jurors have too much common sense to be taken in by this sophistry, this midsummer madness. The certainty that you and I move around in the world — and not vice versa — is so universal, so practical, so indispensable to life and thought that it can’t be false. Here, in fact, we have just one more example of the famous Nokes Law:
Everyone’s out of step, except me!
You can’t prove him wrong. But you can order him to fall out and go back to where he came from. To the glass-house. Or is it to the nut-house?

MYSELF: If I’m out of step, it’s because I’m marching to God’s almighty drum. Let me see if I can confound Sergeant Wilberforce by getting another recruit to hear and march to it...

Will the Witness please go back into the box. [She does so.] Please tell the court what I’m doing...

WITNESS: Turning round, and round, and round in the dock.

MYSELF: Just me? Is the dock, is anything else besides me on the move?

WITNESS: No. Just you.

MYSELF: Now it’s your turn to do what I did. [She complies, gathering speed ...] Tell the court whether you are moving, or the court. Go by what’s given right now.

WITNESS: I’m quite still!... The court’s
whizzing
round! Wow!

MYSELF: Please slow it down... [She stops turning. Somewhat reluctantly, it seems…]

COUNSEL: Be sensible now! Enough of Nokes’s
credo-quia-impossibile
nonsense. You don’t
believe
you set the court in motion. Be honest.

WITNESS: Why not? I was being sensible, just as you say. Coming to my senses. I understood enough of Einstein and relativity to know I’m not talking nonsense, either.

MYSELF: Thank you very much. No more questions...

What Counsel said about common sense, and the practical necessity of imagining oneself moving around in a still world, is true enough of course — so far as it goes. Which isn’t half far enough. It doesn’t go back to the beginning or on to the end. Let me complete it by telling the whole three-part story of his experience of movement:

(1) As an infant he was still and his world was all commotion. When his dad took little Gerald for a drive, he loved watching the lampposts and trees and buildings go sailing by. When his dad tossed little Gerald up in the air and swung him around, it was fun and he wasn’t a bit scared. Why? Because everything in the room was rushing about like crazy — everything except him.

(2) As an adult
he’s
all commotion and
his world
has ground to a halt. And he’s scared. Taking on all that turmoil has ousted his inner peace and left him jittery and twitchy, disturbed through and through. As you can see.

(3) My wish for him is that one day (it could be as a result of this Trial) he will come to his senses and complete his life story. Then he will no longer be agitated and in a dither. He will regain his inner tranquillity by giving back to the universe the turmoil that never was his anyway. He will be an unflappable Seer of Who-he-is, enjoying the sight of a world that has sprung to life again in a dance whose
corps de ballet
ranges from lampposts and city blocks to the stars. God’s Bolshoi, putting on His Nutcracker Suite. What a philistine, what a bunkered ass, what a nutcase he’d been, to rubbish that superb spectacle! But now, arrived at the third stage,
instead of driving his car he drives his world.
And, for good measure, is less accident-prone. Driving about in a still world is driving without due care and attention. It’s dangerous driving. In the end, it’s fatal.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, Your Honour and everyone else in this courtroom, I ask you, I put it to you with the utmost seriousness:
Conceding that it’s the world that’s being driven, can you, dare you, put any creature in the driving seat, anyone except the Creator of the world?
If you can and you dare, it’s not I but you who are guilty of blasphemy. God, Aristotle taught, is the Unmoved Mover of the world. When He condescends to take the wheel of my 1991 Rover, and set all His world a-roving for the price of a driblet of six-star Supershell, Jack can’t and Jack won’t try to shoulder Him out and take over. When he sets the Jungfrau waltzing with the Finsteraarhorn, Jack can’t and Jack won’t halt them in their tracks. That would make a jackass of him.

When you next drive your car, why not let the lampposts and the trees and the buildings and the hills
en route
tell you
Who’s
driving? They are all raring to enlighten you. If you go on reading them as fixtures in a stable world, then for sure it’s a human driving — without due care and attention. But please God there will come a day when you’re sensible and humble enough to look and to stop hallucinating like mad. Then you will enjoy the superb spectacle of the World-Mover at work, and you will know that He is Who you really, really, really are. And then, maybe, you will bitterly regret having brought in a verdict of Guilty against me. Or rather, against Him! Think of that: against Him!

Diagram No. 6

Diagram No.6 gives a crude impression of the World-Driver on the job. But it does bring out the fact that upright things (like telegraph poles and church steeples) don’t keel over as they slide past Him. They stay firmly upright. And — how curious and significant, and how overlooked —
upright means radial to His Centre!
When next you kindly take the universe for a spin, see how all
fans out
from its Owner. Actually, you’ve only to glance round the court right now to observe how all its vertical lines converge on — well, on Whom? That’s the question this Trial is all about.

Members of the Jury, you don’t look the sort that habitually has one —or two—or three for the road. But what, after all, is drunken driving? If it’s being so blotto that, suffering from a severe bout of delirium tremens (so to say), you see moving things as stuck, and stuck things as moving, and converging lines as parallel, then I have to accuse you of this offence. What’s worse, accuse you of having committed it countless times. In fact, I doubt whether you know what sober driving means! But there’s a remedy. The only safe and sober Driver stands ready to take charge. Hand over the wheel to your Divine Chauffeur!

I seem to remember Bertie Wooster tottering down the Mall, after a cheerful evening at the Drones. Or was the Mall tottering down him? Anyway, says Wodehouse, he ‘aimed a kick at a passing lamppost’. He saw what he saw, for once. But there’s a cheaper and safer method of sobering up than the in-vino-veritas way, a much better way of seeing what you see than going on a blinder. It is to look, just LOOK, and see what’s moving. And see WHO isn’t. And BE the One that never budged by a billionth of an inch!

COUNSEL, bursting at last under the strain: Oh no you’re not getting away with this! Members of the Jury, Nokes makes a great show of spiritual depth. He figures he’s the profound one, in contrast to us shallow types. I say he’s a master of superficiality. He trivializes the great issues and problems of our life, reducing them to such matters of moment as the curious behaviour of telegraph poles. He’s been playing this funny-man, happy-go-lucky, soft-headed, Mickey Mouse game from the start of this Trial. It’s one which serious and responsible adults, coats off and sleeves rolled up, engaged in the world’s work, decline to play.

MYSELF: And the reason why you hard-headed spoilsports are stressed to the limit is that, instead of playing God’s game, you play God. Stop arrogating to Sir Gerald and Co. His work of world-moving. Give yourselves a break and let Him get on with it, for a change. Look how marvellous He is at the job! Do you imagine that He who quite casually moves the Sun and the other stars can’t shift the picayune obstructions that stand in your path? Can’t the One who stirs the cosmos more effortlessly than you stir your porridge - can’t He also shift your blinkers or blinders, so that you discover simultaneously that magnificent Storm and the Stillness at the Eye of it? His Tempest there, His Peace right where you are?

Tell me, how can you sidestep, how can you trivialize, that deepest Peace, which is yours for the seeing?

Only when we see everything else as moving can we truly sing ‘We shall not be moved’. In their different ways, the following Defence witnesses encourage us, by
placing
motion and Stillness, to enjoy both:

‘Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad... ‘The poetry of motion... Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped... Oh bliss! Oh poop poop! Oh my! Oh my!’

Kenneth Grahame

The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs... Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord.

Psalms

At the Centre where no one abides, this light is quenched in a still stronger Light... For this Ground is the impartible Stillness, motionless in itself, and by this Immobility all things are moved.

Eckhart

The Tao is ever still, yet there is nothing it does not do.

Tao Te Ching

There is nothing that stands fast, nothing fixed, nothing free from change among the things that come into being, neither among those in heaven nor among those on earth. God alone stands unmoved.

Hermes Trismegistus

For a long while I used to circumambulate the Ka’ba. When I attained unto God, I saw the Ka’ba circumambulating me.

Bayazid al-Bistami

If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall move.

Jesus

(Faith - in Greek,
pistis
- doesn’t mean blind credulity, but confidence in one you trust. I say: trusting God includes trusting the visible behaviour of His Alps just as much as their visible form. It means valuing the smooth and stately dance of His mountain peaks as highly as their superb get-up.)

Prosecution Witness No. 6

THE HAIRDRESSER

Witness testifies that she cuts my hair regularly. Excuse me —
styles
it.

COUNSEL: What does it grow on?

WITNESS: His head, of course. The noddle he brings into my saloon for tidying up, once a month.

COUNSEL: Has the Accused ever told you that, in reality, he has no noddle to tidy up or to take anywhere? And that this is enough to prove he’s someone very special? Not a man at all, actually?

WITNESS: Well, he does sometimes joke like that. He says we shouldn’t charge him for doing nothing to nothing. Then I point to the hair trimmings on the floor, and he pretends to be absolutely astonished. We have a laugh and he pays up.

COUNSEL: Do you get the impression he’s mad?

WETNESS: Not at all. Just playful, pleasantly eccentric.

COUNSEL: Isn’t the idea that he’s walking around headless very odd? As for claiming this proves him divine: isn’t this odder than odd? In fact blasphemous, not to say devilish?

WITNESS: That’s going rather far. Though it looks a bit that way, now you mention it.

COUNSEL: Thank you. Please stay in the box. I see the Accused wishes to cross-examine you.

Defence:
It’s Me, Not a Picture

I put it to the Witness that I never claimed I had no head. Quite the contrary.

MYSELF: Didn’t I say, again and again, that I have no head
here,
on
these
immensely broad shoulders, where it would look pimping, quite silly. And that I keep it parked a yard or so away behind glass, on top of that weedy, narrow-shouldered fellow who fits it to a tee? Didn’t I insist, in fact, that I set up around me countless ghostly Nokes-heads, all waiting out there for suitably positioned mirrors and people and their camera to pick up and make something of? To flesh out? Just as you’re doing right now?