City of God by E. L. Doctorow
“That’s only what you’ll think you’re doing,” I tell him.
—Back to my waterside village on the Sound, the light of late September coming in at a slant, a golden beneficent light, placid, unrustled by wind, but like a ripening, with clear intimations of the year now harvested, the sere winter coming. A sad season, the Canadian geese thinking of flying south, flocking in their serious squadrons but circling indecisively, a honking false prophet among them wheeling them back down to skid-land on the coves. When they are fed by well-meaning people, they stay beyond their time and freeze to death.
Over by the ocean beach innumerable swallows darken the sky, swirling about like dust storms, but do they feed as they fly, actually vacuum the air of the insect legions, as swifts do? They are small as sparrows, white-breasted, blue-feathered, with swept-back forked tails and pointed wing-tips. Space is the dimension of their lives, it’s what they live in, like bird galaxies, though not, like swifts, for months, years, at a time without landing. They have a weakness for telephone wires, they can’t resist the linear communal perch as now, with a gingerly first touch down, a few suggest to the rest a break in their migration, until they clear out of the sky over the long stretch of sanded road just behind the dunes and settle shoulder to shoulder on the cursive telephone cable, pole to pole to pole, breasting the ocean wind, head feathers ruffling, these little fuckers know how to live, they are arrayed now for some celestial concert only they can hear.
—I was aware as I did my philosophy in my own way, standing in front of the students in states of abstraction while they waited to write down what I said. . . I was aware that to the degree they were awed was the extent they would make fun of me behind my back. Professor Ludwig Wienerschnitzel. Arguing with himself, lapsing into his German, hearing what he had just said aloud as if someone else had said it, and then disagreeing vehemently. Coming up with one startling brilliant assertion after another, and erasing each one with a wave of his hand, a grimace of self-disgust. Demonstrating the physical exertion of real thought. Hours of this. . . performance. Finally sinking into a chair exhausted, his hair matted with perspiration. But always, I say now here as a confession, always with no purpose but to make things as simple as the world is in its hereness and nowness, baring everything as far as possible to its simple naked given. The world as. . . everything that is so, everything that is the case. So I did that hard work, and it proved infernally difficult. So difficult as to drive me to serious considerations of suicide. But when once achieved, all the difficulty is over, is that not so? It should have been easy now for everyone, and yet. . . I was not understood! I numbered my thoughts and put them in developmental order, as a student makes outlines of his reading. The easier to understand. I did all that could be done. But the simpler I made the practice of philosophy, the more difficult it became for everyone else. Not just people, not just students, but my colleagues, my fellow philosophers! The very men who had taught me!
God knows, I did not look for gratitude. Only for someone in this world who would say to me, “Ludwig, you are not alone.” But all I heard from everyone was, Please explain this, say it so that I can understand it. You see? They didn’t realize that to explain it was to negate it. I had reached the point of apparentness which is inexplicability. The point of all my work is to find only what can be said. And there is not much of that! I wrote to them, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” I said to them, If you would understand what I have written, read what I have not written and perhaps then you will understand. But this only puzzled them further.
Migod. I would tell this or that young Englishman with whom I walked or went to the movies after an exhausting lecture: If you would live in the true spirit of philosophy, don’t be a philosopher. Well what about you, Professor? I have left philosophy before, I tell them, and I will leave it again before it kills me, it was a mistake for me to come back, I tell them. If you are a philosopher by training, abandon philosophy and work with your hands. Become a carpenter, a nurse, a hod carrier. Something simple and real in the real world, something that corresponds with the world as it is. If you are in love, I would tell this or that young Englishman, and, let me say here and now, there were never such enchanting young men as the English turned out, their skin coloring, their reticence, their capacity for self-subjugation, my goodness, what an enticement they were, what a constant, even agonizing enticement. . . But if you are in love, I would say to them, the one or two who genuinely did love me, we must separate, because love can exist only in separation, only in denial of the flesh is the love affirmed for what it is or otherwise it cannot be trusted as unconditional. And if it is not unconditional it is not love. That is the truth I practice when I have the strength to do so. All of civilization as it has developed is designed to sully our souls. All the values of society must be forsworn if you would live as a man. Wealth is a deadly condition. If you are wealthy, as I was—I was immensely rich—impoverish yourself, as I did. If you love, cherish your love by abandoning your lover, as I did. If you are an academic philosopher, leave it and live humbly, as I did. And if your obsession is language and thought, go to the movies as I do and let yourself bathe in the images, the lights and shadows, the places and sweet faces, let the pictograms flicker over you that are the opposite of language, that do not have to create analogs of the world in grammatical propositions, as language does, that do not have to map the world with sentences but are already there, simply and without effort, in it and of it.
I love movies. They make themselves out of the actual materials of the world, you see. They lift the world’s appearances from the world as you would lift with your knife tip the iridescent blue-green coloration of the rainbow from the rainbow trout. . . leaving the substance of the world unchanged but rendered in exact homologous equivalence of itself. With movies you sit in darkness and learn that the world is everything that is the case. And that when they have reached their conclusion and the lights go on, what has not been shown cannot be spoken of, that there is a silence beyond them appropriate to the ineffability of that which cannot be expressed. And at this point you leave. From the darkness of the theater to the darkness.
But where was I?
—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards
DANCING IN THE DARK
(applause)
till the tune ends,
We’re dancing in the dark
And it soon ends;
We’re waltzing in a wonder
of why we’re here.
Time hurries by, we’re here and gone.
Looking for the light
of a new love
to brighten up the night,
I have you, love,
And we can face the music together
Dancing in the dark.
I mean, no candlelight, no firelight, not one lumen,
This is definitely the dark we’re dancing in,
As we ponder the meaning of our existence here—
Let me ask the equally imponderable question: Where is here?. . .
Of course we are lucky to have something under our feet on which to do our dancing.
That’s something.
On the other hand who are the we I speak of?
I’m holding on to you and you dance well enough, but I can’t see you and you haven’t said a word.
Are you in fact there?
If you are, you know as well as I do life is short and as time goes by we don’t go with it.
We’re both looking for enlightenment, am I right?
Like a love at first sight?
And when this luminous love arrives bringing us out
of the darkness of where and who we are
We’ll know what we’re about, we’ll see everything clear
including the person we’re dancing with,
yes, babe, the person we’re dancing in the light with, though obviously it won’t be either of us.
Until that happens, if it ever does,
I am h
All in all, this not very promising situation suggests
That, arm in arm, we’ll be left facing the music
Though how music can be faced when it’s all around you in the darkness
is anyone’s guess. . .
(applause)
I can’t let that go unanswered—
My colleague here is so into his own mind
No wonder he’s in the dark
No wonder he doesn’t see anything.
Lighting up the twists and turns of his brain
With all the voltage of a neutrino
He’s dancing with his shadow
Dancing in the darkness of his mind.
I don’t see a woman there
How could any woman dance to that beat?
I know what a woman can dance to
I know what it feels like to hold a dancing woman
Alive in her exertion, lithe, powerful in her being though she is narrow in the shoulders slender-waisted and light on her feet
I smell the sweet cleanness of her hair
She rests her temple on my cheek.
I feel the pulse in her wrist,
I feel her trust as she follows my lead and leans the small of her back into my hand
We sway and pirouette and match our steps our intimacy hums like another voice of the music
it flows through us as an uncanny harmony
And that is all the conversation I need from her
Dancing in the dark with her.
This is a blessed darkness we’re dancing in
lending to us for the time of our dance
our centrality in the world, the magnitude of our romance
For as long as our song goes on.
(applause)
Whereas I see this as a scene in a nightclub.
Tables lit with small shaded lamps surround the dance floor,
A dim white gleam on each tablecloth
A wirey glow on the rims of the wine glasses. . .
This is a nightclub I have never had the good fortune to play in,
Terraced, with curved walls and lots of space between tables,
A supper club, in fact, where darkness is visible
And the sidemen sitting up on the stand
Are led by a non-playing leader with a baton
As he smiles with his back to them and looks benevolently upon the two dancers.
They’re all smiling on the bandstand, they’re getting paid
This is a Hollywood nightclub, you see
All fake, a soundstage for a movie nightclub
And the two dancers are the stars of the movie
And this is the scene where they discover they love each other
They dance staring into each other’s eyes
While I and the rest of the band play on for them with big stupid smiles on our faces
Because the gig pays.
And the extras sitting at the nightclub tables in their black ties and evening gowns
They’re getting paid too.
We’re all extras in the lives of these star dancers
Dancing in the carefully lit dark with the dim spotlight on each tablecloth and the wirey glow on the rims of the wine glasses.
Now here’s why we’re here:
It happens to be a really bad time outside the nightclub,
The country is broke, no one is working,
Men stand in the cold streets on the breadlines
Duststorms sand the paint off jalopies abandoned in the desert
Worms eat into the cheekbones of the hungry children in the mountains
There are no brothers who can spare a dime
Certainly not in the street in front of the club where the cops slap their billies in their palms
and keep the beggars at bay
behind the police stanchions.
The beggars are waiting for the two stars to finish their dark dancing
And take their fur wrap and lambswool coat from the hatcheck
And come out to the street to hail a taxi
And toss a few dimes their way.
But this won’t happen. The two star dancers will go on dancing
He in his black clawtail coat and slicked-down hair
She in her silver sequined gown with her clenching ass-halves clearly delineated.
These dancers of the silver screen
waltzing round and around
pretending their song will soon be over
are in fact the appointed collectors of the dimes.
Prying our hands open, uncovering our thin ten-cent hoard
They are hauling in the precious dimes of
The beggars in the street, the extras in the scene
We beggars and extras come to sit in the dark, on one side of the dance or another
So that the dancers may lighten all our nights until our time ends,
And we’re gone.
(smattering of applause)
Our life in the dark
Is short as a song
A chorus or two
Our time is gone
You and your lover’s
Waltz is over.
Darkness has won.
The music goes on
Your dance is done
The music goes on.
(applause)
—I mean, no candlelight, no firelight, not one lumen,
—This is an enlightened darkness we’re dancing in
—With the wirey glow on the rims of the wine glasses.
—The dance is our life. We are given the dark to dance our life in. . .
Dancing in the dark
till the tune ends,
We’re dancing in the dark
And it soon ends. . .
(acclamation)
—Pem’s bishop not as I imagined. A small man, almost tiny, fragile-looking, with prematurely white hair. Not a bad sort, generous enough with his time, direct, clerically dogged. Made a point of telling me he was wary of writers, reporters especially. I told him I was too. I assured him that while I was undeniably a writer, I had never sunk as low as reporting. “I’m relieved to hear that. Reporters look for conflict, from wars to divorces, they home in on internecine struggle, the bloodier the better. And where there is empathy, it will be portrayed as its opposite.. . . Father Pemberton, however embattled he may feel, is the object only of our deep concern and collegial regard. You should know that. It is no small matter what he is going through, and his suffering is mournfully acknowledged in my prayers. On the other hand I have to say it is largely self-inflicted. I love him as a dear friend, we were at Yale at the same time, but—and I have said this to his face—he has never quite shaken the sixties. His absolutism is so clearly of the generation that came of age then. I’m a few years older and managed not to contract that. . . habit of militancy. But Pem leapt to the barricades and there he has remained. The issues have changed, but the inflexibility, the all-or-nothing nature of what he wants, what he demands? That hasn’t changed.”
The bishop smiled. “There is something in the father that is downright evangelical, don’t you think? God’s little joke.”
A woman had entered with a tea service and set it out on the bishop’s desk. Some moments passed while he fussed with the teapot.
“Where is Pem now, by the way, do you happen to know why he doesn’t return phone calls?”
“He’s gone to Europe.”
“Ah-ha: I’m glad to hear that. A change of scenery.”
“Actually, I think he’s trying to track down a Jewish ghetto archive hidden during the war.”
“I see. Will you join me? There’s lemon here, or milk and sugar.”
“Thank you, this is fine.”
“Although on reflection,” he said, “it doesn’t surprise me that Pem would find something like that to do, given his obsession with the Holocaust. He is critical of postwar Christian theology. Dismissive, in
“No, it’s fine. Really.”
“Tom Pemberton may speak of the Holocaust, but it’s Vietnam that’s in his soul. You know who his father was, of course.”
“Also a member of the clergy. . .”
“You might say. R. R. John Pemberton, Suffragan Bishop of Virginia. Very High Church, a stern guardian of the faith. A priest who wanted no role on the national stage. But by way of self-sacrifice, he signed on to the heresy charges against another bishop of that day, James Pike, of California. And that is how he is remembered, of course. You’ll find Pike in the first paragraph of his obituary.”
“Pem has spoken of Bishop Pike.”
“He would.. . . You know, the See understands the value of secular therapies. I’ve urged Pem to avail himself of a psychologist. He may have one father too many.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Pike was a destructive influence. Standing in the pulpit, he cast doubt on Immaculate Conception, the Trinity. . . it was as if the wretched counterculture had seeped through church walls. But he impressed some seminarians. It’s not impossible that Pem has internalized them—his natural father, John, of the historic church, and the maverick adopted father, Jim Pike—and set them against each other. There is your story, there is the conflict if you’re looking for one. Or does it sound to you like cheap psychologizing?”
“Just a bit.”
“I assure you it’s not. You would think, given our creedal affront to his reason, Pem would have left the church by now. On the other hand, given his dissident nature, why did he come into it in the first place? And if it is not that. . . if that is not the struggle, we have to begin speaking of evil.”
The bishop rose and looked out of his bay window. “I don’t want that, I don’t want to admit I suspect Pem’s naïveté. Because he has got to be smarter than that, and so it would be a quite calculated naïveté. Wouldn’t he have to know that reason and faith, rather than being incompatible, are complementary? Reason no less than faith sanctifies the ethical life. Both would liberate man from himself. The same mind that conceives the mathematical theorem loves the order of a world under God. Reason and the imagination are parallel paths to God. They need not intersect. One can call on perspective to imagine them as merging in the human experience. . . if in the distance.