[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:18 PM 12/9/2004 -0600, John Wright wrote:

>If God is
>real, and those things said of Him are true, He will hear even the prayer 
>of an
>atheist, and may well answer. The answer may be terrifying beyond belief, 
>as it
>was in may case, and land you in the hospital, but it will be answer.

I am reminded of a passage in my novel TRANSMITTERS (1984); it incorporates 
some material by my pal Rory Barnes. Intellectual Ray's young wife Marjory, 
in 1983, dismally disputes politics with her conservative Catholic father:

============

Ray returns to Jesus. A gold sphere rests in one oozing hand. The other, 
visibly perforated though not yet flyblown, gestures with gloomy confidence 
to his heart, which floats a few inches in front of his robe, dripping 
blood, torn by a vicious plait of thorns. Dr Barney Clark, first Mormon 
with a plastic heart, has finally thrown in the towel and died, Ray 
recalls. An age of botched miracles. Ray wonders if the incipient volcano 
across from him suffers heart trouble. If so, Marjory is certainly doing 
her best to bring on an attack. The Man from Nazareth looks steadily down, 
serenely untroubled by his own cardiac condition.
[...]

Ray listens to his wife. At least she's given up farting in bed. It's all a 
matter of cycles. Holons.

There is a pattering of rain on the window and Ray turns his head to look 
at this unusual sight. All of Melbourne is cracked and parched, walls are 
fracturing as the earth slips, drying out; plaster falls in the night. And 
now the rains have returned. Locales burned to black ash a couple of 
Wednesdays ago have already been flooded by freak squalls further down the 
coast. God's providence.
[...]

The pattern in the heavy brown velvet curtains is starting to go where the 
silverfish have been at work. Jesus and His Mother and a mixed batch of 
saints and Popes gaze on from gilt frames, constant, compassionate, beyond 
blasphemy, shielded by glass.

Ray lets his thoughts slip away into contemplation of poor dead Jean-Paul 
Sartre's error in asserting an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf between the 
Pour-Soi and the En-Soi, Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself, volitional 
consciousness and inert matter. It is the assertion of this gap that caused 
Sartre to deny Darwinian evolution, a denial as absolute and ludicrous as 
any churchman's refusal of Galileo's telescope. But evolution is a reality; 
rationally it cannot be denied or ignored that some of the structural 
elements of consciousness are the creation of selection pressures in the 
brute universe. So human praxis is to some extent canalized by the 
pratico-inert aspect of our being, just as the movements of our limbs are 
constrained by the metrical laws that constitute gravity and inertia. But 
Sartre's intuition of freedom, Ray thinks, that remains largely valid. The 
holonistic structure of consciousness generates an enormous optional range 
of actualisation.

Yet the Pour-Soi has limits, and those can only be unearthed by positivist, 
reductionist science, Sartre's bane. Is the world a clock, after all? Out 
of the cradle endlessly ticking.

The only moving thing in the room is the ornate sweep hand. It presses on 
with its simple gyrations. There is no blood in the clock's veins to 
quicken or falter as the souls of the dead drown in the burning seas of 
hell. Ray considers the sweep hand skimming the gothic numerals, crossing 
the two key holes (one for the main spring, one for the chimes). The clock 
stands solid, a lighthouse in the high tide of anger swirling about it. 
Marjory is sunken and withdrawn in her corner of the sofa, eyes signaling 
her rage and contempt. Ray's body seems quite dead. None of the sensations 
of life ticking over on standby are available to inspection. He wishes he 
were dead. He lets his gaze drift upward again to Jesus, the Man sharing 
his torn-out wounded heart with the room, a perfect case of the triumph of 
the Pour-Soi over the En-Soi.

To his horror, Ray's eyes well with burning tears.

He is taken up and out of the room, into another place. Light pours into 
him. Cream, thick and sweet, into the cracked jug.

Why now? Oh shit. Not me. Aw fuck.

He chokes, coughs, stares at the painting, horrified, sick with belief. It 
is the flood after the drought, too much, too suddenly, smashing into the 
ashes and hurling them in a foaming muck to smear the broken charred stumps 
of incinerated trees, the crisp-skinned rotting corpses of animals too slow 
to escape the flames and now too dead to care about their drowning.

The old man's rage is love shouting at his deaf, stupid, brilliant daughter.

Ray goes out of the room, stepping on Doris Nourse's arthritic toes as he 
stumbles by. Father and daughter look at him in surprise. He rips down his 
jeans, strikes the cold rim of the lavatory bowl, no time to lower the 
seat, and voids his liquid bowels. It is the love and truth of God pithing 
him. He finds himself grinning. He wipes his stinging arse, using sheet 
after sheet of floral absorbent paper. The stomach cramps subside. All his 
bitter shame. He flushes the lavatory and washes his hands happily, trying 
to believe this dreadful, ill-timed ambush.

In the living room, he tells Doris of his attempt to cook one of her 
casserole recipes. Oven temperatures and pyrex, carrots and stewing steak. 
His own heart is pumping. Marjory leaves her redoubt on the sofa and sits 
on the arm of Ray's chair, putting her arm around his neck, her hand coming 
to rest against his collarbone, inside his shirt. She is trembling. Ray 
disengages himself, gives her hand a squeeze, goes to the kitchen on the 
pretext of checking a detail in Robert Carrier. The volcano follows him, 
passes him in the hall, heading for the workshop out the back. Ray returns, 
wondering what he is going to do with the rest of his life, and sits in an 
unoccupied chair, leaving his wife on the arm of the one he has vacated.

======================

Damien Broderick