John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He took a breath and walked nearer, with exaggerated caution, to the preposterous place of meeting. It was a tent. It was square, with a pointed roof — an old tarpaulin which had been furnished with a wooden floor and had been painted white, as gleaming white as sugar. On the white there were painted symbols of glittering red, blue, and yellow, and purple. Over the door there was a picture of a lion’s head, vaguely Egyptian. Strangest of all — and most ridiculous — the tent was not on the ground. It hung suspended from the railroad trestle, directly in the path of any train that might come. The log-chain that held it up had been painted bright yellow.

Fifteen feet from the tent, Clumly stopped and stood rubbing his nose.

“Ridiculous,” he whispered. “What am I doing here? Ridiculous!”

Then he caught the smell. There was no question about it. Inside the tent he would find the Sunlight Man. The tent-flap opened and a dirty rope ladder dropped slowly down. Clumly studied it, studied the tent. For a long time nothing happened. At last, behind him, the Sunlight Man said, “Shall we go up?” Clumly whirled and reached for his revolver in a single motion, but the revolver was, naturally, gone. The Sunlight Man bowed. He had on the same drab black suit he’d had on at the church last night, but today he had added to his costume an enormous turban. Clumly’s gaze went to the clasp on the turban and remained there. The clasp was a police badge. He did not need to touch his shirt to know it was his own.

The Sunlight Man bowed again.

After a moment, heart quaking, Clumly moved, half-stumbling, toward the ladder. When he clambered inside — the tent both swinging and turning now — he found that whoever had thrown down the ladder was gone.

SUNLIGHT: You find our tent curious?

CLUMLY (coughing): The tent-flap … if you would … some air!

SUNLIGHT: Ah, yes. One forgets. It’s a bit of a trial to be cooped up this way with a man who carries my curse. Air then. Better.

CLUMLY: Thank you.

SUNLIGHT: Haven’t you wondered about that smell? Have you tried to identify it?

CLUMLY: At times. I’ve wondered about how it comes and goes. You take it off and put it on like a coat.

SUNLIGHT: That’s interesting, yes. Fascinating! But we must hurry along. You were asking about the tent.

CLUMLY: No, you were.

SUNLIGHT (speaking rapidly) : Have some manners, you old fool. Be civilized! Good manners are all that stand between you and Kingdom Come. Don’t forget it! We’re here in truce, not peace. Just once in the history of the world I want to see cop and robber understand who they are, what they’re doing it for, before they come out blasting. I want you to know my position, sir, so that if you kill me it’s not with that tiresome leer of self-righteousness. But I warn you well, I too can be driven to righteousness. Mock me, abandon the decent forms, and I’ll shoot you. I think I may be serious.

CLUMLY: I’ll be careful.

(The Sunlight Man laughs.)

CLUMLY: Are you all right?

SUNLIGHT: Well enough. I thank you for asking.

CLUMLY: No trouble. No trouble at all.

SUNLIGHT: You’re very kind.

CLUMLY: I try… (Pause.) This is a funny sort of tent.

SUNLIGHT: Bless you! You are kind! What drives a man like you to a life of decency? (He laughs again.)

CLUMLY: Well—

SUNLIGHT: Enough. Sh! The tent. We’re on the track — excuse the pun. Our time is limited. Precisely limited, as a matter of fact, because the afternoon freight … Are you getting all this? Does the tape recorder work inside your shirt? Have you listened over to what I said last night? Did you pick it up?

CLUMLY: It came out fine, yes.

SUNLIGHT: You make me nervous, keeping it inside your shirt. Get it out where it can work right. The microphone— (Sounds of the tape recorder being shifted; a sharp bumping noise from the microphone.) Good. There. You won’t run out of time and miss the end?

CLUMLY: No danger. You see, there are three separate—

SUNLIGHT: Enough, enough! Don’t tell me the details. You’ve no idea how sharply our time is limited. I wanted to tell you about the tent, explain all the symbols. No time for that now. On the wall there behind you, those are Babylonian figures for the twelve houses — astrological houses. I wanted to explain, but you got me off on … What was I saying?

CLUMLY: I got you off.

SUNLIGHT: Astrology. Yes. No doubt you laugh at astrology, like everybody now. The same as they laugh at religion. They do. Don’t fool yourself! The arrogance! If only we had more time! If only you hadn’t … (Calms himself.) All right. This much: if religion is scorned in America — and everywhere else in the modern world — it’s because nobody understands its terms any more, nobody can penetrate the distinction between religion and mere theology. So with astrology. People look at it now, with their incredible modern arrogance, and they ask precisely the wrong questions, look precisely in the wrong direction, and when astrology gives them no answers they scorn it, mock it for childish superstition, and, worst of all, foist it off on the stupidest people in the culture, the devout of the drugstores-old ladies, gamblers, uneducated halfwit housewives thirsting for adventure. Well they’re wrong, and if my lips shake as I say it, I apologize. I hate this modern slime, I make no bones about it! Centuries of labor by serious men, ah, brilliant men, shrugged off by a pimply, pasty-faced age which conceives itself—

CLUMLY: The wrong questions?

SUNLIGHT: Such questions as Does it work? yes. Such questions as How does it work? Modern. Interesting and valuable questions, perhaps, but irrelevant if your concern is with whether a thing makes sense. What did the ancient astrologers do? In other words what did they think their usefulness was? Did they predict? No! They tabulated and afterward by study of their tables they advised the king on what the gods seemed to be saying. There was no guarantee that what the gods seemed to be saying was true — no guarantee whatever of the prediction. They did not ask why albinos tended in those days — as they do today — to be born in certain months, or why Virgos (as we would say) are flighty. They were statisticians. They filled up enormous libraries with statistics on human character in relation to the seasons, and they discovered in their statistics profound patterns. They discovered, for instance, that axe murderers have, invariably, certain physical features in common — blue veins in the forehead, among other things — the very same discovery made in Germany thirty years ago from a wholly different direction, endocrinology. All right. They were students of fate, mind-readers of the gods. If they read dimly, they knew it; it was natural, after all, because the minds of men and the minds of gods have very little in common. In modern language, the order of the conscious human mind and the order of the universe are dissimilar, as far apart as the particles of an atom. Nevertheless, for students of human character there are no more valuable books on earth than the books of ancient Mesopotamia and India and Egypt. Fact! But enough! I’ve run on too long, our time is running out. Let this suffice: we are here to speak of houses, the twelve houses of the sun, and of how the world turns now, and of omen-watching, the art of divination.

CLUMLY: For my part—

SUNLIGHT: Let us make a distinction. Omen-watching, divination, has nothing whatever to do with magic. Divination is man’s attempt to find out what the universe is doing. Magic is man’s ridiculous attempt to make the gods behave as mortals. Divination asserts passivity, not for spiritual fulfillment, as in the Far East, but for practical and spiritual life. After divination one acts with the gods. You discover which way things are flowing, and you swim in the same direction. You allow yourself to be possessed. Soldiers understand it. The so-called heroes of our modern wars especially. A man runs up a hill with a machine-gun, gives up his will to live, his desire to escape: he has a sudden, overwhelming and mysterious sense that he has become the hill, the night sky, the pillbox he’s attacking. The machine-gun fires of its own volition — he ducks, spins, turns as the gods reach down to duck him, spin him, turn him. A fact of experience. A question for science, possibly, but not to the man with the machine-gun: for him it’s a thing done, sensual act: he’s one with God. Race-car drivers know. The mind grows large and irrational, one suddenly knows things impossible to know. In extreme cases — Don’t shut off your mind when I say this, sir. Resist. In extreme cases, a man can remember the future. We hate that. Naturally. We are embarrassed by the bearded professors who brood on the mysteries of parapsychology. But every scientist who’s studied the evidence has been forced to agree: it’s real. And every man who’s discovered and worked at his own psychic quirks knows certainly, beyond any question, that he does indeed know more than he can know. I could tell you experiences myself … But I’m off my schedule. See how my hand shakes! Mukil res lemutti, stay far from me! (He begins to speak more softly, more rapidly than ever.) I’m talking about luck. Do you believe in it, Clumly? Luck? They have words for it in Old Babylonian, Sumerian, the rest. Mysterious words for mysterious ideas. Istaru, the blueprint already complete for all Time and Space. And simtu, personal fate. No escaping it. No more hope for escape than you have, hanging in a tent with a madman in the path of a freight train, a madman holding the policeman’s gun, pointing it straight at the policeman’s forehead. There’s only luck, good luck or bad, the friendly or unfriendly spirit that stood at your side when your simtu was designed, and stands there yet, and changes nothing. Changes only the quality of the thing. You understand me?