John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

CLUMLY: In all this heat—

SUNLIGHT: You whine too much. A sign that your luck is bad. You won’t act with the universe, you’ll be acted upon by it, like a log in a buzzsaw.

CLUMLY: Your ideas about luck—

SUNLIGHT: I know. Difficult the first time through. But no time to explain. You have the tape. Study it. Is the machine all right? Are you getting all this?

CLUMLY: As far as I can tell—

SUNLIGHT: Listen! Was that a train whistle?

CLUMLY: I don’t know. I didn’t hear—

(The Sunlight Man laughs.)

SUNLIGHT: See how I’m sweating! My luck is bad too, as you see. What were we saying?

CLUMLY: The tape recorder?

SUNLIGHT: No, no. Christ! What help are you? If Socrates had had — But wait! Now I have it. Luck! Good luck is nothing but being in shape to act with the universe when the universe says, “Now!” What is personal responsibility, then? The Babylonian would say it consists, first, in stubbornly maintaining one’s freedom to act — in my case, evasion of the police, you see — and, second, in jumping when the Spirit says, “Jump!” You never know, of course, that the gods will speak. There’s an old Mesopotamian story, very famous — it’s one of the Naram-Sin legends; survives not only in texts from Nineveh and Harran but in Old Babylonian too. Story of a king who waited and waited for some word from the gods but got nothing, absolute silence, no matter what form of divination he tried. “Very well,” said the king. “Has a lion ever performed extispicy? Has a wolf ever asked advice from any interpreter of dreams? Like a robber, I shall proceed according to my will!” Ah, then they spoke! They smashed that poor devil like an ant! You see the point. You never know when the gods may speak, you never know what your luck is. You can only wait, and if they say act, act.

CLUMLY: But all this—

SUNLIGHT: Exactly! What has all this to do with the ancient Hebrews? A brilliant question! According to the Jews, a man is responsible for obeying laws, performing his duties. According to the Babylonians, the greatest responsibility is to remain absolutely free. Very well, let us think about that. Take sex.

CLUMLY: Excuse me. What time is that train due?

SUNLIGHT: Were you going somewhere?

CLUMLY: I was merely thinking—

SUNLIGHT: Take sex. In the sexual sphere, from the ancient Babylonian point of view, one must never marry, or else one must maintain one’s sexual independence in marriage. To the Jew, of course, that notion seems monstrous. But let us consider it. The Jewish point of view has not been an unmitigated boon, after all. You’ve heard about mad medieval nuns and monks turned rapist. You’ve heard about queens murdered one after another by husbands with a roving eye. And you know as well as I do the way we live now. The Playboy philosophy. The Ginsberg terror. Perhaps the Babylonians were right. Is their answer possible? Is the sexual revolution you read about — all those West Coast surfers and beatniks and Berkeley students, fornicating fourteen-year-olds in Los Angeles — or in Syracuse, if we dare tell the truth, and in Johnson’s Forks, Missouri, and Batavia, New York — is the sexual revolution a step in the right direction or madness?

It’s possible, I say — I’ve no time for details — but in our culture possible only for superior people. The woman’s problem is greater than the man’s in one respect: she carries the more-than-merely-cultural shame of menstruation. You don’t need that explained. Every animal has some measure of distaste for mess. It tells lions where one has been, if nothing else. For the male, on the other hand, the central problem is that he can’t invariably achieve an erection. When the honeymoon’s over, the first storm of infatuation, his potency depends heavily on his feeling of at least equality with his partner — among other things. If intercourse is a job, strictly a familial function, or a pitying gift or an embarrassment or a thing of no mystery, then sex is poisoned for the male. And both male and female must contend with the family instinct by which each seeks to entrap and control the other. You follow all this?

CLUMLY: I—

SUNLIGHT: What are the necessary rules, then? Simple, of course. First of all, both male and female must be practically, that is to say, functionally protected from their own weakness by the total culture — at least insofar as possible. It’s not enough that males and females understand each other’s problems. Through analysis say. Excessive rationality about sex leads to duty and guilt and to unintuitive sex. The proper place of intellect, then, is to establish the cultural norms — build the highway, so to speak, down which lovers can unthinkingly speed. Excuse my manner. I was a college professor once. I was saying. .

Yes. Now it’s back.

The “superior people” I mentioned, then, are not superior intellectually but superior by cultural gift: they are the accidental product of the right homes. And the sexual revolution is a step in the wrong direction — an anti-puritanism which has only disastrous results. For one thing, a loss of mystery, and heightened guilt of a new, strictly psychological kind. Sex is pure kick — a violent kick — at the age of fourteen. It points not home to itself but away to new kicks-LSD, murder, suicide. But it remains a possibility that the wrong step, the sexual revolution, might yet be transformed by accident of history to a mediate step toward a right step. The revolution leads away from ancient Israel. It does not lead home to Babylon, but it may make Babylon once again a live option.

There still remain problems, no one denies it. There’s mismatched desire, the familial instinct, the difficulties of the insecure, dominant male or female, so on. So it was in ancient Babylon. I could tell you horror stories. Sodom and Gomorrah, the lunacy of Belshazzar in the Jewish temples … No time. But granting the innate imperfection of the species, some cultural premises are better than others. O ponder the end of the man God chose as the last just man on earth — the wine-sot patriarch, fucking his daughters in his tent! Don’t be shocked. The story is religious. So this: Babylon is fallen, but so is Israel. Sexual independence remains a high value from which our culture — and every modern culture — seems blocked.

Take social and political implications. Here the Babylonian imperative that one remain free raised even more difficult problems, as you can see. Socially, one must at once maintain one’s ethnic identity and yet spurn any ethnic identification — white, black, Irish, Jewish, so forth. Compare the Babylonian and the Israelite ways of assimilating the foreign. The Babylonian asked nothing but token acceptance of ruler and gods. Israel demanded circumcision and total transformation. Neither worked, but for special reasons. Rome proved later the wisdom of the ancient Babylonian choice, though Babylon itself was overcome by the furious stubbornness of Jews not yet gone soft, true fire-eaters — if you’ll forgive it. As for Israel, the system failed because it had, built into it, a contradiction of the nature of man — an assertion that a man can renounce himself. We cannot “love one another,” to quote a philosopher, by renouncing self and becoming the other. The only way people can love one another is by simultaneously knowing themselves and coming to personal, intuitive knowledge of those who are different. That’s impossible now. The population’s too large, by now, and our heritage is against it. Armed truce — that is, democracy — becomes the only apparent hope — a false hope. Truce has always meant regrouping. Ask any general. And so ultimately social problems must be resolved by the annihilation of all minorities. How the annihilation is accomplished is an irrelevant detail, a matter of aesthetics. One answer, the Rightist answer, is “Kill them now.” Another is “Intermarry,” an answer which destroys the individual social unit as surely as State religion destroys the citizen.