John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Don’t shoot,” a timid voice said. It came from all around him.

Clumly smiled like a dead man, still training the flashlight beam on the limp white glove. He was morally certain that if he fired he would find there were no bullets in his gun. He was tempted, almost overpoweringly, to try it. Slowly, the coffin lid opened the rest of the way, and the Sunlight Man sat up. He was dressed as before, in the same motheaten black suit, but he had on a ludicrous derby now, and his face (horrible!) was painted white.

When he was upright, the Sunlight Man said, not moving his lips, as far as Clumly could see — perhaps because of the thick white paint on his skin— ”Now you can shoot.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clumly snarled. He lowered the gun and moved closer.

“No, do. I beg you.”

Before he’d quite thought about it — the prickle of heat running down his arms took the place of thought — Clumly obeyed. In the small, sealed room, the pistol was no louder than a capgun, or so Clumly imagined. The Sunlight Man took on a look of dead surprise, then slumped over the side of the casket and hung there, one arm dangling. Horrified, Clumly slipped the gun to its holster, leaped to the man, and caught at the white glove. It came off in his hand, dry cloth. The arm was straw. Clumly clutched his head between his hands and bent his knees, grinding his teeth. And now, behind him, the Sunlight Man said happily, “That was good, right? You were mystified. Admit it!” Clumly went rigid. At last he turned his head slowly and looked up between his fingers. The Sunlight Man sat upright in the coffin across the room from the first, dressed in the same black suit, the same derby, his face the same white mask. In his hand he had Clumly’s pistol. He blew across the mouth of the barrel. “Now,” he said. Then, after a moment: “You’re all right?”

Clumly dragged deeply for air. “Get on with it,” he whispered. “For God’s sake get on with it!”

The Sunlight Man heaved a sigh. “Ah well,” he said. He looked away and, after a moment, smiled. “You brought the tape recorder?”

Dutifully, Clumly drew it from his shirt.

SUNLIGHT: To begin with, don’t worry about the door. When the time comes, it will be opened, you will be delivered. Have faith. As for the fellow outside, he has orders to wait. And now to business. Let me get comfortable, though. There. What were we speaking of last time? You remember? You’ve studied the tape, I imagine?

CLUMLY: I’ve listened to it.

SUNLIGHT: I think we were speaking of the astrological houses.

CLUMLY: Mmm.

SUNLIGHT: And of freedom, a man’s responsibility to maintain his freedom at any cost. You’ve thought about all this?

CLUMLY (after a pause) : Some.

SUNLIGHT: Ah! And you’ve reached some conclusion?

CLUMLY: I think it’s nonsense.

SUNLIGHT: Ah ha! Expand!

CLUMLY: I’d rather not. I’d rather hear it to the end. That is, I’m interested to hear what you think you’ll … get out of this.

SUNLIGHT: Very good! Fine! In other words, to what extent is the action itself individual — a personal as well as a universal expression.

CLUMLY (without conviction) : That’s it.

SUNLIGHT: So we come to the subject of the Mesopotamian dead.

CLUMLY: Hah.

SUNLIGHT: Are you familiar with the epic of Gilgamesh? A splendid epic, but very obscure, difficult for people like us — undramatic, one thinks at first glance. A technique made up of careful segmentation, with elaborate echoing, repeating and counterpointing, with texture enriched still more by rare and artificial words. You understand me, I take it? A kind of poetry naturally suited to elaborate description and oration and hymnic address, symbolic dreams, and armings. Needless to say, its poetry not suited to dramatic actions which move the story forward. Lifeless, people call it. And they observe with sorrow that in Akkadian historical writing — prose — the battle of Sennacherib, for instance — there’s splendid brío, a clear delight in the joy and furor of fighting. “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait” was the rule for historians. But for poets hobbling on the clumsy crutches of their intricate technique, the rule was, “Make ’em snore.” Ah, pity! one might say, if one were sentimentally inclined. But the Akkadian artists are dead, praise God, and no grand vile hicks can poke their bellies with the pointed stick of brainless criticism! What was I saying?

CLUMLY: Actually—

SUNLIGHT: Yes of course! The Akkadian technique. They were concerned with larger elements of form. They played scene against scene, speech against speech. Lovely! It makes you want to march! This interests you?

CLUMLY: Not really.

SUNLIGHT: Very well, then. To the point.

Eleven of the twelve tablets tell of Gilgamesh’s life and adventures during his unsuccessful quest for immortality.

CLUMLY: Mmm.

SUNLIGHT: The poet sets up two parallel scenes — one at the beginning of the first tablet, the other at the end of the eleventh tablet — as a frame which symbolically establishes the futility of the quest. He focuses on an image of walls — the walls of the city Gilgamesh has built, Uruk. There are parallel lines, at the beginning and end — the poet’s description and comment in the introit that the walls will be the hero’s only immortality (but his name will cease to be connected with them) — and Gilgamesh’s own description, an echo. The poet goes farther. The same walls that are the hero’s only glory seal his doom. To get the walls built, Gilgamesh is forced to make all the inhabitants of his city work for him like slaves. The people cry out to the gods, the gods are enraged and resolve to destroy him. There you have the paradox. The rest of the epic elaborates it, describing the kinds of immortality Gilgamesh tries for and misses — eternal youth, lasting fame, and so on. The twelfth book tells of Gilgamesh point-lessly ruling the pointless dead. It’s introduced — not by accident — by the tale of the universal Flood, the final destruction from which no one escapes except temporarily. Enough. One can’t say everything.

In Babylon — I leap to essentials — personal immortality is a mad goal. Death is a reality. Any struggle whatever for personal fulfillment is wrong-headed. Mankind is walled in from the outset: the very walls man builds around his city to lock out his enemies are the walls around his tomb. The pursuit of Youth is ridiculous, the Babylonian says. Compare America: “Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation!” Doll-faced fifty-year-old boys and girls on bicycles-built-for-two smoking Salems (sign of Spring), heavy-headed with cosmetics, weak-witted from dieting. I speak of things general. Youth be damned! We die of it! The pursuit of fame, equally mad. Compare America. Every girl in gradeschool wants to be a movie star, a famous doctor, the inventor of radium, the lady riding the fat white horse in the Shriners’ Circus — and when she’s old, ah woe! a misery of failed ambitions: cooking dinner in her curlers for her 2.4 children and the sullen grouch in the crewcut watching “Ripcord.” Or if you’re good you can be John Kennedy, and Mexicans will buy your head in handsomely gilded plastic in the shops of Tijuana. Fame! The same for the pursuit of lineage — Gilgamesh died without issue, being a city man. And the same for the building of great palaces, or the writing of symphonies, the amassing of wealth. As for the pursuit of Heaven, the answer in the Gilgamesh is that if there’s an afterlife it’s sealed up, brothers, walled in, sisters, like life. And so, in answer to your question, one acts to maintain the freedom to act, but the ultimate act, the act which comes when the gods command it, is utterly impersonal, a movement of the universe, a stroke by, for, and of sole interest to — the gods.