John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

(No answer. On the foreground of the tape there is a sound of regular, heavy breathing. Chief of Police Fred Clumly is asleep.)

Very well then, baffling. And yet from all indications they were a serious people. The greatest mercantile civilization of ancient times, a profound influence on Greek and medieval thought, creators of the most beautiful cities — perhaps the only truly beautiful cities — the world has ever seen. Yet a spiritual civilization as well. Only in the short-lived Middle Ages — speaking relatively — was religion more central to the whole life of a people. They were the founders of astrology, and, indirectly, of astronomy. They were the cornerstone of alchemy, the fathers of all modern science. What gifted madmen, then. Yet their gods were wood and stone. How can we explain it?

Mercantile. (Slyly:) An important detail. They were lovers of substance — fine cloth, gold, precious stones, the very land itself. The first great agriculturists, remember. While the Hebrews moved from place to place with their sheep, turning green meadows into enormous deserts, indifferent as any intellectual to earth, the Mesopotamian peoples studied it, toyed with it, experimented with it as elaborately as they experimented with, for instance, sex. — They were also the inventors of all the great perversions. No doubt one can explain it geographically — the Mesopotamian peoples had better land than the Hebrews — but that misses the point. Whichever came first, the chickens or the egg, the Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians loved substance in every form — they explored their flesh, tabulated the movements of the planets, studied the chemical components of matter, followed the seasons and made the finest calendars of the ancient world. Became the first great jewellers, the first great goldsmiths, weaponsmiths, architects, artists. Cities of hanging gardens and magnificent towers, devoid of slums — compare miserable Jerusalem or Rome or Athens, or London and Paris in the fourteenth century! — not because they had any love for the poor but because they had a love for things, brute matter — unsullied cities, aesthetic creations. And yet they were lovers of spirit too. Their alchemy and astrology was religious to the core, a celebration of the essential holiness of matter itself. They bought and sold by the horoscope, fanned according to the omens, catalogued the organs of living things for their simultaneous physical and spiritual meanings. My God! In a word, with everything they did they asserted a fundamental coexistence, without conflict, of body and spirit, both of which were of ultimate worth. And as for the connection between body and spirit, they ignored it. It was by its very essence mysterious. They cared only that the health of one depended upon the health of the other, God knew how. When their battles went badly, they chopped their battle-gods to bits and made themselves new gods. Well might the Children of Israel mock!

Duality. Listen. Suppose an ancient Mesopotamian came to us now, having read all our books but remembering his own culture. What would he say to the problems that enrage us?

Sex. Think only of the usual case, as though there were not a vast Kloot’s Congress of sexual miseries in the modern world — as though there actually were, these days, such a thing as the usual case. A man falls in love, marries, has children, and so progresses through troublesome ages to the troublesome age of thirty. In the hypothetical usual case he feels a certain trifling longing for experience with women he is not married to — because a wife is a great responsibility, and that very sense of liberation, escape from parents, norms, old chains, which made sex an adventure when he married his wife, has become for him now a jailhouse. You’ll surely understand, married as you are to a blind woman, a skinny stick of a creature. How exciting it must have been for you at first, copulating with a lovely freak, a violation of Nature! But violations, like other people, have their heartaches, desires, requirements, and, with love or without, one must satisfy. That’s the law of the Jews. One must make the life one has imposed upon a woman not unbearable. Did you notice, at thirty, that all the women in the world are beautiful, Clumly? There are statistics on such things. It is not an unusual predicament. The answer of the ancient Jews was simple: Having made a vow, a commitment, one must live by it. One might marry more than one — it was the usual practice of ancient civilizations — but one did not leave any of one’s wives forlorn. One studiously did one’s job: one acted as though the love, once real, was real. Not Babylon! Marriage was a union of estates. In other words, the marriage vow was practical, it had nothing to do with love. Both husband and wife might experiment, flirt and, for that matter, copulate as they pleased. The whole culture was behind it. “Satisfaction” was left to mysterious instinct, and any lawlessness whatever was allowable. The only law was that husband and wife, estate and estate, should remain everlastingly allied. And so, for thousands of years, the Babylonians survived. And felt no great guilt. A Jewish product, guilt. You will say it’s against man’s grain, because, like any honest Jew, you are a capitalist: man’s pride, confidence, is a function of his knowledge that this and this he possesses. But I say, with the Babylonian, Faddle! One must possess — so Sholokhov tells us, the greatest of all Russian novelists. But it is not important that he actually possess exactly what he possesses on paper and not something else. What man needs to possess is what he actually possesses, whatever the paper may say.

Put case:

If a Don Cossack had exclusive possession of his horse in the sense that he alone was responsible for its care and feeding, it would be irrelevant to him who happened to carry the ownership papers. Yes! Sufficient that his actual possession is secure and perpetual. So with women. What does it matter that the woman you love is another man’s wife? What matters, in our culture, is that she cannot commit herself utterly to you. If the culture understood that marriage was convenience, that a wife’s sole responsibility to her husband was to give him her money and lands, and that her emotions were her own, her lover a matter of her own satisfaction, there would be no trouble — no problem from without. It’s the error of the culture which destroys. I see you understand me, since I speak, as usual, so clearly.

So the Babylonians understood that a man must be physically and spiritually prosperous, and that the two had no necessary relationship. What has this to do with the gods? you say. I say this:

The Babylonian gods were, to ordinary perception, brute objects. Their physicality had no rational connection with their spirituality. Witness. For the ancient Jews, as for the Greeks, feeding the gods was a rational matter: it was the scent of the food which appealed to gods, they being less substantial than we are. So in Homer the emphasis on the smell of the offering. But in Mesopotamian culture, the smell was purged! The cella were fumigated, cleansed of all scent. In short, nothing ordinarily human was offered to the gods. It would be impolite, grotesque, and above all, irrelevant. What was offered was nothing more or less than an act, absolutely symbolic — if you wish. There was the world of matter and the world of spirit, and the connection between the two was totally mysterious, which is to say, holy. Were they wrong? Can you define the relationship between love and sex? (Pause.) Can you?

(Regular breathing on the tape.)

Or take politics. In politics the Babylonian would assert a close but mystical connection between rulers and the mumbling gods. He would make governing, laws, contracts, and the rest merely practical matters, but he would finally leave the welfare of the state to the ruler’s intuition — aided, of course, by the diviner’s reading of omens. I grant you, it’s obvious that the system didn’t work in ancient Mesopotamia — but compare the failure of Israel, where law was wholly rational, as no one has shown more clearly than Spinoza, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, or whatever it’s called. I forget, for certain reasons. Just the same, the principle that a ruler’s great freedom and great responsibility make possible great wisdom, an ability to act flexibly, moment by moment, not on a basis of hard and fast principles but on a basis of action and intuitive reaction — is worth thinking about. But I’m getting off the track. I was saying ( Pause.) I was saying … Ah! In ancient Mesopotamian politics, exactly as in ancient Mesopotamian religion, there’s a sharp distinction between the practical, that is, the physical, and the spiritual. The king rules, establishes simple laws and so on, but he judges by what we would call whim — though it isn’t whim, of course: it’s the whole complex of his experience and intuition as a man trained and culturally established as finally responsible. You see problems in that, I imagine.