Pilgermann (5 page)

A matter provocative of thought, and new approaches continually offer themselves. For example: God being omnipresent is therefore everywhere at once in what is called time; all slaughter of
X
is therefore in his awareness simultaneously with the birth of him whose death the slaughter avenges. Might it even be possible that God, in his Hebrew aspect writing from right to left, writes first the slaughter of
X
and later the crucifixion for which they are slaughtered? If we look at it in that way we might see the slaughter as cause and the crucifixion as effect: the sin of the slaughter being heavy on the sinners, there comes the redeemer to offer his
innocence for their guilt, the one for the many. As Pontius Pilate washes his hands
X
is heard to say (by an evangelist writing some four decades later), ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us’, quite accurately predicting that they,
X,
will be held accountable for the death of that one who gave his life in expiation of the sins committed and yet to be committed against them,
X.
The purist may argue that God, being everywhere in time at once, would not have written one thing ‘before’ and another ‘after’ but that argument is well answered when we point out that the Creator characteristically employs a sequential mode of presentation, even going so far as to work six days one after the other and rest on the seventh.

One seeks, as far as possible, reasonable explanations, but here, speaking as waves and particles freely ranging through what is called time, speaking as a witness to what has been done to six million or so
X
not so very far from here in what is called time, I must say, though lightning strike me as I speak, that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him even as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I’m being arrogant, and maybe that’s why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it’s that simple—God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and Pfft! there go a few hundred or a few million
X.
Ah! to be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.

I am the resurrection and the life,
saith the Lord …

So presumably there will always be action of one kind or another, some of us moving in flesh and blood, some of us in waves and particles.
I return now to my flesh-and-blood days. Being now strong enough to travel I prepare to go. I sell all my possessions except my books; my books I give away, I keep only my Holy Scriptures. How shall I dress for my pilgrimage? Not as a Jew, certainly. For the first time in my life I can travel incognito, nobody can prove that I’m a Jew. A wildness comes over me, a giddy sense of freedom. At the same time I think: What have I to live for? It’s as if I am at once walking on very thin ice and drowning in the black water beneath. The Bath Kol then speaks to me for the second time. The same words: ‘Thou pilgrim Jew!’ These words I accept as an answer. Ah! the scent of Sophia in that daughter of a voice!

I dress as did the tax-collector: I put on a long coarse woollen tunic, woollen hose, stout boots. I have an ash staff shod and tipped with iron; a dagger with a Damascus blade; a good thick woollen cloak with my spare underclothes and surgical instruments in a satchel slung on my back; in my scrip bread and cheese and apples; sausages too, I don’t intend to be a kosher pilgrim; fifty gold besants in my purse, three hundred more sewn into a special compartment in my satchel; the same amount in diamonds sewn into the hem of my cloak.

I have no debts to pay; I make my farewells. And Sophia? Our hello and our goodbye will be for all time together in that one time we have been together; such as I am I will not climb that ladder again; I will not intrude upon that altar where I cannot offer. The Shechinah was present in our holy sinning, I know that; nothing can be added to it, nothing can be taken from it. All the same, when I leave the town that night I take my way past the great dark house in the Keinjudenstrasse. I look up at that grouping of the lower stars of the Virgin and those three stars between the Virgin and the Lion, that gesture like a hand flung up: What! will you block the road for ever?

I move on.

So. Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights? It isn’t. The barking of a dog, the cry of an owl, the distant burning of the stars, these are of every night. The departure? Also every night. Every night the departure softly closes the door of the house behind it and puts its foot to the dark road; there is a continual walking into the dark on the road away. Other nights I have lain in my bed; tonight I hear my footsteps on the road, tonight I put my feet into my footsteps and I go.

Night, night, night. The owl is the Jew-bird, I have been told. Because we are called the children of darkness. Why children of darkness? Because we clung to the so-called night of our old belief, we turned away in A.D. 30 from the new dawn of Jesus Christ. And who should know better than I that A.D. 30 is, along with everything else, the present moment. It’s all here and now, you can choose whatever line you like to follow through the space that is called time. Virtualities and actualities both. Look, here’s a virtual time-line entangled with the others. What does it say on it? ROMANS. Very good, I’ll follow it a little way, see where it goes. It looks quite interesting, things are altogether turned round: Rome is governed by Jews, Rome is an outpost of the far-flung Jewish Empire.

Rome with a Jewish governor! Maybe it’s Jairus, the father of that Eleazar who on another time-line commanded the Sicarii against the Romans at Masada. But on this time-line Masada won’t be happening, and in A.D. 30 Jairus is Governor of Rome. So they bring before him this fellow Jesus, he’s a wandering preacher from Arezzo or some place up in the hills. He’s been
getting the people all stirred up with his teaching and his miracles, he’s been worrying senators and priests and officialdom in general, they don’t know what he might bring down on their heads and they think it would be much better for everybody if he could simply be got out of the way. Mind you, he’s no Jew, this Jesus; he’s an uncircumcised Italian, he’s one of theirs but they want no part of him, he’s too dangerous. When Jairus says to them, ‘What then may I do to Jesus called Christ?’ the assembled senators, officials, priests, and hangers-on all say, ‘Let him be crucified.’ Jairus is willing to let the Romans sort things out in their own way. He washes his hands before the crowd, he says, ‘Innocent am I from the blood of this man; ye will see to it.’ And the assembled Romans say, ‘On his own head let the blood of him be.’ I listen and I listen but no one says, ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us.’

The Jewish legionaries scourge this Italian Jesus and they nail him to a cross on the Capitoline Hill. After his death I mingle with the crowd, I listen to what they are saying.

‘Lousy Christ-killers!’ says the man next to me.

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Who?’ says the man. ‘Those murdering Jews! Who else?’

‘I thought perhaps you meant the Romans who told the Jews to do it,’ I say.

‘Never mind that,’ he says. ‘Who’s governing Rome? Who put Jesus on the cross, eh? Who drove in the nails? It was those lousy Christ-killers, it was those murdering Jews.’

I turn to others in the crowd. ‘Those lousy Jews!’ is what they all say. ‘Those Christ-killers!’

Here I leave the Italian Jesus; I don’t know whether or not he rose up and made further appearances.

Night, night, night. Perhaps the only realities are night and departure. Everything else is illusion. Staying anywhere in the light of day is illusion. If there were no Jews they would have to be invented.

Yes, I am a child of the night, a child of departures. The barking of dogs is my signpost, the voices of owls mark my road into the darkness. Inside my head I have stopped talking, I am quiet. I give myself to the old, old night that waits within me, the old, old night in the old, old wood. In this night the charcoal-burners
crouch listening by their hearths while the trees pray, the wind speaks, the leaves rustle like souls departing with the upward-flying sparks. Quiet, quiet, the mist is rising from the river, the bats are writing the names of darkness, the owl is teaching the mice: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

I listen for my Bath Kol but I hear only the thumping of my heart and the sound of my footfalls. Why am I on this road through the dark wood? I am afraid. What have I to sustain me? Jesus has appeared to me but what have I to do with Jesus? I think of the tax-collector, perhaps he too has passed through this wood wondering what would sustain him. ‘Thou Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol suddenly, whispers the Bath Kol in my ear in the dark wood. ‘My Jew!’ whispers the Bath Kol.

In fear I go forward. The quietness of the Bath Kol draws itself together in the dark, becomes a point of silence from which a hugeness grows. In the hugeness I perceive this wood, this rising ground to be the Mount of Venus between the opened thighs of the mother-space that is time. The wood is clamorous with the silence of birds and demons and great wordless mouths full of sharp teeth. When I close my eyes I see the colour of the dark: it is a strong purple-blue, very luminous and vibrating like a crystal. In those crystalline vibrations I seem to see a pale green phosphorescence in the shape of a man hanging head downward by one leg. He is hung by one ankle, his other leg is bent, the bent leg crossing the straight to make an upside-down figure four. His arms are bent to make a triangle on each side, his hands are behind him. He fades with the purple-blue and I hear the low voice of a bell that nods to the walking of an animal. ‘Thou also,’ says the rough and broken voice of the bell, so I know it to be the bell hung from the neck of Death’s pale horse. I see Death on his horse, all luminous bones that look as if they would clatter but they move in perfect silence. Death beckons and I follow through the dark wood in which he moves like a lantern.

There is a stench of rotting flesh. I am standing in front of a tree; it is an oak tree. In the crystalline vibrations of the purple-blue I see the shapes of oak leaves trembling and I see the man hanging by one leg. He is naked. He has no head, his head has
been cut off. Much of the flesh has been eaten off the bones by animals; what remains of the corpse is bloated and writhing with maggots. The swollen male member sticks out stiffly, uncircumcised and tumescent with rot. Death says to me in a low voice, ‘This is that man who saved your life when they cut off your manhood.’

I begin to cry with great wracking sobs that shake my whole body. In this stinking maggoty corpse I see a light like a candle in a tabernacle, within the stench I smell a sweetness. Inside the corpse I see Jesus Christ crucified, broken and twisted on his cross that is right-side up in the upside-down body. ‘No, no!’ I cry, ‘It mustn’t be like that! Stop it, thou Jew, stop being crucified! Come down off that cross!’ I claw at the rotting corpse, trying to pull the crucified Jesus out of the dead flesh so that I can get him off his cross. Jesus smiles and begins to fade. O God! what will there be now? Only the black spin of the universe, only eternal motion without face or voice when Jesus is gone. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Don’t go away!’

‘Hurry!’ whispers the Bath Kol, ‘Hurry to Jerusalem!’

Hearing that urgent whisper I become terribly, terribly afraid that I shall not be able to get to Jerusalem quickly enough, that no one will get to Jerusalem quickly enough to keep Christ from going away. How do I yearn for the haunting dread and joy of his voice in the echoing dark of the world inside me, the comfort and terror of his presence. How do I long for him the virtuality without limit, him the quickener, him the mystery. Remembering no prayer I howl in my fear and I begin to kick the maggoty corpse. ‘Jesus!’ I cry, ‘Come thou out of there! Thou Jew! Be with me!’ But there is only darkness and rottenness in the corpse, the light that was within it has gone and the sweetness. The corpse is too high for me to kick properly; kicking it I fall down. Lying there in the wet grass under the corpse I feel maggots under my fingers and among them a gold ring, I feel the goldenness of it in the darkness, it must have fallen from the headless man’s gullet when I kicked him.

It is of course the tax-collector’s wedding ring, the circlet of gold that proclaims his union with Sophia. There has been a day in the life of this headless carcass when it knelt beside that
splendid woman, exchanged vows with her, put a ring on her finger, received this ring on its own finger that is now bloated and glistening. I feel in this dead man’s headless memory the touch of her hand, the scent of her breath, the softness of her mouth in the marriage kiss. In the memory of this rotting stump of flesh I hear the rustling of silk that slides away to reveal the dazzle of her naked flesh, the imperious and delicate scroll of her law. This golden circlet has dropped with the maggots out of the dead gullet because the pilgrim tax-collector before his death has swallowed his wedding ring, has renewed his covenant with his wife before being murdered and robbed. What am I to do with this ring from the finger of this maggot feast that was the lawful husband of my wife of one night?

Here I must speak of a particular phenomenon and to do so I must refer again to Hieronymus Bosch, that marvel among painters who never fails to notice the butterfly in Samson’s field of vision. Bosch is above all the master of what is seen out of the corner of the mind, the essential reality behind the agreed-on appearance of things. Sometimes I manifest myself as an owl painted by Bosch and in this way I fly through the skies of his paintings and observe what is happening. My owl-by-Bosch manifestation is not a superficial one, it follows virtual lines back to his pencil and charcoal sketches and forward from underpainting to varnishing.