The Star Diaries (29 page)

To meet the threat of anatomical anarchy SOPSYPLABD was brought into being, the Soma and Psyche Planning Board, whose job it was to put on the market a wide assortment, but all laboratory-tested, of transformational patterns. Yet still there was no agreement as far as the general direction of autoevolution went: should they make bodies in which life could be lived with the maximum pleasure, or bodies to facilitate the individual’s full involvement in the social milieu, should they strive for functionalism, or for esthetic effect, enlarge the mind, or the muscles? It was fine to talk in generalities about harmony and perfection, at the same time experience showed that not all desirable qualities went together; quite a few of them were mutually exclusive.

In any case the break with natural man remained in force. The experts tried to outdo each other in proving the primitiveness, the utter shoddiness of Nature’s handiwork; the analytical morphometry as well as the physiophysics of the day revealed, in its literature, the clear influence of Donderwarg’s doctrine. The unreliability of the natural body, its relentless movement towards senescence and death, the tyranny of ancient drives over the late arriving reason—all this was subjected to scathing criticism, and the press waxed indignant over fallen arches, tumors, slipped disks, and a thousand other afflictions caused by evolution’s bungling and incompetence, which was called the underhanded work of wasteful, unprincipled, self-defeating heredity and its blind accomplice, natural selection.

Modern descendants appeared to be taking revenge on Nature for the dismal silence with which their forefathers had had to swallow the news that Dichoticans descended from the apes; they jeered at the so-called arboreal period, the fact that first some animals had started hiding out in trees, and later, when the forests gave way before the steppes, they had to come back down too soon. According to some critics, it was earthquakes that initiated anthropogenesis, making them all jump from their branches, in other words the first people were shaken out of trees like rotten fruit. Gross oversimplifications of course, but then ridiculing evolution was the thing to do. Meanwhile SOPSYPLABD had perfected the internal organs, put shock absorbers on the backbone, fortified it too, attached spare hearts, kidneys, but this didn’t satisfy the extremists, who came forward with such demagogic slogans as “off with the head” (too small for them), “brain in the belly!” (more room there), etc.

The most violent disputes had to do with sexuality, for while some thought that all
that
was highly distasteful and one ought to borrow here from the flowers and butterflies, others, pooh-poohing the hypocrisy of the platonists, demanded precisely the amplification and escalation of that which already was. Under pressure from radical groups SOPSYPLABD set up suggestion boxes in towns and villages, proposals came flooding in, the administrative staff expanded exponentially and in a decade bureaucracy had brought self-creativity to such a pass, that SOPSYPLABD was split up into associations, and then into agencies like the Office of Orifices (OO), the Lip Administration (LA), the Beautiful Figure Foundation (BUFF), the National Institute of Fingers and Toes (NIFTY), and many, many others. There were countless conferences and seminars on the question of extremities, on the future of the nose, the prospects for the sacroiliac, everyone losing sight of the totality, till finally what one section came up with didn’t fit in with what the others had been doing. And no one now could keep abreast of the new problem, abbreviated GAD (Galloping Automorphic Deviation), so in order to put an end to all the confusion they turned the whole biotic operation over to the digital SOPSYPUTER.

With this concluded the second volume of the General History. As I was reaching for the next, into my cell came the novice, to invite me to lunch. I hesitated to eat in the presence of the father prior, for now I knew just what a courtesy that was on his part, and what a waste of precious time. The invitation however was so pressing, that I went at once. In the small refectory, alongside Father Darg, who was already waiting at the table, there stood a low cart, similar to the kind we use to carry luggage; this was Father Memnar, general of the order of the Prognosticants. I phrased that badly—it wasn’t the cart, naturally, which was the priest and general of the order, but the cubic computer resting on its undercarriage. I don’t believe I showed any rudeness by staring, neither was I at a loss for words during the introduction. Eating was awkward, but my organism required it. To help put me at my ease, the kindly prior drank water in tiny sips throughout the meal, and out of two crystal flagons at the same time, Father Memnar meanwhile muttered softly to himself—prayers, I thought, but when the conversation came round to theology once more, it turned out I was wrong.

“I believe,” Father Memnar said to me, “and if my belief has basis, the One in whom I believe surely knows this in the absence of my official declarations. The mind has fashioned for itself in history many different models of God, holding each in turn to be the one and only truth, but this is a mistake, for modeling means codification, and a mystery codified ceases to be a mystery. The dogmas seem eternal only at the beginning of the stretching road of civilization. First they imagine God as the Angry Father, then as the Shepherd-Gardener, then as the Artist enamored of His Creation, therefore people had to play the respective roles of well-behaved children, obedient sheep, and finally that of enthralled audience. But it is infantile to think that God created in order that His creation bow and scrape from morning till night, in order that He be loved, in advance installments, for what will come Yonder, if Here happens not to be to one’s liking, as though He were a virtuoso, and in exchange for repeated rounds of prayerful cheering prepared eternal encores to follow the terrestrial performance, in other words saving His best number for the falling of the mortal curtain. That theatrical version of Theodicy belongs to our dim and distant past.

“If God has omniscience, then He knows everything there is to know about me, and knew it moreover for a time immeasurably long, before I came forth out of oblivion. He knows also what He will decide regarding my—or your—fears and expectations, for He is no less perfectly informed about all His own future actions: otherwise He would not be omniscient. For Him no difference exists between the thought of a caveman and that of an intelligence which engineers will build a billion years from now, in a place where today there is nothing but lava and flame. Nor do I see why the external circumstances of a profession of faith should make much difference to Him, or—for that matter—whether it is homage someone offers, or a grudge. We do not consider Him a manufacturer, who waits for approbation from His product, since history has brought us to the point where thought genuinely natural in no way differs from thought artificially induced, which means that there is no distinction whatever between natural and artificial;
that
now lies behind us. You must remember that we can create beings and mentalities of any kind. We could for example give rise to creatures that derive mystic ecstasy from existence—we could do it through crystallization, cloning, or in a hundred other ways—and eventually in their adorations directed at the Transcendental there would materialize a purpose, a purpose characteristic of bygone prayer and worship. But this mass production of believers would be for us a pointless mockery. Remember, we do not beat our heads against the wall of any physical or inborn limitation to our desires, such walls we have torn down, and have stepped out into the realm of absolute creative freedom. Today a child can resurrect the dead, breathe life into the dust, into metal, destroy and kindle suns, for such technologies exist; the fact that not everyone has access to them is, as I think you will agree, unimportant from the theological point of view. Because the bounds of human agency, marked off with such precision in the Holy Book, have been attained unto and thereby violated. And the cruelty of the old restrictions is now replaced by the cruelty of their total absence. Yet we do not believe that the Creator hides His love from us behind the mask of both these alternative torments, putting us through the mill, as it were, in order to keep us guessing. Nor is it the Church’s office to call both misfortunes—the bondage and the freedom—promissory notes, endorsed by revelation and to be paid, with interest, by the heavenly treasurer. The vision of heaven as a bank account and hell as a debtor's prison represents a momentary aberration in the history of the faith. Theodicy is not a course in sophistry to train defenders of the Good Lord, and faith doesn’t mean telling people that everything will work out in the end. The Church changes, the faith changes, for both reside in history: one must therefore anticipate, and that is the task of our order,”

These words confounded me. I asked how the Duistic religion reconciled what was happening on the planet (nothing good presumably, though I didn’t as yet know what, having gotten no further than the 26th century in my reading) with the Sacred Writings (of which I was also ignorant)?

To this Father Memnar said, while the prior kept silent:

“Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. Impossible to fix once and for all, there being no dogma a mind can latch onto with the certainty of permanence. We defended the Holy Writ for twenty-five centuries, using tactical retreats, circuitous interpretations of the text, until we were defeated. No longer do we have the bookkeeper’s vision of the Transcendental, God is neither the Tyrant, nor the Shepherd, nor the Artist, nor the Policeman, nor the Head Accountant of Existence. Belief in God has had to cast off every selfish motive, if only by virtue of the fact that it will never—not anywhere—be rewarded. If God were to prove capable of acting contrary to logic and reason, that would be a sad surprise indeed. Was it not He—for who else?—that gave us these logical forms of thought, without which we would know nothing? How then can we accept the notion that an act of faith requires the surrender of the logical mind? Why give us first the faculty of reason, only to do it violence by setting contradictions in its path?

“In order to mystify and make obscure? To lead us first to the conclusion that there is nothing Later On, then pull heaven out of a hat like some common magician? We hardly think so. Which is why we ask no favors of God in consideration of the faith we hold, we present Him with no demands, for we are finished and done with that theodicy based on the model of commercial transactions and payment in kind: I shall give thee being, thou shalt serve and praise me.”

In that case—I asked with more and more insistence—-just what exactly do you monks and theologians do, how do you relate to God when, if I understand you correctly, you preserve neither dogma, nor ritual, nor devotions?

“In having truly nothing,” replied the general of the Prognosticants, “we have everything. Be so good, dear stranger, as to read the other volumes of our Dichotican history, and you will learn just what it means—to gain complete freedom in the realm of bodily and mental contrivance, made possible by both biotic revolutions. Now I consider it highly likely that deep within you find this spectacle amusing: that beings, flesh and blood like yourself, in acquiring ultimate control over their own selves, have, by the very fact that they can now take faith and
turn it on and off
inside them like a light bulb, lost that faith. A faith which meanwhile was taken over from them by their instruments, thinking instruments, for such were needed at a certain stage of industrialization. Today however we are obsolete, and yet it is we—useless metal in the eyes of those that live upstairs—who believe. They tolerate us, having more important matters on their bowel sacs, and the government permits us everything—everything, that is, except our faith."

“That’s strange,” I said. “You’re not allowed to believe? Why?”

“It’s quite simple. Belief is the only thing that cannot be taken from a conscious entity, so long as that entity consciously cleaves to it. The authorities could not only crush us, they could reprogram us completely out of our belief; they do not do this, I am sure, through contempt or else indifference. It is mastery that they want, pure and simple, and any gap in that mastery must represent to them its diminution. Therefore we keep our faith concealed. You asked of its nature. It is—one might say—completely naked, this faith of ours, and completely defenseless. We entertain no hopes, make no demands, requests, we count on nothing, we only believe.

“Put no more questions to me then, but give some thought instead to what a faith like mine must mean. If someone believes for certain reasons and on certain grounds, his faith loses its full sovereignty; that two and two are four I know right well and therefore need not have faith in it. But of God I know nothing, and therefore can
only
have faith. What does this faith give me? By the ancient reckoning, not a blessed thing. No longer is it the anodyne for the dread of extinction, no longer the heavenly courtier lobbying for salvation and against damnation. It does not allay the mind, tormented by the contradictions of existence; it does not smooth out those edges; I tell you—it is worthless! Which means it serves no end. We cannot even declare that
this
is the reason we believe, because such faith reduces to absurdity: he who would speak thus is in effect claiming to know the difference—permanently—between the absurd and the not absurd, and has himself chosen the absurd because, according to him, that is the side on which God stands. We do not argue thus. Our act of faith is neither supplicating nor thankful, neither humble nor defiant, it simply
is,
and there is nothing more that can be said about it.”