On the Authority of the Senses

UNCOMMON CONVERSATION ABOUT MAN, GOD AND

(pditor's note:

n the beginning of his new book On God, Mailer fleshes out his principal beliefs—his personal religion, if you will, formed by 50 years of observation of the human condition. After abandoning atheism, Mailer says, he recoenizcd that he did believe in God. "The

conviction grew that I had a right to believe in the God I could visualize: an imperfect, existential God doing the best

He (or She) could manage against all the odds of an existence that not even He, our Creator, entirely controlled. Note the possessive: our Creator. God, as I could visualize such a being, was an Artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy, an embattled moralist, a celestial general engaged in a celestial war, but never a divinity who was All-Good and Ail-Powerful." The excerpt that follows expands upon man's relationship to God, the devil and sensory perception.

MICHAEL LENNON: You've spoken or the authority of the senses many times, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas or quoting Hemingway. What exactly is this authority based on? What empowers it? If God is your answer, then to complicate the question, can't we say that evil in all cultures has almost always been associated with the flesh and the senses? NORMAN MAILER: My basic premise proposes that there's a different mixture of God and the Devil in every one of us. Some ot that variety cre­ates the shape ot our character. You'll hear one person say about another, "He's a good guy, he's stand-up, but he sure can be a son of a bitch." In ourselves and others, we find this constant interplay of good and bad.

If we are going to talk about these matters, I think we would do well to approach them with the confidence that humans have the right to explore any­thing and everything—at our spiritual peril, but we do have

the right. It seems to me—how to put it?—I see no reason tor a divinity to put everything into a Book and expect that to be our only guide. He gave us tree will. Or She gave us free will. Once again, let's leave gender out of it. If we were given tree will, then the Book is the first obstacle to it.

What's the role of the senses?

I would say the senses were given to us by God. If I'm ready to go in for speculations such as these, I would even go so tar as to say that mind may have been the contribution of the Devil—or, at least, more so than God. How can I justify such a remark? Animals seem to function extraordinarily well on their instincts and their senses. To a large degree, they have community— ants, bees, all the way up to primates. There is an extraordinary amount of communication we can witness in animals, and they are undeniably superior to us in one manner: They don't go around slaughtering one another in huge numbers. If, by every other mode ot moral judgment, we see ourselves as superior, still we know that animals left to themselves are not going to destroy the universe. But we could. So it may be a true question:

Did the Devil invent mind? Or is this still God's domain? Or, more likely, does the search for dominance there become the field of battle?

There is no question in my mind that the Devil did enter mind. And, not being the first Creator, did His best to invade the senses as well, to corrupt the senses. But the question is suf­ficiently complex to assume that the senses are neither wholly God given nor Devil ridden.

But the line you quoted, which has puzzled me for decades, is "Trust the authority of the senses."

St. Thomas Aquinas said that, and Hemingway, in his way: "If it feels good, it is good." I've never read Aquinas in depth, but I was taken with the notion that the most formal of the Catholic philosophers had presented this rule ot thumb. What I think it means—leave Aquinas out of it—is that we must trust the authority of the senses because that is the clos-

est contact we have to the Creator; however, it is a most treacher­ous undertaking. As anyone who's ever enjoyed a drink knows, the authority of the senses on a boozy spree is exceptional. You feel so much, see so much—and that's even more true on marijuana. You trust the authority ot the senses until, perhaps, they become so intense that God and the Devil seem to be there working with you full-time. We've all had the experience of an extraordinary trip on drink and/or pot, but what I know is that the end result is as often disaster as happiness. I won't pretend that every time you get drunk beyond measure nothing good will happen. It occurred to me at a certain point in my lite that I had never, up to that moment, gone to bed with a woman tor the first time without being drunk. Since some ot the most important experiences ot my lite occurred that way, 1 can hardly wish to argue that drink serves the Devil alone. Given the rigors of modern society, it's possible we'd never get anywhere without liquor or pot.

The other thing you said that gave me pause was how the Dei'il invades mind. On more than one occasion you have suggested that scientific thinking undercuts metaphoric, intuitive thinking,

and 1 wonder if that is what you see as the invasion of mind by the Devil.

It seems to me our minds work on two disparate systems. One is based on the senses. Metaphor, for example, is almost impossible without being somewhat attuned to nature, to its often subtle shifts , of mood. That depends so much on one's senses. But then there is another faculty of mind that can be as cold as the polar cap. Indeed, it is a readiness to repel the senses, distrust them, even calumniate them as powers of distortion. This readi­ness to free oneself from the senses may be exercised most by the Devil.

Almost everything I dislike in the mod­ern world is super-rational: the corpora­tion, the notion that we can improve upon nature, to tinker with it egregiously, dra­matically, extravagantly. Nuclear bombs, as one example, came out ot reason. It's not that scientists, filled with an acute sense of their own senses, brought their creative intimations to the atom bomb. On the contrary, it was an abstraction away from the senses, a pure (light of mind that came to the conclusion that it was possible to make the bomb—and then, that it had to be done, not only to defeat Japan but for the furtherance of science itself.

This may be related. I'd like to talk about Thomas's Gospel. In Elaine Pagels's book [Beyond Belief], Thomas's Gospel states that as human beings ire all have the obligation to "bring forth what is within." And if we do, it will save us. If you keep in u'hat is in, repress it, what­ever it is—it u'ill destroy you. I used to believe that entirely. I now think it to be generally true but risky. Because what does it mean to bring forth what is within? I work on the notion that there's godliness within us and diabolism as well. So to bring forth what is within you, it is necessary, very often, to send out the worst elements of yourself. Because if they stay within, they can poison you. That is much more complex than saying, "Get it out! Act it out. Be free, man! Liberate yourself." Because very often what comes out is so bad that it injures others, sometimes dread­fully. You could say that every crime of violence is a way of getting the ugliness in oneself out, acting it out, doing it. If, for example, the need to get falling-in-the-gutter drunk thereby intensifies the miser­ies of everyone in your family, it is doing nothing good tor others. Or excessive gam­bling. Or beating children. Or entering sexual relations with them. To the degree that certain ugly emotions are acted out, others are injured terribly by your freedom

DID THE

DEVIL INVENT

THE MIND?

to do so. I could argue that it is often a Devil's urge you are expressing.

You have to ask yourself at a given moment, "Who is speaking within me.'"

Hcwi' do you answer that?

Well, I can give you one story; it's fasci­nated me for years. At a certain time in my life, I was feeling rocky. My third wife had decided she didn't want to go on with our marriage at a time when I had heen hoping, "Maybe this time I can start to build a life." She was a very interesting woman but easily as difficult as myself. So when she broke it up, I didn't know where 1 was. And I remember one night, wan­dering around Brooklyn through some semi-slums—not the hard slums but some of the tougher neighborhoods a mile or two out from my house in Brooklyn—not even knowing what I was looking tor, but going out, drinking in a bar, sizing up the bar, going to another bar, looking...this is ironic, but in those days, you actually would go to a bar and look for a woman. I think you still can, but it's been so long now since I did it that I can no longer speak with authority. Anyway, I found no woman. I went into an all-night diner— because I realized I was hungry, not only drunk but hungry'—and ordered a dough­nut and coffee, finished it. Then a voice spoke to me. I think it's one of the very few times I felt God was speaking to me.

Now, of course, one can be dead wrong. I go back to Kierkegaard—-just when you think you're being saintly, you're being evil; when you think you're being evil, you might be fulfilling or abetting God's will at that point. In any event, this voice spoke to me and said, "Leave without paying."

It was a minor sum—25 cents tor cot-tee and a doughnut in those days. I was aghast because I'd been brought up prop­erly. One thing you didn't do was steal. And never from strangers! How awful! I said, "I can't do it." And the voice—it was most amused—said, "Go ahead and do it," quietly, firmly, laughing at me. So I got up, slipped out ot the restaurant and didn't pay the quarter. And I thought about this endlessly. If it was God...as I said, this was the closest I ever came to trusting the authority of my senses. My senses told me this was a divine voice, not a diabolical one. It seemed to me that I was so locked into petty injunctions on how to behave, that on the one hand I wanted to be a wild man, yet I couldn't even steal a cup of coffee. To this day, I think it was God's amusement to say, "You little prig. Just walk out of there. Don't pay for the coffee. They'll survive, and this'll be good for you."

Now, I've thought about this often because it's a perfect example of how diffi­cult it is for us to know at a given moment whether we're near to God or to Satan, which is why Fundamentalists can drive you up the wall—their sense of certainty is the most misleading element in their lives. It demands, intellectually speaking, spiritually speaking, that one must remain at a fixed level of mediocrity.

You know, this always stops me. I try to think how you would translate your metaphysics, your cosmology, into an ethical system. It's not just the Funda­mentalists. Most religious systems say, "Okay, we have the theology, now let us show you how that translates into ethics." But what you tell me over and over again is "We can't be sure." It would be very difficult to construct an ethical system by which to life one's life based on your scheme of beliefs. Have you thought of that? I accept your point. I do search tor an ethic I can believe in. And that is where I go back to trusting the authority ot my senses. They can also be—what's the word I'm looking for?—traduced. To the degree that the Devil may affect our senses, they can become a perfect place for Him to get to us. That would be the Devil's aim exactly—to (continued on page 168)

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enter our senses, make us feel we are having a godly emotion, when in fact we are being inspired by the Devil.

So I hope I never construct an ethic by offering a few bones. The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. If a good dog is upset, give it a treat.

Fundamentalism is comfortable. It's comfortable, but it is limiting. I keep going back to Kierkegaard, who, for my money, was probably the most profound Christian. He searched into the complex­ity of our relation not only to divinity but to diabolism as well. He knew that we must take nothing for granted in the moral firmament. We cannot kneel for­ever before the neon sign that purports to be God's mystery: "Don't ask, just obey!" Fundamentalists, beneath everything else, feel the same fears that existential thinkers suffer—that the whole thing

can come to an end. Fundamentalists look to alleviate that fear by way of what I would call their desperate belief that it's "God's will" and at the end they will be transported to Heaven. Well, once again, this supposes that God is All-Good and AU-Powerful and will carry the righteous right up there. Of course, that offers nothing to the idio­cies of human history, particularly that the more we develop as humans, the worse we are able to treat one another. Why? Because we now have the power to destroy one another at higher, more unfeeling levels. This can be epitomized again and again by repeating the famil­iar example I take from the concentra­tion camps—telling poor wretches that they're going to have a shower to get rid of lice, and instead they die with a curse in their hearts. That's more hideous, in a certain sense, than dropping a bomb on 100,000 people—on people you know

nothing about. And yet you have Funda­mentalists carrying on about abortion, speaking of it as thwarting God's will. What does it have to do with God's will if you kill 1,000 people in one minute with gas? Or destroy hundreds of thou­sands in an instant of atomic man-made lightning from the sky? What does that do to God's will?

We might assume that God, like us, is doing the best that can be done under the circumstances. God is our Cre­ator. God put us here. We are God's artistic vision, we are God's children, if you will, and it's not a good pareni who looks always to control the child. The mark of a good parent is that he or she can take joy in the moment when a developing child begins to outstrip the parent. God is immensely power­ful but is not All-Powerful. God is pow­erful enough to give us lightning and thunder and extraordinary sunsets, incredible moments where we appreci­ate God's sense of beauty. But if God is All-Powerful, then how can you begin to explain the monstrosities of modern history? There are theological argu­ments by great theologians that these horrors are to test us. But this reduces

our concept of God to a stage director who says, "Let the actors follow the script. Do not give them access to the playwright."

In one of our earlier conversations, you said humans zvere created by someone or some­thing not unlike ourselves. So we are then, in some way, created in the image of Cod? Yes. I believe that.

Doesn't that suggest we are more good than evil?

Whether it's 50-50, 60-40, 70-30, the odds change in each of us because there's an intense war that goes on for­ever, not only between God and the Devil but—I've said this before—God and the Devil as they war within us. We make our own bargains with Them. God and the Devil do not have the resources to be in complete control of us all the time. It isn't as if we walk through a nor­mal day, and there's God on one shoul­der and the Devil on the other—not at

all. They come to us when we attract their attention, because it affects Their interest as well as ours.

What I use as the notion behind these assumptions that divine energy is analogous to human energy—it is not inexhaustible. God and the Devil are each obliged to manage their own economies of energy, which is to say that they will give more attention to certain elements of human behavior than to others. Very often, they with­draw from certain people. Too much is being given, too little is coming back.

Given this supposition, I feel more ready to make an approach to the ques­tion of ethics. It must be obvious in all I've said so far that I not only am an existentialist but would go so far as to say that we do not know our nature. We only find out about ourselves as we proceed through life. And as we do, we open more questions.

Jean Malaquais once made a splendid

remark—at least for me—during the course of a lecture. He was a brilliant lecturer, and in the middle of a verbal flight—this was at the New School— some kid said bitterly, "You never give us answers. You only pose questions." And Jean stopped in the full flight of his rhet­oric and replied, "There are no answers. There are only questions."

The point is that the purpose of life may be to find higher and better ques­tions. Why? Because what I believe—this is wholly speculative but important to me—is that we are here as God's work, here to influence His future as well as ours. We are God's expression, and not all artworks are successful.

What I'm offering to people as an ethic is to have the honor to live with confusion. Live in the depths of confu­sion with the knowledge back of that, the certainty back of that—or the belief, the hope, the faith, whatever you wish to call it—that there is a purpose to it all, that it is not absurd, that we are all engaged in a vast cosmic war and God needs us. That doesn't mean we can help God by establishing a set of principles to live by. We can't. Why not? Because the principles vary. The crudest obstacle to creating one's own ethic is that no principle is incorrupt­ible. Indeed, to cleave to a principle is to corrupt oneself. To shift from one principle to another can, however, be promiscuous. Life is not simple. Ethics are almost incomprehensible, but they exist. There is a substratum of moder­ate, quiet, good feeling. Generally, if I'm doing things in such a way that the sum of all my actions at the moment seems to be feasible and responsible and decent, that certainly gives me a better feeling than if I am uneasy, dissatisfied with myself and not liking myself.

So it isn't so much that you have no ethical system but one that cannot be abstracted nor can'ed on tablets for people to carry around and consult whenever they have to make a decision. Life is always more complicated than any rule that can be laid down. What I'm asking for.... This is an odd analogy, but not entirely. There are cer­tain people who worship sex, good sex. I might be one of them. What I've noticed about good sex, when it's really good, is the extreme sensitivity with which you proceed. At a given moment, it's a creative dance. There is such a thing as a pure act of love when every moment is distinctive and lovely and fine. That does happen. For most people, it happens so rarely that they remember it—and then remember it and remember it. A sense of perfection does live in our concept of sex.

In the same way, sometimes, for short periods in our lives, I think there's an analogous sense of perfection to all sorts of basic emotions—in love, in nur­ture, in caring for people, in grieving, in mourning. It's very hard to mourn,

mourn openly and honestly. Mourning is an element in people's lives that can be duplicitous, even ugly. Take a wife who's been married to a man for 40 years—and in her mourning, what if she detects a secret spot of glee? "That self­ish bastard is finally gone." So mourning can be shocking for people because they discover sides of themselves they never knew existed—or the reverse.

/ remember something else you said about getting close to yourself: "If you dig deep enough into yourself, you're going to come out your asshole. [N.M. laughs]

In other words, yes. there are doors, and you must open many of those doors, and the ensuing doors within doors, but every once in a while you want to be careful about what you open. Well, of course you have to be care­ful about certain doors. Anyone who flings everything ajar at once would be blown away. A mighty change could rage through all the rooms in your psyche. One of the most jealously self-protective elements in human nature may be to protect oneself from one's own dark and barricaded corners.

So I don't think it's a real problem that we're going to open, by mistake, all the doors at once—we don't. We can't. What I meant by the closer you get to yourself, the closer you are to coming out of your own asshole has to do with

something I'd like to attach to this dis­cussion concerning the nature of def­ecation, shit and waste. It may be worth getting into. As a small premise, think of people who are terribly prudish about evacuation. They don't want to think about it, don't talk about it, it's beneath them, they hope it is terribly far away from them. I'd say, ethically speaking, that's not a comfortable way to be. Far better that when you're sitting on the throne—parenthetically, it's interest­ing that we have that metaphor, "the throne," precisely for the toilet—when you're sitting on the throne, you do well to be regal about it and enjoy the sniffs of your own waste. Smell your own shit and decide for yourself if you're a little more healthy or a little more unhealthy than you thought you were the last time you sat down. That's part of being close to yourself. You take this notion that what comes out of you may be unpleas­ant, but it is certainly real. It can be the nearest we come to a fact.

In your view, is there any merit or value in the holy books of the great religions, or do you think they should he seen as historical artifacts, quaint, useless curiosities? No, no.

What is their use, then? Well, if they're seen as general princi­ples rather than as absolute dicta, they can be of great use. The Ten Command-

merits—most of us do react within the framework of those 10 injunctions. The point is not to build up an inner sense of sell-righteousness—"I obey the Ten Commandments, and therefore I am nearer to God." No, they are crude guides. "Do not kill." Well, yes, do not kill. Does that mean you have to piss in your pants if you have a gun in your hand and you're face-to-face with Adolf Hitler in 1941? No, you kill him. At that point, I would not consider "do not kill" an absolute command.

So you're not interested in jettisoning the great holy books of the world: you just want to qualify them. Not qualify. I want us to cease looking upon them slavishly. Once one becomes a peon to any part of one's mind, one is then open to the dark side of the moon, which is mass destruction.

[I would like to see] more readi­ness for humans to accept the heroic demand that they stop leaning on God, stop relying on God and start realizing that God's needs could be greater than ours, God's woes more profound than our own. God's sense of failure may be so deep as to mock our sense of failure. God, I believe, is, at present, far from fulfilling His own vision. He is mired in our corporate promotions all over the globe, our superhighways, our plastic, our threats of nuclear war­fare, our heartless, arrogant ethnic wars, our terrorism, our spread of pol­lution all over His environment. How can God's sorrow not be immeasurably greater than ours?

Rely too much on God, and we are comparable to a tremendously selfish child who drives a parent into exhaus­tion, deadens the parent through end­less demands. "Save me! God. please, can I have that beautiful dress I want for the high school prom? Thank you, God, deliver it to me, God." [jxiuse] "If you don't, God, I'll be angry at you" is the underlying element in so many of the prayers. Or the abject beseech-ment—"God, have pity on me, I'm a poor worm.'

I think we become a hint more heroic if we recognize that we do have to stand on our own. So I can feel a certain respect for atheists. I have huge disagreements with them—the first might be the abso­lute refusal of a majority to consider the notion of karma for even a moment. Or any kind of Hereafter—their determined intensity that there will be nothing after life. This creates its own sort of trouble. It fortifies the liberal notions that we have to take care of people we know nothing about and enter strange coun­tries and provide them with democracy, whether they desire it or not. Needless to say, Christians have been doing the same for a long time.

If God is All-Powerful, then how can you begin to explain the mofistrosities of modern history?