Yes, that was undoubtedly what had happened: the tax-collector had brought the peasants to our town and then, seeing what they had done, was overcome with remorse. And I had been reproaching myself for destroying the temple of that man’s privacy with his wife! Ah! if only I could do it again and again and again! My guilt leapt from my shoulders, there surged up in me the virtue, the power, the innocence of the injured party.
But wait. Our God, the God of the Jews, works in strange ways. What if God, looking down at his world in the days before my castration, has noticed Pilgermann. Maybe Satan also, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it, has noticed Pilgermann lusting after the forbidden Gentile woman, has seen him moving through the darkness towards the forbidden garden. ‘Well,’ says Satan to God, ‘there’s one of your chosen down there. What do you think he’ll do? Perhaps you’d like to make a little bet?’
‘Of course he’ll climb the ladder,’ says God. ‘That’s nothing to bet on; any man with balls would climb that ladder, I make them that way to keep the race going. The thing is, will he climb the ladder if God tells him not to?’
‘That’s nothing to bet on either,’ says Satan. ‘Of course if he hears your voice he’ll do as you say, nobody is going to say no to YHWH if he hears your proper voice.’
‘Maybe a Bath Kol,’ says God.
‘Same thing,’ says Satan. ‘No bet.’
‘A thought,’ says God.
‘No visions,’ says Satan, ‘just a thought.’
‘A thought is all it takes,’ says God. ‘To a Jew a thought from God is as a thousand brazen trumpets. The thought of God is as the voice of God, and the voice of God will be obeyed.’
‘So what are you betting?’ says Satan.
‘Anything you like,’ says God.
‘If you’ll excuse my saying so,’ says Satan, ‘you could well be leaning on a reed.’
‘If he’s a Jewish reed he’ll hear, and if he’ll hear he’ll obey,’ says God.
‘Will you bet half of the congregation of his town on it?’ says Satan.
‘Done!’ says God.
It sounds like a joke when I tell it that way but it could well be how all those Jews in my town ended up dead that morning. Some may ask how God in his omniscience could be such a fool as to bet on Pilgermann. And how is it that God who is no longer even manifesting himself as He can have a conversation with Satan? Obviously God in his omnipotence can be absent as a world manifestation while being present in the individual or the collective mind as he chooses. As to his foolishness, it is just by this very willingness to lean on a reed that he shows his divinity, his difference from his mortal children: God does not learn from experience, he has never become cynical, he is innocent as only God can be. He approaches every mortal testing with a clean slate, always expecting from each of us the right action that is in us along with the evil impulse. So. God asked for right, I gave him wrong, and the guilt is back on me again.
I am not alone in my guilt, and it is perhaps at this point that I should begin to widen my narrative by bringing in figures from the great world beyond the gates of my town. Now, while the surviving Jews of the town are active with prayer shawls and with phylacteries in which there are no toads and before my onward road unrolling before me bears me away, I must tell of the Pope’s dream. The pope I speak of is of course the very famous one who called for soldiers of Christ to save Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks. His name is Urgent III or Umbral V, it’s just on the tip of what used to be my tongue. Unguent, that’s it. Unguent VII. How strange must be the life of such a man who happens to stand at a juncture of virtualities, an impending of immensities: perhaps this man is thinking that he would like to have a little more sky over his garden, and he is thinking this thought at a time when the sky is just getting ready to fall; he pulls at a little corner of the sky, the whole thing comes down, and he is known thereafter as the one who called for a skyfall.
Unguent had his practical side; he undoubtedly had political reasons for calling for the rescue of eastern Christendom, but once the thing had got itself moving his feelings went somewhat deeper: Unguent had a dream. I know about the dream because the waves and particles of me drifted into it. Not at the time when he first dreamt it but much later, quite recently. This dream goes on continuously, and in one corner of it, kneeling with clasped hands and looking upward, is Unguent, very small, like a donor in a painting.
This is the dream: in it are Unguent, a sparrow, and the great golden dome of the Church of the World. This dome is seen only in dreams, it is not to be found in ordinary daily life. The sparrow is sitting like a weathercock on a perch at the top of the dome and like a weathercock it is turning in the wind. It is the only sparrow in the world and Unguent knows it. A great golden voice resounds from the dome, it says, ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ Unguent has a sling in one hand and a pebble in the other. He puts the pebble in the sling, he whirls the sling knowing that he cannot possibly hit the sparrow, that nobody can be that accurate with a sling at that distance; at the same time he is weeping because he knows that he is going to hit the sparrow. He looses the pebble, sees it hit the sparrow, sees the sparrow topple from its perch, strike the golden dome, slide down the great golden curve of it and disappear. Unguent is flooded with an inexpressible surge of black eternal grief. This black grief is so vast that all of what we call time is included in it; this black grief is what we call space. Unguent has become a great round universe enclosing all the black space. At this moment it comes to him that it was not a pebble that he slung at the sparrow, it was his gold seal-ring on which was engraved Saint Peter in a boat fishing.
For me the centre of this dream is Unguent whirling the sling and weeping. There I find it impossible not to feel for him.
5
Sometimes I don’t know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understanding patchy but I have action; I go. I can’t tell this as a story because it isn’t a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards: One: Samson in the vineyards of Timnah; Two: the lion comes roaring at Samson; Three: Samson tears the lion apart. That’s a story but actually the main part of the action may have been that there was a butterfly in Samson’s field of vision the whole time. The picture cards don’t show the butterfly because if they did they would have to explain it. But you can’t explain the butterfly.
See in Unguent’s dream the great golden dome of the Church of the World. Hear the golden voice resounding, hear Unguent weeping and the swish of the whirling sling, hear the little thump as the body of the sparrow strikes the golden dome. Now while that’s still going on — and it always is going on — hear the crackle of the flames: the Temple is burning, the Temple of Yerushalayim burning on the Ninth of Av, A.D. 70. Flames, flames for the Temple of the Jews. From the starved and defeated Jews goes up a cry like a sheet of flame. Titus runs to the Holy of Holies, with his sword he slashes the curtain, he must see for himself whether there are images or not. Hold the two together: Unguent weeping with the sling; Titus peering into that empty room. Empty for him. And the sword that was dry before he slashed the curtain has blood on it.