(return home) The Electric Chair mixes memoir, fantasy, argument, and encounters with talking statues to get at the meaning of this anecdote about Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia: "It seems that when the electric chair first became famous as a machine for killing criminals there was no king on earth that did not want one. You see a knife is too slow for almost everyone. The most excited was the emperor of Ethiopia, and he sent for one right away. Sooner or later the chair arrived and the king discovered that it would not work in a country without electricity. That much is funny, but it is the next part that interests me. Menelik, the emperor, did not want to waste this expensive new chair, and so he made it into a throne." From The Electric Chair On trains and buses and during car trips Blackie and I used to argue about art and meaning like the yeshiva students who argue over religious law at double desks because two together make double the progress of two apart and may realize, moreover, by the process of their conflict, truths that neither could ever find alone. I think that to some degree I am able to duplicate this method now by myself by having become so contrary that I even contradict myself. I remember once I began a ninety-minute drive up to my grandmother's socialist summer cooperative by propounding to Blackie my theory that Judaism and Hinduism were the world's two great religions, having produced, in addition to themselves, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Sikhism, and being thereby responsible for a majority of human culture to date. "I guess I agree," Blackie said, "except for shamanism, animism, South Pacific and Polynesian religion, Zoroaster, Mani, Mithras, the Gnostics and mystery religions, native African religions, native American religions, and native Australian religions. Oh, and Shinto and religious Taoism and other various Chinese religions and classical Greece apart from the Mysteries, and ancient Egypt, and pre-Christian European paganism, and Celtic religion. Oh, and the Mithraic and Zoroastrian and Gnostic influences on Christianity, and the Zoroastrian influences on Judaism. Not to mention that your whole idea of one religion producing another like a baby presumes that these religions don't undergo internal changes over time, are monolithic, only influence one another in one direction, and are perfectly distinct from one another, all of which are patently wrong. And any other numinous things I'm forgetting. . . . Otherwise I agree." So I retracted my statement and started over. "What I meant to say," I said, being at the time much under the influence of Borges, Spinoza, and Advaita Vedanta, as I knew and understood them, "was that Judaism and Hinduism represent the two logically possible treatments of the monotheistic or monistic premise. Beginning from a premise of unity, you can emphasize either that unity in spite of or, so to speak, against the obvious multiplicity of the sensory world, or you can emphasize the infinity that is evidently a necessary aspect of that unity. The Jews do the former and the Hindus the latter, although of course each contains some elements of the other. The Jews with their single God, despite their many splinters, tend always towards an orthodox homogeny, or rather toward the idea of one: one Torah, one Talmud--even though there are two--one law, one temple--even though there were two--and so on, and the obsession common to all of them, the unyielding insistence that one's own closest kind is the most authentically Jewish. The Hindus, on the other hand, with their infinite Godhead, produce an almost infinite variety, and despite the thousands of pieces of culture and scripture and practice common to them all, it would be nearly impossible even to define what a Hindu is beyond saying that it has something to do with India, or did at one time. Practically every religion or philosophy that has ever existed in the world can find its mirror somewhere in India, and all their followers are Hindus, even the Buddhists--at least according to the Hindus; the sons of Israel, by contrast, who have invented so many of our religions and ideologies, perhaps in the attempt to answer the cosmogonic questions that for Jews are simply not answered, have done so largely outside the fold. Jewish men wear black boxes between their eyes; between their eyes, Hindus paint colored circles. Both religions predate the division of morality from ritual purity, which on the one hand may encourage xenophobia and fuzzy thinking, but on the other hand does train their adherents to accept that some things are arbitrary and not susceptible to reason." I went on and on with my correspondences until, when Blackie had nearly dozed off, I made my summation: "The fact is," I said, "only monism can encompass the universe; only monism is true." This roused Blackie, who responded, "Who says?" "It's the only thing that stands up logically," I said, "the only thing that is air tight." "The same is true of any closed system of paranoia," Blackie answered, "but even stipulating that that's true, who says the world has got to be logically air tight?" "Fair enough," I replied, "but since measurement and distinction are internal properties of the cosmos, viewed from without it must of necessity be single and one." "Fair enough," Blackie replied, "but what does that prove? A tautology is a tautology. It seems to me," he went on, "that, leaving aside your inherited cultural bias toward monotheism and the desire to reconcile that with your adolescent pantheism, with all due respect, there are three reasons for you to feel so committed to what you call the monistic idea: fear, greed, and idealism. The first is fear. You are small and afraid. Not you in particular, I mean, but you as a normal human being. Any human being in a boundless world who might die unexpectedly at any moment, or be put in prison on false charges for the rest of his life, or never find true love, or lose his family, or try as hard as he can to accomplish what he most desires and nevertheless fail, if he has any imagination at all, can in no way bear to face the state of things with an open mind. It is simply too frightening. So we all have our tricks. Don't get me wrong--I smoke a lot, and drink. But anyway, you begin with the question of what things mean, realize quickly that the question makes no sense, is itself meaningless, that all things are meaningless, and that we are as leaves on the face of a river, and then what's left? A renunciation of attachment to all things that a human being holds dear? Why not renounce life altogether? Or quiet acceptance of the caprice of fate? That's really hard. It's not what most religious people are doing, don't be fooled--they're mostly all surrendering themselves to something, even if that something is Nothing with a capital N. But if you can make it and really renounce, good for you; but most people don't want to anyway. They would rather live with all the risk and suffering. And you, as a thoughtful person but also a normal human being, find yourself lying between the majority of people, who simply ignore their nothingness, and the minority that actively embrace it. So there is nothing for you to do but cover the abyss with belief. And by choosing to believe, for example, that the totality of time is eternal and that therefore in a sense nothing that ever happens is lost, you can more or less accept and live with the fact that everything that ever happens to you and everything you value will indeed be, in terms of your own experience, lost forever. Inexorable time moves on, so it comforts you to know that it's an illusion. By choosing to believe that all things are connected and in some sense hang together, you can more or less accept and live with the fact that as far as you can tell, nothing at all is really connected, that not only human being and animals and objects and things but even all moments are disjointed fragments that may briefly collide but which will never sustain any enduring relation. You are alone, as everyone is alone, and so it comforts you to believe that no one is alone. By choosing to believe that all things constitute a single grand pattern, you can protect your mind from the infinite variation and incoherence of the world as you experience it, the incoherence that, but for this sturdy little shield, would destroy your mind entirely. And so on. In other words, your heart secretes belief like a shell around its soft pulpiness because otherwise it would be destroyed by its own natural environment, and nothing that lives truly wishes to die. I suppose on the other hand you could say that the nothingness your heart is protecting itself from is really only the complementary downward aspect of the monistic everythingness that it uses as protection, but I don't know, that might be another trick. Anyway, it's beside the point. What you believe may be true, but that doesn't mean that that's why you believe it. The second reason is that your heart is idealistic. The construction of the average human heart is such that it likes to have an ideal. It doesn't matter what ideal, it can be political, religious, artistic, esthetic, athletic, hedonic, alimentary, or anything, so long as it represents some kind of abstract perfect purity by which the heart can measure and order all things and which can be used as a principle on which to organize the body's actions. And you, my friend, as a sensitive person with strong feelings of all types, are very strongly idealistic, and so you create for yourself the greatest possible ideal, namely, the idea that all things, including all imaginations and ideals as well as all physical substances and events and languages and poetries and arts and wars and prisons and farms and factories and oceans and sufferings and crustaceans and stars and empty expanses and everything so on forever, constitute all together a single perfect eternal ideal. It couldn't be better. And the really beautiful thing," Blackie said, "if you don't mind my saying so, is that you manage to satisfy these two drives so expertly with a state of affairs that is really in essence a product of your libido. Your gut," Blackie said, "like everybody's gut, is, to put it simply, appetite, unlimited and undifferentiated. Unlimited meaning it wants everything; that is, it cannot be satisfied by anything less than the acquisition of everything that exists, the sum total of everything, the universe. Undifferentiated meaning that it wants all things in every way that it is possible to want: it wants to eat everything, it wants to own everything, it wants to fuck everything, it wants to know everything, and so on, and, most accurately, it wants to be everything, whether by taking all things into itself, or by making itself infinite. Now, the average gut spurs its person into acquisitive and imperial behavior in the world, and people work hard, buy objects, and conquer their neighbors. But the genius of your gut is that it knows that any gut that demeans itself to the level of the conscious mind and admits the existence of a world of things and actions has accepted that it will never be perfectly full, because a real human being can't eat the universe. I don't mean that you're without worldly ambition also, but for the moment that's beside the point. The point is that for your gut, winning is not enough; and everybody else losing is not enough; in the end, any competition at all is unacceptable, and anything at all that is not your gut is ipso facto in competition with it, and therefore even the mere existence of a passive object waiting only to be consumed or conquered by your gut is unacceptable to it. Even the conceivable possibility of the mere existence of a passive object waiting only to be consumed or conquered by the gut is unacceptable, because even imaginary implicit competition is still too much competition. And therefore this entire world of time, of cause and effect, of interrelation, of division, of distinction, of hierarchy, of dichotomy, of life, of death, of truth, of error, of love, and all the rest of it is unacceptable, and therefore your gut denies it. So far, so good; and so common, because this is the usual course of the human gut which, like the usual human being generally, refuses to face reality. But merely refusing to face reality implicitly concedes that it is reality, and this is where your gut is really special. Because instead of simply clinging to its denial, like everyone else, your gut, with one brilliant, perfect, invincible stroke achieves the following things: it makes itself infinite; it makes itself God; it excludes the possibility of any sort of being or consciousness apart from itself; it makes itself unoppressed by time and eternal; it satisfies the desires of the heart; it satisfies the desires of the mind and its intellectual pretensions in a way that is undisproveably consistent with the sensory evidence of the mind's perceptions; it even assuages the mind's suspicion of all this by suggesting that the world view it pushes up through the mind's swampy bottom and imposes on it is not a stratagem created in the belly but the eternal truth emanating from the universal godhead of which the mind is only a member; and it does all these things totally and universally and forever without the possibility of argument or challenge with a formula so simple and elegant that even a disinterested party might feel inclined to believe it. Your ambitious belly simply says, 'All things are one,' and everything else it desires falls into place like a domino. That, Heinrich, is why you believe in monism." "Thanks a lot, Blackenshine," I said, after we had arrived at my grandmother's house, and kissed her hello, and put on our bathing suits, and walked down to the lake, and the length of the dock, and jumped in. "Now I don't know what I'm swimming in." "None of what I said," said Blackie, as he climbed out of the water and into a yellow plastic kayak, "means that what you think is or isn't true. I just prefer whisky myself." There are something like two hundred types of iron manhole cover in the sidewalks of the City of New York. Most of them are round, some are square, and all are patterned, some in beautifully circling tesserae, some in stripes, some florally, some with clear sans serif letters naming the interior or foreign cities in which they were produced. Therefore I imagine sometimes that New York is not merely an international port, but an interplanetary oneÑthat if I stand on a particular manhole cover on 43rd Street and allow myself to be enclosed in the cylinder of blue light that will rise from it, I will be instantly transported to another city, this one on a planet in orbit around the star Alnilam in Orion's Belt, whereas another round iron platform on Water Street will send me to the moon. Perhaps some of them are for internal transportation, so that using one will send you into one of the massive water mains deep below Manhattan, and using another will simply relay you more quickly than the subway could to a third platform somewhere in the Bronx, which is next to a fourth that goes to Theta Draconis VII. Or then again maybe they connect through tunnels of memory to different points in one golden book or golden life. I stood on one large round cover and its 108 square tesserae and after a shimmering moment found myself, two years ago on my birthday, on 11th Street, on the sidewalk outside a famous Italian bakery, holding hands with Dana, who was taking me inside, to the back, to buy me a piece of cake and a cup of tea and quietly sing me "Happy Birthday," because I had made no plans for a party and she insisted that we celebrate. After I finished the cake we walked out again and I stepped on another manhole cover and found myself on 43rd Street next to my father last week, wearing a suit and tie, about to go into his club and have crab cakes for lunch. After that another manhole cover sent me onto Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, where I took a lovely summer stroll in the late morning just under two years ago after spending the night at Alma's apartment, and stopped at a Polish doughnut shop with a diner counter to have what they called a "sweet twist" and coffee in a paper cup, and continued on and turned down Bedford Avenue past the park and under its tall plane trees. Just at the mouth of the subway station I stepped on another manhole cover and was engulfed in green light and then I was on the grounds of the Confucian College in Beijing, standing before a large square wooden building that serves as a freestanding classroom, with beautiful red and yellow ornamented beams inside the high ceiling and windows opening onto pine trees. I found a small copper tag in my hand that said, "Electrum is also called green gold." But I only thought that I was standing there, because the scene flickered before my eyes, and then I realized that I was in fact a high school student on my way to play handball with Blackie on the Lower East Side. I crossed over a manhole cover and then I was a college senior on my way back home from having breakfast with Solomon at the diner in Chatham Square. I crossed over another and I was outside The Black Head on a bitter cold night under seven stars about to go in and join seven friends. Right beside this one there was another, that I stood on, and which sent me to the roof of the building where I grew up, on an autumn night an hour or two past sunset. I sat in my mother's garden with a mountainscape behind me of roofs bearing oaken water tanks, and the lit up Woolworth Building before me looking in its milky white and green light like it was made of water and sugar. I saw that I had a glass of whisky on the table, and the night was so clear that despite city light the sky was covered with stars. I am only one small man, and so I have to jump from place to place, but the places that I jump to, whether or not I can see it, are all connected in a single whole.