Unapologetic Read online

  And here is a description by Marilynne Robinson, in a novel of 2008:

  Della’s father . . . told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing . . . Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe . . . It’s why I keep to myself. When I can.

  It doesn’t change much, chaos. I’m running a risk here, that you as you read this will fail to recognise a condition I’m putting a lot of explanatory stress on as a human universal, and I’m sure that there is a lot of variation between temperaments: but I don’t think there are many adults to whom this has never happened at all. If you don’t recognise it in the slightest, then I submit that either (a) you aren’t paying attention, or (b) you are very, very lucky.

  I want to give chaos its due here, unmodified, unconsoled, not yet smoothed into a new status quo; rough as it is the first night after you move out of the marital home. Because it is in that chaos, that true realisation of a true formlessness in yourself, that the need can begin which is one of the strong motives for belief, one of the basic emotions from which the rest unfolds. It’s only one of them. Certainly there are others, other strong needs that serve as starting-points: for comfort in sorrow, for company in isolation, for guidance in perplexity. They aren’t all negative, either. People can and do begin sometimes with a state of powerful happiness, one that blows in like weather and yet feels so substantial that they learn it can be leant on, depended on, built on. And I’ll grudgingly agree that now and then awe – all right, all right – need not be a total National Trust property, at which we only have visitors’ rights. Now and again, permanent things can result from being transfixed, struck into wonder by some powerful displacement of our ordinary awareness. But it’s the guilty chaos of HPtFtU that I’ll follow, since so much in Christian belief particularly follows from it.

  For what do we do with the knowledge that we’ve fucked up, that we no longer make sense to ourselves? Turn to face each other, for a start. A community of acknowledged fuck-ups ought at least in theory to be kinder to one another. And there are things we can use our imperfection for, once we admit it: structures that can be built from unreliable parts and yet be reliable themselves, like the constitutional order of the American republic, or the scientific method, or the internet. But there’s a limit to what we can do for each other, a limit to how much of each other’s HPtFtU we can ever manage to bear – even just to bear to hear about – while it often feels as if there’s no limit to how far or how long the ripples of our multitudinous fuck-ups can keep travelling, or how intricately they can go on colliding and encroaching and causing collateral damage in other lives. Think of the consequences of John Newton’s HPtFtU, still fresh and vigorous after two hundred years. In this case, and in plenty of others where the harm is ongoing, it wouldn’t even be right to ask for help with the aftermath of doing the harm. Should John Newton’s victims have been asked to make him feel better about what he’d done to them? I think not. We have to attend to justice as well as mercy, and we’re finite creatures, with limited powers to make good what’s been broken. With the best will in the world, we can’t always take the weight of other people’s bad stuff, we can’t often lean in and lift it off them. The crack in everything is here to stay.

  So one thing we do instead, when we’ve fucked up, when we no longer make sense to ourselves, is to turn towards the space where the possibility exists that there might be someone to hear us who is not one of the parties to our endless, million-sided, multigenerational suit against each other. To turn towards a space in which there is quite possibly no one – in which, we think as we find ourselves doing it, that there probably is no one.

  And we say: Hello? Hello? I don’t think I can stand this any more. I don’t think I can bear it. Not another night like last night. Not another morning like this morning. Hello? A little help in here, please?

  3

  Big Daddy

  And nothing happens. Almost always, nothing happens; nothing at all. A big fat zero. No answering voice speaks up in the echo chamber of your skull. The morning you couldn’t face comes anyway. Night falls, and the darkness of your guilt or your sorrow or your bereavement comes round again. If you happened to be crouched in a shell-crater on a battlefield when you made your experiment in prayer, on the no-atheists-in-foxholes principle, the bullets continue to zip towards you on trajectories that are perfectly unaltered. You can beat with your fists on it and the door stays locked, possibly because the thing you’re asking to open isn’t even a door. It’s one of the walls. It’s just one of the smooth, flat, hard, sintered surfaces of the state of things.

  Well, we’ve arrived at God. Or at God’s absence. I’ve made you wait. I started a step further back than you may have been expecting, because when we got to this point I wanted us to be arriving at Him as people do in experience: not as a philosophical proposition, an abstract possibility, but as the answer to a need, something we might yearn toward for reasons of intelligible guilt or sorrow, whether or not there’s anything there to satisfy the yearning. More Hebrew poetry: ‘Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God.’* The deer the soul’s being compared to, there, is being chased by someone. It’s being hunted. It’s hot, and sweaty, and desperate. It has been running for a long time. It wants a mouthful of cold water it can snatch up as it runs, to keep it going a little bit further. It is not looking for a world-view. It wants, it needs, it hopes, it longs.

  * Psalm 42.

  But what does it get in response? What do you get, when you ask? Nothing. No pannikin of cold water is brought to your thirsty lips. A lot of people conclude from this, not surprisingly, that they were foolish to ask at all. They recoil, feeling stupid. Feeling, despite themselves, a little rejected too. You ask for help and you get nothing: on a conscious level you may have decided that there was nobody there to help, but less consciously, since you did ask, it feels as if help was denied. Hence the angry edge that sometimes sharpens disbelief when it’s been renewed by one of these episodes of fruitless asking. In the words of Samuel Beckett, ‘He doesn’t exist, the bastard!’ The life of faith has just as many he-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard moments as the life of disbelief. Probably more of them, if anything, given that we believers tend to return to the subject more often, producing many more opportunities to be disappointed. This is because, for us too, nothing happens when we ask for help. The nothing that happens is universal, an experience shared by believers and unbelievers alike. It is true that we understand the nothing differently, but not because we start from a different experience of it.

  Instead it’s that from the same experience a different perception grows, slowly and intermittently and (from time to time) overwhelmingly. I’m going to have to generalise freely now from my own experience, because I’m dealing with strictly internal events, and I don’t have direct access to anyone else’s interior. I haven’t been anyone else; only myself. But I’d guess that for most of us who do end up believing, the moment when we asked and nothing happened changes in retrospect. It becomes, afterwards, part of the history of how help did after all arrive, though not in the way we were expecting it to. We look back on it and we find it altered. Its significance is different now. Literally its significance: its sign-age, the way that it points. It isn’t that the story has been rewritten, with a piece of imaginary cause and effect projected back into it from some happier future point, with unreliable memory erasing the disappointments of the past by inserting a phantom helper’s phantom action. That’s not the feeling. It remains perfectly clear that at the moment of asking nothing happened, nothing altered in the world, nothing started up. But we begin to recognise that the moment signifies anyway, because it was then, when we asked and because we asked, that we started, falteringly, tentatively, to be able to notice something that was happening already. Something that did not need to start, it having never stopped, never pa
used, never faltered. Something that did (we come to see) constitute an answer; something that had been going on all the time unremarked, so steady and continuous that we had never picked it out of the general background roar of the world. I mean the roar in our minds as well as the literal clash and grind and hum of things. We live in a noisy place, inside and out, and the noise we hear pours into the noise we make. It’s hard to listen, even when misery nudges you into trying.

  Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has littered the landscape with specialised buildings where attention comes easier. I walk in. I glance around. And I see the objects that different ages carried in here because they thought they were precious, tattered battle flags and stained glass, carved wood and memorials saying HE WAS A MAGISTRATE OF UNEQUALLED PROBITY: not in order to declare, those past people, that this was a place where only a precious and tasteful selection from human behaviour was welcome, but the opposite, to celebrate with the best things they had the way the place acknowledged absolutely all of human behaviour. The calm in here is not denial. It’s an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I sit down. I shut my eyes.

  Churches are vessels of hush, as well as everything else they are, and when I block out the distractions of vision, the silence is almost shockingly loud. It sings in my ears. Well, no; metaphors are inevitable here but we might as well try to use them accurately, and to prune out the implications we don’t want. The silence has no tune. It doesn’t sing. It hisses; it whines thinly at a high constant pitch, as if the world had a background note we don’t usually hear. It crackles like the empty grooves at the end of a vinyl record, when the song is over and all that’s left to hear is the null track of the medium itself. Which is welcome, because it’s the unending song of my self that I’ve come in here to get a break from. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out; noticing the action of my lungs swelling and compressing, swelling and compressing, much more than I usually do, and so far as I have to have something to concentrate on I concentrate on that, just that, the in and out of my breath, trying to think of nothing else but the air moving. I do my best to step away from my thoughts when they come, and they do come, I’m not trying to clamp them down. Every so often I find I’ve strayed off from the breathing along some loop of associations or memories, and that’s fine. When I find that that’s what I’m doing, I step away from the thought-loop, I leave it be, back to the simple process of breath. I know my whole lumpy, complicated, half-known self is still there, but I’m not trying to put it in order; I’m not trying to arrange it flatteringly, so that it tells some creditable story of me, or – just as bad, just as effortful – unflatteringly, so that it neatly accuses me. I’m deliberately abandoning the enterprise of making sense of myself. I breathe in, I breathe out. The silence hisses, neither expectantly nor unexpectantly.

  And in it I start to pick out more and more noises that were too quiet for me to have attended to them before. I become intensely aware of small things happening in the space around me that I can’t see. I hear a bluebottle blundering by somewhere above. I hear the door sigh open, sigh closed. I hear the creak of wood as someone else settles into a pew. I hear the intermittent murmur of a conversation going on in the vestry. I hear the sailcloth flap of a single piece of paper being turned over up in the organ loft. I start to hear things outside the church too. A passing plane. A bird in a tree. A car’s ignition coughing awake. The patter-tap, patter-tap of a leafy branch the breeze is brushing against one of the windows. Two street drinkers arguing. Far-off motorway roar I must hear all the time and cancel from consciousness usually. Layer upon layer of near sounds and far sounds, stopping and starting according to no score, none of them predictable by me, none of them under my control. The audio assemblage of the world getting along perfectly well without me. The world sounding the same as it did before I was born, the same as it will do after I’m dead.

  I expand. Not seeing, I feel the close grain of the hardwood I’m sitting on, the gritty solidity of the stone pillar my arm touches. I feel their real weight, I sense the labour that made them, I know their separateness from me. My mind moves outwards, to the real substances of things that are not-me beyond the church walls. I feel the churchyard grass, repeating millionfold the soft green spire of each blade, the tarmac of the road compressed like cold varnished chewing gum, the scratchy roughness of each red suburban brick. Out and out, the streets of the town unreeling faster and faster into the particular pattern of fields beyond; the viridian tie-dye of those fields seen from above, and receding, higher and higher; the island, seen whole in mottled greens and browns; the limb of the planet, shining in electric blue; the ash-coloured moon; the boiling chemical clouds of the gas giants; the shining pinprick of our star; the radiant drift of the Western Spiral Arm; the plughole spin of one galaxy; the flying splotches of others, uncountably many, flinging out into a darkness which is itself expanding; and all, all of it, as locally real and solid and intricate as the time-darkened, bottom-polished oak plank beneath me. Breathe in, breathe out. Yes, time. Expand again, not from this particular place but this particular moment, this perch on one real instant in the flood of real instants. Breathe in, breathe out. Day opens the daisies, sucks carbon into every leaf, toasts the land, raises moisture as clouds. Night closes flowers, throws the protein switch for rest in mobile creatures, condenses dew, pulls the winds that day has pushed. Breathe. Dark cycles into light, light cycles into dark again as the earth turns, and this cycle measured in hours spins inside others timed in weeks and years and aeons, building a nested spirograph of change of which the world is made as truly as it’s made of matter organised in a sphere. The fields flash green-yellow-brown with the seasons. The forests ebb and flow. The hills themselves melt like wax. The ice advances and retreats, ocean covers this spot with sunlit shallows or anoxic black depths. The carbon fixed by a trillion tiny swimmers hardens as limestone and erodes gently to gas again. Natural selection whittles new creatures from old with its blunt knife. And it’s all real. The moments that happen already to have happened were as capacious, as strutted and braced with true existence, as this one in which I am momentarily sitting here, and the moments which happen not to have happened yet will be in their turn as truly and encompassingly the one single existent entire state of things, just for a moment. This instant at which I sit is as narrow a slice of the reality of the whole as a hairline crack would be in a pavement that reaches to the stars. The real immensities of time and of space merge; are – always were – the same real immensity.

  But now it gets indescribable. Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not-me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are already included in the sum of what is so? I don’t know. I’ve only got metaphors to work with, and this is where metaphor, which compares one existing thing to another thing, is being asked to reach beyond its competence. Beyond, again: but I’m not talking about movement through or out of any of the shapes of existing things. I’m talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which feels now as if, in this direction that can’t be stated, it is no thickness at all. It feels as if, considered this way, every solid thing is as thin as a film in its particular being, and is backed onto some medium in which the journey my attention’s been taking, toward greater and greater solidity, richer and richer presence, reaches an absolute. What’s in front is real; what’s behind is the reason for it being real, the source of its realness. Beyond, behind, beneath all solid things there seems to be solidity. Behind, beneath, beyond all changes, all wheeling and whirring process
es, all flows, there seems to be flow itself. And though I’m in the dark behind my closed eyelids, and light is part of the everything it feels as if I’m feeling beyond, so can only be a metaphor here, it seems to shine, this universal backing to things, with lightless light, or dark light; choose your paradox. It feels as if everything is backed with light, everything floats on a sea of light, everything is just a surface feature of the light. And that includes me. Every tricky thing I am, my sprawling piles of memories and secrets and misunderstandings, float on the sea; are local corrugations and whorls with the limitless light just behind. And now I’ve forgotten to breathe, because the shining something, an infinitesimal distance away out of the universe, is breathing in me and through me, and though the experience is grand beyond my powers to convey, it’s not impersonal. Someone, not something, is here. Though it’s on a scale that defeats imagining and exists without location (or exists in all locations at once) I feel what I feel when there’s someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world but glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.