WHAT WE FOUND most thrilling and novelistic about the stories in the Bible was at the same time exactly what made us angriest. What struck us in the end as most absurd and unjust. It wasn’t clear how you could consider a bunch of real bastards as teachers, masters, leaders of the people, spiritual guides, with all the crimes that had sullied their hands.
With the benefit of hindsight, looking back from my current vantage point, the Bible appears very realistic and almost Machiavellian, adventuresome and far more profound than any modern psychological novel: but back then, when I was a boy, it seemed crazy that it should serve as the foundation to a religion that was also said to be a religion of goodness, charity, and love, etc. Elements that were practically missing from the scene. You might as well read the Greek myths, in that case.
In the Bible, the obsession with guilt suggested that human beings had been assigned no other destiny than this, to sin, sin, and sin some more, to fall, no, better yet, to plunge, deviate, betray, degenerate, be corrupted, rot, give the lie to every slightest illusion that could be entertained about them. If I had believed these negative prophecies to the letter and if I had known enough about him, something that was highly unlikely in a Catholic school at the time, perhaps I would have become a follower of Luther. The idea that man by his very nature is made to fall can be a simple observation or something to fight against or even a morbid indulgence that voluptuously embraces evil while at the same time denouncing it: when it comes right down to it, there is no real difference.
EVEN JESUS’S DEATH struck me as pointless. A sacrifice for its own sake, admirable and yet utterly in vain, seeing that since then mankind hadn’t improved in the slightest. If even killing the Son of God wasn’t enough to make mankind better, or at least a little less evil, then that means it’s just not possible, or else that the right approach hadn’t been used, it’s pointless to shed blood, cut lambs’ throats, immolate the innocent, the procedure of sacrifice washes away no sin, it doesn’t cancel the crime, if anything it just becomes one more. Why should one murder absolve you of other murders? Instead of making me milder, the death of Jesus, when I was a boy, just increased my thirst for revenge. Forgiveness be damned! What I wanted was a savage reprisal. Perhaps people fail to take into account the fact that, once you’ve reached a certain level of emotion and pathos, once you’ve heard enough stories of martyrdom and persecution (whether the protagonists are saints or refugees, or detainees in German concentration camps, or poor Jesus, spat upon, beaten, whipped, and crucified), beyond that teary point what snaps into action is a reaction that is hardly unpredictable: either you feel like burning those Christians alive yourself, or else you’re tempted to lead the uprising against their persecutors.
In teaching lessons about how goodness is the tolerance of evil, people always forget that you can hardly expect such sage wisdom from a boy, that the real goodness in our nature would be the one that refuses to tolerate injustice, that rises up against it, to put an end to it, to remediate it, and that therefore the monstrous iniquities suffered by the martyrs can only teach us to revolt against them, and certainly not to submit to them with an ecstatic smile—that is a prerogative of saints. The edifying stories aim to accentuate the sentimental aspect of injustice and cruelty (for example, the cruelty that was inflicted upon Jesus), pushing us to be stirred to emotion, remaining passive, like so many spectators in tears in a movie theater, whereas if they have any effect at all on those who listen to them, it is to bring to the surface their instinctive sadism, reawakening through imitation the latent violence lurking in the individual, until you realize that you too want to stone the adulteress, of course, after all, deep down that slut deserves to die and I wouldn’t mind smashing in her skull with a rock, or else, to the contrary, it stirs a chivalrous sense that aspires to return blow for blow, picking the rock up off the ground and hurling it into the face of the one who first threw it. Observing the succession of persecutions suffered by innocent people at the hands of wicked people only stirs you to join forces with the latter and to have a good time doing so, taking it out on that sniveling mass of Christians, Jews, women, and defenseless old people, or else to spring to their defense, but for real, with a club, with a sword, in the tradition of the Seven Samurai—with rifles, in other words, not with prayers.
That’s the effect the story of the cross has always prompted in me: it makes my fists itch. I think about Jesus every day. Jesus! Of all the religion there is, You’re the most curious, necessary, and disconcerting figure. I’d be able to accept You more easily if You were only God or merely a prophet. But both things taken together! You’re just insatiable!
No objections to be made concerning the individual figures, if taken separately. Rather conventional, actually. Indeed, compared with the pagan religions, on the one hand, and folklore and practical wisdom on the other, pretty drab, no special flair if you think of a Zeus or an Indra or a Shiva; as a paradoxical philosopher, as a street preacher, Christ possesses a spectacular simplicity and fluidity, fair enough, but the concepts He expresses don’t have a great deal extra compared with the ones you might find scattered here and there in Socrates, Zhuang Zhou, or even Marcus Aurelius. If He had only been a man, Jesus’s teachings might be the subject of a chapter in the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, with the famous anecdotes, the parables, the magnificent Sermon on the Mount, and then, in a few brief lines, or even in a long and heartbreaking episode, the trial, the torture, and the death.
. . . It’s something I seem capable of taking seriously only on paper, when reading, reading the Gospel, or Holy Scripture, or the powerful tirades of the Church Fathers, or looking at the apocalypses painted by artists, the resurrections of the dead bodies, with skeletons emerging from the ground, the sweet Marys, their cheeks tinged with modesty . . . but which ceases to make sense as soon as I return to reality and find myself at a mass and all the emotion I’d experienced in my reading vanishes as I watch the sad line that forms at the center of the church, ladies in raincoats heading up to receive the wafer. It’s a lightning cut for me, a break with any form of adherence, credulity, faith. It’s already difficult for me to believe, to believe anything, even to believe in myself, believe that I even exist . . . so you just imagine how hard this is.
Only in the formal or figurative perfection or in the elevation of thought, perhaps, or in the abyss of last acts, do I glimpse even a scrap of possibility, but in that case, rather than believing, I am dominated, I feel that I’m at the mercy of some greater force that brusquely demands that I put away my skepticism. In other words, I surrender. Let’s just say that, without believing, I obey.
Normally, instead, I’m just there observing, I observe and nothing more, perhaps tickled by a slight irritation, let me be clear, not toward the faithful, but toward myself . . . and taking on the point of view of the entomologist or the satirist or the person who “just wants to understand” does nothing whatsoever to make up for the chilly initial sensation of detachment, it doesn’t transform it, it fails to redeem it.
I’ve said that I obey. And yes, that’s correct. I obey beauty, for instance, and its extremely powerful redemption. I even obey when I would have strong objections to the objects upon which that beauty draws my attention in order to oblige me to venerate them, the figures before which it demands that I prostrate myself, the values that it conveys or propagandizes. I’m almost never in agreement with the authors or artists I admire. But it’s the power or the beauty of the way they work, in other words, the form or technique they create and then apply, after having created it . . . it’s almost never the arguments themselves that persuade me, or should I say, bend me, instead, it’s the argumentation. In the Gospel, for example, the terse economy of the discourse; the inexorable unpredictability of the logical transitions; the hammering, simple style with which the examples are produced, why of course, the parables, with their hooks, impossible not to dangle impaled upon them, snagged. Yes, this is the sensation that Jesus’s wor
ds—paradoxical at first blush—provoke: the desire to obey them.
But the reason this happens isn’t because I devalue the reality of things in favor of ideas, theory, or fantasy. Quite the contrary, I’m attracted by the concentrated, amplified, intensified reality of the molding and shaping, the implementation of the form. I am by no means interested in abolishing or escaping reality, rather what I want is to confront reality, take it on its most powerful expressions, when sadly I usually find it under my nose in a diluted, watered-down form. What can I do if people and their actions are almost always disappointing with respect to ideas? Is it the ideas’ fault, or the fault of the people who put them into practice? And for that matter, if ideas aren’t applied by people, then who on earth are they intended for? The sagas, the myths, and the legends that so captivated me as a boy still make my heart race today (I’m nothing other than a failed mythographer, or rather a failed-almost-everything, a failed musician, a failed mathematician, engineer, photographer, psychoanalyst, maybe even priest, yes, that’s it, a failed priest), don’t those myths and legends and sagas spring out of human beings, and aren’t they aimed at human beings? Power and precision and authenticity and profundity exist solely in written or sculpted or painted form: then the word tarnishes in a split second, and everything conspires to prove the opposite, to give the lie, corrupt, and water down. If that’s what religion is, then I’m not interested. It will never kindle me, never light my fire. Christ is something else. Yes, but where is Christ? Who truly follows Him?
But after all, I wonder, why always that central Italian accent, from the Marche, Abruzzo, Molise, straight out of a dialect play, as if they were from the home town of Padre Pio, exchanging “g” for “c,” “d” for “t,” lo Sbirito Sando gi assisde, Gristo gi vete e gi sende . . . the Holy Sbirit assisds us, Ghrist sees us and hears us, who knows why all these preachers always have a raucous voice, a piercing, hoarse timbre, which whispers into the microphone as if through the grate of a confessional, and why they’re always full of amazement as if they’d just opened their eyes onto the world only now, for the first time, as if they were witnessing a miracle, why of course, the miracle . . . the miracle of grace, the miracle of forgiveness, the miracle of human contact, the miracle of gratitude, the miracle of goodness and repentance, of the sun that rises every morning, the miracle of life, the miracle of this, that, and the other thing . . . Yes, when I’m in the car, I listen to two kinds of radio broadcasts—the kind for and by AS Roma fans, and the kind done by priests: the former amuse me, the latter are the subject of my study. Both categories are absolutely incorrigible, which is what I like about them.
I don’t care if it rains or freezes
As long as I have my plastic Jesus
But if I put it like that, then you might be led to believe that my sole contact with faith comes through reading St. Thomas Aquinas or Dante. Not at all the case. The closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience dates back, as is perhaps true for everyone, to my childhood. And it was at my grandmother’s house that this minuscule miracle took place. There, too, entrusted to my grandmother by my parents so they could go off on their wonderful and romantic trips, the biggest problem for me was sleep. In the still hours of the night, thoughts and feelings became terrifyingly prehensile. I believe that I managed to grasp, in the sense of understanding, most of the important things in my life at night, before age twelve. Everything that’s happened since has been a matter of applications and consequences.
Yes, specifically by night, guided like a divining rod by that form of mad, overemphatic lucidity. But those conquests came at a cost, from when I was very small, the cost of hours and hours of hallucinatory wakefulness spent crushing and forming my pillow into every imaginable shape. At my grandmother’s house, though, there was a figure that stood awake beside me. I could see it glow from the night table, not far from my head. I’d blink my eyes and rub them to see it better, but its cerulean blue remained vague and ill defined. So I’d reach out my hand to touch it. It was a phosphorescent Madonna about four inches tall. Clutching Her in my hand, I’d remember what She was and why She was there: to protect me. And, in fact, She protected me. From what?
From my own thoughts, from the looming shadows, from the illusions generated in darkness, from the dangers created by my own mind. The frightful dimensions of my nocturnal obsessions, clutching the luminous Virgin Mary in my hand, were slowly restored to the scope of normality, and they ceased to threaten me—especially the most insidious, the most radical, the most implacable of all the thoughts that burdened me, namely, the thought of death. By night, in fact, I became aware, acutely aware, to the brink of the intolerable, of death. Not so much of the fact that I would someday die and that there was always a risk of dying, from one cause or another, but rather the fact that everything dies, that everyone dies, and in the end, there is nothing left . . . And did the Madonna do anything to overturn or counteract that conclusion? Not at all. Very simply, though, she rendered it innocuous, she emptied it of all anguish. Death therefore became a conquest and no longer a stabbing wound. One problem, however, arose: if I held the statuette in my fist and clutched it tight, it disappeared. I could no longer see its glow in the darkness. My touch extinguished it, like when you catch a firefly in a glass and in its alarm, it stops glowing.
And so I had found a system for remaining in contact with Her, without dimming Her light: I limited myself to clutching the pedestal between thumb and forefinger, so that the rest of the little figure would continue to glow. And so, I believe that with my arm extended toward the night table, fingers touching the base of the phosphorescent Madonnina, I must have spent many hours of my childhood, reassured by Her, protected by Her faint light. And in that position, having thought everything thinkable, and imagined everything imaginable and unimaginable, and after feeling the tide of dismay subside within me, I would finally manage to fall asleep.
A FEW YEARS AGO a weekly newsmagazine asked me to reply to a list of questions, which was called, for some reason that eludes me still, “The Proust Questionnaire.” Flat questions, answers of half a line or a single word, about the things you like best or hate most, such as: your favorite book, your favorite film, what impresses you most about a woman, or a man, the saddest day of your life, the happiest, and so on. I can no longer find that copy of the magazine. I’m certain that 90 percent of the answers I gave then would be different today, in fact, they would already have been different one week after the interview. Not because I might change my mind, no. But because I have many different thoughts and ideas in my mind, it’s not as if I change it or repudiate it, no, let’s just say that I alternate my mind and the ideas in it, in rotation, like 45s in a jukebox. My tastes, memories, passions, books . . . there are so many of them, and variety is such a wonderful thing! What a stupid thing a fixation is, or perhaps I should say, how foolish to have just one! For instance, I remember that I didn’t include Karl Malden among my favorite actors, and now I would, and the same goes for Aroldo Tieri. There’s only one answer that I remember giving that I would probably give today, exactly the same.
Question: Who is your favorite historical figure?
Answer: Jesus.
I WAS BEING ASKED, basically, to believe in something I couldn’t understand, and—in spite of the fact that it’s clear to me now that this and this alone is the true meaning of the word “believe,” that is, to place faith in something that you can’t understand or verify, because something that you can understand need only be acknowledged, you only need to recognize its existence, which means, therefore, that there is no need to believe in it—at the time such a demand struck me as unacceptable.
If there is something that by its very nature is unintelligible, fine, let’s leave it right there, where it is, in its splendid world beyond our comprehension: what need is there to attain it or ingratiate ourselves with it or make an alliance or jolly it along, get it on our side, to resist it or surrender to it, since no matter what we do, you
can neither predict what it will do in advance nor understand what it does afterward, nor, in the final analysis, does it have any obligation to justify its actions, so that if it sends you an earthquake or a cancer or it lets you win the lottery, it really all adds up to the same thing, the meaning behind that choice remains mysterious, look what it did to Job or allowed to be done to its own chosen people, does any of this strike anyone as logical? Exalted sinners and innocents burned at the stake or crucified.
ARBUS WAS THE ONLY ONE of us who had no hesitation in declaring and demonstrating his absolute lack of any religious sentiment whatsoever. Among our classmates, even the most foulmouthed and profane, if really questioned closely, would have admitted that, deep down, well, yes, they believed in God, at least a little, and that they perceived something supernatural in the world, or they could sense it, they were afraid of something! Maybe of hell. In short, they believed in Jesus, or in the Resurrection, or in the angels. Scattered scraps of faith or residues of catechism or snatches of prayers accompanied by the powerful and obscure sensation “there has to be something out there.” Not Arbus. It’s as if his exceedingly pure, automatic mind had been liberated—and God only knows to what extent that actually constituted a liberation—from the desperate and naïve need to believe.
“Man fears God the way that monkeys fear snakes.” Arbus feared nothing, that’s all there was to it.
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