Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

The Stephenites were the most radical of all the Catholic clergy and made even the Neo-Jesuits, under General Berrigan, seem like milkwater liberals by comparison. There was virtually no nation on Earth which didn’t have several Stephenites in prison for what the Stephenites called “following the laws of God rather than the laws of man.”

  Members of the Stephenite order absolutely refused to countenance any behavior that fell short of the ideals in the late Pope Stephen’s encyclicals on Social Justice; and what the Stephenites would not countenance, they would resist. It was the passive, nonviolent nature of their resistance that made the Stephenites so troublesome to persons in authority; it is impossible to jail nonviolent idealists without a large part of the world sympathizing with them.

  Father Starhawk had served three terms himself, for passively resisting Unistat’s wars against Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the People’s Republic of Hawaii.

  Like all Stephenites, he wrote the familiar lapel button with a photo of Pope Stephen, the famous black patch over his blind eye, and the sainted Pope’s famous remark, “What—me infallible?”

  Pope Stephen had totally revolutionized the Catholic Church during his brief five-year reign. Indeed, as the French feminist Jeanne Paulette Sartre said, “This one man has single-handedly turned the most reactionary church on this planet into the most progressive.”

  It was due to Pope Stephen that the “social gospel,” previously preached only by a minority of far-out Jesuits and worker-priests, became the official Vatican policy. By being the first to denounce Hitler and Mussolini, and excommunicating their supporters, Pope Stephen had knowingly risked the biggest rupture within the Church since the time of Luther; but, while nearly 30 percent of the Catholics in Germany and Italy continued to follow their national leaders, over 70 percent obeyed the Pope, and both dictators fell from power.

  Adolf Hitler became a portrait painter again; and Benito Mussolini, deprived of power, returned to his early belief in anarchism and spent his declining years writing fiery journalism against all those who did manage to achieve and hold on to political power.

  At the time of Pope Stephen’s death in 1940, it was estimated that the wealth of the Vatican was less than 10 percent of what it had been when he took the Chair of Peter, but its prestige about 1,000 percent higher.

  The Pope had spent 90 percent of the Vatican’s wealth in projects for the abolition of poverty, disease, and ignorance.

  Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with “I am a sinner, also,” which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended all his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence.

  It must be admitted, however, that the first Irish Pope did have his own brand of arrogance: He believed he was the best Latin stylist since Cicero, and was rather vain about his command of English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Danish, and Hebrew, also. He was also convinced that he was a greater psychologist than James or Jung, and it was only when their names were mentioned that a tinge of uncharitable sarcasm would enter his speech.

  Pope Stephen, in fact, had a habit of listening far more than he spoke, which led many to regard him as a bit aloof. Actually, he spoke little because he was so busy observing. This passion for studying other human beings had gradually turned him from a disputatious young intellectual into an almost pathologically sensitive middle-aged man, because the more he observed people, the more he liked them, and the more he liked them, the less able he was to bear seeing or hearing of injustice to anyone anywhere.

  On one occasion a learned and erudite French Cardinal said to the Pope, referring to the steady parade of visitors to the Vatican, “You must find most of these nonentities profoundly boring.” He was making the usual mistake of interpreting the Pope’s long silence as a sign of ennui.

  “But—there are no bores,” Stephen said, shocked.

  “You are being paradoxical,” the Cardinal chided.

  “Not at all,” the Pope said dogmatically. “I have never met a boring human being.”

  It was the only time anybody ever heard him pontificate.

  It was due to Pope Stephen that every Catholic priest was not only allowed, but encouraged, to get married. “Living with the mystery of the feminine mind,” he said, “is the best training for trying to cope with the greater mysteries of the Divine mind.”

  He himself had married a peasant girl from Galway, who was said to be barely literate, and his love for her was legendary.

  Nobody knew what the Pope and his wife ever found to talk about, since she obviously did not share any of his intellectual interests.

  Actually, with his wife, as with most of humanity, the Irish Pope spent most of his time listening, not talking.

  Because of the liberality of his sexual views, the Irish Pope was still controversial among conservative Catholics, who claimed he was a pervert and were forever trying to have him posthumously excommunicated.

  They also spread rumors about his private life, which had gained so much currency that whenever his name was mentioned somebody would mutter “garters, garters, garters.”

  Pope Stephen’s whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas:

  Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur:

  integritas, consonantia, claritas.

  Which may be rendered:

  Three things are required for beauty:

  wholeness, harmony, radiance.

  It was Stephen’s thought that the universe, as the product of a Great Artist, must be comprehensible in terms of integritas, consonantia, claritas—wholeness, harmony, radiance. Why, then, he asked himself, does it not appear so to the ordinary human mind? The only answer he could find was that we are not paying attention. We have not learned to observe closely enough. We do not have the Artist’s eye for detail.

  And so Pope Stephen paid very close attention to everything that entered his field of perception.

  At the time of the Irish Pope’s death in 1940, obituary writers all over the world compared him to every saint and sage in history: Buddha, Whitman, Plotinus, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart, John of Arc, St. Terrence of Avilla, and so on, and on; but the one who came closest to categorizing how Stephen’s mind worked was an obscure Canadian professor of literature who wrote, “The only mind in history comparable to Stephen’s was that of a fictitious character—Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.”

  Like Tobias Knight, Pope Stephen had spent all his life “trying to find out what the hell was really going on,” although he never expressed it that way.

  He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

  The Stephenites called themselves “Seekers of the Real” and were always watching very closely to see what was going on. They all had posters in their rooms with the sainted Pope’s famous remark: “If you don’t pay attention to every little detail, you miss most of the jokes.”

  When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was stopped on the street by a haggard and wild-eyed minor bureaucrat who said his name was Joseph K.

  “They have everybody mind-warped” Joseph K. said, clutching Dashwood’s sleeve desperately.

  “Yes, yes,” Dashwood said, trying to disentangle himself. “But I really must hurry—”

  “What are the charges against me?” Joseph K. demanded. “What are the charges against any of us? We all try to obey their rules, don’t we? Of course we do; we know what will happen at the slightest, the most minute, the most microscopic infraction, do we not? Not that I mean to imply that they are wrong, necessarily, or unjust—you won’t find any subversive literature or pornography in my room, I can assure you absolutely—no, certainly not unjust or in any way unfair, but it must be admitted that in the application of the rules, in the application, I say, they are sometimes overfinicky, a bit strained and literal, if you take my meaning.�
��

  “Certainly, certainly,” Dashwood said, struggling to remove Joseph K.’s fingers from his sleeve. “But if you were to see a good counselor—not a psychiatrist, necessarily … I don’t mean to imply—”

  “We are all guilty,” Joseph K. said flatly. “They have established so many rules, and recorded them in archives that the ordinary citizen cannot consult, that we must all, the most loyal and decent of us, stumble on a mere technicality occasionally. Not that I mean to assert that technicalities are not necessary, you understand, since it is important to spell out in detail the exact meaning intended in a statute, don’t you agree, George?”

  “Frank,” Dashwood said automatically.

  Joseph K. suddenly looked sly. “Oh,” he said slowly, “you claim that you are not George Dorn? How clever of them, although I can’t imagine how they persuaded you, but of course a man of your moral principles would not be bribed, certainly. They must have convinced you it was for my own good in some absolute metaphysical sense, right? Certainly. You would not work for them out of malice, would you?” He released Dashwood with a poignant, despairing gesture. “You mean well, he said. “They all mean well, I know. But I am innocent, I tell you!”

  He backed away. “And you are George Dorn, and I am not deceived,” he added bitterly.

  Then he turned and ran.

  PARAREALISME

  The big news of the 1985 season in the art world was that François Loup-Garou had abandoned Neo-Surrealism and founded a new school of art called Pararealisme.

  This was only partly the result of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg; it was also a matter of economics.

  For nearly a century, it had been very important for an artist to belong to a “school,” and it was even better to be the founder of a “school.” This was not just a case of “In Union There Is Strength”; it was also a shrewd marketing strategy. It might take an individual painter ten or twenty years to be “discovered”—if he were original, it might take much longer, and he might not be alive to enjoy it—but when a School of Art was formed, that was News, and all members of the school were discovered simultaneously.

  There had been an Impressionist school, a Post-Impressionist school, an Expressionist school, an Abstract Expressionist school, a Cubist school, a Futurist school, a Pop school and an Op school, and so on. François Loup-Garou had noticed that the commercial life of each school was getting shorter all the time, due to the accelerated intensity of competition: Neo-Surrealism was already being eclipsed, as an object of news and debate, by the Neo-Cubism of the American, Burroughs.

  He decided it was time to launch a new school.

  After the experience of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg, Pararealisme seemed appropriate to him.

  According to Standard Operating Procedure, he got a few friends together and they began issuing Proclamations denouncing all other schools (especially Neo-Cubism) as obsolete and reactionary. This got them into the Art Journals and into some newspapers.

  Then they held their own first show, and that got them into the international news magazines.

  They were news; it didn’t really matter if their paintings were any good at all.

  In fact, their paintings were rather good, in a fey sort of way.

  They had revived traditional “representational” art (everything they did was as naturalistic as a news photograph), but with a difference that made a difference.

  The largest canvas at the first Pararealiste show was Loup-Garou’s own What Do You Make of This, Professor? An enormous work it was, covering two walls, bent in the middle on a special hinged frame. It showed a cerulean-blue sky, with hailstones: thousands and thousands of hailstones, six months’ painstaking labor, and each hailstone had a tiny image of the Virgin Mary on it.

  Puzzled viewers might have found some enlightenment in the First Pararealiste Manifesto:

  We of the Pararealiste movement, recognizing the meaninglessness of this chaos that fools call life, find the relevance of existence only in its monstrosities.

  But we are not Existentialists or anything of that sort, thank God; and besides, the perversities of humanity have grown boring. After the Fernando Poo Incident, what can a mere man do that will shock us? It is the abnormalities of nature that we find illuminating; that is what distinguishes us from sadists, New Leftists, and other intellectual hoodlums.

  We are delighted that Pluto, Mickey, and Goofy are all at odd angles from the plane of the eight inner planets. We are thrilled with Bohr’s great principle of Relativity, which shows that to look out into space is also to look backward in time. WE ARE THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY!!!

  Some said that the Pararealistes were even better at writing manifestos than at painting pictures; but they meant what they said. The hailstones in What Do You Make of This, Professor? were no image of dream or delirium—“We spit on surrealism! Fantasy is every bit as dreary as Logic! It is the REAL that we seek!” the First Manifesto had also declared. What Loup-Garou had so painstakingly depicted was an occurrence that actually happened at Lyons in 1920. Xeroxes of the old newspaper stories about the event (“PEASANTS SEE VIRGIN ON HAILSTONES”) were distributed to the press, emphasizing again that Pararealistes only painted the real, or as they always wrote, the REAL.

  Little Pierre de la Nuit—Pierrot le Fou, he styled himself—was Loup-Garou’s best friend and had contributed seventeen canvases to the first show. Magnificent, monstrous things they were, of course—flying saucers, all of them: blue and gold and silver and green and bright orange, shaped like doughnuts or boomerangs or ellipsoids or cones. Every one of them had been reported in the sky by somebody or other in the past forty years. Loup-Garou circulated news stories about each sighting, you can be sure, to demonstrate again pararealisme’s devotion to the REAL.

  Then there was Jean Cul’s The Sheep-Cow; some claimed it was the greatest of all Pararealiste paintings. It portrayed an animal half-sheep and half-cow, a veritable insult to the laws of genetics. Such an animal had been born in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1888. They circulated news stories about it.

  All of this created so much international discussion that the Pararealistes immediately released the second Manifesto. (They had learned something about P.R. from the early surrealists.)

  They denounced those who did not like their paintings as fools. They then denounced those who did like their paintings as damned fools, for liking them for the wrong reasons. They went on to fulminate against everybody in general:

  We renounce and hurl invective upon the rationalist conducting experiments in his laboratory. Every instrument he uses is a creation of human narcissism; it emerges from the human ego as Athene from the head of Zeus. The rationalist imposes his own order on these instruments; they impose order on the data; and he then proclaims that the universe is as constipated and mechanistic as his own mind! What has this epistemological masturbation to do with the REAL?

  And we abominate and cast fulminations upon the irrationalist, also. Behold him, in his drugged stupor, maddened by opium or hashish, gazing inward and depicting his childish dream and nightmares on canvas. He is as limited by the human unconscious as the rationalist is by the human conscious. Neither of them can see the REAL!!!

  It reads better in the original French. But it would have been a top news story if it hadn’t been eclipsed by the singularly obscene “miracle” at Canterbury Cathedral that week.

  The details of the alleged “miracle” had been censored and covered up by high Church officials from the very beginning. Newspapers, at first, printed only short items saying that something strange caused the Archbishop of Canterbury to turn a ghastly white during Mass and stumble so badly that he fell off the altar.

  Of course some cynics immediately assumed that His Eminence was as drunk as a skunk. There are always types like that, believing the worst of everybody.

  Then the rumors started to circulate. Those who had been in the Cathedral said that the Most Reverend Archbishop had not so much stumbled as jumped, and th
at his expression was one of such fear and loathing that all present felt at once that something distinctly eldritch and unholy had invaded the church. Others, imaginative types and religious hysterics, claimed to have felt something cold and clammy moving in the air, or to have seen “auras.”

  By the time the rumors had gone three times around the United Kingdom and twice around Europe, there were details that came out of the Necronomicon or the grim fictions of Stoker, Machen, Walpole. Horned men, Things with tentacles, and Linda Lovelace were prominently featured in these embroidered versions of the Canterbury Horror, as it was beginning to be called.

  The press, of course, got more interested at this point, and the Reverend Archbishop was constantly besieged to conform or deny the most outlandish and distasteful reports about what had occurred. At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing Cthulhu fthagn!, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary.

  “Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile.”

  This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course.

  One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass.

  According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist—just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn’t have wings—had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence’s high episcopal nose.

  The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills.

  His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons.