Nokes goes on and on about the good sense and practicality of his philosophy. Only gaze and gawp long and hard enough into your One-off Interior Blank (says he, in effect) and all will be tickety-boo. Oh, really? Look at the fix that this priceless jewel of wisdom has landed him in already, to say nothing of where he’s going from here. Look, members of the Jury, and be warned.
The Accused’s credo must strike you the way it strikes most people - as nonsense. Philosophers have for centuries had a word for it: namely, solipsism. By which they mean that extreme subjectivism - that blown-up blend of naïvety and conceit - which cries: ‘Hey, guess what! I’ve never met another I! They’ve all been hims and hers and its - motorheads and robots to the last man, woman and child. I alone am Consciousness Indivisible, the only One! Wow!’ No philosophers worthy of the name waste time on this daydream. It’s not that they can disprove it. It’s not even that they strongly disapprove of it, but that they have no use for it. It’s short of meaning and sense, a non-starter and dead end. Solipsism ranks no higher than an occasional pastime - a very dull game of solitaire - which not even the player (if he has any marbles left at all) takes seriously for a moment. Much less the non-player.
Psychologists have an even ruder word for it, namely regression. By which they mean a falling back into infantile self-centredness and illusions of omnipotence, a retreat from the bleak and harsh realities of adult life to the time when things and people weren’t other, or separate from oneself. When all existed to serve oneself. And further back still to the solitary warmth and safety of the womb. Here’s an illness born of fear of the real world and unwillingness to take up its challenges. In other words, a refusal to grow up, evasion on a grand scale, a drop-out’s dream of kingship and world dominion. The pipedream of an addict.
Yes, you can get hooked on Nokes’s hallucinogen all right!
In this courtroom, for almost four weeks, we’ve been treated to an extraordinary presentation (as if to a panel of physicians and psychologists and social workers) of a severe and chronic case of solipsistic regression. Fascinating and ingenious, say some of us. Pathetically simplistic and naïve, say others. Sick, sick, sick, say yet others. More menacing than crack or heroin, say the rest. But the general feeling is that the Accused’s pretensions are perverted, deeply immoral. In some indefinable way they are shameful.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, along with most of our witnesses, along with every sane and sensitive human, you have this gut feeling about the assertion ‘I am God!’ It makes you shudder. You are sickened, appalled. This instinct is for trusting, and all the sophistry of all the John a-Nokeses in the world shall not prevail against it. Of course Nokes will presently have a last go at confusing you with paradox, and explain how he must be infinitely humble to be infinitely great. Well, a court of law is no place for, has no time for, such double-talk, and there’s no call for you to rack your brains over it. Anyway, so far from supporting the Defence, it undermines it. Not content with being God in the highest, the Accused claims to be God in the depths, and so to possess Him completely. Far from clearing himself of blasphemy, he compounds the crime. He convicts himself of double blasphemy, if there is such a monster. He only endorses Martin Buber’s judgement on him: ‘Woe to the man so possessed that he thinks he possesses God!’
But really, members of the Jury, it doesn’t matter what you think of the Accused’s theological contortions in all their variety. The point is that he has committed, deliberately and consistently over many years, the terrible offence he’s charged with. For which he will have to pay the penalty.
You may ask why the Prosecution bothered to go so carefully into - and to refute so effectively - the Accused’s claims to uniqueness and divinity. I’ll tell you why. However shameful his pretensions and however fallacious his arguments, it was important that he should be free to ventilate them - with the result that the Prosecution was obliged to take them far more seriously than they deserve. This Trial had to be seen to be a fair Trial in which the Accused wasn’t muzzled or bullied, and was encouraged rather than merely allowed to put his case at length. Besides, it wouldn’t have done to assume in advance that the Act has no loophole in it by which he could escape. It was, I suppose, just possible that solipsism and infantile regression and satanic pride, when rationalized and robed in the holy vestments of a kind of spirituality, could have furnished arguments and evidence which would help his case. Unlikely but conceivable. They didn’t, as it turned out. But no one can say they weren’t given a chance.
So, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I come back to the nub, to the heart of the matter. It’s perfectly simple. Never mind the peculiar circumstances of this case, its ins and outs, the emotions roused, the countless side-issues. If anyone in the world has been proved guilty of blasphemy - of this ultimate crime against man and his Creator - it is that creature over there in the dock.
You have no reasonable alternative but to find him guilty as charged.
Your Honour, that concludes the arguments for the Crown in the matter of Rex versus John a-Nokes. I rest my case.
Defence Summing-up
As usual, the Crown Prosecutor is so obviously wrong. It just isn’t true that much of my Defence was irrelevant to the charge brought against me, a smokescreen. Or that my tactics have been diversionary, and that I have deliberately spent much of the court’s time answering questions that weren’t being put by the court.
I kept to the point - which is that I am Who I say I am. And indeed I’m grateful for having been given the opportunity to make that point in so many ways. Most grateful to the Establishment for providing such a large and well-lit shop-window in which to display my wares for so long. I’m specially beholden to the powers that be because what matters is not so much what happens in this place, or even whether I shall or shall not go from here to the place of execution and my long home. What really matters is what’s happening in the world beyond this court. The world that - thanks to twenty-first century telecommunications - is avidly watching and listening to us. I’m concerned with the millions who, though invisible and inaudible, are as present here at this moment as the Judge and the Jury are. As I am.
It’s a world that’s sick. Sick with the degenerative and dehumanizing diseases of bigotry, fanaticism, bitter and cruel intolerance. Its vital organs are so feverishly at odds with one another that they threaten to work their mutual destruction. I see this Blasphemy Act, under which I’m being tried, as the first dose of a hastily concocted febrifuge, of a medicine for bringing down the patient’s temperature a few degrees. Which for the moment it has done - but at a quite unacceptable cost. For this medicine is as poisonous as the disease it purports to treat. Indeed it’s a product and a part of the disease itself, of that same witches’ brew of bigotry and fanaticism and, bitter intolerance which they call fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, my Aunt Fanny! It’s superficiality run amok.
Persisted in, it gags and throttles the patient. It can only produce yes-men and brainwashed apparatchiks. And eventually zombies. It renders pointless the martyrdom of countless brave souls who have sweated their guts out and died to achieve, against all the odds, freedom of speech and of the written and spoken word. It casually throws overboard man’s hard-won and precious liberty to question every belief and practice (no matter how entrenched and revered), without which he’s an angry ape playing dirty tricks on other angry apes. A creature so blinkered and so stiff and so solemn, so touchy and so cruel, that he’s not only dehumanized but de-animalized. Shocked Nature’s most shocking monstrosity.
Now what is the cure for this degenerative illness? A spate of new and juster laws? Of new, intelligent and well-thought-out legislation, enforcing tolerance? A live-and-let-live Act of Parliament? If achievable (which I doubt, seeing that enforced tolerance is a contradiction in terms), it would be of little or no use in that it addresses the symptoms while not diagnosing the disease, let alone treating it. No, there’s only one cure, and that’s the cure I’ve been descr
ibing and prescribing all along in this courtroom.
This sovereign remedy is a true simple - simplicity itself, natural, commonsensical, obvious, inescapable - once you’ve tumbled to it. The way to reach agreement with your opponent is to find Common Ground with him, the Bottom Line you share.
A cliché? I can’t help that. Corny or daring, it’s the only way to peace in our time, O Lord. A way little travelled, alas.
Exactly what and exactly where is this wonderful (but woefully overlooked) Common Ground and World’s End and Bottom Line which is our reconciliation and our peace? Need I remind you that it’s not an abstraction, and it’s not a metaphor, and there’s nothing vague about it? It’s not, like the equator, an imaginary line which, though precisely located, is neither drawn nor seen. This Line is for real. Of all sure things it’s the most sure. More homely and down-to-earth than Earth itself, it’s the Base that supplies all our needs. It’s a real Home for constantly going back to and putting one’s feet up in, not an ideal home one will never set foot in. With all my love I’m inviting you to join me here right away. And - because this isn’t one of those bogus ‘Oh, do come and visit sometime’ invitations - I’m handing you a sketch-map showing you how to find your way.
Yes, yet another picture, Diagram No. 34, and the last in your booklet.
Diagram No. 34
You will find me at the very Centre. You will be me at the very Centre. In fact, you and I are already One with each other here - the One we both really, really are, the BEING whose first name is I AM: I AM John a-Nokes, I AM Gerald Wilberforce KC, I AM everyone in the telephone book, and so on ad infinitum. Here are to be found our Healing and Wholing, our Centre which instantly expands into our Diameter and Circumference. Into our 360° completion which, though it looks like 160° war and 200° armistice, turns out to be the wraparound Peace that passes all understanding.
Your Honour, and each lady and gentleman of the Jury, to you I now issue this personal invitation to join me here at home. Oh, it’s a comedown all right! l know my place. No place on the map is lower, humbler, less posh, than mine. All the same, I assure you, you won’t regret your gracious condescension.
For in fact it is no more and no less than the goal of your submission to the truth, your deep bowing before the evidence of how things already are with you and with me. Bowing, I repeat, to what’s given. Ceasing to resist the obvious. No, I haven’t forgotten that we’ve already been through this bowing routine time and time again in the course of this Trial. I’m saying that we can’t repeat it too often if we’re at all interested in the healing of our sickness unto death, the disease of which this Trial is a symptom. So I beg you to join me again in the descent to the nadir of all things.
Look up at the ceiling, at that ornamental plaster-work and those fluorescent light-fittings. Objects of little interest to you, I guess, unless you happen to be an ornamental plasterer or an electrician...
Lowering your gaze, look out at the courtroom. At His Honour, splendidly robed and bewigged, presiding over this court; at learned Counsel, somewhat limp and crumpled after having put the case (such as it is) for the Crown; at John a-Nokes (also rather shopworn) here in the dock, the fellow whose life is in your hands. Well, for the time being, you are very much involved with us lot, aren’t you?...
Bowing still more deeply before the evidence, and looking down, you come to those feet of yours - the feet you are comfortably putting up (putting up, as I said, and as the Diagram shows) at home. Yes, you’re getting warm now. Deeply involved...
Finally you arrive at Home-Base, the World’s End, the Bottom Line, and total involvement. You arrive at the Frontier which is none other than the Line you can now actually draw with your finger across your blouse/shirt/pullover, the Line where that garment gives place to the absence of garment and shoulders and neck - the Absence of Everything. On this Aware Absence I put my shirt.
Speak as disrespectfully as you like about the equator - that invisible line where nothing happens - but not about this visible Line where everything happens, where Non-being flips over into Being. Here it is that the incredible switching from No-thing to Some-thing to All-things goes on without let-up and without cause - the switching from the Sink of the Universe to the Spring and Fountain of the Universe, from the Great Unconscious to the Conscious, from the Bottomless Abyss to God and His world, from I AM NOT to I AM and I AM ALL. Here at Home-Base, right where you and I are now, this wonder of wonders is in full flood. Here, where we are privy to the Incredible Achievement, where we are the Incredible Achievement! The Achievement of the Achiever, the Origination of Self-Origination!
Here, where you and I draw the Line, is where we Line up, where we are brought into Line at last. Consciously to remain here, enjoying its infinite resources - yet continuing to leap rejoicing from the darkest Abyss of Mystery below the Line into the bright world above the Line and back again - is to be healed.
Here I’m healed with you and as you. Here I take with you the one sensible remedy for the otherwise incurable disease which this court and the Blasphemy Act are attempting to treat. Here, to be you no less than myself is to cease to blaspheme. Here, coinciding with this Line, I am you and you are me, for ever One Being in the Eternal Christ, no matter how at variance our terms and temperaments and beliefs and practices above the Line. Here I’m in with you on the Ground Floor of this Enterprise of Enterprises. Here and here alone (I repeat) we sink to absolute Sameness and leave our differences floating.
And up there they remain, of course. And proliferate marvellously. No possibility of sinking them. But all’s well now that we survey them together from the infinite tolerance of our Common Ground. Now we are no more opinionated by our opinions than we are pulled over by our pullovers or motorized by our motors. We have those things, and trade them in from time to time for smarter models. Secure in the silent vision that I am you on the Line, I can now afford - can now welcome and insist upon - the delightful clashing of the things we get up to above the Line. Vive les différences!
No wonder, ladies and gentlemen, that hemispherical map of my constitution kept cropping up throughout the Trial. Clearly it displays the nature and the cure of the horrible disease we are all afflicted with: the endemic disease of blasphemy, the high treason of the human trespasser from his own region out there, as he makes for the Centre where he aims to unseat his Creator and King.
The Prosecution asserts that a malady which everybody suffers from is one which nobody suffers from. Not so. The history of disappearing species abounds with examples of creatures that were sick not as individuals but en masse - the most quoted example being the dinosaurs, whose gigantic size and fantastic and crippling armour is supposed to have sealed their fate. No doubt their size and armament had been advantageous up to a point and in moderation; beyond that point they became handicaps that contributed to (if they didn’t cause) the extinction of these Tertiary reptiles. Not altogether different is the case of Homo sapiens, the creature that developed another sort of crippling armour. I’m referring to the illusion that he is for himself at Centre the thing that he looks like to others out there, the lethal fiction of First-Person versus second/third-person symmetry and confrontation. This fiction or myth is precisely what made him human, and for ages it was a tolerably good myth that was productive of nearly all he holds valuable. But now, more and more, it’s proving counter-productive, a bad myth that’s increasingly destructive of all he holds valuable, including humanness, including himself! He may well follow the dinosaurs into Life’s packed charnel-house.
I don’t know what will happen. But I’m guardedly hopeful, inasmuch as what’s required of Homo sapiens (if that prize misnomer is to become a nomer) is no big deal. It’s not to do something difficult and tricky but to stop doing something difficult and tricky. Namely, to stop muddling things. It’s to let things be themselves in their proper places. It’s to let God be God at the Centre of things, and man be man off-Centre - a metre or so away - keeping a respectful dist
ance from that Presence. The arrival and survival of Homo sapiens depend on its perception of itself as a blaspheming species, followed by its ceasing to blaspheme and becoming a reverent species. One that substitutes God’s in, I’m out for the present disastrous I’m in, God’s out.
God, the Alone, is right here. Man, one of many, is over there. Which brings me to the Prosecution’s supercilious dismissal of John a-Nokes as a case of naïve subjectivism. A severe attack of solipsism - a term which has more than a whiff of the snake-pit about it - is what the poor fellow is suffering from! Well, I say it isn’t Nokes but the Prosecution that’s pathetically naïve here, simplistic to a degree.
I have news for Counsel. There’s not one but two sorts of solipsism - man’s and God’s - and they lie poles apart. The former, in so far as it’s at all possible, is insane. ‘I, Jack, have access to my own awareness only; that of others is speculative, dubious and probably non-existent.’ This is solipsism by exclusion, the denial of love, loneliness at its most lonesome. And it’s nonsense because - to tell the truth - Jack as Jack-by-himself, as that peripheral third person, isn’t aware at all: he’s a picture, a glossy and paper-thin appearance, all object and no subject. He’s aware only as the First Person who is Awareness itself; the Awareness in all beings, the whole of it at their Centre. He’s aware only as the infinitely deep and substantial One who says with an engaging grin, ‘Here I AM! It’s ME and not a picture!’ He’s aware only as the One whose Aloneness is absolutely real, blissful, loving - because it’s solipsism by inclusion. He’s aware only as the Universal Subject who is the sole Healer of my loneliness and all loneliness.
In short, the only kind of solipsism that Counsel can reasonably accuse me of is God’s. Which means that he’s accusing me of being Who I say I really, really am - this truly Singular First Person. Which I find rather funny.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 31