Pilgermann

5

Sometimes I don’t know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understanding patchy but I have action; I go. I can’t tell this as a story because it isn’t a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards: One: Samson in the vineyards of Timnah; Two: the lion comes roaring at Samson; Three: Samson tears the lion apart. That’s a story but actually the main part of the action may have been that there was a butterfly in Samson’s field of vision the whole time. The picture cards don’t show the butterfly because if they did they would have to explain it. But you can’t explain the butterfly.

See in Unguent’s dream the great golden dome of the Church of the World. Hear the golden voice resounding, hear Unguent weeping and the swish of the whirling sling, hear the little thump as the body of the sparrow strikes the golden dome. Now while that’s still going on — and it always is going on — hear the crackle of the flames: the Temple is burning, the Temple of Yerushalayim burning on the Ninth of Av, A.D. 70. Flames, flames for the Temple of the Jews. From the starved and defeated Jews goes up a cry like a sheet of flame. Titus runs to the Holy of Holies, with his sword he slashes the curtain, he must see for himself whether there are images or not. Hold the two together: Unguent weeping with the sling; Titus peering into that empty room. Empty for him. And the sword that was dry before he slashed the curtain has blood on it.

I am the resurrection and the life,

saith the Lord: he that believeth

in me, though he were dead, yet shall

he live: and whosoever liveth and

believeth in me shall never die.

Well of course the action never stops. Look at me, not famous or anything yet here I am. Is this, then resurrection and life? I suppose so. Although my action continues I don’t actually know who I am. By now I am only the energy of an idea; whoever is writing this down puts the name of Pilgermann to the idea, says, ‘What if?’ and hypothesizes virtualities into actualities.

On some plane of virtuality the Temple stands, the Jews of A.D. 70 sing and dance while the scholars among them ponder God’s choices. God is a scientist. He knows everything and, having all the time there is, he demonstrates everything including his actual non-presence. Names colour actualities; forget the names Jew and Christian, call them X and Y. Let X be those who said, ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us.’ Let Y be those who sometimes call that to mind when killing X. What is being demonstrated? X is being demonstrated as victim, Y as avenger. X’s action as victim shows us something of X’s character;xsxsxsx Y’s action as avenger shows us something of Y’s character. Will Y, red of hand with the blood of X through the centuries, ever say, ‘The blood of them on us and on the children of us’? It’s a matter provocative of thought.

A matter provocative of thought, and new approaches continually offer themselves. For example: God being omnipresent is therefore everywhere at once in what is called time; all slaughter of X is therefore in his awareness simultaneously with the birth of him whose death the slaughter avenges. Might it even be possible that God, in his Hebrew aspect writing from right to left, writes first the slaughter of X and later the crucifixion for which they are slaughtered? If we look at it in that way we might see the slaughter as cause and the crucifixion as effect: the sin of the slaughter being heavy on the sinners, there comes the redeemer to offer his innocence for their guilt, the one for the many. As Pontius Pilate washes his hands X is heard to say (by an evangelist writing some four decades later), ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us’, quite accurately predicting that they, X, will be held accountable for the death of that one who gave his life in expiation of the sins committed and yet to be committed against them, X. The purist may argue that God, being everywhere in time at once, would not have written one thing ‘before’ and another ‘after’ but that argument is well answered when we point out that the Creator characteristically employs a sequential mode of presentation, even going so far as to work six days one after the other and rest on the seventh.

One seeks, as far as possible, reasonable explanations, but here, speaking as waves and particles freely ranging through what is called time, speaking as a witness to what has been done to six million or so X not so very far from here in what is called time, I must say, though lightning strike me as I speak, that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him even as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I’m being arrogant, and maybe that’s why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it’s that simple — God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and Pfft! there go a few hundred or a few million X. Ah! to be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.

I am the resurrection and the life,

saith the Lord …

So presumably there will always be action of one kind or another, some of us moving in flesh and blood, some of us in waves and particles.

I return now to my flesh-and-blood days. Being now strong enough to travel I prepare to go. I sell all my possessions except my books; my books I give away, I keep only my Holy Scriptures. How shall I dress for my pilgrimage? Not as a Jew, certainly. For the first time in my life I can travel incognito, nobody can prove that I’m a Jew. A wildness comes over me, a giddy sense of freedom. At the same time I think: What have I to live for? It’s as if I am at once walking on very thin ice and drowning in the black water beneath. The Bath Kol then speaks to me for the second time. The same words: ‘Thou pilgrim Jew!’ These words I accept as an answer. Ah! the scent of Sophia in that daughter of a voice!

I dress as did the tax-collector: I put on a long coarse woollen tunic, woollen hose, stout boots. I have an ash staff shod and tipped with iron; a dagger with a Damascus blade; a good thick woollen cloak with my spare underclothes and surgical instruments in a satchel slung on my back; in my scrip bread and cheese and apples; sausages too, I don’t intend to be a kosher pilgrim; fifty gold besants in my purse, three hundred more sewn into a special compartment in my satchel; the same amount in diamonds sewn into the hem of my cloak.

I have no debts to pay; I make my farewells. And Sophia? Our hello and our goodbye will be for all time together in that one time we have been together; such as I am I will not climb that ladder again; I will not intrude upon that altar where I cannot offer. The Shechinah was present in our holy sinning, I know that; nothing can be added to it, nothing can be taken from it. All the same, when I leave the town that night I take my way past the great dark house in the Keinjudenstrasse. I look up at that grouping of the lower stars of the Virgin and those three stars between the Virgin and the Lion, that gesture like a hand flung up: What! will you block the road for ever?

I move on.