Pilgermann Read online

  Go with Jesus, come with me.’

  ‘You’re so full of jokes and fun,’ I say. ‘What happened to your more dignified manifestation as Goodman Death riding slowly on your pale horse with the slowly ringing bell?’

  ‘That’s for strangers,’ he says. ‘You’re not a stranger now. I’ll see you at the inn.’ And he’s gone again.

  Through the long day I walk my road to Jerusalem while the world on both sides of me makes hay, drinks beer, mends thatch, shoes horses, draws water, carries burdens, crows from its dunghill, grunts in its sty, grazes on its hillside. With evening I arrive at an inn, The Black Boar. In the inn yard are horses, carts, wagons, sledges, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks, dogs, peasants, pilgrims, and a sow wearing a red cross.

  The sow is looking at me from under her blonde eyelashes. She turns her snout towards me and begins to grunt urgently, perhaps ecstatically. I say ecstatically because I note that she has been mounted by the ever-potent Bruder Pförtner who is himself grunting ardently as he makes love to her. ‘Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!’ grunts Bruder Pförtner. ‘Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh!’ grunts the sow. The sow is on one end of a rope; on the other end is that peasant who said, ‘Cut it off and make a Christian of him.’ He is looking at me narrowly as if trying to remember where he has seen me before.

  I kneel beside the sow listening attentively to her grunts. ‘Quick!’ I say to the peasant, ‘Get a basin!’

  ‘What for?’ he says.

  ‘To catch the blood,’ I say as I cut the sow’s throat. Her blood spurts out and in the same moment with her dying squeal I hear Bruder Pförtner screaming as he comes. The peasant grabs a billhook but before he can take a step towards me Bruder Pförtner, his great bony pimmel still erect, has leapt upon him and is enjoying him. The peasant utters a choked cry, gives birth to his death immediately, and falls on his face on the ground.

  I am left standing there with the knife of the second Sophia in my hand and in my mind the thought: Jerusalem is wherever I am when the end comes. The other peasants are looking from the dead man to me and back again. They make the sign one makes against the evil eye. The pilgrims as well are looking at the dead man and looking at me.

  I look at them from one to the next. I look at them all. In the air in front of me I draw the two mingled triangles of a six-pointed star. I don’t know why I do this, it simply comes to me to do it. They look at what I have drawn in the air, I wait for them to take up their knives, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks and staves and kill me. No one moves, no one says a word.

  ‘You saw me listening to the sow,’ I say. ‘She was confessing to me, she was telling me her last will and testament. She was telling me of her many sins, how she repented of them; she had no wish to go on living. She leaves her corporeal being, her bacon, her ribs, her chops, her crackling, all of her sweet flesh and nourishing juices to you her countrymen and to you her fellow pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, that golden city that is at the same time in the Holy Land far away and in the heart of each of us. May Jesus Christ how savoury be with you and keep you from all harm.’

  I let my eyes pass over all of them. I do not expect to leave this place alive. No one moves, no one says a word. Stepping very carefully, as if I am walking on crystal goblets, I go out of the inn yard and back to the road.

  8

  ‘Jesus Christ how savoury’! Almost I said, ‘Jesus Christ our Saviour’, almost those words leapt out of my mouth. Strange, how eager those words are to be said, and stranger still how busy is the idea of being saved. As a boy I was told that there is a big book in which every deed is recorded; on the Day of Judgment one is shown this record, must examine it carefully and sign it. I was told that the righteous go to Gan Eden and the wicked to Gehinnom but even as a child I never believed it; even as a child I sensed that the arrangement of one place for the good souls and another place for the bad ones was simply not such a thing as would happen in a universe of sun and moon and stars, of night and day and the wheel of the seasons. God said a great many things in the time when it was manifesting itself as YHWH; some of them may well have been misunderstood or written down wrong. Or it may be that he put things in a very simple and vivid way so as not to require too much of the general understanding. Space and time have in them no Gan Eden and Gehinnom, no Heaven and Hell as what could be called places, and I cannot believe that anyone can now take seriously the idea of a soul that is simply righteous or wicked. Even the souls of such creatures as Torquemada and Hitler are not simply wicked although the weight of their actions is mostly in the gehinnom of things—I use the word as one might say right or left, up or down, plus or minus. It is in the rotation of eden and gehinnom that we feel the cosmic dance that is the motion of the universe, and in the play of these energies come punishment and reward. My punishment is that such evil as I have done has tuned me to the gehinnom frequency where I vibrate to the memories of all who have done evil; I share their being as well as their memories, and what I remember I remember as a doer remembers. My reward for being no worse than I am is that I remember no more than I do.

  And what is this I that speaks now? Only a fiction, a name of convenience, a poste restante for whatever addresses itself to the persistence of memory and the force of idea: there is no Pilgermann distinct from anything else; why should there be? It is difficult for me now to understand why anyone should want a continuance of identity in a life after death. All those ancient mouldering kings entombed with their murdered wives, with their servants and soldiers and horses, with their weapons and chariots, their stone bread, their stony dregs of long-departed wine! Imagine the burial of a mouse with weapons, an ant with concubines! The arrogance, the greed of it! Even now the space all round me is thick with the fat globules of undissolved souls blinking and bleeping their greed for more! more! until the signals fade to silence and the lights go dark. More indeed! Not only human souls—the dying Earth itself moans like a stunned ox; the deeps of space are clamorous with its panting, its unwillingness to be absorbed into the allness from which it came. I have lost my humanity, I have been waves and particles too long to feel what humans feel. And yet, and yet … I remember with something like a pang how I wanted God to come back, how I wanted Jesus not to go away.

  I am on the road again. Life is so strange! It is nothing I have ever been able to take for granted, just simply being alive with the world in front of my eyes and looking out through those eyes at the world. And when the eyes are closed, the colours, the patterns, the flashes and flickers; pictures even. How can it be that pictures can be seen with the eyes closed? Dreams! Maybe there were dreams before there was anything else; maybe there were dreams before there were people to dream them. Maybe dream life is the real living and our waking life is just the necessary exercising of our bodily functions in the time between dreams.

  I am on the road again, trying to remember the last thing Jesus said to me. ‘From me came the seed that gave me life,’ he said.

  He may be right. Look at what he does with stone, it sets time at naught completely; give him any stone and any stonecarver whatever and he can make it happen, he can make his living and his dying be Now, for ever this very moment. He has no need of flesh and blood, he can live in stone as others live in flesh and blood. Partly I understand it: what one thinks of as the hardness of stone is actually its memory, its retention, its capability of holding images and thoughts. That’s why Christ has always been so easy with stone, he comes to it so willingly because it goes with him so willingly; he likes to be long in stone, short in stone, likes to live out his story large and small in shapes of stone. Christ comes for any stonecarver who calls him with his chisel, calls him with his iron to the stone. He has no vanity, does not push himself forward, he takes his place modestly with the other figures, acting out his story as bidden. Because of this the stone is eager to please him, it’s always thinking of new little touches that will put something more into the story. In my drift through what is called time I have my favourites here an
d there, and as often as not they are after my own time. What an odd thing to say: my own time! That time during which I lived is what I mean, and that sounds equally odd because I have always been somewhere in one form or another; precision with words is impossible.

  But I wanted to say something about a particular stone Christ-story, the one in Naumburg Cathedral in the west rood-loft. I believe that it was done in the twelfth or thirteenth century, I don’t know who the sculptor was. There are seven scenes in it: the first is the Last Supper, perhaps it is that moment when Christ is saying, in the Gospel of Mark, Take ye; this is the body of me.’ As Christ speaks these stone words—they are not cut into the stone but they are there in the air of that stone scene—he puts into the mouth of Judas a piece of bread while Judas still dips with his own hand in the dish. The stone and the carver are good with this scene as they are throughout: as Christ with his right hand puts the bread into the mouth of Judas he draws back with his left hand his right sleeve to keep it out of the gravy and in this way the eye is led from the bread to the hand, wrist, and arm of Christ that extend the bread, showing the oneness of the bread with the self of him who gives it. Or it may be—and I rather believe it is—that the moment shown is that one in the Gospel of John when Jesus, having been asked who will be the betrayer, answers, ‘That one it is to whom I shall dip the morsel and shall give him.’ And John goes on to say, ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’ Yes, that for me is what is happening in that stone moment. Because all eucharists are double—this is what I know now, this is why I am easy now between the grinding of eden and gehinnom in the mill of the universe. When God was a he he never told us everything; where is it written that he told us all there was to tell? Nowhere. Nor did Jesus tell us everything. He never told—did he, is it written somewhere? I think not—that all eucharists are double; but they are. ‘Take ye; this is the body of me.’ ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’

  What chance has Judas? He eats the bread of Christ as would a dog given a crust by his master, and with the bread comes Satan. There sits Christ, stolid and stocky in the Naumburg stone, solid as the stone itself. There is no fault to be found in him, he will betray no one. Ay! Judas, Adam and Eve, the Jews—what was to be expected of them? What did God as He, God as Logos, God as Christ, want of any or all of them? How were Adam and Eve to resist the fruit that God had created irresistible? How were the Jews to be other than imperfect and deviant from the will of that same God who created them imperfect and deviant from his will? How were they not to make a golden calf in the shadow of that holy, that terrifying and untouchable mountain of the Law? How was Judas not to betray Jesus after Satan had entered him in that double eucharist? Jesus was the one who could withstand Satan, he was the strong one; he required of Judas that betrayal that Judas, powerless to do otherwise, already a dead man and Satan-entered; enacted as his necessary part of the story.

  What are we but creatures of the God who made us as we are? Either God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent or he isn’t. If he isn’t then he must take his chance with the rest of us and not demand special treatment; if he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present then he has nothing to complain of except that the universe would come to a halt without the dynamic asymmetry of Adam and Eve’s original sin, of the Jews’ whoring after false gods, of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, of Pilgermann’s adultery and every other act of wrongdoing since the human race first took upon itself the task of maintaining universal spin and motion according to the will of God. Try to conceive of things as other than they are—it can’t be done. While humankind exists there can only be the rotation of God’s impossible requirements and humankind’s repeated failures. Indeed, what is God but an impossible requirement? Any possible requirement would not be God.

  So. Stone Judas, fed by his stone master, eats his stone bread while dipping his hand into the stone meats of the last supper. The stone, friend and brother to Christ and stonecarver and all of us alike, remembers this because the iron has told it to remember and it obeys.

  In the next scene of the Naumburg stone story Judas gets his thirty pieces of silver from the high priest. Here we see the full power of that stone memory, that stone retention. This stone knows what it knows: Judas, his face that of a stunned brute, is not his own master, and this is not forgotten by the stone. But if Judas is thus sold even as he sells Jesus, what of this high priest through whose listless fingers slide the clinking silver coins into the fold of the cloak Judas holds out to catch them. Is this Caiaphas? It must be he. And what is in his face, this face that seems of all of them to be the most thoughtfully observed? Does Caiaphas choose to be Caiaphas? Why does he look out at us like this from the stone? Such a tired face. There is left to me only this!’ says that face.

  Why? Why only this? What words of Caiaphas does John give us, what has Caiaphas to say of Jesus? ‘If we leave him thus, all men will believe in him, and will come the Romans and will take away both the place and the nation.’ What else does Caiaphas say to the council of the chief priests and the Pharisees? ‘Ye know not anything, nor reckon that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people and not all the nation perish.’ And this, John tells us, Caiaphas ‘from himself he said not, but being high priest of that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but that the children of God having been scattered he might gather into one From that day therefore they took counsel that they might kill him.’

  So. Judas is entered by Satan, Caiaphas is doomed by reason and prophecy. How much freedom of choice has Caiaphas? He, like the rest of us, is free within the limits of his understanding. As I have said before, a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action. Vulgar tradition, like a painter who does not know how to render shadows, has filled in the sparseness of the Gospels with a sugary muck that makes the empty spaces dark and sticky. In the coloured picture cards in which Jesus now lives he and his twelve disciples move softly in their marzipan robes but the Jesus I saw was not a soft mover, and Caiaphas’s concern indicates that Jesus’s following was such as could well have moved Rome to take away both place and nation from the Jews.

  Thus Caiaphas, acting for the good of his people, ensures their everlasting infamy. God as He, God as It has done this, has shown in this the never-to-be-understood mystery of his action in which Judas must betray Jesus and Caiaphas his people. All we can know is that there must be betrayal. Is not life betrayed by death? Is not up betrayed by down? Is not space-time betrayed by that recurrent contraction to the singularity from which it must burst anew? The Jesusness of Jesus cannot live without the Judasness of Judas, the Caiaphasness of Caiaphas, the Pilateness of Pilate. Ponderous wheel!

  In the next scene Judas kisses Jesus while Peter with a sword cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Christ stares out in perpetual innocence from the stone while the guilty betrayer, submissive to the forces moving him, presses close like a dog to his master. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says to Judas, ‘Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ In Mark he says nothing. In Luke he says, ‘Judas, with a kiss the Son of man betrayest thou?’ In John again he says nothing. There it is: the Gospels say what they say and the stone remembers what it is told. Very good. Who is this Pilgermann, this drifting wave-and-particle vestige of a castrated Jew, who is this Pilgermann to have an opinion on the matter? From where I am now I see the universe isotropically receding in all directions. I am, equally with all other waves and particles, its centre. From that centre I speak as I find, and I find that I have questions for which neither the Gospels nor the Holy Scriptures offer answers. Theologians and fathers of the Church cannot confound me, they have no firmer ground on which to stand than I. So. Here is Christ, the one who makes the blind see, makes the crippled walk; here is Christ, the one who raises the dead, walks on the water, feeds the thousands with his loaves and fishes. Christ the Word made flesh, Christ the Son of God. And what says h
e to this mortal lump, this uncorrected sinner, this strayed sheep and Satan-entered? What says Christ, the Good Shepherd? ‘Judas, with a kiss the Son of man betrayest thou? Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ Because Christ will have, must have his betrayal. ‘Comrade, do that on what thou art here.’ Do it that the cosmos may uncoil its onward energy, that the wheel may go on turning: night and day, plus and minus, eden and gehinnom, matter and anti-matter, Jesus and Judas.

  Now I wonder, yes I wonder, on whom is it to forgive whom? Who is the sacrifice, the one for the many, the ransom, the redeemer? Who is to represent us all? Is it Jesus the betrayed, the crucified, or is it Judas the betrayer and his own hangman? Or is it the binary entity of Jesus/Judas alternating and inseparable? How the thunder rolls when certain words are put together! When certain mysteries are named! Not to be understood, not to be attempted even! Roll, thou eden and gehinnom of the rolling universe! Hurry on, thou road to Jerusalem, thou road returning! A rushing and a plodding, a palimpsest of footsteps rising from the ground under my feet up into the air high over my head so that I feel myself to be drowning in the going and the ghosts of going of those footsteps, footsteps upon footsteps and ghosts upon ghosts, a madness of going that moves both ways on this road. This road is the treadmill on which we walk day into night and night into day, eden into gehinnom into eden, Jesus into Judas into Jesus.

  Jesus does not tell us everything but he has much to show us. In the next scene of the Naumburg stone story we see Peter on the left-hand slant of the roof of the porch of the rood-screen doorway. He is turning away from the high priest’s maidservant who questions him; he is making one of the three denials he will make before the cock crows. Ah! the genius of that Naumburg stone, that Naumburg master! Look at the face of that maidservant, the eternal directness of the soul behind the stone eyes that are turned away from Peter as she looks towards what is not carved in the stone, towards Jesus brought before the high priest, chief priests, elders and scribes. She looks away from Peter but she stretches out her left hand, it is almost touching Peter’s shoulder as she says, ‘And thou with the Nazarene wast—Jesus.’ Peter says, ‘Neither I know nor understand what thou sayest.’ What is meant by this triple denial of Christ? Is not each part of the Holy Trinity being denied once in it? As if Christ is telling us: ‘Look at this mortal lump, this thrice-denier; yet will he be my rock.’ Because mortal lumps are all humanity can offer, and if rocks are needed these must suffice. Having only mortal lumps to choose from, Christ will use this one for a betrayer, that one for a rock. Just as his father before him used this one to receive the tablets of the Law, that one to make a golden calf. Matter and anti-matter, yes and no of the treadmill that walks the rolling earth from night to day. Here stands in the stone Peter the rock in baffled recognition of what he is and what he is not in the numbers of eden and gehinnom. That the stone and the carver could produce these two faces, the maidservant and Peter, that is certainly in the eden side of the balance for all of us. Such a brutal innocence, that maidservant! An innocence not possible for Jesus, the innocence of the pure lump of mortality with no connexions in high places. And Peter! that face of his! The light of understanding that floods the stone of him!