Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
We haven't yet seen the comet. The days are fine but the skies are cloudy and in the evening the stuff moves in from the northwest and blots out everything. Mind you, there is a good chance we would miss it anyway because by the time the optimal viewing time (around 9pm to 9.30pm) rolls around we are usually in the depths of some meaningless debate about a topic of paramount insignificance. This evening it was limericks.
Felix has a vast fund of examples of this egregious verse form (all of them unprintable) and insisted on regaling us with a number. We suffered him for a while until someone (it might have been Amanda or even Trevor) came up with the question as to whether or not a limerick could be a vehicle for anything other than a comic sentiment. Could you have a love limerick, for example? Or a religious limerick?
'There once was a bishop of Birmingham...' Trevor began.
'No,' I said, before we lost all the good ground we'd gained. 'You can have a limerick on any subject, of course. The question is could it be anything other than bathetic.'
'I can't think of anything,' Rupert said.
'But that may be only because you're conditioned not to,' Amanda told him.
'Or maybe it's that rhythmic pattern,' I suggested. 'Ditty-dum. Ditty-dum. Ditty-dum. Maybe it just can't work with a serious subject.'
'The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,' Trevor said. 'Is that serious?'
'It's not a limerick,' Janice said.
'No, but it's that rhythm. What's it called? Anaesthetic?' Trevor was grinning.
'Anapaestic,' I told him.
'It sounds pretty anaesthetic to me,' Felix said.
'You know, this might be a nature versus nurture thing,' Trevor suggested. 'Either we're conditioned to think there can't be a serious limerick or else there's something about that form that makes it innately and inevitably comic.'
I could see Rupert's eyes light up.
'It's conditioning,' Amanda said, as she was bound to do.
'Well, then. Find counter example,' Rupert said.
'What's the evolutionary advantage in only having comic limericks?' Trevor said.
Nobody had an answer to that.
I knew my conversations with Janice would cause difficulty. Everybody is in on the secret by now. Barbara, my wife, wants to know when I am going to stop talking about God. She thinks it isn't a good look and that my public image will suffer. And, of course, she's right. Pelicans, in general, will think I am a dreary old bore, banging on about a subject that nobody is interested in. True believers, like my nephew, will think I am an agent of the Devil. Agents of the Devil, like Trevor, will think I am a joke. Perhaps the only person in the world who sympathises with my theological preoccupations (other than Janice whose motives are suspect) is my old friend Augie McEgg.
McEgg and I go back a long way - to 1961 to be precise. We have had many a long debate on the niceties of various religious distinctions (the calculation of the number of angels on a pinhead had nothing on our thoroughly modernist investigations). McEgg is the only person I know who fully appreciates that the most important things in life are the most ridiculous (and vice versa). He may deny this, of course. He has his own rearguard actions to fight.
In the meantime, I'm not going to talk God any more. Barbara's right. It isn't a good look. There are less than two weeks to my book launch and the good Jennifer tells me there are reviews in prospect. I have to get my act together. I can't afford to appear to be too intellectual. That's the Kiss of Death to some readers.
'I've been talking to everyone about this God-thing,' Janice said.
I started to protest but she interrupted me.
'Oh, don't worry. I didn't mention you. I just pretended I was being naive. It's interesting, though. You were right. Rupert's a screaming atheist and Trevor just laughs but I asked a whole lot of other people and almost all of them say they believe in something.'
'Fair enough,' I said. 'But what is it? That's the problem.'
'Some kind of mind?'
'I don't think so. I can't see that the word 'mind' means much unless there's a body, too. What could a mind possibly be like if it hadn't ever moved about in the world and experienced physical things like smells and tastes and sounds? I think only human beings or things like human beings can have minds. In fact, I'll go further. I'll say that whatever God is, It doesn't have a point of view.'
'Well, if it didn't have a mind, it couldn't, could it? That's that stuff you were saying before, right?'
'Right.'
'But couldn't it just think of something or know something?'
'To have a thought is to be focused. To listen, at this moment, to what you and I are saying is not to listen to all the other conversations in the world. It makes no sense at all to say that, at this moment, It is thinking, seeing and knowing everything.'
'I guess it isn't anything we can really understand.'
'If we could understand it, we wouldn't want to call it God.'
'Can we even talk about it, then?' she asked.
'Good question. And Rupert would say that if we can't talk about it, at least in principle, it doesn't exist."
'Ah, Rupert! "I have no need of that hypothesis." Pompous prick!'
'He's quoting. La Place, I think it was.'
'Still.' She looks scornful.
'Rupert's main aim in life is to explain things. That's all he cares about.'
'What about you?'
'Me? Well,' I said, 'I suspect there's maybe more to it than that.'
'What I want is a sense of purpose. I think that's all anybody wants out of this, some kind of ultimate purpose. But if you're right about the what's-its-name not having a point of view, then there is no purpose, is there?'
'I don't know,' I said. She had me there. I didn't want to say there was no purpose either. If I did, I may as well just go and swap mumbo-jumbo jokes with Rupert.
Later on Amanda button-holed me.
'How're the theological discussions going?' she asked.
I pretended innocence. 'What theological discussions?'
'Oh, come on,' she said. 'The way Janice was rattling on, I knew someone had set her going. And one or two of the phrases she was coming out with sounded just like you.'
I couldn't answer and, of course, she laughed.
'You want to watch it,' she said. 'It's a well-tried female seduction technique, getting a bloke to explain things to you.'
I was blushing. Why was I blushing? 'How would you know?' I blurted. I sounded like some truculent schoolboy.
'Oh, I know. I've used it myself on one or two occasions.'
In a conversation we had today Felix again mentioned his Ten Commandments of Book Reviewing (see Stands to Reason). I asked him if I could put them in the blog.
'Four five hundred dollars,' he said.
'That's absurd. No way.'
'One hundred, then.'
'Forget it.'
'Fifty.'
'You wrote these things yourself, did you?' I asked.
'Well...'
'Ah! So you're trying to charge me fifty dollars for a text that someone else wrote? That's outrageous.' Felix is the only person I ever get to take the moral high ground with and I like to rub it in.
'Okay,' he said. His shoulders slumped. He gave me a sheepish kind of look. 'Go ahead if you like.'
Here they are, then.
The Ten Commandments of Book Reviewing
Thou shalt not be nice to thy mates.
Thou shalt not give away the entire plot.
Thou shalt not review some other book.
Thou shalt not conduct a personal vendetta.
Honour thy reader that thy days may be long in the space that thy editor gives thee.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit uncritical adulation.
Thou shalt not ride thy hobby horse.
Thou shalt not work without payment.
Thou shalt read the book.
Fairly nondescript and unoriginal, I must admit. Felix might well have written them. But it suddenly occurs to me that if he didn't then I might have a problem. I really hope someone else isn't going to sue me. Cringe.
'Do you believe in God?' Janice asked.
I was taken aback. It's a perfectly reasonable question but not one any of us would normally think about discussing.
'It depends what you mean by 'God' and 'believe'.'
'That's the kind of thing I thought you'd say. You can never get a straight answer out of a philosophical type.'
'Well,' I said. 'What do you mean by 'God'?'
'A supreme being.'
'I don't believe in that. 'Supreme' seems to imply some kind of hierarchy with God at the top. And 'being' suggest a human like creature. It all smacks of the Sistine Chapel version - a patriarch with a long white beard.'
'A grand principle, then.'
'Maybe.'
'So you're an agnostic?'
'I'm not sure.'
'You're not sure if you're an agnostic? Isn't that a bit weird?'
'Probably,' I said. 'The problem is that an agnostic is someone who can't decide whether or not a certain thing exists. With me, it's more a matter that I don't know what I am supposed to decide about. If I knew what it was, I'd be perfectly confident about whether or not it existed.'
'I can see what you mean about a supreme being but there must be something, though.'
'What we need is a way of talking about it. And the first problem is the gender thing. If God is a principle and not a being, then it has no gender, male or female. So Rule One should be that in any discussion like this there is no He or even She, only It.'
'I quite like the She. The Female Principle.'
'The Female Principle is still an it. Only people and animals - beings if you like - have gender. Gender implies sex and reproduction, evolution and species survival.'
'Hmm,' she said, 'interesting. I have to think about that. So, you're not against the whole idea?'
'No. Not completely. Don't tell Rupert, though. I'd never hear the end of it.'
'Okay.'
'Or Trevor. He'd only laugh.'
'Fair enough.'
'Or even Amanda. I'm not sure what her reaction would be.'
'It'll be our dirty little secret,' she said. 'Because I certainly won't mention it to Felix. We're not talking.'
'Why not?'
'He called me a blonde bimbo.'
'You're not blonde,' I said.
She looked at me, an Amanda kind of look.
'And you're not a bimbo either.'
'That's what I told him. He's blind as well as stupid. How can he be rich and stupid?'
'Money doesn't necessarily go with brains,' I said.
'You have to have some brains to make money, though.'
'He won a lottery.'
'Did he? Like that bloke in your book?'
'Yes. But there's no other connection.'
A pause. I knew what she was going to say next.
'You were too slow with that not a bimbo remark.'
'I'm sorry,' I told her.
'Yeah, right.'