The Sunlight Dialogues

John Gardner

Don't be fooled by clever hands, sir, the Sunlight Man said. He'd be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. Entertainment's all very well, but the world is serious. it's exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician's trick. That's what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage--the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth--and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren't fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil's work. It eats the soul."

When you think about it, the voice said, infinitely weary, the world is more like a jailhouse than like a hospital. No matter how cynical we try to be, the food is never what we secretly expected; the beds rob us of our sleep and health; the company lacks zest, not to mention how it smells; the toilets are a cruel, cold shock; and at the end of it all, instead of the justice we have a right to expect, as feeling creatures--fzzzt! the electric chair. If we had any sense we'd hang ourselves and be done with it.

But intelligence is not the world's strong point.

But sunlight in the morning shows things as they are: it was faded and threadbare in that hard, steady light: as ruined as the dead thing inside it. I saw everything, that morning, as clear as something you see in your childhood: like a vision of death.

Surely we must not forget, dear lady, that there is pleasure in our self-sacrifice. Our kindness has been tainted with masochism since the world began, and it is not to our best interest to forget it. Think better of yourself, my dear Mrs. Clumly. No man was ever perfect but Jesus Christ. Do you think it doesn't give you pleasure--if only a drop of pleasure--tell me that you are unworthy of being alive? And, on the other hand, do you think I don't find some touch of pleasure in suggesting that your husband is less than he seems--no better than yourself, in fact? Perhaps worse?

But he had not known that yet and would not make it out until too late, after he had won by destroying her, had sapped her mind because he would not learn what his father's life taught: stop, listen, wait.
It takes strength to listen and wait, and neither one of us was strong. To desire too much, to think oneself unfit--
Not a circle, a spiral inward (introversion) to a madness of cool objectivity.
Nothing passes belief when a god's intention
We weren't ready yet, either of us; we loved each other and were at war for fear that we didn't deserve what we took. Withdrew by separate paths. You forward to madness, and as for me--

I did not want it left to me, and it was not fair.
I wanted--what?
No, words again. Large gestures.
I wanted to be beautiful.
I wanted to be loved for myself alone, as God loves even giraffes.
There is a moral to this. There is no such thing in this world as love. Until the day we go to Heaven, there is only childish infatuation and jealousy, duty, despair.
A sickly moral, admittedly, but better than endless burning. I wanted him to make me feel pretty. Isn't that sad?

Do you know what it's like to grow up on a Reservation? I don't mean pity him. I don't mean sob. I mean your laws are irrelevant, stupid, inhuman. I mean you support civilization by a kind of averaging. All crimes are equal, because you define the crime, not the criminal. It's effective, I admit it. But it has nothing to do with reality. There is good and evil in the world, but they have nothing to do with your courts. I know better than anyone, believe me! I have been the victim. But that's in the past. Assault and battery is always the same, no matter who does the assaulting and battering. That's your Jewish law. Well I reject your law!
Have you really missed the point? Listen! How can you act for what you don't believe in? And don't tell me "That's democracy." Don't take me for a fool. If I accepted democracy I'd put up with the majority opinion until I could muster the voting power to change it. But I don't! Who in his right mind does? Take a look at the world! Are the demonstrators accepting majority opinion? Are they setting up an alternative? A demonstrator is a Hell's Angel without brains. Or put it this way. You say accept majority opinion, work lawfully to change it. Suppose the majority favors anarchism, or suppose the majority goes Nazi. Will you quietly pass pamphlets soberly arguing for a change of opinion? It comes to this: I don't say I can beat you. I'm not interested in beating you. I say only that the will of the gods is with me. Your side will win, eventually. You've got the votes. But meanwhile I will kill you. The gods will rumble on, indifferent to your theories, and your house will in due time fall around your ears.

Story of a king who waited and waited for some word from the gods but got nothing, absolute silence, no matter what form of divination he tried. Very well, said teh king. Has a lion ever performed extispicy? Has a wolf ever asked advice from any interpreter of dreams? Like a robber, I shall proceed according to my will! Ah, then they spoke! They smashed that poor devil like an ant! You see the point. You never know when the gods may speak, you never know what your luck is. You can only wait, and if they say act, act.

Let us make a distinction. Omen-watching, divination, has nothing whatever to do with magic. Divination is man's attempt to find out what the universe is doing. Magic is man's ridiculous attempt to make the gods behave as mortals. Divination asserts passivity, not for spiritual fulfillment, as in the Far East, but for practical and spiritual life. After divination one acts with the gods. You discover which way things are flowing and you swim in the same direction.

He of all people, trapped in an allegory.

And which way will you go my child? He whispered. No answer came. The Sunlight Man nodded. Either way, you have my blessing. He made a cross in the air, then sadly shook his head. So much revolution in you, he said, so much hatred for order, so much hatred for anarchy--and so much love. How terrible! Where can you run to? I tremble for your soul.

She had underestimated love.

Love is revolt, someone had told her--Stanley Burrish, when they met in San Francisco three years ago--and it was true. A flight from the humdrum, from reality: you shucked off all you had been before and the world that went with it, you became the enemy of the universe and imagined your lover to be another just like you, and so for a moment the two of you were free, lifted out of all ordinary dullness, out of the old vulnerability, became godlike or childlike or a little of both, and the world, no longer a fence around you, was beautiful. So that love was doomed, the new world sickened like the old.

Another illusion. Nothing prospers but the soul. The universe is a great machine gun, and all things physical are riddled sooner or later with bleeding holes. You're bombarded by atoms, colors, smells, textures; torn apart by ancient ideas, appeals for compassion; you twist wither, try to make sense of things, you force your riddled world into order, but it collapses, riddled as fast as you build, and you build it all over again. You put up bird-houses and cities, for instance, but cats eat the birds and cyclones eat the cities, and nothing is left but the fruitless searching which is otherwise called the soul.

Do not say that thou art weary, O my soul, do not say, This Life is grief, the Strife is grim

All this, though some may consider it strange, mere fiction, is the truth.

I haven't any words to add to this, so Gardner will have to provide the last words:

He read one more time the poem about friendship and suddenly, ardently, Benson wished he had a friend so he could mail the poem to him.