The Book of Skulls

Why are we so depressed tonight? Why this loss of faith?

It must have come from Eli. He was bleak all day, lost in realms of existential despondency. I think it was a purely personal gloom, born of Eli’s difficulties in relating to the immediate environment and to the cosmos at large, but it subtly, surreptitiously generalized itself and infected us all. It takes the form of grinding doubts:

1. Why have we bothered to make this trip?

2. What do we really expect to gain?

3. Can we really hope to find what we’re looking for?

4. If we find it, do we want it?

So it must begin again, the task of self-hyping, of self-conversion. Eli has his papers out and studies them intently: the manuscript of his translation of the Book of Skulls, the Xeroxes of the newspaper clippings that led him to co

Not the first time I’ve heard this. Eli presented all his data to us long before. The decision to go to Arizona ripened exceedingly slowly and was forced along to maturity by acres of pseudophilosophical palaver. Then I said, now I say, “Descartes died at fifty-four, didn’t he?” . “An accident. A surprise. Besides, he hadn’t perfected his theories of longevity yet.”

Timothy: “A pity he didn’t work faster.”

“A pity, yes, for all of us,” Eli said. “But we have the Keepers of the Skulls to look forward to. They’ve perfected their techniques.”

“So you say.”

“So I believe,” said Eli, striving to make himself believe. And the familiar routines came forth once more. Eli, eroded by weariness, teetering on the brink of disbelief, trotting out his arguments to get his head together once more. His hands upraised, fingers outspread, the pedagogical gesture. “We agree,” he said, “that coolness is out, pragmatism is through, sophisticated skepticism is obsolete. We’ve tried that whole pack of attitudes and they don’t work. They cut us off from too much that’s important. They don’t answer enough of the real questions; they just leave us looking wise and cynical, but still ignorant. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Oliver, eyes rigid.

“Agreed.” Timothy, yawning,

“Agreed.” Even me. A grin.

Eli, again: “There’s no mystery left in modern life. The scientific generation killed it all. The rationalist purge, driving out the unlikely and the inexplicable. Look how hollow religion has become in the last hundred years. God’s dead, they say. Sure he is: murdered, assassinated. Look, I’m a Jew, I took Hebrew lessons like a good little Yid, I read the Torah, I had a Bar Mitzvah, they gave me fountain pens — Did anybody once mention God to me in any context worth listening to? God was somebody who talked to Moses. God was a pillar of fire four thousand years ago. Where’s God now? Don’t ask a Jew. We haven’t seen Him in a while. We worship rules, dietary laws, customs, the words of the Bible, the paper the Bible’s printed on, the bound book itself, but we don’t worship supernatural beings such as God. The old man in the whiskers, counting sins — no, no, that’s for the shvartzer, that’s for the goy. Only what about you three goyim? You’ve got empty religions, too. You, Timothy, high church, what do you have, clouds of incense, brocaded robes, the choir boys singing Vaughan Williams and Elgar. You, Oliver, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, I can’t even keep them straight, they’re nothing, nothing at all, no spiritual content, no mystery, no ecstasy. Like being a Reform Jew, And you, Ned, the papist, the priest who didn’t make it, what do you have? The Virgin? The saints? The Christ Child? You can’t believe that crap. It’s been burned out of your brain. It’s for peasants, it’s for the lumpenproletariat. The ikons and the holy water. The bread and the wine. You’d like to believe it — Jesus, I’d like to believe it myself, Catholicism’s the only complete religion in this civilization, the only one that even tries to do the mystery thing, the resonances with the supernatural, the awareness of higher powers. Only they’ve ruined it, they ruined us, you can’t accept a thing. It’s all Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman now, or the Berrigans writing manifestos, or Polacks warning against godless communism and X-rated movies. So religion’s gone. It’s over. And where does that leave us? Alone under an awful sky, waiting for the end. Waiting for the end.”

“Plenty of people still go to church,” Timothy pointed out. “Even to synagogue, I suppose.”

“Out of habit. Out of fear. Out of social necessity. Do they open their souls to God? When did you last open your soul to God, Timothy? Oliver? Ned? When did I? When did we even think of doing anything like that? It sounds absurd. God’s been so polluted by the evangelists and the archaeologists and the theologists and the fake-devout that it’s no wonder He’s dead. Suicide. But where does that leave us? Are we all going to be scientists and explain everything in terms of neutrons and protons and DNA? Where’s mystery? Where’s depth? We have to do it all ourselves,” Eli said. “There’s a lack of mystery in modern life. All right, then, it becomes the intelligent man’s task to create an atmosphere in which surrender to the implausible is possible. A closed mind is a dead mind.” He was warming up, now. Fervor taking hold of him. The Billy Graham of the Stoned Age. “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen — we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the a

Timothy said, “And you want us to believe that the Book of Skulls shows the way, huh?”