Godhood For Beginners You know how it is, every time you find something that is so perfectly wonderfully spot-on RIGHT for you, and you cannot stop yourself from humming “What a Wonderful World” on some level or another in some key of your own choosing as it hits you in one vast euphoric wave that YES! This is a thing so flawlessly and completely designed for just you that you must have a Guardian Angel somewhere who is trying to compensate for doing such a lousy job of your Life so far that he she or it hopes this magnificent Gift will make up for all of it in one Grand Gesture to end all Grand Gestures - is usually the precursor to another moment when you discover that tiny little catch that follows on from it like an irksome yet Karma-balancing companion. This euphoric enthusiasm had been originally provoked in me when I checked my mail and there mixed amongst a pile of utility bills and fliers discovered that the American university I most wanted to pursue my doctorate in was prepared to offer me an unconditional place. Gethsemane University, nestled between the only two hills in the hole of Iowa (sic) like a cultural and intellectual Oasis, had earned itself a fast-growing reputation as a sharp-edged research centre to rival Oxbridge, CalTech, M.I.T. and Skibbereen. I thought I had a good idea, from the brightly coloured brochures that had accompanied the offer, of what I would find when I went there in September but when autumn came round I found it a revelation. From the time my plane had touched down at O’Hare Airport to the moment nearly ten hours later I drove the little second-hand Nissan my limited dollars had purchased in Downtown Chicago through hundreds of miles of cornfields randomly punctuated by friendly roadside gun shops and then finally into the tree-lined outskirts of Gethsemane, I had felt an increasing sense of foreboding but that left me as I drove through the University’s sumptuous Campus; which was a feast of exotic plants, sculptures and bizarrely beautiful earthworks that seemed to serve no purpose but to please the eye. So there I stood, barely an hour later, feeling very much the little farm boy raised in a sleepy corner of West Cork (and I defy you to show me a corner of West Cork that isn’t), staring up at my course curriculum pinned to the Faculty Notice Board. I’d spotted the flaw in my ointment right there labelled as a Subsidiary Subject (Mandatory) accompanying my Post-Graduate course in Quantum Mechanics. “Godhood 1:01” with Professor Sheldon. “What the…?” I stared at it again, wondering and hoping it was a miss-print or some strange midwestern foray into ironic humour, but I felt a sinking certainty that it was neither. What could it mean? I stared at it again, as if it might resolve into something less perplexing. “Godhood 1:01” with Professor Sheldon. The words seemed to be literally printed on to the page, and all I got by staring at them was the foretaste of an encroaching headache. The puzzling words remained unchanged and brought to mind something my favourite uncle had told me about America. I know that most people thought of my Uncle Tadgh as an overweight buffoon who lived just outside Clonakilty, but I knew they were wrong about that. I knew my Uncle Tadgh was an overweight buffoon who lived just outside Rosscarbery. That said, his widely travelled view of the world and tendency to immerse himself up to the neck in local colour wherever he went had led him to form some oddly useful conclusions about the quirky creature that is man. I recalled him sharing one or two of those insights with me over an Irish coffee some months earlier after I had shared the news of my offer of the PhD course in Gethsemane. A wistful look had come into his eyes as he talked about his own first trip to the US in 1980 as a wild-eyed youth of thirty-two. The picture he painted was of an America steeped in obsessive certainties: be it in a vengeful right-wing God, the sanctity of motherhood, the laziness of Mexicans, the worthlessness of left-wing ideologies, the untrustworthiness of the Arab and the Asian and the prior claim that Americans could invoke to any of Earth’s resources or treasures they damn well fancied for themselves – as if God was from somewhere in Montana and blessed their every whim. But Tadgh reserved his greatest scorn for American TV news. He said that the Irish, like most other Europeans, are used to watching news from all over the planet. Watching the news in Florida, Oregon or Indiana, you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing of note ever happened outside mainland USA. Then one day whilst visiting his mother, my Great Aunt Eileen, in Daytona Beach he noticed a TV show that seemed to contradict all of that. It was a documentary about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that talked of their motives with a fair-minded impartiality that would have done credit to the BBC. Fascinated, he had stopped what he was doing as he listened to the documentary’s avuncular anchorman describing the Russian rationale in careful measured tones. Then, just as Tadgh was starting to think he’d got American TV all wrong, the anchorman started his summing up. “And you know” he intoned enthusiastically, “its all there in the Bible!” Tadgh described himself sitting down, his mouth open with numbing horror as this Network television programme went on to treat arcane Biblical prophecy from the Book of Revelation as a strictly deterministic script we were all acting out with an almost robotic inevitability. “In 1980 at least” Tadgh had concluded, “the Americans were a people so in love with answers that they had no room anywhere in their mindset for any actual questions – and certainly not if they referred to religion, politics, or NBA Football! They were certain about everything because the very idea of doubt scared them.” Okay. Maybe I hadn’t fully subscribed to Tadgh’s energetic prejudice against all things American but staring at the printed curriculum now, I did wonder if Godhood 1:01 was some intellectually feeble attempt to square the subatomic majesty of the quantum world with the teachings of the New Testament or, like the quasi-intellectual “argument from design” which attacked the idea of Darwinian evolution, something even sillier. So it was with a heavy heart that I completed the registration procedure and moved my things into the attractive little apartment that the university had allocated for me. Godhood 1:01 was my first class at ten the next morning and I steeled myself to face it as best I could. Things started to look up again when I reported to the study room set aside for the course and met the six other students sharing the programme with me. Easily the tallest of us was a self-effacing Brit called David Tyke with a Birmingham PhD in “Exotic Logics” that I’d enjoyed in its incarnation as a rather surrealistic cartoon strip in the Guardian, and easily the smallest was an elfin-faced Italian girl called Gianna who had a background in Catastrophe Maths and Chaos Theory. Standing beside them, trying to blend into the carpet was an acutely shy and mild-faced Egyptian called Bahaa Seedhom. Bahaa had clearly fallen under the spell of a Russian-Armenian girl called Nadia Katchachurian who, in a throaty accent that irresistibly reminded us of that of some sultry James Bond lady-spy, had invited us to call her “Natch” for short. The first two characters to introduce themselves to me were Chuang Tse, a physicist from Hong Kong who never quite stopped smiling however much one stared and, as the only North American amongst our motley contingent, was an impossibly good-looking and deeply tanned Californian, aptly named Cal Geach who, we all knew, had made a something of a reputation for himself some years previously, when a paper he had written at Berkeley called “The Heresy of Quantum Consciousness viewed from a neo-Con perspective” had won him an invitation from the Bush White House to become an official Presidential Advisor, which had then been famously and hastily withdrawn once he’d explained that its intentions had been purely satirical. Of Professor Sheldon there was, as yet, was no sign. Then, some fifteen minutes later, she appeared. A voluptuous blonde woman I guessed to be in her mid to late fifties, although it had to be added that middle age had been very kind to her, she glided rather than walked into the room and I felt the space around her to be charged with a fierce charismatic energy. She motioned us to be seated and then reclined into a large leather armchair I hadn’t even noticed up to that point and smiled as she introduced herself to each of us in turn. Oddly enough, she knew each of our names already, but that was only one mystery to join the several others that were piling up in my head. For example, when I had seen how silently she walked amongst us I had glanced down to see what type of shoes she was wearing. That she was completely barefoot was somewhat less surprising than the fact that, in making each sure-footed step, her feet hadn’t quite made contact with the parquet flooring. Her next surprise was on a different level altogether. She asked each of us to recall when, and why, we had first applied for our places at Gethsemane University. It then shocked us to realise that none of us could actually remember applying at all – even though, as each of us readily attested, it had at the time seemed to us so perfectly natural, if somewhat fortuitous, to have been offered both scholarships and positions there. As she talked her smiling eyes, the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea, rested hypnotically upon each of us in turn and calmed both our turmoil and our doubts with the practised ease of someone who believed the truth of their own words. She talked of humanity’s share dreams and shared nightmares; of terrible wonders and magnificent horrors; of distant pasts and of impossible futures. As I listened to her words flowing like beautiful and semantically rich music from her mouth, I felt my own consciousness lurch onto another level of being. Now every word she uttered was accompanied by a brilliant visual effect spilling away from her across the room – the bright fizzing energy of verbs driving forward colourful cartoon-like three dimensional pictured ideas so that, for example, when she spoke the word “tree” there suspended in the air we could see the quintessential image of a tree – simultaneously just one tree and also every object that we had ever referred to as a tree. And so this dazzling light show continued unabated. At some stage she did something fractal with Time, effortlessly cutting it up into topographically impossible shapes so that she could dwell at length on important features of her thesis without any regular time passing at all. At one point, she reached forward and gently held my hands with her own and I felt my body become flooded with a warm euphoric tingling from my scalp to my toes, and I felt my being swell to accommodate the most enormous happiness. “We are one,” she whispered softly, as I noticed from the corner of my eye six other Professor Sheldons simultaneously holding hands with each of my new colleagues, squeezing their fingers and blessing them with the self-same words. Throughout all of this, the one sensation that over-rode every other was the overwhelming conviction that all of this was right and inevitable, that this moment was where my life so far had been leading, as a river to the sea. Here, nothing was surprising; nothing was strange, nothing alien. The dreamer had become the dream, and the dream the dreamer. Now ideas as sweet and rich as ripened fruit poured from the beautiful professor into our willing and receptive minds, which were awash with the pleasure of the lessons. Then, sometime later, I once again felt the gentle warm pressure of her fingers on my hand. “Take your mind to a happy place” she urged me. For a moment I drew a blank but then my mind alighted on that Cornish beach when I was seven years old staring up at the giant thin finger of rock rising from the golden sand. My eyes closed with a flush of pleasurable memories, and when I opened them we were there. Standing in front of us I could see my gently sunburned skin; my right hand protecting my squinting eyes from the bright sunshine. I could hear the lapping of the waves breaking on the beach and the distant cries of tetchy seagulls. Light wind from the sea cooled the skin a fragment, and I could see my sister Caitlin with my parents a few hundred metres behind my left shoulder. The professor released my fingers and looked around her. “Why here?” she asked, her expression thoughtful as her eyes met mine once again. I pointed at the craggy finger that stood about a hundred feet high. “The only moments in my childhood that I ever felt truly alive, or knew any kind of pure joy, were solitary ones,” I told her “and when I saw this rock I knew I had to climb it, and that nobody should ever know that I had done so.” As I spoke the child I had been stepped up to, and then started to climb that face of the rock that was obscured to my parents view. My movements were sure and confident until I reached a height of around 85 feet. There, my young head moved this way and that as I searched for my next handhold. The slight overhang that seemed to us to block any further progress shaded me, and I soon slumped down into a crouching position with my forearms resting on my bare knees and with a mortified look on my face. Far below, we could see the young boy wipe bitter and disappointed tears from his/my face, and I turned to explain to Professor Sheldon what we were about to see next. “Getting to the top was all I could think of,” I said, “and although I’m fairly sure I didn’t know the word “metaphor” at the time, I remember having the strongest feeling that to fail to get there would mark a crucial turn for the worse in my life. The idea of failure seemed quite unbearable to me.” I paused as we stared up at my former self. Suddenly the boy stood up with a new look of determination on his face. He punched his left hand into a shoulder high crack in the rock and then, with his body now leaning perilously outwards, stretched up his right hand to feel for a possible hand-hold above the overhang. For some moments his outstretched hand was a fast blur of frantic searching and then settled into a position over to his left. “I’d found a single hand-hold on a small spur of embedded quartz,” I explained to the professor as, both of us squinting from the strong sunlight, stared up at the action, “the only problem was, I had no way of knowing whether or not it would lead me to a viable climb and only a leap upwards would allow me to grip even that.” “My only choice was to jump and risk falling to my death, or to turn back.” I shuddered from the powerful memory. “So I leapt, believing it might be the last thing I would ever do,” I said as we watched my young self act out my words synchronously, “and as you can see, I made it to the top.” We could now no longer see the boy as, his body currently shaking from the experience, he lay spread-eagled at the very top of the rock basking in the joy of his climb. Professor Sheldon leaned towards me and I could feel the warmth of her breath on my ear as she softly whispered to me. “That leap was your first step here,” she said, and as she smiled the whole scene dissolved and became, once again, the classroom. Once more I became aware that the same teacher was singling out each one of my colleagues at the same time. The illusion of multiple Professor Sheldons persisted for a moment more and then, in a blink, resolved into just one as she sat back in her armchair and regarded us all with a level gaze. “Still,” she said evenly, “perhaps that’s enough to begin with. I don’t want to work you too hard on the first day. We’ll make a proper start to the course from next week.” She glanced down at her wristwatch. “Time for my espresso,” she said and then with a final beaming smile, she was gone. For several moments, her departure drained light, colour and sound from the room but, within a minute or so, we felt the classroom shift back to its original appearance and feel. None of us were able to speak at first and the only things we could hear were the gentle sounds of our own breathing, the faint ticking of a clock on the wall and, from somewhere outside the large windows, some earnest but crass attempts by one student to proposition another. He sounded Texan. A pause in his entreaties was followed by the noise of a loud slap. Cal Geach, for the moment no longer the unflappably mellow Californian cool-dude, broke the silence by telling us some rumour he had overheard about our next day’s lesson with Normus Greeley, the wildly eccentric Quantum Physics professor who, for his own pleasure, had double dutied as the university’s officially appointed landscape gardener. Cal grinned broadly as he told us of the legendary stories of this teacher’s insane sense of humour and his perverse and mischievous application of multidimensional Super-string Theory to the design of the lawns and flower beds, which had reputedly led to consequences that would have turned Maurits Escher into a quivering wreck - had that famous artist, for example, been reckless enough to try to walk across the Quadrangle from the Coffee Shop to the Library; located as they both were in slightly different dimensions. Still, that lesson was for another day. Right then I felt the need for a tall glass of iced tea followed by a long nap, and my body was a blur as, taking a hasty departure from my new colleagues; I headed off to my new apartment for both of them. td
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:05:29 +0000
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