36 Arguments for the Existence of God (11 page)

Cass had been surprised by the surge of his own insights. That thing about the sublime, the subliminal, and the self—what this whole seminar was about!—had just hit him like a wallop between the eyes while he was talking.

Professor Klapper’s eyes, which were shaped to the contours of sadness, slanting downward like two arrows taking aim at his lower face, had kept themselves unseen, obscured in the iconic thinker’s pose.

There was silence in the classroom, the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing, until, at last, Jonas Elijah Klapper lifted his brow from off of his palm and revealed his face, which was contorted in silent-film fashion with the unmistakable mien of unmitigated aghastment and dismay. His lips were twisted, and his nose, a fleshy mound piled high on his face, was crinkled up as if some gaggingly offensive smell had entered the room.

“No, no, no!
That’s not what I was talking about at all!” He held up his two hands in an apotropaic gesture. “Not at all, not at all! Spare me, spare us all, such bromides. And above all keep the bad fictions of Charles Darwin out of my classroom. Darwin’s fingerprints are all over this poem, indeed! I will not have such infantile slobberings upon the sacred body of literature”—he pronounced it, as always, “lit-er-a-toor”—“not even upon a poem of Matthew Arnold’s. And since, Mr. Seltzer, you are a committed Darwinist”—the word came pushed out of his lips as if by peristalsis— “let me inform you that, though Arnold may have published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, he had actually written it sometime between 1849 and
1852.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859. If you want to point to such precursors and influences, then do at least check the dates. You’d have been better off citing the
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, published anonymously in 1844, by Robert Chambers, a radical journalist. But do, please, have a care for my suffering sensibilities! Now it is Darwinism with which I must contend.” He turned his head away so that his mournful countenance fell upon the non-Darwinians in the room. “As I have oft warned those of you who have any proclivity to receive my instruction, most of what passes for science is merest scientism.”

The moments while Klapper spoke had at first borne the true marker of a nightmare: too perfect a realization of one’s worst fears not to be a dream delivered sizzling from hell. Horrible disbelief was followed by far more horrible belief, and for the remaining hours of this first meeting of “The Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self,” as Jonas Elijah Klapper’s voice continued without interruption, not even Gideon Raven hazarding a comment, Cass sat unmoving, unhearing, almost unexisting, deliquescing into a numbness that approached the state of being nothing at all.

The two-and-a-half-hour seminar was drawing to a close. Professor Klapper was speaking of next week’s assignment, Aristotle’s
Poetics
.

“…
answering the challenge that his discarded teacher, Plato, issued after he had symbolically, if not diabolically, banished the poet from his city of reason. As Plato wrote in his
Republic”
—Klapper was staring off into the inscribed distance—“‘Let us, then, conclude our return to the topic of poetry and affirm that we really had good grounds then for dismissing her from our city, … for reason constrained us. And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ I skip over a few lines here, not from lack of recall but lack of relevance, and proceed:
‘
But nevertheless let it be declared that, if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell.’

“Now, my creatures of sweetness and light”—this was one of his endearments for his students—“it is in the context of this gauntlet flung down by Plato that Aristotle’s
Poetics
must be read. Aristotle is answering
the older philosopher’s challenge by pragmatically—I use the word in the sense of William James, which is my own as well—connecting it to psychopoiesis.”

Cass recognized the word from his summer studies of the twenty-eight tomes. Psychopoiesis. Soul-making. The coinage was, so far as Cass knew, Klapper’s own, struck out of the ancient Greek.

“Poetry is in the business of psychopoiesis at least as much as philosophy is. And if I might be permitted, humbly, to stand between Plato and Aristotle and offer my emendation, you will hear me fervently whispering ‘oh more, far more!’

Cass was suddenly called back into himself by the pain squeezing his heart as he contemplated that all but he and the girl who had voluntarily departed under the professor’s gaze would be returning next week to hear the dialogue between Plato, Aristotle, and Jonas Elijah Klapper. Even those three undergraduate lovelies, who had managed, over the course of the seminar, to progress from chattering neophytes to wide-eyed acolytes, would be allowed to attend. He alone was to be cast out for the sin of his unclothed ignorance and arrogance.

And then, suddenly, Jonas Elijah Klapper was addressing him again, all vestiges of vexation vanished.

“Mr. Seltzer, I would like you most especially to pay keen attention to Aristotle’s concept of peripeteia. Would you, by blind chance or happy happenstance, happen to know what peripeteia means?”

“Reversal of fortune.” Cass’s hoarse voice sounded unfamiliar to him. It sounded older, the voice of an ancient knowing that the best has been and will be no more.

“Excellent! Peripeteia! Reversal of fortune! Exceedingly excellent! It’s a most un-Darwinian concept, wouldn’t you say, my dear boy? Now you are thinking! Yes, until next week’s peripeteia, my creatures, my delights!”

And Jonas Elijah Klapper, still beaming, gathered up his books and papers and shambled out the door.

Cass looked up from the table to see forty-two eyes fastened upon him. The three girls looked away so quickly they may have lost a few eyelashes. Only Gideon Raven continued to hold his stare, blankly and noncommittally He pushed back his chair and came over to Cass’s side, tossing something onto the table right in front of him.

Cass’s first thought was that Gideon Raven was so outraged with him, either for upsetting Jonas Elijah Klapper or, more probably, for the original sin itself, that he wanted to pelt him with a spitball and his aim wasn’t good. Cass looked up questioningly, and Raven gave him a little twitch of a smile and then exited from the room, the rest of the seminar silently filing out after him.

Cass looked at the missile. It was a piece of paper that had been folded over many times, until it was the volume of a sugar cube. Cass unfolded it to find a flyer for something called “Sex Week at Frankfurter”:

What did this mean? Could Gideon Raven be so offended that he was insinuating that Cass was of an alternative sexuality? The fire in Cass’s face and under his scalp, which had begun to subside, re-flared.

After a few minutes of sitting there alone, it occurred to him to turn the paper over. There, scribbled in chicken scratch, were the words:

Cass had not the hint of a clue as to what these words could mean. Was it a line from a poem? These people were all so formidably well read. Whatever it meant, it must have been given to him because of what had befallen him during the seminar. Did it contain a hint as to what was the nature of the peripeteia that he had just undergone? Was it what he needed to know in order to survive as a student of Jonas Elijah Klapper’s?

He trotted over to the Lipschitz Library and up to the reference librarian on duty. She was a woman of about sixty, thin-lipped and spare. The nameplate identified her as Aviva Landesmann.

“Would you have any idea how I could go about finding out what this means?” Cass asked Aviva Landesmann.

She read it aloud, scowled at Cass, and then read it aloud again.

Aviva Landesmann looked familiar somehow. She reminded him of someone, someone who stirred up forgotten love and confusion.

Did psychologists have a word for this sort of thing, a reminding that consists in nothing but a mute emotion that can’t name its own object? Was he having a Proustian moment? He wouldn’t know. Wherever he turned, he was confronted by the vast ignorance that made him unentitled to be a student of Faith, Literature, and Values.

Aviva Landesmann was staring at the slip of paper. She turned it over and saw the announcement for Sex Week at Frankfurter, and her expression, which was none too encouraging to begin with, curdled with distaste.

“Feh!”

That’s when it hit Cass. Aviva Landesmann reminded him of his beloved bubbe, his mother’s mother.

His mother always kept the details of her stormy relations with her mother from Cass and Jesse when they were little, but he remembered the unsettling voice from behind the closed door of his mother’s bedroom when she phoned his bubbe, terrifying bursts of fury that his mother emitted with no one else. When she emerged, her face white and strained, she could only say that his bubbe had “done it again.” He later learned that what Bubbe had done again was what people with borderline personality disorder always do with their intimates: get their goats, push their buttons, pick at their vulnerable spots, draw them into destructive dramas that don’t let up until the borderline tastes blood. Then, finally, Bubbe had stepped over some invisible line and had gone too far, even for her. All that Cass knew was that the support group that his mother belonged to, Borderline Offspring Injured Lifelong (BOIL), backed Deb up in her decision. One of the rules in the BOIL handbook was: set the limits of your own tolerance. Deb had reached her limits.

Cass had nevertheless loved his bubbe. He couldn’t help himself. She used to sing a special song about a rooster, “Cookooreekoo,” just for him. She had spoken in a special cooing voice, just for him, her oldest grandson, whom she called Chaim, his Hebrew name.

“Oy, such a boychik, so
shoen”
—which means “beautiful”—“so
klig”
— which means “smart,” though it tore up her heart that he was being brought up like a
vilda chaya
, a wild animal.

Deb always blamed inbreeding for her mother’s personality disorder. Deb blamed inbreeding for a great deal. Deb—who was originally Devo-rah Gittel Sheiner—came from a family that belonged to a sect of Ha-sidim, the Valdeners, who had originated in a town called Valden, in Hungary. Almost all the Hasidic sects are named after the towns where their first Grand Rabbi, the founder of his dynastic lineage, had originated, or where he had established his rabbinical court. So there are the Satmars, from Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania), the Lubavitchers from Lubavitch, Lithuania, the Breslovers, from Breslov, Ukraine, and at least a dozen sects still surviving from the dozens more there had been before the Second World War. And all of them are crystallized around a charismatic Rebbe, the term that means “my rabbi,” with the position of Rebbe passed down through family lines, from father to son or to another male relative, though occasionally there are controversies, splits, factions. Only the Breslovers never saw fit to have any Rebbe but their first, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: a mysterious figure with messianic aspirations, known for his collection of allegorical tales, and himself the great-grandson of the eighteenth century’s founder of Hasidism itself, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.

The current Rebbe of the Valdeners, Rav Bezalel Sheiner, also claimed a lineage that could be traced back to the Ba’al Shem Tov. Deb was related, on both her maternal and paternal sides, to the Valdener rabbinic dynasty, though according to her that was nothing to brag about. Valdeners tend to marry each other, so just about everybody was related to everybody.

“And then they wonder about the genetic diseases.”

Cass’s father, Ben Seltzer, had also come from a fairly observant family, but it was standard modern Orthodox, so Deb’s family was exotic to him, too. Both Deb and Ben had wandered far from the religiosity they had each been born into, but Deb had had to travel a lot farther to get to where they were, the non-kosher and non-Sabbath-observing house in which Cass and Jesse had been raised. After Jesse’s Bar Mitzvah, his parents had let their membership in the synagogue lapse.

The Valdeners lived in a self-contained village, tucked into the folds near the rocky Palisades edging the Hudson River. It wasn’t a gated community, but it might as well have been. Nobody but Valdeners lived in
New Walden, except for a few sons-in-law and daughters-in-law who had come over from some other Hasidic sect.

The other sects lived in urban areas—in Jerusalem, or Montreal, or Brooklyn—always in some well-defined section. In Brooklyn it was in Williamsburg and Boro Park, where the Valdeners, too, had settled when they had first come to America. The previous Valdener Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Sheiner, who in the 1930s had shepherded some portion of his flock out of Europe and into safety in the nick of time, had decided in the 1950s, that Brooklyn, too, was getting
tzu heiss
—too hot—what with the increasing crime rate and the deteriorating relations between the Hasidim and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to speak of the high rents that made it difficult for the large Valdener families—average number of children, 6.9—to afford decent housing. The Rebbe had quietly, so as not, God forbid, to raise the fears of the Gentile farmers in the area, purchased a large chicken farm not far from where Rip Van Winkle had snored, and built a self-contained shtetl, the first village in New York State to be completely governed by a religious authority, with the town’s mayor being none other than the Grand Rabbi himself, and the aldermen his closest disciples.