36 Arguments for the Existence of God (27 page)

But what if Cass said “I love you” and Lucinda didn’t reciprocate? That would probably result in some degree of discomfort for Lucinda, and a huge loss for Cass, especially if Lucinda was discomfited enough to decide to move out: they had both agreed that the arrangement was experimental.

Cass supposes he has, for the sake of thoroughness, to fill in the box in which the situation is reversed, the lower box on the left, with Lucinda confessing her love and Cass keeping silent, even though he knows that this square exists only in the realm of the purely theoretical. Still, they call it game
theory
, don’t they? Better call them X and Y.

The last box is the one in which neither of them said “I love you.” That is the status quo.

So now how is Cass supposed to figure out from these boxes the rational thing to do?

If he says, “I love you,” then, considering the situation only from his own point of view, there is possible bliss but also possible hell, which, he supposes, cancel each other out. If he doesn’t say “I love you,” there is neither bliss nor hell to be gained. He will maintain the present situation, which is certainly a positive one for him—not as positive as bliss, of course, but definitely positive. It seems as if it is rational to keep silent— so rational, in fact, that he wonders why anyone would ever risk saying “I love you” first, which is a bit of a paradox.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that it isn’t always sensible to be rational.

Or perhaps the Bliss × 2 that can possibly result if a lover speaks out his love is so hugely positive that it blows all the other boxes out of the water. Could that explain why anyone dares to say “I love you” first?

And here’s another thought: If he shows Lucinda his little grid, it would be a way of indirectly saying “I love you” without taking the risk of saying the actual words. If Lucinda wants to accept his reasoning as a way of saying “I love you” and reciprocate, then they will keep the huge payoff of the first box on the left: Bliss × 2. But if she doesn’t want to reciprocate, then he won’t have blurted out an indiscretion that can’t be taken back. They can keep up their present relationship, maintaining the imperfect-but-preferable-to-nothing status quo. So, by indirectly saying “I love you,” Cass, or X, can possibly get the biggest payoff without risking the biggest payout.

Cass extends his grid to test out his calculations:

It is cogent. It is elegant. He has to admit he thinks it pretty damn near brilliant.

The Seltzer Equilibrium, he decides. Now he has an equilibrium to call his own.

There was no doubt among the seven students that something new and momentous was gathering itself around Jonas Elijah Klapper. His interests were precipitously veering away from literature and into theology, and a paradox shift of untold proportions was working its way out. The intensity of the cerebration going on before their eyes was both exalting and humbling. The ovoid seminar table was like the sacred circle that used to be drawn around the inspired poet-prophet to make a safe place for his wracking genius. His sentences emerged with the profundity, sententiousness, and obscurity of Gideon’s favorite poets, so that Gideon might have said that Jonas Elijah Klapper had become a crucible for poetry, only he knew, as they all knew, that something even beyond poetry was being spilled. His invocations of the thing beyond genius amazed them all, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who sometimes sat back blinking his eyes in wonder over words he had heard himself speak.

They were scheduled to meet from four until six-thirty on Wednesdays, but time ceased to behave conventionally once the seminar was under way. One week Jonas went on for four and a half hours without a break. Then there was the week in which he had abruptly gotten up and left after barely twenty minutes had elapsed.

Nothing surprised them anymore. They felt, at times, as if they themselves were careening toward the Sublime. The Subliminal and the Self had dropped out of the picture.

The syllabus had dropped out as well, and the seven of them never knew which books they ought to have read, only that the number was formidable, even for Gideon Raven, who was struggling with the rest of them to keep up with this thunderklap-in-the-making, as well as having
his own undergraduate classes to prepare, not to speak (really, Cass wished that he didn’t) of the continuing problems he had in his marriage.

At the top of the list of the books on Jonas Elijah Klapper’s mind was the
Zohar
, also known as
The Book of Splendor
, as well as the
Yetzirah
, also known as
The Book of Formation
, both of them fundamental texts in Kabbala, or Cabala, or Qabalah, which last was now Jonas’s preferred spelling, upon which, indeed, he would need henceforth to be insistent, because it was his informed suspicion that the alternative orthographic representations preserve far more sinister distortions. “Kabbala” was the spelling preferred by “Pharisaic normative Judaism,” the mainstream Judaism of conventional rabbis, about which Jonas Elijah harbored harsh reservations; “Cabala” was the spelling adopted by the Christian Cabalists, who, beginning sometime around the twelfth century, spuriously argued that Romanism had assumed full ownership of Jewish esotericism.

“The Christian spelling can most likely be traced to the influential gri-moire
Opus Mago-Cabalisticum
, which was authored by the Bavarian alchemist and theosophical thinker Georg von Welling, and appeared in 1735. Both variations are distortions of the Hebrew
—nota bene, the single
beth
, the letter
qoph
, not
kaph
—which orthographic distortions are not unrelated to the distortions that had been imposed on the ancient proto-Hebraic Gnosis, the Tree of Life, in which all the great religions, from Zoroastrianism to Tantric Hinduism to the New Age of the redwood-hot-tub crowd, have their roots, just as the Tree of Life itself has its roots in the grounding of all existence, which is the pure negativity of absolute unity, referred to sometimes as
LO
, the Hebrew for ‘no’ or ‘not,’ as in the
Detzniyutha, The Book of That Which Is Concealed
, which begins, and I quote: ‘The Book of That Which Is Concealed is the book of the balancing in weight. Until LO existed as weight, LO existed as seeing Face-to-Face. And the Earth was nullified. And the Crowns of the Primordial Kings were found as LO. Until the Head, desired by all desires, formed and communicated the Garments of Splendor. That weight arises from the place which is LO Him. Those who exist as LO are weighed in YH. In His body exists the weight. LO unites, and LO begins. In YH have they ascended, who LO are, and are, and will be.’”

They were all scrambling to get English-translation copies of
The Book
of Splendor
, and
The Book of Formations
, and
The Book of That Which Is Concealed
, since Professor Klapper had never sent his reading list to the campus bookstore. It was Gideon who went and found
The Book of Splendor
in the stacks, the only one of the books yet translated, and put it on reserve in Lipschitz so that they would all have access to it.

Another event that seemed to herald great-things-in-the-making was Professor Klapper’s exchanging his office for the adjacent one of Mar-jorie Cutter, his secretary. Marjorie was now occupying the large and sunny corner office, with its thick carpets and sectional sofa, and Professor Klapper was squeezed into quarters that duplicated more than ever the office he had left behind at Columbia. His students half expected to look out the window and see the traffic of Amsterdam Avenue creeping below.

Zackary Kreiser had suggested that Professor Klapper’s retreat to a confined space might signify his symbolic return to the womb while he was in the process of gestating some immense new idea. But Miriam Chan had shot down Zack’s suggestion, since it would entail that Jonas Elijah Klapper was the gestatee rather than the gestator.

Cass had defended Zack’s intuition, remembering Klapper’s words to the Valdener Rebbe that the Qabalist cosmic vessels, shattered in the birthing of the world, are to be thought of as representing the womb of the Cosmic Feminine Presence. Cass had left out the story of how he had happened to hear Professor Klapper speaking on the subject of gynecologico-cosmogony, but he convinced them that the Qabalist account of the
shevirah
, the violent bursting of the vessels that brought forth the flawed world, was not irrelevant to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s seeking the narrowed space of Marge’s former office.

The seven had done the moving and rearranging for the professor. They had just been able to squeeze Klapper’s huge desk into his new office, but there wasn’t space for much more, only his own green-cushioned chair and a flimsy metal folding chair that he kept folded up near his desk but could, if he wished, set up for a visitor, which he had done when Cass came by this afternoon to discuss the next phase of his independent study on faith. They were supposed to meet every Tuesday afternoon, but the last two Tuesdays, Cass had found the door closed and
his knock had drawn no response. The first week, he went to the next office over to ask Marge whether she knew when Professor Klapper would be back.