Psyche, Anchises, Mary: there must be better, less prurient, more philosophical ways of thinking about the whole god-and-man business. But has she the time or the equipment, to say nothing of the inclination, to do so?
Inwardness. Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god's being? A question that no one seems to ask any more, except to an extent her new find Susan Mitchell, who is not a philosopher either; a question that went out of fashion during her lifetime (she remembers it happening, remembers her surprise), just as it came into fashion not too long before her lifetime commenced. Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her a Kantian kind of question. If her ear is right, then inwardness started its run with the man from Königsberg and ended, more or less, with Wittgenstein the Viennese destroyer.
'Gods do exist,' 'writes Friedrich Hölderlin, who had read his Kant, 'but they carry on their lives somewhere up above us in another realm, not much interested, it would seem, in whether we exist or not.' In bygone times those gods bestrode the earth, walked among men. But to us modern folk it is no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. 'We come too late.'
She reads less and less widely as she grows older. A not uncommon phenomenon. For Hölderlin, however, she always has time. Great-souled Hölderlin she would call him if she were Greek. Nevertheless, about Hölderlin on the gods she has her doubts. Too innocent, she thinks, too ready to take things at face value; not alert enough to the cunning of history. Things are rarely as they seem to be, she would like to instruct him. When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. The gods have not retreated: they cannot afford to.
Odd that the man who put his finger on the divine apatheia, the inability of the gods to feel, and their consequent need to have others do their feeling for them, should have failed to see the effects of apatheia on their erotic life.
Love and death. The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves. That is why they are so curious about us, so endlessly inquisitive. We call Psyche a silly, prying girl, but what was a god doing in her bed in the first place? In marking us down for death, the gods gave us an edge over them. Of the two, gods and mortals, it is we who live the more urgently, feel the more intensely. That is why they cannot put us out of their minds, cannot get by without us, ceaselessly watch us and prey on us. That, finally, is why they do not declare a ban on sex with us, merely make up rules about where and in what form and how often. Inventors of death; inventors of sex tourism too. In the sexual ecstasies of mortals, the frisson of death, its contortions, its relaxings: they talk about it endlessly when they have had too much to drink – who they first got to experience it with, what it felt like. They wish they had that inimitable little quiver in their own erotic repertoire, to spice up their couplings with each other. But the price is one they are not prepared to pay. Death, annihilation: what if there is no resurrection, they wonder misgivingly?
We think of them as omniscient, these gods, but the truth is they know very little, and what they know know only in the most general of ways. No body of learning they can call their own, no philosophy, properly speaking. Their cosmology an assortment of commonplaces. Their sole expertise in astral flight, their sole homegrown science anthropology They specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack; they study us because they are envious.
As for us, do they guess (what irony!) that what makes our embraces so intense, so unforgettable, is the glimpse they give us of a life we imagine as theirs, a life we call (since our language has no word for it) the beyond? I do not like that other world, writes Martha Clifford to her pen pal Leopold Bloom, but she lies: why would she write at all if she did not want to be swept off to another world by a demon lover?
Leopold, meanwhile, strolls around the Dublin Public Library peeking, when no one is looking, between the legs of the statues of goddesses. If Apollo has a marble cock and balls, does Artemis, he wonders, have an orifice to match? Investigations in aesthetics, that is what he likes to tell himself he is engaged in: how far does the artist's duty to nature extend? What he really wants to know, however, had he only the words for it, is whether congress is possible with the divine.
And she herself? How much has she learned about gods in her wanderings around Dublin with that irremediably ordinary man? Almost like being married to him. Elizabeth Bloom, second and ghostly wife of.
What she knows for certain about the gods is that they peek at us all the time, peek even between our legs, full of curiosity, full of envy; sometimes go so far as to rattle our earthly cage. But how deep, she asks herself today, does that curiosity really run? Aside from our erotic gifts, are they curious about us, their anthropological specimens, to the degree that we in turn are curious about chimps, or about birds, or about flies? Despite some evidence to the contrary, she would like to think, chimps. She would like to think the gods admire, however grudgingly, our energy, the endless ingenuity with which we try to elude our fate. Fascinating creatures, she would like to think they remark to each other over their ambrosia; so like us in many respects; their eyes in particular so expressive; what a pity they lack that je ne sais quoi without which they can never ascend to sit beside us!
But perhaps she is wrong about their interest in us. Or rather, perhaps she used to be right, but now is wrong. In her heyday, she would like to think, she could have given winged Eros himself cause to pay earth a visit. Not because she was so much of a beauty but because she longed for the god's touch, longed until she ached; because in her longings, so unrequitable and therefore so comical when acted on, she might have promised a genuine taste of what was missing back home on Olympus. But everything seems now to have changed. Where in the world today does one find such immortal longings as hers used to be? Not in the personal columns, for sure. 'SWF, 5' 8", thirties, brunette, into astrology, biking, seeks SWM, 35-45 for friendship, fun, adventure.' Nowhere: 'DWF, 5' 8", sixties, runs to death and death meets her as fast, seeks G, immortal, earthly form immaterial, for ends to which no words suffice.' In the editorial office they would frown. Indecent desires, they would say, and toss her in the same basket as the pederasts.
We do not call on the gods because we no longer believe in them. She hates sentences that hinge on because. The jaws of the trap snap shut, but the mouse, every time, has escaped. And what an irrelevancy anyway! How misguided! Worse than Hölderlin! Who cares what we believe? The sole question is whether the gods will continue to believe in us, whether we can keep alive the last flicker of the flame that once used to burn in them. 'Friendship, fun, adventure': what kind of appeal is that, to a god? More than enough fun where they come from. More than enough beauty too.
Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.
A vision, an opening up, as the heavens are opened up by a rainbow when the rain stops falling. Does it suffice, for old folk, to have these visions now and again, these rainbows, as a comfort, before the rain starts pelting down again? Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?