How can one forget a revelation? One can forget something normal that any mortal might know, a simple piece of information or an item one has discovered or got by paying cash: a name, the plot of a film, or an umbrella. But not a prophecy. This makes him realize how deceptive one’s memory can be and forces him to contemplate the possibility that it was not so much a prophecy as a dream. A dream that had seemed so real he had mistaken it for a prophecy. But he knows it wasn’t a dream. And also knows that if he doesn’t manage to remember, he will feel eternally mortified. His wife taunts him at every opportunity: “What kind of prophet are you? If you can’t remember the prophecy, there was no such thing. Ezekiel and Isaiah would never have been prophets if they’d forgotten what they were supposed to be prophesying. That would have been hilarious, for sure. Can you imagine them saying they’d forgotten?”
“What if a prophet suffered from memory loss? That’s hardly his fault. I can even agree that I am a bad prophet, a clueless or mediocre prophet. But in either case I am a prophet. A truth was revealed to me. I know that is the case and I’m not deceiving myself. That fact isn’t belied by my lapses of memory. I will remember some day. But even if I can’t, it’s nothing unusual. Nobody can deprive me of my role simply because there’s never been an absent-minded prophet before. There’d never been a prophet who flew off in a chariot of fire until one did just that.”
The prophetic state can be a spontaneous happening or be prompted by a variety of techniques: meditation, magical or mystical formulas, movements or punishment of the body. Also by music, particularly drums. Or by dancing or ingesting narcotics. Maybe, thinks the prophet, he should stimulate himself, take recourse to one of these methods. He is increasingly clear that what’s really serious is not that he has forgotten what he should be prophesying, but his inability to put it all behind him. This makes him feel even more exasperated, sinks him into a mood of deep despondency, and makes him finally suspect that the revelation that caused him to get up, eyes sparkling, breathing feverishly, was exactly that, after the initial epiphany, he wouldn’t remember anything at all when he was out in the street.
A few years later, out of the blue, the prophet feels another revelation coming on. The trumpet blasts, the dazzling flashes of light, the words intoned clearly and slowly by a solemn voice. He had read that prophecies can be repeated, particularly in the case of prophets who feel reluctant to assume their role. To ensure this prophecy doesn’t elude him, he switches on his bedside lamp and looks for paper and pencil in his drawer. He can’t find either. He jumps out of bed. He can’t find either in his whole bedroom. He rushes into the kitchen; there’s a notepad hanging on the wall, in the shape of a chef wearing his hat: the pad is his apron. But when he gets there he sees that the pad is used up and the chef is displaying an obscene hole rather than an apron of sheets of paper. He’d forgotten. The pad had run out days ago and he hadn’t remembered to buy a new one, precisely because there hadn’t been any paper left to jot down a reminder to buy a new pad. This lack of coherence really winds the prophet up. Shouldn’t notepads have an end paper, where one can jot down a reminder to buy a new notepad? Sure enough the pad’s last page should, to a certain extent, fulfill this function. But how can we know that we’re writing on the last sheet if nothing identifies it as such? There could very well be one underneath. To ensure users know it’s the last one, at a glance, the solution would be to make it a different color: yellow, pale green, bluish, light enough to write on with the usual pens or pencils but distinct from the last white page, so one realizes it is the end sheet and jots down: “Buy another notepad.” They could even carry a message, like those calendars that tell you in mid-December: “Buy this or that new calendar,” understanding by “this or that” the brand of the calendar in question. Evidently this last sheet would increase the item’s price (because of the different color or extra printing), but this increase would be easily offset by the advantages of having the sheet. This final sheet would be similar to the sheet one finds in a checkbook, the one that indicates the checkbook is almost used up and that one should ask one’s bank for a new one.
The prophet is thinking all this while searching anxiously for a scrap of paper to jot down his revelation. But even before finding one (he finds a notebook in his son’s briefcase and tears a sheet out), he knows that when he finally has that sheet in front of him, and his pen (he takes one from the pencil case in the same briefcase), so much time will have passed and he will be so stressed out that he’ll forget what it was yet again. In effect, when he has the sheet in front of him and a pen at the ready, he can’t remember the revelation. Only shards, fragments, and vague ideas remain. But he finds it impossible to reconstruct. Besides, he’s wracked by doubt. Was this revelation the same as the last one or were they two distinct revelations? Has God repeated the message he’d not been able to remember, or did He decide it was a lost cause and send him a new one?
The day after he decides to put a notebook and pen on his bedside table, just in case, the revelation is repeated. Obviously he regrets forgetting it again, but he finds the fact he has had another revelation hugely encouraging; we can assert that he’s never been as optimistic as he is today. Because this second revelation confirms he is a genuine prophet. His only idiosyncrasy is that he has a bad memory. Another source of hope: if the revelation has been repeated once, it can be repeated again.
He buys a small cassette-recorder in an electronics shop; he always carries it with him and puts it on his bedside table at night, ready to switch it on as soon as he has another revelation: if he sees it’s going to elude him yet again, he’ll record it rather than write it down. Even so, he keeps the notebook and pencil nearby, in case the cassette recorder doesn’t work or the batteries run out, even though he checks them every week, and he throws them away and inserts new ones long before they run out.
The years go by, but all his precautions are in vain. He has no more revelations. That son who was in his cot when he had his first one is now twenty-eight years old. His father has alerted him: You could get a surprise at any time, and you must always be prepared. When he was seven, his mother died; father and son wondered for several days whether that could have possibly been the prophecy, that his mother would die and he’d be half-orphaned. But it didn’t strike any bells with his father. Even so, they kept wondering. Whenever a war broke out or there was a disaster somewhere in the world, father and son wondered whether that might not be what had been revealed.
The father is now on his deathbed and calls for his son. His son is sitting outside on a chair, head bowed. The doctor leaves the bedroom, tells him to go in and to be sure, above all, not to tire him. The son enters the bedroom in a highly emotional state. The prophet’s eyes sparkle; he tries to talk, but is exhausted. He tries to say something, is breathless, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes for a moment, as if keeping them open was a struggle, but then re-opens them immediately. He says: “Son . . .”; his son leans over, clasps his father’s right hand in both of his. “Before I die . . .” the prophet whispers. But he immediately goes silent again. He looks away and stares at the opposite wall. His son looks where his father is looking, in case there is some special sign, some thing to indicate what he is trying to say with those quavering words, evidently the last words he will ever say, his final farewell. The son squeezes his father’s hand even harder. “Rest. Don’t try to say anything.” The prophet suddenly feels a breath of energy. “I mean that . . .” The door opens, and the nurse clatters in on her heels. The voice of the dying man is lost in the racket. The son puts his ear to his father’s mouth, hopes he will repeat himself. The nurse changes the bottle on the drip that enters one of the dying man’s veins through a tube. The son is literally lying on top of his father. Once she has changed the bottle, the nurse leaves, trying to ensure that her heels don’t clatter as much as they did when she came in. The prophet opens his eyes again. When he yawns, there are grayish folds at the corners of his mouth. “That’s why . . .” “Don’t force yourself . . .” “. . . I didn’t know how to . . .”