HOW TO READ A SACRED TEXT
ONE DAY PIERRE invited us to reconvene in the library, not in the evening but in the middle of the afternoon, not to sit round the table but in the comfortable wingback chairs and the deeply cushioned green-gold sofa, before the hearth. We would gather not to eat but to listen.
At last he would read a translation of the codex!
After his reading, we would have a bouillabaisse of memorable fishy flavors with seasonings fresh from Zanzibar. I wondered if the danger Pierre’s father had mentioned before our cave expedition was more metaphysical than physical. Would reenvisioning the book of Genesis cause minds to quake? Certainly.
Without hesitation, Adam and Arielle exchanged a single glance and claimed the two seats on the green sofa, facing the fireplace, which hosted a small flame. Left of the sofa were two matching wingback chairs, high and mighty as thrones, upholstered in a feather pattern in French blue, with a small Louis XV table between them. I chose the chair closer to the little fire, while Pierre seated himself at a right angle to the sofa so that his daughter was at his right elbow. He had entered the room carrying the black French horn case, which he now laid across his lap before snapping up the bright clasps.
“Where is your father?” I asked.
The bedouin’s low, barrellike chair—replete with cushions whose fabric had been heavily embroidered and set with tiny mirrors—was empty. Pierre shrugged. “Perhaps he chooses to remain below, reading the paintings.”
Although Pierre opened the case so we could see the codex, he did not remove it from its safe place. I thought its inscribed signs looked like rivets, as though they were shaped to hold elusive meanings on to the dry, frail sheets. “I place these pages here, for you to see. We will not touch them, though. I read from my draft of the English translation. But I want the codex to be present,” he said, “to represent the person whose own hand so long ago hovered above them, writing.”
Each of us acknowledged the presence of the codex by inclining our heads in the direction of the case.
“I translated first into modern standard Arabic, the language of Cairo, then into French, the language of the country where I have chosen to live, and finally into English because it is the language we come closest to having in common, among the five of us. Of course my English is not so skillfully deployed or idiomatic as one might wish.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry my father is not here, but I will read the Arabic translation to him later.”
He glanced around at all of us and at the little fire. I thought he wanted to remember the moment accurately—the color and size of the flame, how his daughter was dressed—in a cotton shirt and neat khaki pants, the sort with a zipper concealed in a seam encircling each leg just above the knee so the pants might be shortened if they proved too warm. Her cotton shirt was dyed burnt orange. She had not bothered to change from her comfortable lace-up walking shoes into something more fashionable. Adam and I were both stylishly dressed in the neutral linen clothes we had worn when we arrived. My shoes were fashionable but low-heeled, a tasteful compromise between style and comfort.
“It is a jeweled moment,” Adam said. Though he spoke to us all, he turned his head and looked only at Arielle, beside him on the sofa. How lovely it was to hear Adam’s voice—calm, warm, assured. It was the voice of a man of cultivation, a man of the world. “Like John Keats, I would ask of this moment ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ It seems too lovely to be true: to be here, with you all, in the south of France.” Despite his warm words, Adam rubbed his hands together briskly as though they were cold. He nodded at the sprightly flame dancing in the fireplace, and I thought of the comfort we had drawn from our fire on cold damp nights under the rocky overhang.
“‘O for a beaker full of the warm South,’” Adam quoted from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He hesitated and extended his hand as though he held an imaginary wineglass and were toasting the flames:
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
I knew that he did not quote for me.
Keats’s words seemed new-minted when Adam pronounced them. Pierre blushed for the young man, this handsome American, so obviously smitten with his daughter. “Well then, from poetic words to sacred ones.” Pierre cleared his throat. “Perhaps they are the same. Let me begin,” he said. But feeling the need for explanation, he hesitated again.
“These notes are thoughts written about two and a half thousand years before the time we now live in, before the beginning of the common era. While these words do not compare, in antiquity, to the paintings that exist in the system of caves below our feet—or they to the age of the star-writ dark studied so devotedly by Lucy’s husband—this writer’s mind, like the minds and needs of artists of parietal paintings and drawings, was like ours. You must not think of him as foreign, or remote. He was like us, a quester.”
Pierre shifted his body to look at me, saw with approval my excitement and interest. “We are full of curiosity?” he said, in a friendly tone.
“Of course,” I murmured. But I also felt a special calm. The moment, the culmination of all our effort, was too important to be defined only with the froth of excitement. I closed my hand around the titanium case of the flash drive.
“The Neanderthals had bigger brains than ours; those later ones, the cave artists, Homo sapiens, and those who lived and wrote in Egypt and Mesopotamia were more like us in brain size and in stature. Dress them as we are dressed, and any of them would pass unnoted on the streets of Paris.
“Even before our codex, a few passages in our own Genesis had been written down by a scribe designated as ‘J’ because he always referred to God as Yahweh, which is spelled with an initial J in German. About the same time, other passages in Genesis were written down, most biblical scholars believe, by an author they designate as ‘E’ because he always referred to God as Elo-him. Two hundred years after J and E walked the earth, the writings of J and E were brought together by a priest—his work is identified by biblical scholars with a ‘P’—who also added his own original cosmic view of creation, the magnificent first two chapters, more or less, of Genesis. The opening of our Genesis was written after the other parts, though it is presented first. We do not know the real names of J or E or even P. The words of J and E were inscribed in the eighth century BCE, or ‘before the Common Era,’ as scholars say so as not to be so provincially Christ-centered.”
“Were they Israelites?” I asked.
“Yes, though their story has deeper, older roots in the creation stories of the Sumerians and the Babylonians, who were not Semitic peoples. J lived in the land of Judah to the south, while E was from the north, the Kingdom of Israel.”
“God dictated the first five books of the Bible to Moses,” Adam said. “Or so I have always been taught and led to believe.”
He spoke as calmly as he had of Keats, but Arielle reached over and rested her hand on his knee. I would have done the same, had I been beside him.
“Perhaps the historical truth is more complex,” Pierre said to Adam. “Perhaps to some the idea of Moses represented the spirit of ‘the beginning’ or ‘that early time when Moses lived,’ and later people took the era of Moses to mean Moses himself, literally. You are correct—the churches usually do not teach their parishioners that the so-called book of Genesis was composed over a long period of time, and by several authors, none of them Moses but more simple men, not political leaders but poets, inspired but obscure storytellers. Some scholars even think that J was not a single person, but there was a J1, J2, J3. In any case, passages by J and by E were incorporated into the account assembled by P, in the sixth century BCE.
“And now we have been given these words that have traveled in the refurbished case of a French horn, these squarish leaves of papyrus I have translated—at least a first draft of translation—in Arabic, in French, and in English. Our codex, present with us here, in this moment, was also written at the time of P, in the sixth century before the Common Era. P wove the others’ verses together, but more important, perhaps, he gave us the beginning of the beginning, the first two chapters of the creation story that trumpet down the centuries louder than a shofar. His words, rendered in Middle English by Wycliffe and later again in English at the time of King James I, who had commissioned the scholars of his court to make a new translation from the Greek and Hebrew, are these: ‘In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.’ Of course that is not the only way one could translate the opening passage. Robert Alter in 1996 begins his Genesis translation: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth—’”
“Please read what you have translated to us, Pierre,” I urged.
This day is the first birthday of my twins, a daughter and a son, and they are healthy as blushing apples growing on a green tree. My wife and I agree, of life, one can ask no more than this.
Overcome with emotion, Pierre’s voice trembled. He swallowed. “I could have translated ‘blushing’ as ‘red,’ but because the children are so young and ‘growing’ is mentioned, I chose ‘blushing’ to imply process; they are not yet fully ripe and red. I suppose I could have said ‘reddening,’ but ‘blushing’ is more naturally associated with the cheek of a person, and it’s more tender.” He continued:
No one knows how people came to this fertile place between the rivers. No one knows why darkness comes at end of day nor why we sleep. Nor why the sun and moon and stars travel the sky, in their turns. Into the mouths of our children and ourselves we give good food and sweet liquids to drink. That is the first requirement of our lives as human animals. Like Tigris and Euphrates, two rivers—of food and drink—enter us, flow through us as through a fertile land, and then these substances leave our bodies as two kinds of foulness. There is no shame, for in this way we live. We ourselves emerge from the nether region of the body.
No one knows why sheep and donkeys, birds and cattle and all animals of the water and of the earth and of the air, like ourselves, are created male and female, or by what magic we mate, and from that mating little ones, each of the kind whence it originated, come forth.
Only in imagination do creatures come forth who are part this or part that. No men are born with antlers, and no women are born with wings, for that is not the way of procreation. Yet we can imagine demons and angels, though no person, except through wine or fasting or fever or dream, beholds these fantasticals.
Surely our creators formed the first of us even as we have come together to form our children. What might have been the food and drink, what might have been the mating, of those first gods? What pleasured them, sustained the god forces, and made them fruitful?
My friend, a priest, tells my wife and me a story of one creator who made the heaven and the earth in seven days. His poem begins with the beginning, “In the beginning, God created…” I point to our twins. I place one of them upon his knee and the other upon my own knee. Their faces beam like two stars. To my friend, who taught me myself how to write, even these words recorded here, even to him I say, “But life comes from the melding of Two who are the same and yet distinct and different.” I suggest another opening for his poem.
In the beginning, there was something
and there was nothing.
When they connected, there was everything.
And it was everywhere.
Then, I thought, life is throughout the universe. I closed my eyes and squeezed the memory stick with all my might. We are neither alone nor unique in our aliveness.
“The writer contradicts Genesis,” Adam said. “He proposes an alternative.”
“Yes,” Pierre answered.
“It is only his supposition, his imagination, his audacity,” Adam went on, trying to control his rising anger.
“Because we live in our own time, we must each create new myths to represent the truth,” Pierre said as nonaggressively as a voice can be voiced. “How, if you were going to tell the story—how would you tell it, Lucy?”
I felt dazed.
Waiting for my reply, he remarked, “I could have translated the phrase ‘when they connected’ as ‘when they collided,’ but I wanted to avoid the suggestion of violence. Our author—I call him ‘X’—has been thinking of human procreation. Surely connection is more in that spirit than collision. And, Lucy, how do you think of creation, of the beginning?”
Tranced, I spoke as though I read words chiseled on the air; I knew I spoke of my own need:
When the atoms of gray dust began to stir, each searching for the other which it had simply imagined into being (having no eyes with which to search but only yearning), there were forces that caused among the atoms a swirling, bending, curling, both inward and outward. The swirling was like the whorl on the pad on the underside of a pointing finger. And the gathering of the dust was like those distant shining smudges we apprehend scattered in the blackness of space known as galaxies and known to be composed of stars of enormous size and number.
When the dust began to congregate, it stirred itself into the idea of fruitfulness, though it lay helpless and dry.
Was it the tears of a god, shed in pity of the puny prehuman effort, that added the necessary lubricant?
Or was it an accidental splash over the channel of a river that saturated the dust and made sticky clay?
Was it a lapping wave from the edge of a salt sea onto a stand of grass that created a fecund marsh?
Or was the beginning at a place now known as a dry gorge, a place where rock and clay have crumbled to sand, a place shaken by the distant thunder of the hooves of vast herds of oryx, gazelle, zebra?
While I recited what had been given to my mind to say, I thought of Thom and of the magnitude of his inquiry, and the question of fidelity evaporated. It was insignificant.
Though words had stopped, I imagined myself and the friends who now sat about me in Africa, at the Olduvai Gorge where the fossil bones of Lucy had been found.
“Your rhapsody, our Lucy, is not so different from that of the unknown scribe,” Arielle said. “My father gives him a more casual tone. Your speaking has more of the formal notes of poetry.”
Pierre said, “If my father were present, he would say: ‘We speculate, we imagine. Because we are human.’”
“I feel bewitched,” Adam said, but his face was eagerly turned to Arielle. “I feel I could put my hand through a membrane that we can’t see, and there would be the hand of the scribe. I felt that way looking at the human handprints in the cave.”
Adam turned to look at me, and I felt frightened by the rush of time and space in my brain.
I saw myself night-walking with Thom, on the outskirts of Iowa City into a low pocket of fireflies, and how he had laughed and flapped his arms and said, “It’s like walking in the Milky Way.” And then we had walked out beyond the city to a high, dark place and looked up at the real stars, and Thom had murmured, “Behold the sacred text, which each of us must read differently.” Surely Thom was good. Surely he had loved me as I loved him, been faithful and loyal. Plum could have transferred the images to my flash drive. I hoped it was so, but I knew that I would never know, and I need not concern myself with the question. My path had turned. Boustrophedon.
Pierre went to the library window, looked out, and said, “It’s thoroughly dark now.”
Preceded by an enticing fragrance, the serving staff quietly appeared bearing to the table a clay tureen of bouillabaisse and an immense cut-glass platter of salad greens. Small glass bowls glittered on the plates. “Do you see Grandfather?” Arielle asked.
“I see a light coming this way, at his speed, approximately. He’s come home across the face of the mountain this time.”
“Have you finished the reading?” I asked.
“I’ve finished the first part; there is a second part, much more abstract, but it grows out of the first.”
“Read it, please,” Adam said.
Pierre returned to his chair, sighed, and began again to read his transcription of the wedge-shaped marks on the little pages. I breathed in the potpourri fragrance of the hot stew.
In the beginning, there was something
and there was nothing.
When they connected, there was everything.
And it was everywhere.
When my mind meditates on my own nature, and on my origins, I ask, “Am I, then, something, or am I nothing?” Does everything, including myself, partake of both these elements which I call Something and the invisible twin of Something whose name in my story is Nothing? “In the beginning” my friend writes. But the beginning assumes the existence of time. Both time and place are human perceptions. Let us step over those mud puddles. Let us say, “In the Realm of the Ultimate, beginning and end did not and do not and cannot exist. By the Ultimate we may mean the Infinite.”
I cup my open hand before my mouth, and I puff my breath against my flesh and into the cup of my hand. I do not see the air, but I feel it when it moves. Breath is not Nothing. Perhaps there are other realities not only invisible to sight but also unapprehendable by touch and by all the senses. That Nothing which is no thing to be apprehended by neither eye nor ear, nor tongue nor nostril nor simple skin, might be called the Spirit that resides in its own domain. The Creator Spirit—I imagine it Magnificent and Magnanimous.
What is man, then, of whom I can be mindful? Is he naught but dust or clay; so writes my friend, who is a good priest, kind to the poor as well as attentive to his writing and also attentive to the collecting and retelling of old tales so that they might not perish from the earth. He writes, “Man was dust, formed by the fingers of God so that he had limbs and body and a face, an image of God was man, but inert and without meaning till God breathed life into him—Adam.” So writes my friend, whom I do not believe, though I am his friend and admirer.
What if God is Nothing, without shape or form? And we, too, are, in part, nothing?
Then that is good news indeed, for it means we cradle divinity within ourselves.
We were speechless. Stunned by what the ancient scribe had termed “good news,” we looked at one another’s faces and felt stricken. I pictured the poet Wordsworth walking with his staff, like the bedouin, and would have said I preferred the ideas of pantheism, but at that moment, the library door banged open and three men came into the room, the first with a drawn pistol.
For an instant the intruders appeared only as impressions or shapes—one, a long dark rabbinical shape with a beard; two, a business suit with a face like an eagle; three, a tweedy British form.
I sprang up from my chair and exclaimed, “Gabriel Plum!” Beyond these three, through the library door, in the hall was a coterie of dark forms.
In a quick, low tone, Pierre Saad said, “Stay where you are, Lucy.” Then he stepped near the edge of the carpet, though not beyond the territory it defined, held out his hand in friendly gesture, and spoke. “Pierre Saad here, old chap. We met in Cairo. I’m pleased to see you, Dr. Plum.”
Gabriel Plum took a few steps forward, followed by his two cohorts, but he did not advance enough to shake the proffered hand. Instead he waggled the steel barrel of his pistol.
“The demons of literalism,” I murmured so that Arielle would have some notion of what was at stake.
“I suppose you’ve come for the manuscript?” Pierre said.
“And for your pendant, Lucy,” Gabriel said, moving the barrel of his handgun to point at me. Did Gabriel fear Thom’s starry secrets, or did he covet them?
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“It is less a matter of you, madam, than of the blasphemous codex,” the bearded one remarked in curiously accented English.
Pierre frowned. “Then let me give it to you, by all means, my friend. Put away your pistol.” Pierre snapped shut the locks of the French horn case.
Adam had risen so gradually that no one noticed his moving, but now he was standing beside Pierre.
“Does the übermensch wish to speak?” Gabriel sneered at Adam. “Or act?”
From the doorway behind them came a stirring, a parting of those dark forms, a making way, and then another voice speaking, a soft Arabic voice, crinkled with age. Holding his twisty staff crowned with growing green, the bedouin walked through the men waiting in the hall and stepped just inside the library, still speaking. Very gently, he closed the door behind him.
“My father extends greetings to you,” Pierre interpreted. “He quotes from the Psalms, albeit in Arabic. Allow me to translate: ‘He preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies.’”
All in an instant, their three pairs of eyes shifted to look at the beautifully appointed table, and the wrinkled old man took a red leather book from the shelf, opened it, and pressed the control. The bookcase revolved open. Pierre pushed Adam through it. I grabbed Arielle’s wrist and pulled her with me. Shots were fired. Immediately I heard the satisfying click and lock of the bookcase behind us. Like spirits, we floated down the stairs to the netherworld.