On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Read Free Book Online

possible they became too great in number for God to measure with calm and justice? It may be that karma has been in a species of uproar ever since the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the gulags.
    The moment you postulate that God is striving to promulgate His vision across the stars, you are also postulating that the nature of the Beyond—to use another word than the Hereafter—is existential. Not fixed, but changing with cosmic circumstances.
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    Well, you have certainly touched on my next question. You see God as an artist. I think all too often your visions of the Hereafter or the Beyond are built on your own experience of this life. Couldn’t God just as well be an engineer?
    Absolutely.
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    Or a general?
    Yes.
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    A public administrator? Or a diplomat?
    Yes, yes.
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    Those are all human occupations.
    How can God not be all those things? God is certainly an engineer. An engineer would see it all in terms of future construction. How do you organize the Hereafter? How do you arrive at the best levels of spiritual sanitation? Yes! Heavenly comfort stations for psychic waste are not necessarily to be taken for granted. When I speak of God as an artist, I don’t pretend to mean that God might be a novelist, as if that is all God is up to. Finally, the word “artist” has hegemony over other professions because whatever else, it is creative. God is a creator. A Creator. I don’t like the prefix “mega”—it’s been used too often—but God is, all right, at the least, a mega-artist. All the faculties of engineering, war, social building, art, music, sport, painting, science, philosophy, medicine, herbology are His or Hers, and at a level more highly developed than we can begin to conceive. But God is still an artist. A great engineer is an artist. So is a great general like Clausewitz or Robert E. Lee. So are the best in all human categories. We point to that in our own speech. We do speak of artists at war. That is the sense in which I want to use the word. I don’t want to diminish this projection of what God might be. Let’s think of the size of the Creation. Even if God is not All-Powerful, we have only to contemplate the vast extent of flora and fauna, the painterly touches—to offer one example—revealed in the chromatic scales of a butterfly’s wing.
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    Well, the thing that did appeal to me about your notion of God as an artist—and, indeed, as a novelist—is that novelists have to conceive of the destinies and the forked paths that people take through their lives and so create the second phase, the third phase. In a sense, that’s very much like God presiding over reincarnation—the second, third, fourth phases. God as an artist is portraying His or Her conception of the metamorphoses in each character’s destiny.
    Well, we are parts of God’s vision, certainly. I believe that, yes—lively but seriously skewed parts of God’s vision. That, I would add quickly, is because the Devil is also present. I don’t presume to say exactly what part He plays in cosmic affairs or local earthly matters—but in any event, we are not pure representations of God. We are tainted, warped, even treacherous in relation to the divine projects offered us. We are torn between God and the Devil, and our own vanity can be counter to both of them. Across the centuries, human vanity has become a factor, a prodigious factor. The human ego, which has always been fearful of God’s power and the Devil’s—that same human ego can still separate itself into a simulacrum of omnipotent confidence. There’s nothing more irritating to most of us than the feeling that we are not completely under our own power, that other forces are pushing us, external forces that