“What does he do for a living—or is he a professional gambler?”
“No, he’s a real-estate agent, a specialist in commercial property. He spends his days on the cell phone with clients and bookies and his nights in front of the television switching channels between the games he’s down on. If they decided to have a sports-free month, I think he’d have to be hospitalized.”
“Doesn’t he do any casino gambling?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot that. Casino gambling is for holidays. He spends his vacations in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. They’d have td close the casinos for a month too.”
“That wouldn’t matter. He’d find something else to bet on. He’d match coins in bars. He’d shoot craps on street corners. He’d bet on the weather, on the elections, on the make of the next car turning the corner, on the number of passengers getting off the next elevator.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“You really don’t see that the two of you are brothers in more than a biological sense?”
“No. What sense do you see it in?”
“What’s at the root of your brother’s obsession? You say he lives and dies fifty times a day. What does he live and die fifty times a day to find oufi.”
“He lives and dies fifty times a day to find out if he’s right.”
“No, you’re missing the point entirely. If you bet someone that the Nile is longer than the Amazon, then of course the issue is whether you’re right. But if you bet someone that the next toss of a coin will turn up heads, being right has nothing to do with it. The issue is, will the universe back you up? If you say heads and it turns up heads, it doesn’t mean you’re
right, it means God is with you. You could just as easily have said tails, and if God wanted you to win, then it would have turned up tails. This is what every compulsive gambler is really trying to find out: ‘Are you with me, Lord, or against me?’ When Harlan wins, he feels as divinely affirmed as any saint, and when he loses for days on end, he knows the dark night of the soul, and God has abandoned him.”
“Okay,” I said. “I see what you mean. I remember once, in five-card draw, being dealt the card I needed to fill an inside straight flush. Getting that card was definitely a religious experience. It was like a transfiguration. I expected everyone at the table to be blinded by the divine effulgence that was radiating from me.”
“When you call it a religious experience, are you being facetious?”
“Not at all. I suppose it was the kind of experience called oceanic. I was in a state of cosmic transcendence. I felt that the universe in that moment had taken notice of me. I was in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being.”
“A religious experience but presumably not a Christian experience.”
“No, not a Christian experience.”
“This oceanic feeling you describe has often been conjectured to be the source of the religious impulse, but only B traces that oceanic feeling to this patch of ground here in front of us, with its beetle scratchings and mouse scratchings. This is where we first began to reach into a dimension beyond the ken of any other creature on earth, a dimension that is surely not our own domain. But if we can imagine it to be anyone’s domain, then whose must it be?”
“It must be the domain of the gods.”
“To flip a coin and bet on heads is to enter the domain of the gods. To draw a card to a four-card straight flush is to enter the domain of the gods. To read the marks on this patch of earth and begin a hunt is to enter the domain of the gods. And when the coin turns up heads, when the fifth card fills your straight flush, and when the hunt succeeds, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in one god, a thousand gods, or no gods at all, you know that the universe has taken notice of you, that you’ve been in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being.”
The sacred harmonic
“Now you understand—or at least I hope you understand—what I meant about the harmonic I was talking about yesterday. I said that when mental process crossed the border and became human thought, perhaps thought itself began to resound with a harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion or awareness of the sacred.”
“Yes. At the time I had no idea what you were getting at. I thought it very unlikely that you’d ever be able persuade me of such a thing.”
“And now?”
“And now it makes sense. Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods. Crossing the border, you can’t help but meet them.”
“And you’re in a position now to understand the universality of the animist experience—to understand why there once was a universal religion on this planet. It doesn’t matter where you cross the border and meet those gods, the experience is the same. The African experience is not different from the Asian or the European or the Australian or the American. Every hunt begins here”—she patted the ground in front of us—“and is pursued into the domain of the gods.”
Dynamiting “Nature”
B asked me to explain again the meaning of our “work of bricolage.” I picked it up and studied it for a moment. “The fossil shell represents the community of life,” I told her. “Animism is bound up with that community and resonates with it. The Law of Life, represented by the pen, is written in the community of life, and animism reads this law, as does science in its own way.”
“Good. We’ve talked about resonance in two connections here, haven’t we, Jared? Human thought resounds with a harmonic that corresponds to awareness of the sacred, and animism resonates with the community of life. What’s the connection? Are these resonances actually just one resonance?”
“I’d have to guess they’re the same.”