blueballs

quotes from ‘on god: an uncommon conversation’ by norman mailer

i’ve not been intellectually stimulated so much by a book for an extremely long time, if ever. and it is here i shall attempt to catch brief essences of what i have read.

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on the conflict between God and the Devil
“Not only do we humans have a fundamental desire for order, we have an obvious tendency as well toward disorder – a true conflict between order and disorder.”

“Reason, ultimately, looks to strip us of the notion that there is a Creator. The moment you have a society built on reason alone, then individual power begins to substitute for the concept of a Creator. What has characterised just about every social revolution Is that sooner or later revolutionary leaders go to war with each other…… Only one leader is left, an absolute dictator”

“When we work with the greatest energy, it’s because our best motive and our worst motive – or to put it another way, God and the Devil – are equally engaged in the outcome and so, for a period, working within us. There can be collaboration between opposites, as well as war. This collaboration can consist of certain agreements – “The rules of war will be…” (me: see the contradiction?)…… The rules can be broken, and the Devil can betray God. Once in a while, God also breaks the rules – with a miracle……… take an average contest in football. Two teams fight each other on the field with skill and bestiality, each side laboring to win. Nonetheless, a whole set of laws also prevails. After they tackle a guy, they don’t kick him in the head. In order to keep it flowing, God and the Devil have certain understandings with each other…….. It isn’t that we are passive onlookers while God and the Devil wage a war within us. We are the third force and don’t always know which side we are on in any given moment, or whether on another occasion we are independent of both… (Too much of this) powerful energies can arouse opposition. USA vs USSR.”

on the difficultly of ascertaining whether at any given moment to whom we are closer – God or the Devil
[at this point mailer faces his 3rd divorce. he roams from bar to bar looking for a woman to sleep with for the night.]
“…anyway, I found no woman. I went into an all-night diner, as I realised I was hungry, not only drunk but hungry, and ordered a doughnut and coffee, finished it. Then a voice spoke to me. I think it’s one of the very few times I felt God was speaking to me… this voice spoke to me and said, ‘Leave without paying.’

it was a minor sum – twenty-five cents for coffee and a doughnut in those days. I was aghast, because I’d been brought up properly. One thing you didn’t do was steal. And never from strangers! How awful! I said, “I can’t do it.” And the voice – it was most amused – said, “Go ahead and do it,” quietly, firmly, laughing at me… It seemed to me that I was so locked into petty injunctions on how to behave, that on one hand I wanted to be a wild man, yet I couldn’t even steal a cup of coffee.”

on god as the artist
“…that I feel no attachment whatsoever to organised religion. I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks. I also see animals as His artworks. When I think of evolution, what stands out most is the drama that went on in God as an artist. Successes were also marred by failures. I think of all the errors He made in evolution as well as of the successes… …(evolution was the) mode the Artist was trying to express something incredible, and it was not, for certain, an easy process. Indeed, it went on forever! I would guess that evolution was tempered with, if not actually blindsided on occasion, by the Devil… … … sometimes a young artist has to make large errors before he or she can go further”

“God is powerful enough to give us lightning and thunder and extraordinary sunsets, incredible moments where we appreciate God’s sense of beauty. But if God is all-powerful, then how can you begin to explain the monstrosities of modern history? There are theological arguments by great theologians that these horrors are to test us. But this reduces our concept of God to a stage director who says, ‘Let the actors follow the script, do not give them access to the playwright.’”

on god as the parent
“God is our creator, God put us here. We are God’s artistic vision, we are God’s children, if you will, and it’s not a good parent who looks always to control the child. The mark of a good parent is that he or she can take joy in the moment when a developing child begins to outstrip the parent. God is immensely powerful, but not all-powerful.”

on technology
“The Devil is another god and wishes to preempt the god who exists. The Devil has other notions of what existence could be. I’d go so far as to assume that technology is the Devil’s invention.”

“Jesus does make a kind of sense. Jesus as a principle of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy is something we can all comprehend”

on love
“there are any number of men and women who are full of love but are nonetheless timid and cowardly and hate themselves for being cowardly – it poisons the love in them, even if, essentially, they are loving creatures”

“I found myself saying to my children, ‘Don’t go searching for love. Love is not a solution but a reward.’ So long as you go searching for love directly, you will fail. Because love is a grace, and you don’t pursue grace.

dogs..
“in reincarnation, you may not come back as human. you could come back as a dog, and, I will say in parentheses, that makes a great deal of sense to me, because so many dogs, I find, are closer to the human than humans.”