Read The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God for Free Online
Authors: Douglas Harding
believe my ears! Just give me one reason why that face you’re looking at isn’t yours.
MYSELF: I’ll give you ten!
COUNSEL: Funny man!
MYSELF: Your Honour and members of the Jury, let’s address this very funny and very serious matter together, very carefully. And very humbly, prepared to follow whithersoever the facts lead us. I’m asking you not to look at me when I go through these ten reasons, but look in your mirror and check up whether what I’m saying about me is true also of you.
That face is not my face, because:
(1) It’s the wrong way round — faces inwards instead of outwards.
(2) It’s the wrong size — a miserable three inches across.
(3) It’s in the wrong place — off-centre by upwards of ten inches.
(4) It’s all over the shop — liable to come at me from any angle, incapable of getting its act together.
(5) Appropriately, it haunts crazy rooms, where clocks go anti- clockwise and printing reads back to front.
(6) It’s locked in one direction, unable to glance up or down or sideways.
(7) It’s intangible.
(8) In these and all other respects it’s the opposite of what I find on these shoulders, and therefore not my face but someone else’s.
(9) A conclusion I check by slowly bringing the mirror right up to me. On the way here, I try to catch hold of that face, turn it round, enlarge it to full size, and plant it on these shoulders — thereby setting John a-Nokes up at the centre of my world . . . I can’t. This place won’t take it. Anyway, it vanishes without trace just before arrival.
(10) And if, instead of this mirror, a friend’s camera makes the same journey, it comes up with the same pictures. Out there it registers that face. On the way here, parts of it. Here, none of it.
Ten reasons why that face is not my face. How many would you like, Sir Gerald? There are lots more, but perhaps ten’s enough to be getting on with.
COUNSEL: Whose face is it then, for God’s sake?
MYSELF: John a-Nokes’s, of course. The face of a fairly close pal of mine. One whose charm is that he’s about as different from me as he could be. It’s often that way with friends, you know.
COUNSEL: Specious stuff, members of the Jury! But what does it boil down to? To this: we adults are wrong, the children are wrong, and only infants and Mr Nokes are right. So let’s all go infantile. Back to the cradle! This isn’t the way to be taken seriously in a lawcourt, which of all places on earth is reserved for grown-ups.
MYSELF: I’m not saying ‘back to infancy’ but ‘forward to sanity, to true adulthood, to sagehood, to the wisdom of God which is foolishness with men’ — in a word, to Godhood.
COUNSEL, flourishing his brief wildly, shouts: To blasphemy!
MYSELF: To truthfulness! It’s all so very simple and sensible. To find out who you are — whether you are George or Henry or Marmaduke or Lady Godiva or whoever—I look at your face. To find out who lam - whether I’m Jack or Jill or the Elephant Man or whoever — I look at my face. How else, for goodness’ sake? I look at my true and present and naked Original Face, instead of at that acquired face over there in its glass case, with its tenfold disclaimer, its tenfold denial that it’s mine. I look at the bright and charming Face of the One I really, really, really am.
However did I come to trade This for that, to disfigure myself so? Wasn’t my Original Face attractive enough, its complexion clear enough? Was it losing the bloom of youth? Did looking myself in the Face suddenly become — absurd, wicked, impossible?
Between Dick’s age and Mary’s, I learned the art of self-dodging, of deliberately looking for myself in the wrong direction - as if were now to seek myself on the Judge’s bench instead of in the dock! I looked there in the glass – in that glass case – to see myself here in God’s fresh air! But now I look in it to see my buddy, my mate, my opposite number. I used to say to myself, ‘That’s
MYSELF: I’ll give you ten!
COUNSEL: Funny man!
MYSELF: Your Honour and members of the Jury, let’s address this very funny and very serious matter together, very carefully. And very humbly, prepared to follow whithersoever the facts lead us. I’m asking you not to look at me when I go through these ten reasons, but look in your mirror and check up whether what I’m saying about me is true also of you.
That face is not my face, because:
(1) It’s the wrong way round — faces inwards instead of outwards.
(2) It’s the wrong size — a miserable three inches across.
(3) It’s in the wrong place — off-centre by upwards of ten inches.
(4) It’s all over the shop — liable to come at me from any angle, incapable of getting its act together.
(5) Appropriately, it haunts crazy rooms, where clocks go anti- clockwise and printing reads back to front.
(6) It’s locked in one direction, unable to glance up or down or sideways.
(7) It’s intangible.
(8) In these and all other respects it’s the opposite of what I find on these shoulders, and therefore not my face but someone else’s.
(9) A conclusion I check by slowly bringing the mirror right up to me. On the way here, I try to catch hold of that face, turn it round, enlarge it to full size, and plant it on these shoulders — thereby setting John a-Nokes up at the centre of my world . . . I can’t. This place won’t take it. Anyway, it vanishes without trace just before arrival.
(10) And if, instead of this mirror, a friend’s camera makes the same journey, it comes up with the same pictures. Out there it registers that face. On the way here, parts of it. Here, none of it.
Ten reasons why that face is not my face. How many would you like, Sir Gerald? There are lots more, but perhaps ten’s enough to be getting on with.
COUNSEL: Whose face is it then, for God’s sake?
MYSELF: John a-Nokes’s, of course. The face of a fairly close pal of mine. One whose charm is that he’s about as different from me as he could be. It’s often that way with friends, you know.
COUNSEL: Specious stuff, members of the Jury! But what does it boil down to? To this: we adults are wrong, the children are wrong, and only infants and Mr Nokes are right. So let’s all go infantile. Back to the cradle! This isn’t the way to be taken seriously in a lawcourt, which of all places on earth is reserved for grown-ups.
MYSELF: I’m not saying ‘back to infancy’ but ‘forward to sanity, to true adulthood, to sagehood, to the wisdom of God which is foolishness with men’ — in a word, to Godhood.
COUNSEL, flourishing his brief wildly, shouts: To blasphemy!
MYSELF: To truthfulness! It’s all so very simple and sensible. To find out who you are — whether you are George or Henry or Marmaduke or Lady Godiva or whoever—I look at your face. To find out who lam - whether I’m Jack or Jill or the Elephant Man or whoever — I look at my face. How else, for goodness’ sake? I look at my true and present and naked Original Face, instead of at that acquired face over there in its glass case, with its tenfold disclaimer, its tenfold denial that it’s mine. I look at the bright and charming Face of the One I really, really, really am.
However did I come to trade This for that, to disfigure myself so? Wasn’t my Original Face attractive enough, its complexion clear enough? Was it losing the bloom of youth? Did looking myself in the Face suddenly become — absurd, wicked, impossible?
Between Dick’s age and Mary’s, I learned the art of self-dodging, of deliberately looking for myself in the wrong direction - as if were now to seek myself on the Judge’s bench instead of in the dock! I looked there in the glass – in that glass case – to see myself here in God’s fresh air! But now I look in it to see my buddy, my mate, my opposite number. I used to say to myself, ‘That’s