35.

When he opened his eyes and pulled up his weary neck, Joshua found himself in a court of law. He wondered if he were on trial; but no, looking now, he was seated with the jurors. There was a brown wooden look to everything here, as if the light reflected off of the wood of the jury box, defense and prosecution tables, the bench, and infused everything else around it--the walls, floor, Stars and Stripes at the head of the courtroom--with its brown color, its wooden substance.

There was a black man, a lawyer, making opening or closing statements Joshua did not know, speaking for the prosecution or defense, Joshua could not immediately tell. He wore a goatee of curly hairs that was only a little blacker than the sable of his skin. There was a wet look to his full crown and goatee, as if he'd been sprinkled with water, or the sweat had gathered there and beaded up, got trapped in the coarse hair.

"He will have you believe there is no such thing as race," the lawyer was saying. "That it is an artificial abstraction, an arbitrary grouping of certain genetic traits together, while other inherited traits--height, obesity, eye color--are not racial but random. He will say, 'Why call pigment race and blood type not? Why call a man with black skin a certain race, while one who has black only on his hair is not?' But I submit to you that nothing--nothing humans classify, group together, call under a common name--is any different. Why do we group apples together? Say, green apples and red apples? Why not throw the green apples with the green pears, the red apples with the red pears? Each and every object in this cosmos has something in common with everything else, and something that sets it apart from each other thing. It is only Man who deems certain similarities valid--but his reasons for doing so are just that, human reasons--arbitrary, artificial. Each one of you"--here he thumped his open hand against the jury box--"each one of you could as easily be called more similar to Pakistanis than to Americans. How, you ask? You are jurors! That you be grouped with Pakistani jurors, over and above nationality, is just as valid as grouping you with Americans. It is only human to emphasize which categories, which similarities and differences between objects, should be the important ones. Nature in itself knows nothing of 'importance' or 'emphasis'. Science prides itself on distinguishing 'objective' and 'true' similarities between things when it groups them together, classifies. But it is only so under their peculiar, some might say even random principles, such as being closer together in terms of genetic biology. There is no"--again he slapped the jury box--"no reason why men should not be thought more like ants than like gorillas. Ants, after all, live in nests, like we live in houses--gorillas do not. And in some other world with a different history, perhaps scientists would see this behavior as a more pertinent similarity than our scientists do in our own world. Groups. Classes of things. They do not exist--they are a human means of organizing experience. There is no silver cord between all apples making them apples. You in the jury who are male, and black--are you better grouped with the male whites among you, as men; or with the female blacks, as a Negroid? There is no answer--both ideas are perfectly valid, while neither is at all quite objective. We have thrown the transparent charts language gives us over our eyes and ears, experiencing things only in terms of classes and groups that do not reach beyond language into the true nature of things. There is but a single class of things, a single group that is not a mere arbitrary, human abstraction. That is--'the Cosmos'. Either a thing is part of the sum total of everything, or it is not; that is, does not exist. There is only one object at all, one being that transcends all the false patters of thought we lay over our image of the world--that is God, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And God is the supreme reality, the sum total of all that is--or he does not exist. When you deliberate on this question, when you ask yourself whether God exists, you shall do best to put it in these terms: ask yourselves whether there is any perspective from which, and in which, the sum total of all reality coheres and subsists. If not, there is no God--and neither is there a totality of being. Only fragmentary things seen by fragmented pieces of it all, nothing existing within a final, complete All and Everything."

He cleared his throat, betrayed a slight misapprehension, as if he'd noticed a hole in his logic that he hoped would not be detected, then went and sat next to the defendant. "That is all your honor," he said.

Joshua felt a sweaty piece of paper in his hand, crumpled and magnifying the sense of moisture there in his palm. He opened his right hand and saw a little ripped piece of page. He lifted it, straightened out its crumples, and read, "God has come near." He wondered if the Dreamtime would ever start to make sense.

He suddenly found himself across from the lawyer, their faces nearly touching--whether he were sitting or standing, facing up or looking down he had no idea--he felt like he had no physical body beyond the eyes he used to see this man. "God!" said the lawyer. "The word 'God' means something for christsake! People use the word in perfectly sensible sentences all the time. Would this be possible if the word stood for nothing at all?"

Joshua understood the conclusion the lawyer wanted him to draw. He wished the proof of God's existence weren't so simple as that--for every proof as simple as that was mere slight of hand, fallacious.

Now the lawyer said to him, "There is no such thing as delusion, no such thing as illusion, nothing exists but the real. Our idea of illusion comes when we call dreams reality. But dreams as dreams are as real as anything--so long as we call them really dreams. Illusion means calling a dream waking life--it is not as much unreality, as inapplicability. To mistake a dream for what is real is the same as calling a scent green, or a stone talkative. Falsity is not the opposite of the true, but an act of misapplication."