The Gods of Their Choices

One of the baristas at a local bookstore told me a while back about a visit to the store made by Mr. Kinky Friedman. It was the holidays and Kinky's farewell words to the assembled multitude were, "May the God of your choice bless you." I was reminded of that ecumenical spirit this weekend reading Mr. Banville's The Infinities and Dr. Verghese's Cutting for Stone. Both novels feature interventions from deities, some wished for, some unbidden. In Banville's book, the ancient Greek gods are back--with a vengeance. I've reached the part where the god ol' Zeus intervenes in the lives of Adam and Helen Godley (yep, note the name) in a way that is both shocking and characteristic. In Cutting for Stone, surgeon Thomas Stone has just prayed to the Christian God he does not believe in for a miracle, and then cannot accept that the miracle you get is not necessarily the one you asked for. Meanwhile, his fellow surgeon Dr. Hemlatha, faced with the same crisis, has channeled "Shiva, her personal deity," realizing that "the only sensible response to the madness of life ... [is] to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva."

Faced with the "madness of life," Banville's divine narrator, Hermes, has a startling piece of advice for us humans: "The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things are they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas."

So there we have it: two responses to earthly suffering, each with its divine "sponsor": creative madness, and creative blindness. Two responses, but not the only two, of course.

Posted on Mon, February 22, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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