Allan Gurganus
I should admit, at the outset, that I hail from a long line of
preachers. I look upon this high-concept podium as a kind of pulpit. And in
this august company, I'm overwhelmed with a sudden urge to testify: Can I hear
a straight Amen from out there? Yes, thank you so much, Jesus, thank you.
I begin with a little text from the Holy Scripture: John 1:1. "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God."
Because I am by trade a maker of fables, and because this always means telling
of people's lust and greed and sweetness, telling their tendencies to fight
wars in the names of Divinity and to usher their greatest loves into the
messiest of all divorces, I choose today to try and save just one word. It
lives sunk in a ready-made phrase, frosted upon many office doors. "The
Humanities" is now a departmental subset of scholastical pursuit. But,
within it, a shorter, harder, more luminous word—"Human." That
term always sounds a little spurious for those of us qualified for Mensa but
with too much class to actually join it. "Human," a sweaty, brief,
naked word, and perhaps more beautiful for sounding naked.
Because I have so little time, and because I want to be remembered, useful, and
yes, loved—I choose to press "human" free of the Humanities,
clear back to an even earlier formulation. Back even before Christ falsely
promised to take all guilt and beastliness unto himself, before Renaissance
humanists sought to lift mankind through special pleading as creation's very
crown—rational, artful, clarified, if mortal. We were then placed far
above all other creatures of the earth.
But now, I say to you, we need new myths or ancient half-forgotten truths like
this one: "You are an animal." True, you are an animal with a web
page, but you're an animal. You're a mammal, which is, you know, kind of high
up, but still, animal. You had a mother and a father animal; of that, science
tells me, I can still be sure. And they were imperfect. And yet how they tried,
or they so often told you so anyway. And sex between these creatures brought
you here. Now, picture that deed. OK. Enough, right? One sentence can so
sickeningly summon so much.
You've seen that barroom lithograph of the dogs playing poker—the bulldog
in a green visor, with cheating cards stuck in one paw under the table? Well,
let's all stay humble. This is the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for
and by Animals. That makes our achievement not less significant. No, more. Apt
as we are to come into heat once a month, rigged with the willingness to kill
to protect our suburban lairs and temples—this just makes our inroads into
understanding far more miraculous, my beasty brothers and sisters.
The Genome Project is the first half of our description. Now the metaphors can
come. So half-angelic, we still stand here with our hairy backs and nicotine
patches and the God-damn liposuction scars. You are an animal, which makes you
both handsome and dangerous. And though you're sure that you're still smart,
despite the latest losses of the car keys, you believe you were once maybe even
beautiful. But, verily, I say unto you—you are still beautiful, you
animal. You are very, very sexual. Still. And you are coming to my hotel room
at 2:00 a.m. I hear you laugh, and so I know you are emotional. You are,
therefore—however much you may wish to be fully, cleanly
logical—really only about as rational as a young mountain goat at rut. You
can't help it. In the mind/body split, the mind is, well, a passenger. And
because you are emotional, there are no algebraic right answers in the back of
the book of you. Aesop often embarrasses farmyard beasts by subjecting them to
vain, comic, human motivation. And inversely, we are often shocked by outbreaks
of our own raw creatureliness. We go to sign a contract and out from under our
white cuff, a dark hoof appears. Surely our very amnesia about our past in the
natural world has helped make us its most appalling houseguest ever. The guest
who not only doesn't make up his own bed, but soaks it in toxins.
And what are the other animals going to do about it? Write Letters to the
Editor? If modern medicine permits us to now live past the age of 110, surely
art and philosophy must finally tell us why we should want to. We'll need
explainers who understand that emotion, unlike water, will not always flow
downhill. Those of us who chart mere emotion, its course and torrents, are
always starting over. The heart of darkness is a black hole where even time
collapses. I could not describe Grief for you as I might the coloring and cry
of all pileated woodpeckers in the Northeastern United States. (And I'll leave
it to my friends in the mathematical community to calculate for us the chances
of woodpeckers being mentioned in two talks tonight!)
I can't describe Grief, because every bird of that is a new bird. But, what do
I know? I still dip pen in ink. My tools are yet medieval, creature-like,
crushed berries pressed to reprocessed leaves. I try and chart the saga of the
emotions of our age. And oh, does it not seem to you, fellow members of my
modern herd in church, that the more ways that we invent to instantly
communicate, the less we really have to say? Haven't we all become our own
harried secretaries and zookeepers? We're our own employees whose birthdays, if
we ever knew them, we've forgotten. Don't we really let our emotions go only
when we've paid admission to something else? Aren't we likely to impeach any
hyperalive alpha animal that reminds us that we are, if in a more grudging way,
also continually beasts, magnificent beasts?
W. B. Yeats in his prayer for his daughter asks: "How but in custom and
ceremony are innocence and beauty born?" Art somehow still reconciles the
opposites that form our natures—part of us forever abstract angel of the
air, part of us locked, permanently sensate, on all fours. Because we wear fur,
there is no overarching syllogism. Something must always be left out. Otherwise
we would not be mortal. Someone has pronounced His absence the unknowable.
Other people call him He Whose Name Must Not Be Called.
We workers in the vineyard of thought risk becoming at times too much the
subject of the grey—of our own magnificently trained, surprisingly evolved
grey matter. Goethe—half artist, half scientist, half God, yes,
half-wrote: "Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light." On the
page our achievements are hard-won; off the page there's little logic past the
luminous illogic of the heart. And what's left, mere humans that we are, is
just work and work. The love by which we say we live is still unprovable as
physiological reality. Today the Holy Land does not look holy. The soul, that
ectoplasmic envelope, has no more density than, say, a single palpating
metaphor. Our long howl becomes at times a song of such sweetness. We know we
must die, but we've had no training at all. And, advanced, improved, brilliant
creatures, what will make us happier? This, I know. There is a story in all
that. Here endeth the lesson, my fellow, sexy, mortal animal. You are human. In
the split between the Sciences and the Humanities, we are all a little shaggy.
Do you mind? World without end. Amen.
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