‘Yes.Well, no; I was.I graduated.’
‘Ah.Science, was it, you were doing?’
‘English.’
‘Oh.But you like science?’
I’m sure that’s the way he put it.I jotted a lot of this down next day, and wrote a poem about it – ‘Jack’ – a couple of months later, and I’m sure if I had my notes with me they’d confirm that was how he put it: ‘You like science?’
So we got on to what he’d always wanted to talk about.
He – yes, his name was Jack – couldn’t understand how people thought they could tell something was so many million years old.How could anyone tell what came when and where?He couldn’t understand; he was a Christian and the Bible seemed much more sensible.
Ever felt your heart sink?We’d been on the road two hours, we were barely past Northampton, and I was stuck – probably for the whole of the rest of the journey, judging from the guy’s accent – beside some ancient geek who thought the universe was created about tea-time in 4004 BC.Holy shit.
Being young and stupid, I did actually try to explain (I watched ‘Horizon’; I got New Scientist, sometimes).
Let the poem take up the story (from memory, so make allowances):
And Christ, dear reader, what could I do?
Oh, I made the lame, half-hearted try;
I told him all was linked, that those same laws
Of physics, chemistry, and math that let him sit here,
In this bus, with the engine, on that road,
Dictated through the ages what was so.
Carbon 14 I mentioned, its slow and sure decay,
Even magnetic alignments, frozen in the rocks
By the heat of ancient fires;
The associated fossils, floating continents,
Erosion, continuity and change
But from the first tired syllable, in fact before,
I knew it was pointless.
And somewhere back
Of all that well-informed-layman stuff,
Something a little more like the real me listened,
And looked at the old man’s glasses.
– They were old, with thick frames, dark brown.
The glass too was thick, and thick with dust.
Dandruff, dead scales of old flesh, hairs
Cemented there by grease and stale sweat,
Obscured the views the scratches didn’t.
And even if the prescription wasn’t years ago exceeded
By his dying sight,
The grime; that personal, impersonal dust,
Sapped the bulky lenses of their use
And, removed, inspected,
How could those rheumy eyes unaided see
This aggravation of their disability?
(This was when I was into using rhyme only very sparingly, like any other poetic effect.)There was more, rather labouring the point about ‘views’ and cloudy thinking and so on, but passing swiftly on, we come to:
He took in nothing.
My throat got sore.
The Borders came, and soon he left, met by his sister
In some dismal little rain-soaked town.
OK?So Cut To:
Last week.Me with the hard core of the Creative Writing Group on an Intercity 125, heading for London for a reading at the ICA (Kathy Acker, Martin Millar, etc).I was sitting across from Mo – the good-looking Indian guy with the tash; very bright; chose us instead of Oxbridge, God knows why – and I tipped my microbottle of Grouse into the plastic glass and took out the book I was going to start reading, and Mo just tensed.I’m not too hot on body language; I miss a lot, I know (you see – I do listen to what you say), but it was like Mo suddenly became an ice statue, and these waves of cold antagonism started flowing across the table at me.The others noticed too, and went quiet.
So I’d taken The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie out of the old daypack, hadn’t I?And Mo’s sitting there like he expects the book to bubble and squirm and burst into flames right there in my hands.
Now, I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the kerfuffle surrounding this book – it hasn’t exactly been front page news, and with any luck it won’t be – but since it was published quite a few Muslims have been demanding it be banned, withdrawn or whatever because it contains – so they say – some sort of semi-blasphemous material in it relating to the Koran.I’d talked about this general area of authorial freedom and religious censorship with a couple of classes, but still hadn’t read the novel, and it just hadn’t occurred to me somebody like Mo – who hadn’t been in either of those classes – might be on the side of the bad guys.
‘Mo; is there a problem?’
‘That is not a good book, Mr Munro,’ he said, looking at it, not me. ‘It is evil; blasphemous.’ (Embarrassed silence from the others.)
‘Look, Mo, I’ll put the book away if it offends you,’ I told him (doing just that). ‘But I think we have to talk about this.All right; I haven’t read the book myself yet, but I was talking to Doctor Metcalf the other day, and he said he had, and the passages some people found objectionable were a couple of pages at most, and he couldn’t see what the fuss was about.I mean, this is a novel, Mo.It isn’t a religious tract; it means to be fiction.’
‘That isn’t the point, Mr Munro,’ Mo said.He was looking at my little red rucksack as though there was a nuclear bomb inside it. ‘Rushdie has insulted all Muslims.He has spat in the face of every one of us.It’s as if he has called all our mothers whores.’
‘Mo,’ I said, and couldn’t help grinning as I put the rucksack down on the floor, ‘it’s only a story.’
‘The form is not important.It is a work in which Allah is insulted,’ Mo said. ‘You can’t understand, Mr Munro.There is nothing you hold that sacred.’
‘Oh no?How about freedom of speech?’
‘But when the National Front wanted to use the Students’ Union, you were with us on the demonstration, weren’t you?What about their freedom of speech?’
‘They want to take it away from everybody else; come on, Mo.You’re not denying them freedom of speech, you’re protecting the freedoms of the people they’d persecute if they were allowed any power.’
‘But in the short term you are denying them the right to state their views in public, are you not?’
‘The way you’d deny somebody the freedom to put a gun to another person’s head and pull the trigger, yes.’
‘So, clearly your belief in freedom generally can override any particular freedom; these freedoms are not absolute.Nothing is sacred to you, Mr Munro.You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise.You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.’
‘So because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?I’m sorry, Mo, but for me, Christ and Muhammed were both just men; charismatic, gifted in various ways, but still just mortal human beings, and the scholars and monks and disciples and historians who wrote about them or recorded their thoughts and their lives were inspired all right, but not by God; by something from inside them, something every writer has in fact something every human has.Mo; definitions.Faith is belief without proof.I can’t accept that.Now, it doesn’t bother me that you can, so why does it bother you so much that I think the way I do, or Salman Rushdie thinks the way he does?’
‘Clearly, your soul is your own concern, Mr Munro.Rushdie’s is his.To think blasphemous thoughts is to restrict the sin to oneself, but to blaspheme in public is deliberately to assault those who do believe.It is to rape our souls.’
Can you believe this?This guy’s heading for a First; his father’s an astro-physicist, for Christ’s sake.Mo’s probably going to be a lecturer himself (he already puts ‘clearly’ at the start of his sentences; good grief, he’s halfway there!).It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the dark ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.
So, an argument, while the leafless trees and the cold brown fields stream by beyond the carriage’s double-glazing, and the inevitable wailing child howled somewhere in the distance.
But what do you say?I asked him about the kids who rode across the minefields on their Hondas, clearing the way for the Iranian Army, the hard way.Insane, to me.To Mo?Maybe misguided, maybe used, but still glorious.I told him that while I hadn’t read The Satanic Verses, I had read the Koran, and found it almost as ludicrous and objectionable as the Bible and after that I got a bit loud, while Mo went very quiet and forbidding and curt, and one of the others had verbally to separate us. (Coincidence; I read the Penguin edition of the Koran – edited by a Jew, Mo claims, and unholy too because it puts the passages in the wrong order – and Viking, who publish ‘TSV, are part of the same group fertile ground for a conspiracy theory?)