Island - Aldous Huxley [57]
“What is he doing?” he asked.
“Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter,” the doctor answered. “It was a habit my poor father could never break him of.”
“Did your father disapprove of phalluses?”
“No, no,” said Dr. MacPhail. “My father was all for them. It was the symbol that he disapproved of.”
“Why the symbol?”
“Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container.”
“And the Raja had a weakness for containers?”
“Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He’d always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old.”
“I see,” said Will Farnaby.
“Buttering the family lingam—it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it’s supposed to stand for. And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea—what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my father. He’d drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he’d actually been the milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn’t bear to give up. And, I don’t have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up. But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He’d amended Goethe—Alles vergängliche ist NICHT ein Gleichnis. His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum and pure experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting—he’d have liked to abolish them all.”
“Where would the arts have come in?” Will questioned.
“They wouldn’t have come in at all,” Dr. MacPhail answered. “And that was my father’s blindest spot—poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he didn’t. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science—that was something he simply couldn’t understand. Let’s find his picture.”
Dr. MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.
“What a Scotsman!” Will commented.
“And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese.”
“One doesn’t see a trace of them.”
“Whereas his grandfather, who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput.”
Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side-whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top hat.
“Your great-grandfather?”
“The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr. Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap.”
Will laughed.
“Yes,” Dr. Robert agreed, “it does seem pretty comic. But it didn’t then. Then it was serious—much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they’d never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn’t believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And the proof that they didn’t believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical,