Coincidance - Principia Discordia

114 COINCIDANCE
The Book of Job dares to raise the question—that is its eternal glory—but
then hastily buries it under a cloud of meaningless rhetoric. Only the
greatest works of art have dared to stare unblinkingly at the question
without attempting to smooth it over or bury it—works like Medea, King Lear.
Moby Dick, Beethoven's Fifth, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children and The
Disasters of War.
The theological writings of Kierkegaard and Tillich make honest
attempts to confront this question; and I respect these two men more than I
respect the banal flow of bilge that issues forth from the "philosophers" of
the American Humanist Association.
(If the Reverend Schaef wants to write to the Realist again and renew his
charge that I am a theologian in disguise, 1 will admit that he's not completely
wrong —but I'm only a theologian in the sense that Antonin Artaud was.)
But, is everything completely black and sharkish in Williams' view of the
universe? Well, it has to be granted that it is not. Dr. Sugar does, finally, cure
Cathy, through that discipline of unmitigated psychological honesty which
is the essence of psychotherapy; and a universe in which such honesty and
such cures are possible cannot be all bad.
Indeed, the East which accepts the unity of good and evil, yin and yang,
with such equanimity, has never forgotten that if the evil is omnipresent,
why, then, so must be the good.
And even Melville's vision—at the climax of Moby Dick, when the great
Whale Armada comes before us—includes the significant detail that, with
slaughter rampant all around them, the young whales at the center of the
school are copulating and the mother whales are suckling their young.
"And thus," Melville writes, "surrounded by circle upon circle of
consternations and affrights... the creatures of the center fearlessly indulge
in peaceful concernments . . . yea, in dalliance and delight."
A few sentences later, Melville boldly declares the Oriental doctrine of the
undefiled essence:"... and while planets of woe revolve around me, deep
down and deep inland I still bathe in eternal joy."
But Melville was no fatuous optimist, as we have seen. At the end, Ahab
and whale destroy each other and, in ironic last testimony to the unity of the
opposites, Ishmael returns to life floating on a coffin.
And, similarly, Williams' Dr. Sugar, though he can cure one girl, has
obviously no ilusions about himself or his science. The doctor has frightened eyes.
Montgomery Cliff's sensitive portrayal brings this home to us in scene after
scene, and two of the characters remark upon it.
Nietzsche once wrote: "When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also
gazes into you." And the mystic Eckhart is even more direct: "The eye with
which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."