Free On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon

he’s stand-up, but he sure can be a son of a bitch.” In ourselves and others, we find this constant interplay of good and bad.
    If we are going to talk about these matters, I think we would do well to approach them with the confidence that humans have the right to explore anything and everything—at our spiritual peril, but we do have the right. It seems to me—how to put it?—I see no reason for a divinity to put everything into a Book and expect that to be our only guide. He gave us free will. Or She gave us free will. Once again, let’s leave gender out of it. If we were given free will, then the Book is the first obstacle to it.
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    What’s the role of the senses?
    I would say the senses were given to us by God. If I’m ready to go in for speculations such as these, I would even go so far as to say that mind may have been the contribution of the Devil—or, at least, more so than God. How can I justify such a remark? Animals seem to function extraordinarily well on their instincts and their senses. To a large degree, they have community—ants, bees, all the way up to primates. There is an extraordinary amount of communication we can witness in animals, and they are undeniably superior to us in one manner: They don’t go around slaughtering one another in huge numbers. If, by every other mode of moral judgment, we see ourselves as superior, still we know that animals left to themselves are not going to destroy the universe. But we could. So it may be a true question: Did the Devil invent mind? Or is this still God’s domain? Or, more likely, does the search for dominance there become the field of battle?
    There is no question in my mind that the Devil did enter mind. And, not being the first Creator, did His best to invade the senses as well, to corrupt the senses. But the question is sufficiently complex to assume that the senses are neither wholly God given nor Devil ridden.
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    But the line you quoted, which has puzzled me for decades, is “Trust the authority of the senses.”
    St. Thomas Aquinas said that, and Hemingway, in his way: “If it feels good, it is good.” I’ve never read Aquinas in depth, but I was taken with the notion that the most formal of the Catholic philosophers had presented this rule of thumb. What I think it means—leave Aquinas out of it—is that we must trust the authority of the senses because that is the closest contact we have to the Creator; however, it is a most treacherous undertaking. As anyone who’s ever enjoyed a drink knows, the authority of the senses on a boozy spree is exceptional. You feel so much, see so much—and that’s even more true on marijuana. You trust the authority of the senses until, perhaps, they become so intense that God and the Devil seem to be there working with you full-time. We’ve all had the experience of an extraordinary trip on drink and/or pot, but what I know is that the end result is as often disaster as happiness. I won’t pretend that every time you get drunk beyond measure nothing good will happen. It occurred to me at a certain point in my life that I had never, up to that moment, gone to bed with a woman for the first time without being drunk. Since some of the most important experiences of my life occurred that way, I can hardly wish to argue that drink serves the Devil alone. Given the rigors of modern society, it’s possible we’d never get anywhere without liquor or pot.
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    You have me thinking of Blake’s line: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
    It’s implicit in what I just said, but I think I’d be happier if the line had gone: “The road of excess
can lead
to wisdom.” I’m not in favor of excess because I’ve ruined too much in just that way. Blake did have an apocalyptic mind,