Free The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God by Douglas Harding Page B

diabolical pride and ambition of the blasphemer drive him to suppress the tangible evidence that proves he’s only human after all? To be blunt, the Jury need to decide whether he’s a fool or a knave. Can you help them to do so?
    WITNESS: Perhaps he’s a bit of both. My guess is that he’s the Golden Ass, bright (if not brilliant) in his loopy fashion. Rather like King James I, the fellow they called the wisest fool in Christendom.
    COUNSEL: I’m informed that the Devil has a higher IQ than any other angel — and if you read it as Idiocy Quotient, that’s all right by me... Have you anything to say about the Accused’s lunatic pretensions to divinity?
    JUDGE: That’s a grossly leading question.
    COUNSEL: Delete ‘lunatic’.
    WITNESS: I do have a query. Why should God be in Mr Noke’s head (or instead of his head, or in his no-head - have it any way you like) and not in his heart, for example, where religious folk profess to find Him? Why this fixation on the human head, I ask, with its seemingly unlimited potential for confusion and delusion, leading on occasion to blasphemy trials? Why, with all His Creation to choose from, should the Creator settle for and settle in such a crowded and crime-infested slum? Or such a poky hideout or hide-in as any organ of the human body? Or the whole of it, for that matter? Surely He could have found less congested and dingy lodgings somewhere in all the real estate of His universe?
    COUNSEL, sitting himself down with the air of one who has said the last word: Over to the Accused
    Defence: Taking the Rough with the Smooth
    I continue the Witness’s examination.
    ‘As a prelude to deflating the Prosecution, and answering the very pertinent questions you have raised, I would like to put one to you. To you, who know about such matters. What is this very, very peculiar finial or knob or headpiece, this problematic something-or-other that tops off a human body?’
    Counsel begs his Honour to dismiss my question as yet another red herring, a false trail the court shouldn’t waste time following.
    The Judge fails to see why I want a definition of something that all sane persons are agreed about.
    I claim the right to conduct my Defence in my own fashion, but to save time I’m willing to rephrase my question to the Witness:
    ‘Do you agree that a human head is an opaque, multicoloured, roughly eight-inch, hairy bone-box, jam-packed at the top with knobbly grey stuff, and furnished with a pair of shuttered portholes and a hinged lower section for letting sounds out and food in?’
    The Witness agrees, reluctantly, that will do.
    I have no further questions. He stands down.
    MYSELF, addressing the Jury: While that picture of a human top is fresh in our minds, let me assure you cross-my-heart that I’m topless, a head short, and can find nothing like that lurking on these shoulders. What about your shoulders? Are they a dish for serving up that very fancy meatball on, or for serving up everything but that meatball? For serving up a world? What’s on your plate, right now? At this moment can you think of anything less like what you’re looking out of, either in detail or overall, than that very grotesque and very knotted topknot? Than that very meaty meatball?
    I shall be coming back to exactly what you and I do have here in place of that meatball or topknot. Meanwhile I want to address the question which the Witness put to me at the end of his testimony. It could hardly be more germane to my Defence.
    Why do I pick on the head? The reason’s simple. I don’t: it picks on itself. It’s an oddity, a joker. The joke is that what I took to be most me is least me. It’s the only part of my body (I mean of the whole of it, which is the Whole) that consistently plays truant, the only part I never come across here, that’s permanently AWOL. The rest goes and comes back, much as it pleases and as I please. Thus when I look down it’s just my head that’s missing; when I look out (as