"Oryx," he says. "I know you're there." He repeats the name. It's not even her real name, which he'd never known anyways; it's only a word. It's a mantra.This passage is the one that I will always carry with me from off the pages of Oryx and Crake, one in which Snowman expresses how he longs for a deep communion with an invisible yet seemingly tangible being. Oryx here stands highly symbolic for love, for union, and beauty, and the reality of her name pared down to "only a word," "a mantra," reminiscent of the Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Christian centering practice. Here is a dangerous fusion of sexual fantasy and spiritual ecstasy, yet that which Snowman so craves for. It's transcendence, it's struggle, it's prayer.
Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she's pale and shadowy, but if he can say her name over and over, then maybe she'll glide into his body and be present with him in his flesh, and his hand on himself will become her hand. But she's always been evasive, you can never pin her down. Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark. (page 110)
On Prayer:
"Tonight we will apologize to Oryx," says one of the women - Sacajawea? - "for the rocks. And we will request her to tell her children not to bite us."
He's never seen the women do this - this communion with Oryx - although they refer to it frequently. What form does it take? They must perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly believe that Oryx appears to them in person. Maybe they go into trances. Crake thought he'd done away with all that, eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he's maintained. It had been a difficult problem, though: take out too much in that area and you got a zombie or a psychopath. But these people are neither.
They're up to something though, something Crake didn't anticipate: they're conversing with the invisible, they're developed reverence. Good for them, thinks Snowman. He likes it when Crake is proved wrong. He hasn't caught them making any graven images yet, however. (page 157)
Why is Snowman so caught off guard at the Crakers "praying?" Hadn't he himself been engaging a very similar activity only during the previous night? Oryx to the women, is a Mother, almost a Goddess, much like who she is to Jimmy, deprived of mother as a child and anchor as a young man. "Maybe they go into trances," as Snowman himself went into a trance, a dreaming or half-awakening state of near hallucination. I cannot help but notice Snowman's unfair sarcasm and skepticism, his acquiescence only due to dislike for Crake. If he is such a defender of the arts, and meaning, can he not begin to grapple harder with the reality of God?
On love:
"Maybe Crake was right, thinks Snowman. Under the old dispensation, sexual competition had been relentless and cruel: for every pair of happy lovers there was a dejected onlooker, the one excluded. Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you can see the two inside it, but you couldn't get in there yourself.
That had been the milder form: the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can't have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.
... (flashback to Crake and Jimmy debating on the angst of loving passionately but unrequited, whether or not it has merit, such as creating poetry, art, and meaning. Jimmy could not seem to win the argument against the biologically-minded Crake)
So now Crake's had his way, he thinks. Hooray for him. There's no more jealousy, no more wife-butcherers, no more husband-poisoners. It's all admirably good-natured: no pushing and shoving, more like the gods cavorting with willing nymphs on some golden-age Grecian frieze.
Why then does he feel so dejected, so bereft? Because he doesn't understand this kind of behaviour? Because it's beyond him? Because he can't jump in? (page 165-69)
Snowman, stranded in the midst of his own mind's confusion and heart's wounds, tries hard to intuitively understand the necessity or perhaps lack of what we call "love." The tired and weakened part of him wishes to merely give up, why go through all the trouble only to result in lovesickness, in despair, and even an end to life? Yet somehow he cannot come to terms, either, with Crake's view of the ideal, unsatisfied with being a mere "hormone robot." In seeing the more-than-perfect state of sexual gratification for the Crakers, Snowman's humanity is unsettled, seeing this utopia but feeling it more to be a dystopia. Though it may seem like the promised heaven where "there shall be tears," something is missing. These "people" know no pain, no grief, no unrequited passion, and therefore their paradise no substance. I have known Christians who have suffered much, for their faith imprisoned, exiled, alienated from family--physically and psychologically afflicted. The radiance on their faces mingle with scars, and these marks, I know, manifest the real strength of experience. From struggle is birthed poetry, art, and vitality. The world has been cruel to them, but they are not merely bodies, mechanically moving across time and space; they have loved, been wounded, and continue to love. In them, in their eyes, I see humanity, and the light of heaven.
On Graven Image:
What's the thing - the statue, or scarecrow, or whatever it is? It has a head, and a ragged cloth body. It has a face of sorts - one pebble eye, one black one, a jar lid it looks like. It has an old string mop stuck onto the chin.
Now they've seen him. They scramble to their feet, hurry to greet him, surround him. All are smiling happily; the children jump up and down, laughing; some of the women clap their hands with excitement. This is more energy than they usually display about anything.
"Snowman! Snowman!" They touch him gently with their fingertips. "You are back with us!"
"We knew we could call you, and you would hear us and come back."
Not Amen, then. Snowman. "We made a picture of you, to help us send out our voices to you."
Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them - who first had the idea of making a reasonable fascimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait.
...
Already the children are destroying the image they made of him, reducing it to its component parts, which they plan to return to the beach. This is a teaching of Oryx, the women tell him: after a thing has been used, it must be given back to its place of origin. The picture of Snowman has done its work: now that the real Snowman is among them once more, there is no reason for the other, the less satisfactory one. Snowman finds it odd to see his erstwhile beard, his erstwhile head, travelling away piecemeal in the hands of the children. It's as if he himself has been torn apart and scattered. (page360-63)
With a scarecrow, with their art, the Crakers have prayed. And reached out to Snowman in, love? It is clear that while Snowman had been away, they missed him, or perhaps we can even say that they longed for him? I don't know what to call this special affection, as they cannot be considered as completely "human," and yet the Crakers betray so many aspects of humanity beyond Crake's genetically manipulated master plans. I was moved reading: "They touch him gently with their fingertips." A simple gesture. Their profession of faith: "We knew we could call to you, and you would hear us and come back." This is hardly different from what we would say to family members and loved ones. I do it with my grandmother. She lives half way across the world, across the vastest ocean, 12 time zones, and yet somehow I know that she can hear me, those mutterings and exhilarations at which she would certainly be amused. I believe in her, as I'm sure she believes in me. This is perhaps the product of homesickness, of nostalgia, and deep longing.
Even if I were to die, to "go away" forever, nothing is ever truly destroyed as Snowman fears and griefs. Symbols, images, iconoclasm--they are common reminder as the orthodox and catholics know well, they teach us intercession, and we then move beyond that. Whether it's Mary, Peter, St. Sophia, my already deceased maternal grandparents, or my father who will be dying in the next decades to come, or myself for that matter--we are known tangibly, and we will be known intangibly, both as we truly are.
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