| It is strange that there
are people who deny the existence of God. They have their reasons for doubting Him. One question above all expresses their position: How can the evil of the world be and God exists? How can He countenance the horrors? Is He a Molock who with His own hands lowers guilt- less children into the greasy flames? Can He fashion creatures who, at every chance revel in the torture of each other? And who, stained in their own excrement, yet shake their fists at the sky claiming divinity for them- selves? This is the absurd problem of ethics, of benevolence seeming to em- brace evil, and the conundrum's feverish insolubility has opened wounds in men's minds and there have danced the flies of maddness and which philoso- phers have sought to cure by searching through the tools of reason for an argument of final quality in whose unruffled depth the form of God's Being might shine, direct and weighty as a gem. A few have claimed success: Then, God's thereness seemed certain, real as the sun, and the earth made steady and the memory of a dizzy sky seemed as the dream of a dream. But not for long. A flaw in the argument is found. Again the earth wobbles, the sun vanishes. The hunt goes on. Where is the formula tattooed on the skin of God, linked to existence, in whose coefficients being might flash like a pearl into shuddering water? Men have sought the properties of God in the adulation of His names. They insist on giving Him attributes. The Good, the Omniscient, the Omnipo- tent, the Merciful. But can they capture through the sound the meaning of these lofty, capitalized words? What could Omniscience suggest to them? What metaphors, though large as the Earth, could they manufacture in order to understand precisely? Their minds would reel at details so minute as to become infinite, at multitudinous worlds that bubble out of oblivion, sink into abysses, that the Omniscient Mind grasps in this moment - now. The staggering permutations of universes. But God is adjectiveless. There is no rule of nature that has to bound Him. He subsumes everything, including all the minute and absurd probabilities of Himself. He is limitless. Is that really impossible to understand? He is the unity that embraces all, even the puzzles of contradiction. I think of Him, momentarily, as if He were the paper on which an example of a logical fallacy - say, p and not p - is boldly written. Does the paper because of these few boastful human scratches on it vanish into the blind smoke of non-existence? Does it destroy itself in the ashy flash of an ontological blush? God is the paper on which anything can be drawn, written, or expunged, in which a galaxy is an evaporating pinhead of ink and life a glittering little wind. It is easy to misunderstand Him, as it is to be uneasy about what circulates in a man's imagination, bounded within the white perimeter of a skull. The things that drive a man, that animate his becoming, are cliches forwarded endlessly. When I think of desiring and wanting and lusting after things that too begin and end, I am seized with ennui, scorn, and stupendous pity, and I blush that I have the existence of a man. My body is a weight of common denomination. Yet it is strange, indeed uncanny, that for me God is no mystery. This flesh of mine that bleeds (I have seen it bleed and the line is red and warm and points languidly to the earth) has no terror of God. These eyes are not blind in the combustion light of His glory. I remain standing. My pulse is even. It is this instead, not Him, which provokes my wonder and in this wonderment of myself, there, do I feel the spin of mystery. God walks among the pots and pans. I have seen His heels in the snow. I have heard His laughter in theatres. I have felt His touch in the pulse of my wrist. Symbol does not contain Him. He is as likely to have the form of a man as He is to have the Olympian form. He is Yahweh and a carpenter's son. He is the smile of an infant, and the void. He is the thought that coursed through Einstein's brain, and the drib- ble on a drunkard's chin. I mean this literally, not metaphorically. But who am I, I hear the question. I am an ordinary man. My heart beats, my eyes see, my fingers touch. My pleasures are few and I too have had moments of darkness. Emptiness has been my companion. The abyss has called me and I have listened and heard the hiss of despair, serpent-like and warm its long tongue in my soul. I have shuddered in dread and desired dread as if it were a woman. And the great darkness has pressed its paws before me, hunched its back, and stared the depthless, awful eyes of its skull into my terrified, grin- ning soul. Yes, I have known the negative of calm, of tranquil felicity. I have yearned for the brush of a woman's lips on my cheek. And I too have looked at a woman and felt the drive that starts more than affection, or the need for friendship. I have known the sizzle of love, the sting, the privations, the flights and falls, and when love has sidled into memory, the sudden dullness of the world. The days that were light, impregnated with her smiles, then appeared as before. The change pressed like a gray wind that rubbed the color from the earth. She was no more! I refused to believe the passage of time. That all that remained of her was this ghost of her touch, of her glance, the fading imprint of her kiss, and of love itself just the word, the remembrance of a sound. I remember leaves jarring like metal above me, the clouds turned to garish tin, the earth at my feet an endlessly dull, silent, and cold steel. Yet it had been different. When it was happening, it was not so. I saw her for the first time in a large mirror in a store. I was looking at books, or knives (I loved the gleam of the flawless curve, the line that stopped space and subdued emptiness with its perfection, the edge between nothingness and life). The mirror was long, with beveled edges, in a simple frame. When I looked up I saw her and I did not realize at once I was looking into a reflection. It startled me, because she seemed so perfect. I had to blink. I surmized her existence. Then I turned and saw her. I followed her out of the store, but I lost her. Several days later, while walking in the park, as I like to do, I saw her sitting on a bench. I am not sure what she was doing, if she was reading. Of course I was terrified and normally I would have walked on past her, pretending I did not see her, pretending I was absorbed in my thoughts or in gazing at a tree or in studying the formation of the clouds in the sky. I remember that they were cumulus clouds, lethargic, blown with whiteness. But I managed to stop my walk and to surprise myself by sitting down beside her on the bench. I did not know what to believe then, what to think, what to feel, except my heart beating, for the first time I believed I was real, I felt it in my chest, warm and against my ribs. She spoke to me first. Her name was Mary. That is how it began. And I saw her the next day and the next. She seemed to like me. Then she said that she loved me. And then that she was madly in love with me. I, who had stared at the clouds, whose mind had become a cloud. We were walking up one of the wooded hills in the park and she was behind me and I could hear her breathing as her legs labored against the slope. There were pine trees about us, with the morning light tinctured with pine, and I heard her say, "You know I am madly in love with you. You know that." And she looked at me, shaking her head, as if she could not help the way she felt, and giving me an accussing look, as if I had planned it all, like a magician, or a hypnotise, or a god. It is true that often things happen as I want them to. I pretended not to hear her. I was smug. I asked her to repeat what she had said, and she did and I acted as if I did not care. She pouted, almost on the verge of tears, and a smile, suppliant and hazy, wavered on her lips. I kissed her. Nothing after could equal the touch of that moment of genesis. She did not return the next day. O, the anguish I felt. I thought, I am lost! Yet she had said that she wanted me, madly loved me! How could such a thing be? It was contradictory, irrational. I began to doubt she had ever existed, believed her a cell of my imagination, smoke, a scent in the wind. Yet her kiss was real, and the firmness of her flesh. Did I imagine the coquettish sparkle in her eyes, the playful way she moved, her childish hopeful laughter? These things were there. Was she mad? To appear, beguiling me, to bruise me with her love, tormenting me with her reality and then to vanish completely, to prove herself a dream? Yet she was, is now, I am sure, though her existence escapes me, of which I can prove nothing. She seems a sort of gift now, a special embodiment of the world, a striking smile in the soft distanceless horizon of the mystery. Is there anything that can touch you more concretely than the apprehension of wonder? Nothing is more real than awe. Time is the supreme illusion because through it we go on to believe we under- stand and penetrate into mysteries. This is strange to know this and yet to continue to feel on solid ground about what one knows. I dim myself on purpose. The days must keep rolling. The nights must be kept alive with dreams. Only God is beyond the stasis of clarity. His is the incomprehensible metaphor, misunderstood when lesser symbols are tried in a calculus to grasp Him. He is approached at the edge, where all formulas have been applied and exhausted, and there remains the gap where no symbols thrive, which must be crossed in an impossible way, a way foresha- dowed in quantum mechanics, of leaps in existence, and spins, of matter creat- ed out of nothing, a leap simple (Can anything be simpler than to become out of nothing? Can anything be simpler than a fact without explanation?) and absurdly terrifying. So God is. Was Mary playing with me? I was plunged in self-doubt. I began to question the facts of my senses. How could she who was so real to me, who is real to me now, have been an illusion, a consequence of avid imagination, a too real wish? I proceeded to doubt everything, even my own existence. The sky spun about me, the clouds traced fleecy crowns over my head, and the day moon, pale in its far cold distance, seemed to stare at me like a blind eye in a faceless immensity. I fell to my knees, not feeling the ground. I shivered in fear. Breathless, I clasped my hands together and my eyes turned to the storm that was within me. But when it seemed I was in the center of that meaningless circle, in an end- less descent in meaningless perpendicularity, into that wound in the void, with no hope of return, I began to laugh - Why, I can not say exactly. And I slid out of the blackness like a blade out of tar. Was Mary wind? Was she simply a creature of my wish? Often, I had dreamt of such a girl, on such a hill, in such a day, confessing her love for me, and moving, coquettish and sad with happiness, into my arms. My dreams went no further than that culminating moment. Yet Mary appeared. Without my prompting, for I kept silent, she realized my dream. She spoke my words. And then she vanished, traceless but for the disturbance of her kiss. Would I doubt her now, if she had never existed? feedback top next page literature directory hotpiehot's next dream © hotpiehot@hotmail.com |