Dear diary,
What is our meaning? For what purpose are we lost in space? I know how naive and simple this question sounds, nevertheless I sincerely ask it: these are my first words, upon awaking this day. — I never claimed to be the most original philosopher; my reputation as a thinker can’t get any lower (I’m a blogger on the Internet, for crying out loud); so I can ask “What’s human life all about?” and not feel ashamed.
The correct reply, which we know is right because it appears in the Answer Key at the back of the Textbook, is that life has no purpose or meaning; but this truth, like most truth, is boring: truth is something to be cleverly evaded, not something to tout. So my mind keeps returning to the idea of a tree casting its seeds whithersoever. That seems to me the right metaphor; and it scares the hell out of me. I wish I knew the right word for it, I mean the scientific name for the tree that casts the type of seeds that I’m envisioning, because trees have such interesting names. I’m thinking about the tree that develops pods of seeds, and the seeds are fluffy and they float in the air real slow, almost like movie snowflakes (I’ve heard they use potato shavings to simulate snowfall in old films, cuz actual snow never looked authentic — that’s another lesson: fake things always trump real things: thus art beats life, tho life IS art); I say, these fluffy seeds burst out of their pods and flood the atmosphere. They dally about in the air for the duration of their human existence, and then they land. Now, like Jesus says in his parable, some of the seeds land on fertile ground, and they grow up and become healthy trees themselves, and develop rich pod bay doors that emit little spacecrafts and populate worlds with new star-children. But some of the seed falls on concrete sidewalks and doesn’t get a chance to grow. Jesus also says that certain seeds fall on so-so soil whose dirt tastes flavorless, thus it does allow the seeds to sprout, but they cannot grow into healthy trees: they straightway wither and become sere. They produce bad fruit and crown themselves with flowers of evil. They’re nutrient-poor cultures, such as feudalism or even worse capitalism, which are averse to poetry and instead produce computers whose poor shriveled souls blog nonsense daily. And think about the seeds that fall on radioactive landfills. Or have you ever seen a snowbank where a dog just peed: What if seeds land there? Probably they would enjoy this environment, because plants are different from humans: our waste is their sustenance, and their trash is our treasure: we exhale flames, and they inhale our fire and expel an alcoholic frost, which we then suck up greedily & roar back more flames…
But the idea of zillions and zillions of seed-pods bursting into space & setting up shop haphazardly anywhere: THAT seems to mimic the purpose and meaning of life. Cuz otherwise how do you explain babies that are born with addictions to harsh drugs. Just because the parent made certain decisions, their kid now has to foot the bill? It’s like that maxim often quoted in the Bible: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. Ezekiel talks about it in his eighteenth chapter. Jeremiah mentions it too (31:29). Both prophets argue against the idea of offspring shouldering their parent’s burdens. But then you have the scroll of Deuteronomy, which sez, amid the so-called Ten Commandments, right there, smack dab in the middle: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…” Now, to be fair, Jehovah also says he’ll show mercy to whoever follows his orders; but it’s plain that he’s more like an irate military commander than a kind-hearted guru, let alone a hugging and loving bed-fellow who sleeps at our side through the night and then withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, leaving us baskets covered with white towels swelling the house with their plenty. (I’m quoting Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.) So if God created all life, the way an artist creates a painting, then what would the artist itself concede was the intent of its creation?
Say Jehovah really is God, and he deigns to pay us a visit, like the one he inflicts on unfortunate Job at the end of his book, and God appears before us driving his late-model tornado, so we can address him directly; and we say “Well, LORD, it looks like we meet again. Here I have a question for you, which appeared on the instant-chat message board: it’s from one of the popular bloggers who tuned in to our program and is viewing it from the live stream; the account’s named Bryan Ray — I assume that’s a pseudonym, for I doubt the Real Me is actually online — anyway, he writes ‘Dear Jove, what was your intention in painting our world in a style midway between Impressionism and Mannerism so that it resembles a tree bursting with seeds from pods upon a landscape overrun with lava?’ — I think the questioner means ‘a landscape replete with potential, and which is inherently beautiful’ (because your great volcano has yet to even explode); but I assume you get the gist. So, do you have an answer?”
And the LORD says: “ . . . ”
What should we have the LORD say? I had half a mind to make him give a rude outburst about wanting to watch things writhe & thrive & DOMINATE & fight like baited cocks; then he’d close with a quote from his forerunner King Lear: kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! But I don’t wanna make fun of Jehovah anymore. Everyone knows he’s a warrior god; there’s nothing wrong with that. Let him have his fun. I’d like to keep circling that original image of the tree with its abundance of seeds: Is life really so arbitrary? Like a writer’s room on a sitcom, where you walk in and ask the team “Hi whatcha doin?” And they say “Just throwin ideas at the wall and seein what sticks.” That, however bathetic, seems closest to the genuine essence of life.
In a dream, something significant may occur, but then the scene and characters and even the physics all shift so freely that you can’t recall what you registered as PROFOUND about the foregoing experience. Even if it terrified you, you remark to yourself “Why exactly did that dream seem so darn scary?” Things fade away and leave no evidence of their ever having appeared; like species now extinct. I imagine a scientist exclaiming “Did I dream the dodo?” And this same scientist tells me that oil, at the moment, is humankind’s primary source of energy: we use it to fuel our autobuses and aeroplanes, and we even use it to power the mechanisms that build those solar panels that are scheduled to render all oil-based machines obsolete; so it’s like a father bearing a son who’s destined for patricide (Jehovah and Jesus again: or even Saint Oedipus) — moreover our scientist claims that this same oil is all that remains of the great race of lizard-folk who preceded us, here on Earth. Larry says (I’m christening our pretend scientist Larry, after my uncle-in-law) that the giant lizards got hit square in the planet with an asteroid, and this caused The Big One to erupt, so there ensued a global flood of molten magma (which, if I’m not misunderstanding Larry’s sermon, is LIQUID ROCK), and this smashed all the reptiles flat. Then it basically squeezed them down until they were fuel. My point in relaying this fairy tale is to provide further evidence for our hypothesis “Life is but a dream”: for one thing turns into another, and you forget how all the stuff ever got here, or even if it did. Have you read the affidavit? Yuge thunderlizards are volcano’d to smithereens, & now we’re sipping them as Texas Tea in Purgatory. For mankind’s present stint is the sauroids’ afterlife, and they’re not in Dante’s Inferno, which is a place of eternal punishment; nor are they in Paradiso with Lucy and Beatrice; instead, these lizard people are expiating the sins of their former existence by passing their disorders on to us. They’re “paying it forward”; with “it” being frenzied wanderlust. Our forefathers wept over their spilt wine, & now OUR fangs are set on edge.
Yeah, I can see why Christian Fundamentalists are against the idea that the dinosaurs were our globe’s legal owners for millions of years before we humans inherited it. Cuz if God is truly in charge of space and time, then whatever happens on Earth is like a channel that God can watch on his TV; and you have to ask yourself: Why would you wanna watch a show about reptiles who can’t speak French but only grunt and scream and bite each other all day? And you watch this show religiously for millennia; then one afternoon you get bored and bomb the planet into the stone age, and you wait a while — the screen is just snow for a spell — then you craft bare naked bipeds to trash the place. And this new show is totally meta and postmodern, in that its characters are constantly turning directly to the camera and addressing the viewer behind the screen and saying, “Dear God, we know you’re out there watching us; we praise you and worship you, we love you, we want you to save us: Why don’t you ever send us any messages, or just get up off your couch and come rescue us! We want to live with you, in your house, where your snacks provide permanent health and defy mortality. We don’t believe that you had anything to do with producing that show that aired before us and got cancelled. We don’t think that you desired to watch such lowbrow material — mainly sex & violence. But why do you allow us to suffer so intensely, and for so long? Don’t you get the picture; can’t you grasp the plot of this new series? Humans act out of hatred and jealousy and selfishness; they rape and kill each other; they steal as a rule, and then, to add insult to injury, we formulate moral theories to justify our behavior: portraying what is obviously foul as fair. Plus this place where you have us performing, it’s getting worn down. The set’s falling apart. What are you deriving from watching us, all these years? We refuse to consider the possibility that you’ve fallen asleep in front of the TV set. For we believe that you are all-powerful and all-knowing; so, like Judge Holden from the novel Blood Meridian, you never sleep and will never die. But if you have unlimited power, then why don’t you use a little bit of it to ease our constant pain? And if you have unlimited knowledge, then why did you green-light our show? For you surely knew that it wouldn’t end well.”
Maybe God is like a skyey filmmaker, and he’s collecting a whole bunch of raw footage right now, with the plan of editing out all the bad parts later. So, when we see the finished project, we’ll say “Ah, that’s wonderful! I give this movie two thumbs up. Or if we employ little images of refreshments as a rating system, I give it a perfect score: five out of five bags of popcorn, plus one large soda.” But this only shifts the position of my original question without actually answering it — so now I say: Even if the result of our life in this world will ultimately prove to be a pleasant masterpiece, why can’t it feel harmonious right from the get-go? What’s the meaning and purpose of all this pre-recorded misery? Why must we live thru and experience all this raw footage? Even if our present, temporal life is but a drop in the ocean of eternity, I want that drop evaporated: I don’t want it tainting an otherwise attractive body of water. It’s a blemish; get rid of it.
I know I sound like an ornery king, complaining like this. But I AM an ornery king. That’s my purpose in life. I abhor injustice more than your fussiest connoisseur, so I berate it superlatively.
Aha,
that’s it! — by Jove, we’ve solved our puzzle: My denunciation is so exuberant that it justifies the existence of the stigma.
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