Dear diary,
People think that it’s a bad sign that all babies cry upon being born. Because this is the first thing every infant does when it enters the world, people reason that this world must be a bad place. – But would it really be better if every baby, immediately after emerging, sighed contentedly, or smiled & cheered? What if each newborn were to shout aloud: “Yay! I made it!” — wouldn’t that make you feel that this new life had simply exploited your womb, and used you as a stepping stone or lily pad to escape from danger into spacetime, like a safe house after a bank heist. – I wouldn’t want to feel that my child is a mere opportunist. At least when it wails and moans upon leaving my body, it’s as if it’s saying “This was just as difficult for me as it was for you, mamma mia.”
Yet the pain that accompanies childbirth — is this really the ideal way to keep the kind a-comin’? Also my womb, if not fertilized, monthly discharges its life-favorableness: and that’s painful too. So, between pregnant or not, we got the choice of pain or pain.
If there really is a Creator who made humankind intentionally, why didn’t this Creator associate the continuation of the species with glee, or at least with contentment? As it is, only the act of conception offers any crumb of pleasure — and even that is a short-lived bliss, and not unmixed with dissatisfaction. Many of us women even find sexual intercourse uncomfortable. And many men dislike the heavy labor that goes with all that humping around — it’s just another physical task, which one accomplishes in the sweat of one’s face. (Genesis 3:19)
Why can’t coupling, gestation, and birth all be easy and sweet? That’s how I’d make them, if I were the Creator of humankind. But this is why I assume that there is no Creator, no human-like God that predated us. Or I should rather say: I can’t see there being any God who would have intended for childbearing to be such a convoluted and frankly awful process.
If some type of God predated us, then it seems that she must have fashioned the human body as an emergency vessel to keep the divine spark alive for enough generations until it can figure out how to regain its former eminence:
God was once superhuman, but then some disaster struck the divine realm, and it was incumbent upon her to relinquish her super-ness, and “put on” humanity for a spell; thus God made the act of conception more enticing to her seed-shooting part (her male-ish organ), like a treat dangling before a trap, to lure the divine spark into peril, for its own good (wrap the pill in thick slices of meat to get a tyger to take its medicine): as the passing forward of divinity was the lesser of two evils; the other being the loss of the God-possibility.
What I’m saying is that humans at least make divinity possible. Without us, there’d be no chance of ever attaining anything like God. Or at the very least it would take annoyingly long. (I know that life has all the time in the world to do whatever it wants, but it also is as impatient as a spoiled child, which is probably why it caused its own God-realm to collapse in the first place.)
2
Also this whole idea that we’re made in God’s image — this is an idea that comes from the Bible, from the book of Genesis. In all the above hem-haw, I was speculating about God freely, just fancying things without any restriction beyond my own prejudices. But now I wanna think about God thru the lens of those early chapters of Genesis, which give the Creator of humankind the name Jehovah. (I know that scholars say the name is more properly pronounced something like “Yahweh”; but I like to use the incorrect mistranslation, for the sake of fill-in-the-blank.)
Alright, so Jehovah God sculpts humankind using his own image as a model: male and female therefore he makes us. (Genesis 1:27) Here’s what I want to wonder about:
If we humans are made in the image of God, are we therefore clones of God? It seems not, because I think of a clone as an exact copy, whereas we humans are only approximations — by some amount, we deviate from Jehovah’s actual image. Now, this built-in variation, this tendency toward deviance — was it intentional? Did God aim to clone himself yet mistakenly end up with mutations, or was the imperfect copying actually the stroke of his genius, like a painter painting a royal self-portrait & trying to capture the SPIRIT of the mirror as opposed to attaining mere photographic accuracy?
Here’s what I’m trying to ask: In God’s self-copying program, is humankind’s not-exactly-Jehovah-ness a bug or a feature?
We might all have our personal opinions and hunches, but if we stick to the biblical text, this question’s apparently unanswerable — it remains enigmatic whether or not God wanted this result:
God sometimes speaks as if our failure to be and act identical to him is a fatal flaw in us, and sometimes God speaks as tho it would be fatal to attempt to claim equality with him. One moment, Jehovah yells “Why can’t you be more like ME!” Then the next he yells “Don’t you dare try to be too much like ME!”
And one can’t even reconcile those positions by saying something like “Well, Jehovah wants humankind to be a changed version of himself, only superior rather than inferior.” — This does not work, because it’s extremely clear that Jehovah demands the top spot on the pyramid. He leaves no doubt about his disapproval of anyone trying to surpass him; and, like I said, he even frowns on simple equality.
But it’s plain that Jehovah is happy with a certain type of human — so it’s not a hopeless case. He liked Jacob a lot — he even renamed Jacob “Israel” (which ended up being the name of the entire nation; that’s how important this guy is, and how much God apparently loved him) after Jacob won a wrestling match against God… altho God of course cheated in the end, so that technically he didn’t need to relinquish his Champion Belt. (Genesis 32:22-32.) And Jacob / Israel is tricky and wily, slippery: he’s almost a cheater himself. He cheats his brother Esau out of the blessing, by lying & deceiving their father (Genesis 27). And later, Jacob’s descendant Joseph also seems to capture Jehovah’s favor, by being similarly sly, subtle, crafty… Apparently God loves a smooth operator.
And, as far as I can tell, there’s nobody in the biblical history that God loved more than David, and David was a deceptive warrior who even joined and fought for the Philistines, the infamous enemies of ancient Israel (1 Samuel ch. 27-28)...
But those are all poetic stories, and the reason for their God’s proclivities might simply be the taste of their human authors. So if we think it’s contradictory for Jehovah to value a deviant attitude in one book but then rage against deviant attitudes in another book, we are right: but it’s only because the books’ respective authors held divergent and varying views. What I’m saying is that perhaps its own authors would consider it a laughable notion to try to reconcile all the Bible’s versions of God.
3
So, after all, what can we say but that stuff lives: it moves around and gets into trouble; then it slinks out of trouble. Some stuff is stronger than other stuff; but then sometimes the stuff that seemed weak springs up and proves strong in some unexpected way — sometimes the weakness itself proves to be a new strength. Things keep scrambling all around. One thing becomes another; two other things join; more stuff enters and splits and then combines with other stuff, and some things that were presumed to be dead come alive and merge with everything. But then it all collapses suddenly, and the shot zooms out to reveal that everything was all a day in the life of an incommensurately vaster victual’s belly.
That’s why I like to focus on things that seem average, tried & true. Things like family: mothers fathers sons and daughters. Also love & hate. Relationships. These are things that everyone can understand, because we’ve all experienced them. Even if we’re not parents ourselves, at least we all once had parents, or some type of authority figure who abused us. Everyone was someone’s guinea pig, at some point in the past.
And we all love X as much as we all hate Y. We all gaze up at the clouds and have conversations with them, and believe we hear them answering us in a loud, clear voice; and then a phoenix descends and hovers over our head and gives us its blessing. And it speaks in an alien tongue that, while we do not understand, we understand fully — its meaning is clear as a musical melody: it speaks in a language that is a pure merging of feeling and symbol. This is the life of the common mind: we all recognize the shared experience.
Yes, sales are so much better when you stick to the universal themes. That’s why myths make the big bucks. It doesn’t matter how many times we film the story of Satan, it’s still gonna make a killing at the box office, when the next movie drops. Aim for a release date around Christmastime — that way families will visit the theater together. It is better to sell four tickets (to mom, dad, sis, & bro) than just one (to some sad-sack film-buff).
For it has been said of old “Whoever does not work should not eat” (II Thessalonians 3:10); to which I add: “Only the rich should ever be idle,” and “Let there be no rest for the wicked.” Then, when the pandemic comes to your town, I shall earn another fortune, cuz I own the right stuff. We’re all in this together.
No comments:
Post a Comment