The Story

John was always wrong about God. God is not a man who looks like men, God is not even a blemmye who looks like blemmyae. God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking. It has no sense of timing. It does not obey nice narratives like: a child is born, he grows, he performs miracles and draws companions, then sacrifices himself to redeem a previous event in an old book. That is not how anything works. God is a sphere, and only rarely does it intersect with us – and when it does, it crashes, it cracks the surface of everything. It does not part the sea at just the right time. God is too big for such precision.
-- Hagia, from Catherynne Valente’s The Folded World

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
-- John 1:1

My story starts some time around January of 2007.

Well, that’s not true, not strictly. My creation myth of my own making starts at that point. My actual story starts some twenty-six years before that. But you do not want to hear of those early years, full of crying and whining and vile putrid things coming out of my person. Nor do you want to hear stories of me as a baby, now that I think on it more. Assuming I could even offer a story of me as a baby.

My creation myth is where I prefer to begin. I had a break of sorts. I had a moment of transition. I graduated college, began to officially realize I was an adult, after a fashion. More than that, though, I realized that I could no longer hold back the tide I knew was about to wash over me. Faith, the very idea of faith, was on the verge of utterly failing, of collapsing under its own unsupported and unwanted weight.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
-- Genesis 3:6

My creation myth, like all good creation myths, hinges on the existence of a few key elements. There is the point of innocence – or at least lack of self-awareness – the Garden of Earthly Delight, and the woman. Innocence, in the world of men and boys, cannot long live in the presence of the woman. I suppose if I were gay I might not feel the same, but since that is not the case and my somewhat ceaseless striving towards asexuality found no welcome terminus in its trackless wanderings I must simply offer the lessons of the countless fools who preceded me and who will follow in my wake.

I remember a woman. I remember an Eden. I remember a serpent.

I remember in my creation myth all three were somehow separate. But I also know now, to shamelessly steal a line from a much better writer than I, to begin to tell the history of a thing is to begin to tell a lie about it. I foolishly believed that because I was trained in the arts of history that meant I was immune from the pull of convenient narrative. In my memories and my creation myth, however, the serpent and the woman were separate, distinct.

In reality, I think they were one and the same. It’s not her fault, I don’t think. I needed a narrative and a myth and there simply weren’t enough actors to play all the roles. It doesn’t help that she doesn’t know it was a role she played. It’s unfair, too, since there was no Eden in those days.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
-- Genesis 3:7

There was a wrought-iron table, I think. It was round. Or maybe square. It was the sort of thing that a business puts out on the sidewalk out front during the summer months to encourage those who walk past to sit, loiter, enjoy this place. Purchase a beverage or a bit of food. Relax.

It was on the sidewalk in front of La Spiaza. Or maybe it was Front Street Cocina. These were the days before I learned what real Mexican food was and could eat at places like Front Street Cocina and call white bread Wheaton’s take on refried beans and flour tortillas “good.” Where matters little, in the grand scheme of things. It’s the what that stands out.

I was well along on my journey at the time, that journey that would result In finding some measure of peace far from that which had so long stressed and broken me. I realized, for just a moment, that I had found an answer in a bible. It was Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible.

The passage in question was on Exodus. The writer recalled a Passover supper as a child, reading the old stories. Upon reading the bit where YHWH killed the first born of Egypt, upon realizing that what, in fact, was being celebrated was the death of children, the scales fell from that particular child’s eyes with a question.

“What if I had been one of those children?”

I thought I’d found an answer I sought in that question. I thought to share my question with her as we sat across that round square table in front of Front Street or La Spiaza. I thought she would finally begin to understand the questions I asked myself, that she would finally be able to see that for me this god was not kind and benevolent, but mean-spirited and ruthless. I thought that if I could find the words to help her see, then I could find a way to keep her in my life and me in hers.

I did not understand then what I understand now.

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
--Genesis 3:8

Her eyes grew narrow as I read. Her expression darkened.

I suppose that if I were the writer I wanted to be then I would have understood. Storm clouds would have rolled across her brow. Her expression would have darkened as a sky fleeing a coming storm. It would all have been a foreshadow, a portent of the very real dervish yet to come.

It’s all so neat, really, when you think of it in terms of the narrative structure assembled later. This, I think, is the danger of the story. I know now that we sat at a plot point just as clearly as we sat at a wrought iron table. I know now that we sat on a storyline just as clearly as we sat on a sidewalk. But then the story was still unfolding and I still believed I could control the narrative.

Now the story is over and I can only recount it. Whether I’m honest about that story is a different point entirely though. I think it depends on when I tell the story. I think it depends on what you and I mean when we talk about truth. There may be a capital-T Truth out there, but it is useless and subordinate to my subjective truth and yours. That’s why the remembered history is sometimes no less useful than the unfolding narrative.

To begin to tell the history of something is to begin to tell a lie about it.
--Ysra, from The Folded World

I have now walked away from two creation myths, each difficult in its own way, each compelling for its own reasons. They were different creation myths, but only because I believed one happened to me while I believed the other one happened to all of us. One involved a man, a woman, a serpent, and a granting of knowledge. The other involved a man, a woman, a serpent, and a granting of knowledge. One was the first step towards paradise lost. The other was just another in a long trudge towards acknowledging there was no paradise to gain.

No one will ever stand in front of a congregation and tell the story of me and her and a book and a wrought-iron table and a sidewalk. No one will ever stand at a pulpit and talk of brows furrowing like thunderclouds and skies darkening as faces in a storm. Except that it happens every week. Someone tells the story of a man and a woman standing naked before one another and the creeping embarrassment of the realization that I am not what you are and you are not what I am and I don’t know how to handle a world where this is the case.

Stories are easy. You just take everything that has happened to you and change it so that it looks as though it happened to someone else. If you like, you can change the names to something nicer, and pretend something you only thought about actually happened in the real world, with ant-lions involved.
--Elif, from The Folded World

My first stories all came from my creation myth. I held on to that time, held on to those memories, ignored as best I could the bits with rain and storm and darkened brow. I tried to say, “This, this is how the world is meant to be. This is the life we can all live.”

My first stories were all melancholy. Yes, they had happy endings, but they were the happy endings that come from hope not yet fulfilled. My first stories were the stories of Man and Woman standing outside Eden and asking, “What happened? How do we get back.”

Well, that’s not strictly true. My first stories were the story of Man standing outside Eden alone.

My first stories were an attempt to take that which I was and that which I had learned and make it about someone else. There were characters there: a man-boy searching for home, a farmer worried about his crop, an impatient king searching for a shortcut to wisdom. There was that central tale, the one that started it all, of the knight who slayed the beast through memory and love.

These were all my creation myth. They were all true in that they were false. They were all right in that they were only mostly wrong. They were all hopeful in that they lacked despair.

I find that I don’t feel the need to tell those stories any longer. They lie dormant in the recesses of my mind. I search for new stories.

I no longer need to dwell in the creation myth. I no longer seek the shimmering mirage of Eden. My stories now are those of the Trickster, wandering and attempting but never becoming, railing against the order of the world.

Even Trickster, though, will soon be relegated to memory. The stories I wish to tell now are the Hero’s Journey. I have gone out, I have fought, and I have returned home wiser and stronger for the experience.

God invented Man, the wise man says, because he loved stories. And maybe the other way around: Man invented God for the same reason. Or maybe Narrative invented both of us: couldn’t do without us. Hallelujah.
Amen.
--Lawrence Weschler

Genesis and Revelation. Alpha and Omega. The creation myth is the story of paradise lost, the happily ever after the coda to paradise regained.

My journey is far from over. One chapter, however, is closed while I begin to open another. It’s been nearly five years since the point I say is the beginning of my tale. It’s been three and a half since the unofficial end of my creation myth. I find that I had to put that narrative in place in order to understand it, while I wish I had learned that I couldn’t actually live in that narrative like I wanted.

The god of my childhood left the tale at the beginning. The serpent disappeared as well. This, I suppose, should be expected, as the god and the serpent were interchangeable because they were the same. God and Satan. Accuser and Judge. Gog and Magog. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End.

I find that through it all I do believe in god. I never let go of the idea that there was something bigger and brighter and more powerful than we can know.

God, I think, is the story. God is not in the story, as that wouldn’t make any sense.

We are the universe trying to make sense of itself. Either that or we are ourselves trying to make sense of the universe. It doesn’t matter, not really. Whether man made god or god made man is irrelevant. All that matters is the story.

The story is big, messy, and imprecise. The narratives don’t always tie up neatly at the end. The biggest problem, really, is that it doesn’t actually end. The action rises, then falls, then rises again, forever and ever, world without end, amen. On good days the narrative takes us in, elevates us, makes us the best we can be. On bad days it breaks us, destroys what little we create and what little we understand. Then it just goes on because that is what the story does, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

This is a god I can understand. The answer to every question posed to the story is the same: “Because.” Why did this one die? “Because.” Why did this one survive? “Because.” Why did everything change? “Because.”

The story is not benevolent, but it is kind. It’s the strange, alien kindness of the disinterested, even-handed spinner of fate. My story will end, as will yours, as will everyone’s. But the story will go on, and my story and your story and everyone’s story will be a reflection on that one, main narrative, going around and around in death and life and happiness and pain and chaos and order, always being re-told and always being re-discovered.

What else is there, in this universe at once vast and strange and tiny and familiar?

3 Comments

I recommended _Cabal_ to Matt Mikalatos in the comments on one of the criticisms a while back. I mentioned that it had been... important... to a whole group of us, in college together, at a particular time. And I considered writing a post about why it had been important to us.

It wasn't a creation myth, not as such. But it was a way of understanding ourselves, and understanding each other, as were in that time and that place. It was a mythology we shared, and wrote together - did I mention that it became a roleplaying game for us, the only one I've participated in that actually had an audience? (People who weren't part of the game showed up to watch us play.) It bound us together, gave us a frame of reference, let us explore what we were and what we wanted to be.

It gave us that sense that, Yes, someone else has felt this way, too.

It wasn't important. It was vital, in the original sense of the world. It was something that tied directly to my life.

So I wish you luck in your storytelling, and I look forward to hearing about your hero's journey.

Posted by: Michael Mock | 12/04/2011 at 12:14 AM