Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett Rev History Rev .00 - 03/24/2008 Rev .01 - 03/08/2022
In the beginning, a god made a man…
I was born upon this earth for a purpose.
I am almost confident that that is true. I always knew I was a Jew, and that that meant that there would be no easy answers. To be a Jew means to question: to question loudly and in the face of dire consequences. It’s why we make such good lawyers and assholes. Be it Eve or Abraham; Lilith, Moses or Jesus. We just cannot leave well enough alone. We leap at any opportunity to peel off scabs that disguise grim realities behind promises and pretty words.
That is why God made us.
Because every time we bleed, the world knows there is still blood left in its veins, and we all know that somewhere in our universe, wherever that universe may be, life goes on.
This is a war between life and death and there are no second chances to get things right.
Words.
You think a liar would be good with them, but there is a difference between knowing what wants for the hearing and saying what needs to be heard. There is too much to say to get lost in the beautiful ambiguities of ‘almost explanations’ and ‘open to interpretations’. In the interest of clarity, it behooves the task at hand to define my words now, at least one or maybe three that are one before I can ask you to take the leap of faith necessary to make this a day not lived in vain:
God:
Question: Why is God a man?
Answer: Easy, God is dick.
Maybe too easy.
So let’s look at the relationship between men and love and violence.
Love
What is love?
Stop singing.
To love is to risk. It is to surrender to the possibility that there may be more to living than we can box up or control or bury in the ground.
At its best and at its worst love makes us beg.
It makes us ask what we can do for others even as we experience what others can do for us without needing to exert our egos over what the experience will be. In that, and many other regards, it is the exact opposite of being a man.
But there is more to both love and men than their relationship to each other; because there is also violence.
Love.
Masculinity.
Violence.
A holy trinity of bullshit and atomic particles.
Like forces repelling each other while opposite ones are drawn together into nuclear collisions.
Yes. Sometimes they give birth to sons that can shed light, warm the flesh and carry with them the promise of tomorrow.
But they can also destroy.
Spontaneous explosions, they leave behind nothing but shadows. A slow creeping death that saps our strength and chars our skin until we turn first to leather, then to stone, and then to dust.
Men do not own the monopoly over this kind of power or destruction.
Kali is a wonderful and terrible goddess. But she is not mine. Mine is the God of the Old Testament. Of laws, and jealousy, and wrath, and promises yet still unfulfilled.
A rose growing wild out of a pile of shit.
And yet beneath all those layers of pain and feces, there lies love!
Little larvae consuming excretion and decay, turning dust back into dirt.
Dear God,
All of this will be yours before this journey is done,
but please
for those I leave behind,
please
leave the maggots in the ground.
Let hope hide somewhere
these robots will never think to look for it.
But even to hope is to risk. And thus I must beg you to have faith.
Not in my god, but in my words.
The god of this testament wears his belt in his hand and may be the only one left who can save us all.