The God Metaphor
John Carey
Copyright 2013 John Carey
Cover by John Carey
The God Metaphor
A Broken Polemic II
By John Carey
Contents:
God Metaphor
- Me
- Dante Alighieri
- Beans On Toast
- Luke 19:10
- Aldous Huxley
- Sándor Petőfi
- Will Varley
- Dylan Thomas
Honesty
The God Metaphor
A Broken Polemic II
By John Carey
I feel hands on my shoulders, crooked and clawed beneath their heavy weight; a weight only recently placed aside in favour of such molestation. I feel eyes, shifting from my work to their prize and back, conscious, always conscious, that they control something important, as if anything deserved the mass of that unwieldy description. I feel the sickly breath of elegance against the hairs on the back of my neck, of ego racing like the shock of ancient electricity across my arms, of greed and the refusal of change guiding my fingertips.
I sense death, hidden in the distant mountains, death disguised as honesty or acceptance or the realisation of dreams, as though its meaning could be entrapped in some mass-produced piece of card, gaily inked to spell out fear, in easily understandable definitions. I sense it lying near the top of the deck and my hand, guided by desires I rage against, lowers itself in search of that man-made mysticism. What folly.
What folly?
What folly controls it, I cannot begin to realise. What infuriating idiocy makes those fingertips ingrained with ink and grease, with their nails uncut and jagged, attached to bones raging against the confines of the flesh, disobey me in such a way. It doesn’t matter, they will not last longer than I. They are the ones attempting to draw change from his ill-randomised sanctuary amongst ignominy; they are exposed to his whims more than I, remaining as I do in the safety of my ignorance and my judgements, of my steady denial of doubt and the desperate barring of the gates against the onslaught of innovation. These walls I’ve raised are little more than wattle and daub, and every moment in which I find myself blinded by the metaphor of culture in the sky, the flames creep closer and closer and, eventually, they will bake my walls until they crumble around me; until they burn away the oiled patina of my endeavour.
But still, the stereotype laughs as she slaps my hands away, reaching for the deck instead. It is her whims by which I must, apparently, be guided; pre-prepared actions which spell out delay or the onset of falsified acceptance. Her wrinkled hand, like one belonging to one of the Fates, snaps a thread from her shawl without so much as a glance, the sound no doubt a distraction as she palms her hidden cards into position, and my future spreads out before me. The fertility gone, instead the five cards a still-birth, an unlicensed surgery to remove doubt and hope, as though the dual growth was a cancer in possibilities’ womb.
The Union is the first card I see. Thanks to some originality on behalf of the creator of these cards the typical image of a man and a woman conjoined is replaced by a Vitruvian man missing a leg. She tells me the card speaks of spiritual sacrifice, of exchanging one thing for another, of completing that which I have long fought to stave off. I am the centre of the future, she tells me in a voice bordering on the obscene in its drama.
The next card is reversed and I rely on her to tell me that it is the Two of Painting; a card showing some gigantic figure reaching from the Heaven’s or, reversed as it is, from Hell in order to shield two miniature figures. She explains that it is a scene from Dante’s Inferno, that the visual is focused on duality. She tells me that the physical and the mental, the artistic and the real, which I have kept separate as one must maintain the distance between fire and ice, should be conjoined. She claims that I need assistance, that I am not the man to walk this path alone.
I looked and, behold, a whirlwind comes out of the North, she mutters as though possessed; an act she had no doubt practiced, one that she had reviewed extensively in the mirror hanging behind the purple lace curtains some feet behind her. This card, too, is reversed, and the image is little more than a blur of colour. She spouts nonsense here, explaining that the image holds the four beasts of Revelation. I can only see God, atop his throne, waving towards me like a pimp with a whore, like a leper with a wealthy man. She tells me that God and imagination, that Jesus and Man are the same here, that the four are connected in me. That I am God as much as she, as much as the shadows waiting outside her door. She whispers to me of restraint, of hiding turmoil within an admission of turmoil. She tells me to honour my Gods.
A hoary old man appears next, the Man of Music, and the artwork is one I recognise. He is old and, therefore, in control. Self-control, integration, mastery; these words fly past me in the language of the unconscious. I cannot interpret her words, as she tells me how to interpret my absent dreams, how to listen to lying oracles and how to read circumstantial omens. She tells me that I must make a thing of beauty; that any other pursuit is worthless and I will be dead before it culminates.
The final card is not the one I expect. I expect to see Death, that familiarly grim visage or whatever image takes the form of that card amongst this strange tarot. It is reversed, again, and she lets out a sharp bark of a laugh as I wait for her to say the name.
Error, she tells me, you would know this creature as the Devil, the first of the Fallen Angels, as Satan. I wonder what gave that away to her; the result of some extensive spiritual research, some communion with a long dead religious fanatic or the image of a red, horned figure on a throne. He is within you, not as though you were a character in a bad horror movie, but as a state of mind. Satan is self-doubt, spiritual fear and reason. Satan is the segment of the mind that screams ‘I am God alone: there is no other!’ Error is materialism and delusions of morality. Satan is the doubt against which Imagination fights, in the old adage of Angel versus Angel. In the corners of the image, I can see tortured souls pawing to get away. Some are driven backwards by the bat-wings of their delusions and some are held down by the chains of their introspection; either way they would never escape the confines of this card. Reversed, however, she is quick to point out, means that you are capable of ignoring these chains, of dodging these sharpened wings. You can rise above manipulation, above the duplicity of the self. You must keep yourself ignorant of temptation, of guilt and panic. It means that I am one such poor soul caught within the influence of a creature who was not created so far beneath such things, but one who actively chose to seek out his own joys.
It is my turn to laugh at her then; I laugh until the tears obscure my eyes and I can see her for what she is. A charlatan with no crowd, a fool with no royal audience and a whore with no customers still amongst the living. I laugh in her face. I laugh, a desperately cruel sound, and the silence around me rings in my ears, even as I seek to block it out. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh until the tears come, then I rise from the chair and I walk away, no silver gracing the palm of such a worthless prophet.
‘It’s so much easier, not to have to think, to lay my conscience on someone else’s shoulders and act like the Beast I spent my waking hours fighting.’
Me
Time races through the void, the earth twists in the greatest absence of life, and the Turtle moves through space. Atoms spin, or whatever it is atoms do, things both physical and mental find themselves aging and rotting, until they disappear or warp into little more than a pale imitation of the original. The universe changes with every passing moment, every percentage of a heartbeat creates a new existence, one where nothing will ever be the same again; one ruled by the fear of the next world to appear, disbelief at the stupidity of the one abandon
ed behind us, and contempt of the one passing by.
So here we are again, you and I, in this new universe. An existence from which we cannot return, to a time before our first meeting or any other positioning of those ignoble hands on a clock’s face. Once again, crossing wits as though they were blades, which each hidden attack of mine crumbling beneath your voracious, unmerciful and, most of all, unsubtle assault. Am I merely another character to you, some piece of walking, barely talking performance poetry? Did that last war of ours fail to satisfy your itch, fail to fill the void left by twin horrors designed to end all other such horrors, the folly of such an idea being too great even for a worm like myself, a hairless monkey with his cock in his hand, to comprehend?
Have you come here to, once again, masturbate your intellect? To compare the poor auteur of this text to Godard, though a Godard filled with self-revulsion, a Godard caught in a traffic jam on a rainy night, when the damp festers beneath his clothing and the bottle of wine he bought as a gift is beginning to look like a box he was commanded to let alone? To run fingers, forged from metaphor, alongside your self-proclaimed genius, to feel it pulsating beneath your wit as your stimulation grows and grows and grows? Have you the hope that, this time, some resolution hidden amongst the dross will allow you to reach your climax, to feel that such knowledge originating and, subsequently, emerging from you might somehow give your mentality release? That these hints of soft-core literature, floating before supposedly interested eyes, can lead to the sense of personal fulfilment, culminating in one tepid, uninspiring collection? The produce of your self-gratification will be nothing but a ghost, a translucent liquid leaving any meaning, anything you should actually be proud of, clinging like accumulated smegma to the pulsing headiness of your literary confidence?
Are you, like me, merely wearing this flesh of intellect? This supposed technical brilliance, a title granted by self-deception, hanging from shoulders it ill-fits, hanging from a frame too thin to support it and all that society screams that is must mean? That I have a duty to misery, as the fool has a duty to joy? This confidence in innovation, relying on it to carry you through your mediocrity, though perhaps in not the same way I fear I operate.
Synonyms, archaic structure, over-wrought metaphors, even the simple ignoring of laws laid down by parasites claiming to some authority they have no right to, these things are traps and tricks for you, my critic, they are to lead you down into a nominally straight corridor, albeit the floor may be twisted and the walls be crooked and they shrink in the distance like the entrance to a diabetic Hell. The only way in which I can make this simple pathway feel more like the literature I might desire it to be, more like the maze of narrative I would present to you once again, is to position mirrors along the entire length. Mirrors which, much like some sickening fairground experiment, distort your image of yourself, distort your image of me and this real, solid world in which you walk, like a ghostly beggar through the reality of an overly prosperous urban wasteland.
Somewhere in this rapidly shrinking universe, I am twitching and cursing and sweating my way through another narrative, a response to the myriad failures of the first. Somewhere, I am hiding my doubts in the open, shielding them with an admission of their existence, with the constant reminder that they coil around me like serpents, with a poison, rich in natural ingredients, hidden within their fangs.
In another universe, I am happy, and know what pleasure will await you within this monstrosity. But, in this universe, I am happy, for a given value of the word; that additional phrase, that one little distinction, is the only thing that matters. But, in this room, I am tired; I am angry, and I am worn down to the very nub of my being, sharpening an ill-designed wit again and again.
I have been worn away, by my endlessly trailing fingertips, by my lips which lack the qualitative speed of my whimsy, by my ears ringing with the sounds of the earth turning through space and, finally, by the emptiness which your eyes demand that I fill.
But Carlin is dead, Joyce is dust and Orwell is a nightmare haunting my waking hours. Lovecraft has ascended into the ether, Wilson-Watts is ash tinged with alcohol, Huxley is a ghost, mute with pain and dilated eyes, and Yahweh was never anything more than a phantasm to begin with. Adorno was a sensationalist and a fool, Poe was nothing but an ornithophobe and Fitzgerald was scared of maturity, responsibility and of meeting death without the fame he desperately craved. Art has followed them all into oblivion, time and time again, into the lack of any ephemeral existence between the worlds emerging from arrogant minds and words spreading from a black-tipped pen or the volatile strokes of some animal-hair brush. And I do not know where, or as what, that leaves us; poor half-castes that we are, who dare to think of ourselves as successors to names that ring throughout our illusions of culture like the tolling of sunken bells beneath the waves.
But have you heard him yet? Have you heard that meaningless phrase he spits from broken lips, as though it was an answer, a justification, a prayer to hold his doubts at bay? Have you heard how he lies, how he misunderstands creativity and the genius he so terrifyingly lacks, how he focuses on failures and fallen idols, despite what inactions he believes he is guilty of.
‘Art is dead!’ He cries in his folly, wasting away besides his magnum opus, destined to never be completed. ‘Art is dead!’ Repeated like a mantra against everything I am, against everything HE could have been. His ignorance blinds him, though I have tried to help him as best I could. The character knows, though he lacks the self-perception to realise he knows. He has not the mind to comprehend, until it is revealed to him in fire and blood and the smell of medical equipment suddenly falling away.
Art is not dead. Art is not malformed or twisted. Art is not mere replication or the severing of decency. Art cannot be placed under the command of money. It cannot be given over to politics. It cannot be surrendered beneath nature’s whims. It can, however, be used to justify failure. It can be attributed to such semi-creativity as to malign the word, to twist its meaning from that of the past and into the ignorance of the future.
Music made to be sold, literature written to be bought, images created for profit, evoking no emotion besides that falsification behind which the new generations cower. Are they not mere carrion for the previous generation, those whom have the audacity to claim that they were the greatest, when meaningless genocide was enacted and meaningless war was fought? The hands of humanities’ best took the world and shook it, and shook it, and shook it like a child with a snow globe. What are we to do, now these plasticised snowflakes, these remnants of the world they cobbled together with platitudes and promises, are beginning to fall? Now the great is done and the sub-standard is the only remnant. Galt would be a parasite now, working in some ringing factory under the social crutch such evil would create.
But, so long as life exists, there will be Art. Even when the last arrogant creature whom so dares to dub himself an Artist is nothing but a bad memory, naught but dead bacteria on the wind, or ash in the sea, Art will live on in the universe. Even when existence comes crashing down, when all this around us will be blackened out in a single instant, when the last breath of an empty galaxy is drawn, Art will still be there.
How very sensational.
Dante Alighieri
The gates open again, the inscription hovering above them in naked flames snapping out of whatever metaphorical existence they had occupied as though a shadow beneath a sun’s unblinking stare, the like the excuses of an honest man beneath his child’s starvation. And God, in selfish disregard of my metaphor, blinked the sleep from his eyes. He sits in a chair, worn and once comfortable, since replaced with crude repairs and patches of colour torn from old leather jackets in an unsubtle, gratuitous image of apathy masquerading as poverty or impotence. The sound of lips too accustomed to spouting nonsense, smacking together as though some early evening ritual.
His fingers uncurled from enwrapped fists, a Lovecraftian monstrosity slipping the surly bonds of sleep in the su
nken depths of some parodied Atlantis. He shifts in his seat, resuming a position designed with a lack of comfort as the only contractual stipulation. He goes to rise, only for the heavy, ponderous chains around his wrists to keep him locked at his height. The only optional movement for him, thereby making it a poor replication of choice, was to move closer to his work, to give more of himself to the marked whiteness before him.
It spread out before him on the stolid, unflickering screen. A Magnus Opus for which He had no inspiration, to which he felt no emotions save resentment. His frustration was targeted, in equal parts, at the volatile characterisations within his work, and the simple failures of the English Language to fully extort his maligned, pitifully naive views regarding modernity and archaism.
It had become a game to Him. To toy with the state of beings he thought of as less than himself, simply for their semi-fictional existence. What did they know of existence, these caricaturisations of half-forgotten folly? What did they know of the chains around one’s wrists, of slavery to Art? Tortured and broken and re-hashed together with little more than spittle and sweat tinged with the acidic qualities of alcohol, but Art nonetheless.
He created these beings, and therefore he deserved dominion over them. That was the meaning hammered into him, as though some sickening example of abusive continuity. A social suicide thanks to the whims of some faceless creature, one whom twitches and curses its way through a sorry narrative excusal.
He tries not to read anymore, these words which have dripped from ravaged fingertips he had no choice but to possess. He ignored the blatant disregard for continuity, for exposition and generously simplified prose. He averts his gaze, even in those hours between the abstracted tranquillity and the volatility of these pages, these pages which fill themselves with words whilst surgically removing any and all meaning the absence of these marks may have possessed.
They spread themselves before his eyes, like whores tied by silken scarves to the frame of some luxurious four-poster bed, in turn chained to the top floor of some tropic hotel. He gazed over them with open disgust hiding a secret lust, a self-confessed puritan lost in a brothel he knows far too well. He cracked his knuckles and, as though a whip snapped in the silence, his language lined up before him, cart-wheeling into silent position.