‘Your whims, Author, are they the things which guide us, are they the things which send us reeling into the darkness of drink and depression? Are they the components of our joy; our desire?’ He nods in an off-hand fashion, as though unwilling to impart such information, even to a dying beast. ‘So there is no purpose; I am merely a beast with the taste of meat on my tongue and an accompanying guilt.’
‘Not even that.’ This seems to bring the creature pleasure, as though it was an acknowledgement of some vague theory he had long since begun to formulate. ‘You are a figment; a flash of colour in the imagination, dust in the corner of an eye. Some twisted homunculus, a parody of a man’s form, taught to think that you carry some special spark, some illumination, within the desolate ocean in your breast; you are Evil. Not through your actions, but through the means of your creation. I am Frankenstein and you are the monstrosity I chose to leave unnamed.’
‘Unnamed?’ It looks puzzled for long moments, then lowers its head. ‘I never was named, was I?’ It looks up at Him now, desperately, almost piteously. ‘Will you not do that for me, before you permit me to bleed out? Will you not give me a name, Creator?’
He looks down upon it, the son who could have been so much more, and he desperately tries to think. What would a deity say, what wit would fall from the lips which enable him to plough his trade, to fool a species into his service? He shrugs.
‘What name would you wish I gave you? Judas? Caliban? Abaddon? Belial? Jonah?’ He shakes his head. ‘What use is a name to one such as you? Why bother providing something, merely to be carved on a grave? What use is a name to a dead man; the first and last of this world’s dead men?’ The thing smiles, as though some great victory had suddenly been won. ‘What?’
‘You called me a man, the first man, and so, Author; that will be my name.’ He pushes himself up, his face pale, his limbs shaking with loss of blood, his hair in limp strands around his face. He straightens; he looks down upon his creator with pride and rage and contempt and he says:
‘My name is Adam.’
The God spends some time staring at the corpse on the floor, at the blood crawling from his wound which began to slow and even coagulate under his sight. The world fell away around Him, until existence was nothing but the body, the puddle, the chair and himself. For an eternity he remained thus, forcing himself to stare at the one thing, the one man, who could have understood him.
He felt as though he had lost something; that the man had beaten him in his own realm and, yet, there was a sense of pride in that. He had created something who fought his God, who raged against his creator and shown who, exactly, the real monster was. The corpse would have killed had it the chance, had his influence not interceded and, yet, He felt like the villain. He had been a God, as long as He stayed in the shadow of a computer screen, as long as He kept His fingers flickering; He hadn’t deserved it, He hadn’t been ready for it. When he left he almost said a prayer for Adam, but, He realised, there was no one left to pray to.
* * *
This is where it ends, it seems. You kill, or allow the death of, the only man capable of understanding you, the first man; a character of whom you are, essentially, the father. Was he a modern-day Jesus, and not a Lazarus at all? Was that the half-thought out metaphor you were attempting to push onto the reader? You honestly think that you are a god, don’t you? You think that language has given you some almighty gift, that it has given you the power to be that against which you have always railed? You are a bully, a petulant child with a keyboard and no conscience.
* * *
‘And when the dawn came,’ He read aloud, aware that the catch of nervousness had crept into his utterances once more, like a child admitting some sin before its parents, ‘I found myself floating through the busy air. I followed the ghosts of my footsteps, glowing like protoplasm against the cracked pavement. I sped along the railroad tracks, moving impossibly through carriage after carriage, invisible to those against whom I brushed, unseen by the dull faces clustered at platform edge in cold, huddled masses. I rose above the glass panelled rooftop of Lime Street station, twisting upwards, ever upwards, until I found an open window, from which a haggard young woman was smoking. I cut through the smoke, through the open door and up a flight of stairs. I felt drips of vomit from some upper floor pass through me, I heard it splash onto the carpet far below me. When I arrived they were much in the same position as I had left them, though they had alternated. Those now spread across the floor were, instead, draped over the couches like dolls thrown by some nightmarish child. I imagined God lifting each one between his ink-stained, pedantic fingertips. I saw him running judgemental flesh, hardened by the repetition of this action over millions of years, across their features, their chests, their legs. Then he would toss them aside, petulance in his every motion.’
‘But God has no interest for me anymore. The lies they tell of Him can do no damage to one such as I, to the ghost. I turn my attention to the refrigerator, such a focus being the only thing left to me, still adorned with meaningless phrases, still tarnished with the new religion; one of capitalism combined with narcissism and broken by the ideas of Lords and Ladies in onesies and tracksuits. But, amongst all the lies on that once-white surface, one screams out at me as the greatest folly of all.’
‘’I was here’, it claims; a red untruth if any bloody graffiti deserved that description. ‘I existed.’
Silence greets the last word, the slow release of breath from those who expected something better. He looks up from his paper, from the last page. They look at him with a mixture of expressions; confusion, disappointment, the occasional glimmer that suggested understanding and, yet, could not deliver it. There was no joy in that crowd, no solidarity. The silence continued for a few seconds; they stretched out into aeons. The hands of clocks, buried amongst the ashes, spun like a madman’s eyes until civilisation rose again and again, until the universe returned him to this exact moment, staring out across a crowd in complete silence.
And then, talking too loudly under his gaze; about something or other, none of them managing to meet his eyes, they rose from their chairs and shuffled out of the double doors towards the back of the hall. The first man reached it, an apple in one hand and the other pushing gently at the door as though he hadn’t a worry with his mind. The sunlight streamed into the room until the last pair of shoes clicked against the concrete outside. He heard the laughter; bowed his head again. The door closed, and the room was dropped into the familiar haze of darkness. And, for the first time, he was alone.
And God was dead.
Thank you.
Honesty
Once again I sit at the end of a narrative, or a series of minor decisions which culminate in something approaching a narrative, though I am laughing at some meagre pun of my own. The aspidistra, which once spread out before me in some desperate working class rush to meet the sun, is gone now; I tired of its literary relevance quickly. Instead, in the circle of clean whiteness surrounded by encroaching dust, lies a rosary. Of course, it is not an expensive one, little more than elastic and cheap wooden beads with a cross at the throat, from which the black colouring is already vanishing, rubbing onto the windowsill as though it were mere dust. What else is it, after all?
I didn’t expect much better, a drunken idea twisting into an early morning purchase. A few hours ago I was in a bar, in Wigan, named the John Bull Chophouse. It is there that the image attached to this text was taken, after several failed attempts. I sat there, the rosary secreted in my pocket, reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden whilst making my steady progress through a Guinness. Thoreau spoke of nonsense of course, of finding joy in the base things of nature and I thought how privileged he must have been, how simplistic his desires were that the sight of grass can improve his mood to such an extent. The book was to pass the time, the Guinness to offer me courage. The Kinks’ Death of a Clown was leaping joyously from the jukebox as I ordered a second drink, this one for a greate
r purpose.
I arranged the book, the rosary entwined with my headphones, the glass and a coaster on the table and, using my phone, took a few pictures of that collective. I had the perfect image in mind, ne which reality seemed determined to deny me. The culmination of those objects, of the holy symbol of drink mixed with the logo of Christ, was to be the way I saw religion. But I couldn’t make the idea work, so I abandoned it. In a manner of which Thoreau may well have been proud, I felt the call of nature and climbed the steps to the toilet.
I entwined the rosary in my hand and leant against the white bathroom door. The rest of the room was brown wood panelling, unsuitable for my purposes, so I made the door my canvas. I let the cross hang against my arm and it was that which my target became; that which is the image you have seen at the forefront of this narrative. Perhaps that is the theme here, ignoring the blatancy of religion in its composition. That nothing has remained the same as I originally intended it to be.
This text is, at least to me, a little more controversial and a little more difficult than Adjective Narcissism. I think it is obvious that I hold religion, of any sort, in contempt. That any belief is a folly, merely an exercise in the prevention of fear for those unwilling, for whatever reason, to believe that we are no greater than the dogs I can hear rutting in an alleyway several years ago, no different than the worms steadily advancing from the soil of my rear garden in some silent invasion, no more worthy of love and affection than mosquitos’ draining blood from dying children in Africa. But it fascinates me, as any sane man must be fascinated by the diseases of the mind.
For what else can such a thing as belief be considered, save as a disease? A malnutrition of, perhaps not intelligence, but of the application of any intelligence one might possess. It is the very epitome of fear, of personal weakness, an excuse to behave as one will whilst denying others that same exhilarating freedom. I have tried, believe me, I have tried, to understand such fanaticism as religion can bring and, for the most part, it passes me by. Perhaps I can catch a glimpse of such understanding when I talk about music, and someone flippantly declares that ‘they’re shit’. In those moments, those sudden white-hot breaths of rage, I can see God dipping a hand from the clouds, holding us down, and I would kill for Him. Of course, the moment passes, I call the form before me a Luddite, a heathen and an arsehole, and we move on.
I have endeavoured to see it as anything besides a weakness, an imperfection in our brains that enables such madness. For those indoctrinated at such a young age, I offer my pity, but those who have turned to it voluntarily, that they may find solace of some kind in worshipping such a creature, they have, they deserve, nothing but my contempt. What weakness it is, to proclaim that a corpse must be happy! Contentment, that I could understand, some combination of relaxation and immutable apathy attached to an empty shell, but joy? A fool’s exclamation, though one repeated throughout the world!
The arguments against religion lean towards the factual, whilst whatever meagre defence can be provided on behalf of spirituality and the like are wholly opinion-based, or emotional. I can look at the sky, I can dig deep into the earth, and show you that no Heaven and no Hell is to be found. But you could say that you know it is there, and so you will not accept evidence, or you could proclaim that neither of the two are geographical locations and are, instead, to be found in the mind.
Of course, I know there is no altering of the mind. I know that one cannot truly change the beliefs of another, when those beliefs are wholly believed to be true, when there is no doubt to be found within their breasts. So this text has been written for people like me, who subscribe to the truth, insofar as we are aware of it, as opposed to the nonsense of spirituality that still infects our species.
I wrote this because I was bored. Tired of deadlines and essays on subjects to which I could not even pretend to care. And, since I finished university, because I have had little else to do. I, like many people my age, am caught on the Graduate job pile, a collection of desperate, slightly hung-over, ‘intellectuals’ whom are beginning to panic as their money runs out. It is artistic to fell the threat of poverty, isn’t it? To feel your stomach churn as you weigh up a meal or a glass of whiskey and eternally find the former lacking in its pleasure? I wish I could say there was some higher purpose to my writing now. I wish I could rage at the state of ‘self-published’ literature, to malign it all as genre-specific nonsense. I wish I could focus all my contempt on the idea of a God, on the idea that man was a creature beneath any other, but I cannot. As one focuses more and more on the desperation of ones circumstances, one realises that few things matter. One learns that there is nothing as important as sustenance and, at the moment, I would take a job as a prophet of the Second Coming if it meant I was earning a living wage. For all that I despise money, for all that I follow the parable of Comstock in that regard, that I have declared war on the God of Money, this desperation is something to which I have barely been accustomed to in my life as a student.
It occurs to me that money can only be despised when one has enough of it to abuse, to waste on worthless things, on activities one does not enjoy. I can focus on the problems of Art, on the pretension inherent within the role of the artist, on the stupidity of belief and the hypocrisy of religion, but not when my ears are focused on the discontent of my stomach, on the sluggish sensation of weak blood in thinning veins. I am, perhaps, less capable as a man than you, dear reader. What choice do I have, then, but to set myself up as a God? What simplicity there is there! Immutable authority over my own creations, to whom I offer the pretence of freewill, whilst controlling them as easily as a gypsy controls her cards, as a priest controls his congregation and a politician controls his whores.
There! There is the reasoning I imagine you desire, some weak answer to the unanswerable question of ‘why?’. I wrote this because I am less of a human than you are, less of an adult and more a child, wishing the world were as I willed it. I am a dead man to you, one given every chance to live but ignored, or fought against, at every turn. I am, essentially, you, with none of the ambition and so what path is left to me, but that upon which my feet now tread?
But still, as we know, the earth spins on and we somehow manage not to grow nauseous with its passage. I feel the need to explain myself, as though if I could find the words to release my consciousness into the ether, if I could upload my madness to the internet and watch it leap from computer to computer like a viral marketing campaign, then I might be able to call myself an author. I know, now, that before you can translate my nonsense back to me, I must find a way to translate it for you.
The sun is rising now and my eyes are growing leaden. I’ve been unable to sleep this long night, tossing and turning through the vague discomfort that accompanies encroaching poverty, with the unease of knowing that I am firmly bound to one path; that I must slide into mediocrity and ignominy in order to merely survive. I have no desire to be a face in the crowd, but those faces, slack-jawed and dead-eyed they may be, survive, day after day, and they have a chance at happiness amongst the grey existence.
These are the obvious truths, the ones which I despise, for reasons I cannot explain, even to myself. I do not want to be a part of this society, I want to walk the cinematographic pathways of avant-garde artists. I want to lean against railings by rivers and drop cigarette butts into the water. I want to wear black and grimace at the snow lining the roadside. I want to pull my coat closer about my shoulders in the wind, to drink at ungodly times and find my sustenance in alcohol and the most meagre of foods. I want to be Orwell, starving in Paris, all the while wishing I was anywhere else, anyone else.
I want to work in a bookstore, some local, independent business that is alive in of itself. I want to spend my days reading and writing and sneering at the pretentious students who swagger in, proud to be supporting such a place. I want to laugh at myself, for hiding the realisation that I am one of them. I want to drink wine at the start of my shift and whiskey at th
e end. I want to fall into such an eternal stupor that I am numb to it all, that my worries warp into concerns over whether or not I will vomit before I crawl into bed, that my contempt can turn into the apathy I pretend and my world would shrink until there was nothing besides a bottle, a book and myself. In those moments, I would be Christ, as the book would be my God and the bottle… well, you get the idea.
It was a joke about spirits. Ha fucking ha.
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