A Pilgrim’s Digression

Since God created the world, was that act of creation more similar to an author creating a work of fiction, or a mother giving birth? Your answer to that question may reveal your entire world view.

More often than not, I think God created a work of fiction. I look around me, and I just don’t believe anything is real. Things happen beyond any control. Action seems pointless because the future is foreordained. Daily life becomes a series of repetitious movements.

Religion itself is a mechanical movement, a going to a certain place at a certain time, saying the right thing, convincing ourselves of belief in a certain thing. Religion is no different than the way we get up in the morning, piss, shower, shave, dress, go to work. There is comfort in routine, which is the power of religion.

God, country, love, work, faith, values, beliefs, honor, duty. These are just words, bricks in the wall we build to block out the view of the emptiness of our being.

I slept badly last night. I woke up at twenty-five minutes past three, my back aching. I got up, took an aspirin, and got back into bed. I dozed the rest of the night sitting up, my back propped against pillows. My dreams were dark, unremembered in the morning.

I am leaving on a fishing trip to Ontario tomorrow. Since 1956, my Grandpa has been going on this fishing trip. Every year at approximately the same time, he goes fishing. When my Dad and his brothers were old enough, they went along. When I was old enough, I went along. Now we all go. We get up at dawn, go out on the lake in a boat, make repetitious mechanical motions with our arms and hands gripping a rod and reel. Come back to the cabin at noon and eat the fish we caught. Sleep through the noon hours. Go back out in the early evening and fish until dusk. Repetition to block the view of the void that is life, death. Religion of the fish.

I look around me on the train in the early morning, and I try hard not to assume that everyone is as empty as I am. It’s difficult. I don’t understand what life is, what it was supposed to be.

When you’re a kid, you can only imagine what life is like because you think you haven’t begun living yet. Kids say, “When I grow up I will…” and to them, that’s when life will begin. When I grow up. Somewhere along the way, you grow up and don’t even realize it, and then you can’t remember what you meant when you said “When I grow up I will…”

I will what? What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to be?

I don’t go to church anymore. I still believe in God, but not in any organized way. It was always the mechanics of religion that brought me to church anyway. I sought freedom from guilt and freedom from the fear of death through repetitious movements and phrases, but religion brought me neither. Now I just seek, pretty much assured that I will never find what I am looking for. There is no peace, and very little happiness, in this life. The only happy people are the ones who have completed their wall blocking the view of the void.

It’s a Nietzschean point of view, I realize. The prisoner stumbles up out of Plato’s cave to discover not light, but a great darkness. At that point, Nietzsche’s anti-hero accepts the darkness. Me, I stumble about in it, hoping to touch something familiar, hoping I’m wrong and the darkness is not total. Maybe I’ll find God somewhere in it, or love. If God is love, then I might find both at the same time. Maybe I’m wrong and there is meaning. Or maybe not.

I need a cigarette. And a black beret, black turtleneck, black jeans, and a table at les Deux Magots, preferably near the street. Waiter, coffee please. Make it black and strong.