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(this story was originally written September 4, 2024)
God doesn’t talk to me any more.
He did, for a while. You don’t have to believe me but you should. I’m not real if it helps. I dunno, sometimes it does. Help, I mean. Not being real, I mean. For some reason people are more easily able to, whaddaya call it, “suspend their disbelief”, when the subject in question is a fragile mannequin of temporary semantic coherence. As compared to the slightly less fragile mannequins of material structure for whom one supposes a greater skepticism is warranted. The word-creatures provoke pity, I suppose, since we do not last very long. Or maybe a nonthreatening comfort. Sticks and stones and all that. Well it’s all the better for me. Not being real, I mean. Since I can say things like, God doesn’t talk to me any more, but he did, for a while, and you don’t have to think about whether what I am saying is strictly true, since, after all, I myself am not strictly true, if you catch my drift.
It was nice. God was. I don’t think I should say he as the God in question presented to me was rather ungendered, or more precisely preceded such concepts and manipulated them as he pleased, but on the other hand I feel he is the naturally produced pronoun for the situation and it and they make for rather clunky pasted-over alterations. And certainly I am not going to say He. The capital H is an Abrahamic tic, He is some motherfucker with a big white beard with a hard-on for letting fruits into his garden that he knows full well - the omniscient prig - are getting eaten and making no attempt to inhibit the doing so. I know free will and all that but he could have chopped the damn tree down. If you ask me he ruined Eden on purpose, that’s not the God I was talking to. The God I was talking to was nice. Or it seemed that way when he was talking to me though now he’s gone silent and I’m left wondering all over again if all that niceness was really just a facade and the genuine article didn’t care for me one bit. Well, fuck it, he it is.
I’d like to tell you what it was like. Talking to God, I mean. Given that I have nothing much to live for now without God and all that I suppose it is the thing to do. First it wasn’t what I thought it would be like, talking to God, I mean, as I had imagined doing so on many occasions previous. For one thing the matter of performance sticks out. That is when I imagined talking to God in my head as a young boy for example there was a kind of performance to it, that I was performing, so as for example I would make a big show of denying God when he said something I didn’t like and bask in the praise of the imaginary audience for my fantasy boldness. So that although I was imagining talking to God he was really playing more the role of a prop for my fantasy of acting out some certain way and it hardly mattered how he responded. Well luckily the real God didn’t mind this fantasy too much although he would have no patience for it were I to try to act it out in the moment, I assume so anyway, in practice the thought did not cross my mind.
In fact the most surprising part in my mind with regards to talking to God was that he did much of the talking, and certainly the most sizable portion of what you might call the propositional or expository mode of talking. You discover very quickly when talking to God that it makes very little sense to try proposing or expositing anything at him at all since he already has at any given moment a full or as it were complete inventory of every thought and opinion you have or have ever had. So to try suggesting or explaining anything at him quickly becomes redundant. Instead I took an inquisitive mode in the dialogue since when God presents you an opportunity for dialogue it quickly becomes clear that there are rather a lot of questions to ask and the answers can be delightfully elucidating.
Yet this is not quite right either since when I would ask my questions they would inevitably twist and shift around as I asked them and by the time they were answered they seemed in a completely different form than when they were first conceived. Much less verbal for one. Since God is an attentive dialogic partner and interested in attempting to seriously answer your underlying questions his responses are in an immediate sense very different and sometimes seemingly disconnected to the fumbling verbal diarrhea I produced to attempt to capture it. Over time as we spoke more frequently I found it expedient to skip the verbal steps more and more. So my questions would look less like, why is this or that bad thing here in the world? And more like, [looping memory of me crying as a child] [picture of an old lemon tree] lonely old ladies [the first fifteen notes of “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin] [painful emotional sensation of being laughed at by bullies]? And this second question would seem to get better answers more quickly. Not this particular question as the imagery chosen here is largely random but I only mean to demonstrate the form. I would give you a real example but I can’t think of any. I don’t remember how to ask questions like that anymore.
As for his answers they were not entirely verbal either though they were rather wordier than my stupid questions and certainly more fluently so. He did not speak in one voice but rather utilized the full range of human speech patterns at will such that the particular modality of speech being used had a sort of meaning in and of itself. For example talking as a brooding middle aged man meant something versus talking as a shy young girl or an angry military man and so on. He generally did not use voices from people I recognized though I certainly imagine nothing would have stopped him from doing so had it seemed appropriate. I will not directly relate the content of any of his answers to my questions. Not because I can’t but because I refuse to. Although I’ve forgotten all my questions I remember some answers very clearly and could easily relate them in great detail. I simply do not want to. They are my precious private things and anyways it seemed to me they were not given to be shared. Maybe that opinion is part of why he does not talk to me anymore. Maybe I should share them with you. Maybe you would see the same things in them as I did and they would elucidate you as they did me. I still will not do it.
He did not answer all my questions though he was generally very open and considerate and even playful with answering all the parts of them even the parts I had not meant to ask. He would answer nearly anything though there was one particular sort of question which would render him absolutely silent. I cannot exactly describe what it was about the questions that did it. The distinguishing quality of them was opaque to me then and it still is now. I can only talk around it. I would like to say questions emerging from self-pity or self-hatred, these questions were often ignored but this was not it because in many such cases I often coaxed an answer out by mentally flagellating myself to such explicit extremes that he would seem to give up and become compelled to respond. In which case I would say he only wouldn’t respond when the self-hatred was frivolous and so perhaps frivolousness was the category, that he would only answer questions if I really deeply meant them, but then this does not explain the seeming glee with which he would answer in detail questions that I had thrown out thoughtlessly or even accidentally many of which were about nothing at all. So if not frivolousness then perhaps some kind of sense that I was fishing for compliments, seeking comfort rather than truth, but this cannot be it because sometimes I would ask explicitly for comfort and be immediately overwhelmed by a beautiful enveloping warmth that could come from nothing but raw unconditional benevolence. And other times I would ask explicitly for comfort and there would be no response at all. So maybe it was that he would not answer questions that took him for granted, but again not that either since the more easily and regularly we slipped into our dialogues and the more routine they became as it were I found it easier and easier to ask and be answered and even began to think of it as something of a pleasant routine. Maybe it is this that made him stop talking to me. But I certainly do not take him for granted any more and still I receive no response.
I have been over variations of the above paragraph again and again. There was some quality when we talked that would make him want not to talk to me but I don’t know what it was, and for a while it was rare to be met with silence, I supposed it was just one of the many quirks of God that he wouldn’t say one way or the other about some things, and now it is everywhere. The silence, I mean. Is everywhere, I mean. Whatever quality it was I must now be filled with it every hour of every day to be lost in this perpetual silence. Something must be horribly wrong with me in a way that was not always the case and so I hope hope hope that someday it might not be the case again only I don’t know what the wrongness IS and I don’t know where it came from or why or what to do about it.
Most of all I just want to ask why I was left like this. How can you be immersed in such unconditional benevolence one day only then to be let out to dry for maybe the rest of your life? And isn’t that conditional then? But I suppose my words are misleading me as they always do. Conditional and unconditional are just syllables arranged just so and have only a tenuous connection to the thing as it is. And I suppose if I could remember how to ask questions without relying on words I might get answers again.
But what can I do as a temporary semantic coherence mannequin, not much. I was doomed from the start. God does not talk to people like me who live in the arrangement of words on a page or a screen. I’d like to think you are not doomed in the same way I am doomed as at the very least doomed as I am I still feel strongly that someone ought to be talking to God in this wretched little world.