Blink, Blink, Sparkle, Boom!

[Feel free to skip ahead of this section:

After watching On The Road last night I felt my shame at never having got past the first few pages of the novel and a growing desire to both read and write that has been gestating since having read Donna Tartt's The Secret History. 

Furthermore I have been intensely fascinated at how to live a post-religious life, it has been the undertaking of my existence since I lost my faith all those years ago. I don't suppose it is fully understandable unless you have gone through the experience yourself but here, I have a story for you. Maybe you'll understand a little bit of it once this tale is through. It is stream-of-consciousness, intentional psychobabble. Draw from it what you can as you would the words of a foreign language that you have just begun to learn. Most will remain a mystery due to my own inadequate communication but context clues, gestures and simple concepts may form the bridge between minds necessary for successful communication. I wanted to experience the feverish go-go-go! of Kerouac's mind, time and writing but realized that I could not at this moment in time. The result here is certainly no parody - Kerouac is merely a faint source of inspiration. Here we go.]

Blink, Blink, Sparkle, Boom!

I had met Pastor Victor at a charity event. Somehow I had found my way there via a friend who had done some work in Senegal and wanted my company. She was my age, 21, and all the other members of that particular charity where she undertook her internship were rather grown up and boring for her taste. I, her clown, sat by her side during speeches about the children of Senegal and the good work of the organization in their schools. I cracked jokes as any good jester would and saw my presence rewarded with free appetizers and booze, an ok way to pregame for that night's party at my friends' favourite club. I was pleased to find my French very much intact and I was able to understand a school principal visiting from Senegal as she spoke about the progress that had been made so far and the upcoming problems facing the schools in her city. Next was Pastor Victor, on the podium, talking about the help his Church had provided and their continued desire to help.

Soon after there was more food and drinks and I began to speak to the Pastor, curious as to what his mission was doing. He explained how they built houses and schools, donated books and of course Bibles, spread the word of God, etc.

"You could join us on our next mission, maybe," he said kindly.

"I'm afraid I don't really believe in God anymore," I replied, "so I would feel very uncomfortable giving Bibles to people and praying and all that."

"Anymore? May I ask what caused you to lose your faith?"

"Hm... well, I'm not sure how to word it, it wasn't just all of a sudden."

"I'm still curious to know." He was a patient and kind man and his words did not pressure me but there was an intense curiousity that gave me the time to think.

"Well... I don't know... I'm better on paper than I am in conversation, if I were to tell you it would have to be written I think. I just can't find my words out loud."

"Well then, here is my e-mail address, as well as my church's address. When you do find the words, if you have time that is, I should be very interested to read them."

He handed me a card. I was impressed at this modernity, though I do not know why.

"I am afraid I might offend you," I said honestly. It was already taking all I had to remember not swear in front of him. I swear so much these days, I just love the wrap, twist and slip of 'fuck', 'shit', 'bitch', 'cunt', 'motherfucker' off my tongue so much that I lace my words with them as often and freely as I like. However here I stood in front of what used to be authority to me, and wondered about my manners.

He shook his head. "Don't worry, I am very interested," he said.

"May I ask why you're interested?"

"Well... look at it this way. If someone gets lost, it can be useful to ask them how they got where they are so that you can see if you know a way to help them get back." It was not as condescending as it could have been and I felt that if I were to have this conversation, it would be with Pastor Victor.

Two weeks later I finally found time and motivation enough to set finger to keyboard and concoct a semi-coherent letter.

Dear Pastor Victor,

I hope this letter finds you well. I will endeavour to provide some kind of history of myself and my current leanings. I hope you will understand by the end that I have no hope or desire of 'finding my way back'. I hope also that you don't feel the need to rescue me from my life of sin as I currently enjoy it very much.

The Beginning:

It was a very distinct moment of speech that determined my loss of faith. I said it to my friend while we watched Bruce Almighty. I had spent the past month obsessing about Faith. It had started with a Richard Dawkins video, suggested to me by YouTube due to the fact that I had decided to Google my Biology homework and one video on evolution had led to another and then finally to a fascinating debate. 

I had already had distinct moments of doubt manifest themselves in the face of some particularly unfortunate event like a woman on the streets who had lost her leg to diabetes and now begged for a living. It had struck me fairly strongly that she too must pray as I did at night, she too must hope for help, and yet I sat cosy at home and she sat distinctly uncosy on the streets. However the videos of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and a few others such as the ever-charming Stephen Fry led me to give much more thought to the issue than I ever had and I became obsessed with researching as much as I could. 

I began to apply literary criticism to the Bible while at church just as I would with any other book. There were two creation stories. How had I missed that? I thought of how a Sunday School teacher had taught us that the flood of Noah's time had buried all the dinosaurs. But the science pointed to the fact that humans and dinosaurs had never lived at the same time, otherwise you would find some trace of human remains - and a whole pile of them if the flood had killed all humans aside from Noah's family - on the same layers as dinosaurs, surely. I studied all the other creation and Messianic myths that I could find. I researched when the stories about Jesus had been written as compared to when he had lived, and thought about how easily out of hand rumours could get. I thought about the contradictions of cruelty and kindness involved in God. And then I thought, how would I know I was wrong? 

I remembered a story I had written as a young girl about characters whose thoughts could be traced depending on what they had been touching when they had had the particular thought, and how paranoid I had become about touching things while thinking anything private. I had persuaded myself of my own story as a child - so what was to stop others from doing such things? What was to stop an ignorant person from hearing a story and thinking it true and spreading it as fact rather than metaphor? What made me believe this story and not others? What would the world have looked like if there had been no creator? And always I thought back to my very young days when I had asked my Godmother - who was God's mother? If complex creation requires a complexer creator, then this would create an infinite regression. However if complexity could come out of simplicity then we would be getting somewhere. I thought and thought, and feared the devil had set me on this course, always hearing somewhere in my head: "The greatest trick ever perpetrated by the devil was to convince the world he didn't exist." I persisted despite my fears. I had to know what I believed. Blocks, Legos, fitting together, building my unbelief despite the fears it awakened. 

Then followed my belligerent, arrogant, argumentative phase. I wondered why we all participated in this lie. I wondered at the hypocrisy of the fact that anyone could pitch a tent and invite people with the name of the lord and earn a living, professing to know the unknowable, offering advice that they did not know to be true, only believed. I debated any and everyone. I enjoyed the opportunity to put my research to use. I enjoyed the shock and awe of it all. However, I eventually moved to a more disbelieving country and environment, and had no one left to debate. I began to grow more sympathetic to the Faithful way of thinking.

I did not suffer so much a loss of faith as a very distinct acknowledgement of a loss of certainty. I suppose there is a big difference here and it is important to define it. Certainty is the distinction between those with faith and those without. Certainty is the context of Destiny. Certainty is the outline of omens and prayer. Certainty leads one to believe that things happened or didn't happen because of logical and soon-to-be-revealed-and-understood reasons. Certainty is not foresight, it is simply trust that the best is yet to come. The loss of it is the beginning of a blurry adventure or the underlining of irony depending upon how you interpret life - the irony apparent in some who lose Certainty or never really had it and yet still behave in the way of the Certain.

To further illustrate this statement, I can easily present a friend of mine, let us call her T. She had never been raised religious and was rather firmly atheistic. She had taken up a degree in Social Studies and expected to become a Public Servant of some sort at her parents' behest. As thoroughly persuaded as she was that she would spend her adult days in a dull, numbing environment surrounded by the unpleasant whiff of boredom, she never rebelled against this future, only disdained and anticipated it with an already cultivated regret.

It mystifies me now. For me, as with anyone who once had Certainty, this desire for it remains and that way of thinking takes over unless one remains vigilant against it. As much as we may try to throw ourselves off into the frigid waters of Nihilism, Absurdity, Existentialism - anything that glorifies the haphazard and meaningless - we cannot fully, our upbringing catches up with us and we start again to think that perhaps things went wrong this time because in the end it would not have been good for us. On the other hand, though many will learn to embrace the meaninglessness of life, they forget the last word of the phrase. Life. Life is experience. Life is chance. Life is unlikely. And that we experience it merits recklessness abandon and experiment, not a docile acceptance of timelines and responsibilty or else simply giving up and in to boredom, fatigue and a desire to end it all.

The years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of an existence always so ever balanced upon the non- that it might as well not even be there at all except for the one who stretches the small blip of time into a 'Lifetime', sufficient for them to want to cling to it... how short and irretrievable, and how pitiful to spend it ticking off 'To-Dos'. Of all the millions and millions of people around, you will not even meet a 16th of them, and yet we tread carefully upon the minds around us, we waste time treating them as fragile, irreplaceable things, not as similarly flickering consciousnesses in need of stimulation, in need of prodding, poking, experience, experience, experience! Upon that day when I truly realized that Certainty had left me like a bird, flying off to settle upon some other, more worthy consciousness, I determined that Experience would be the plot device for my story. 

I much prefer the French understanding of the word 'Experience' as it also means 'experiment' and, after all, they go so often hand-in-hand. It was my new raison d'être and it stirred me frantically, suggesting itself in people and places. I became a hedonist for a little while. I thought, surely this will be the way to find out what I'm really made of. I did what I wanted when I wanted and soon fell bored, and needed thrill, thrills that never came easy, thrills that couldn't come through alcohol or sex or parties, thrills that eluded me. Only in pursuing my passions did I find again that small spark of enjoyment: painting, drawing, filming, taking photographs. These brought joy when I grew tired of my company and withdrew into the shell of a dark studio apartment. Of course I still had fun but sometime I think I persuaded myself of their ejoyability, told myself that I liked it or else fooled myself with alcohol. In fact it seemed everyone I knew needed a lie of drugs and alcohol and sex and religiosity to help the pretense of life. The lies seem to be necessary for enjoyment and as hard as I had worked to attain truth I knew I must accept some dishonesty and illusion if I were to truly enjoy myself.

I grow ever more wary of speaking to a Pastor about such things but I think you are also reasonable in understanding what I mean here. I live a life of sin. I chose to do this. I am aware of the consequences and have endured them and now wonder if I might not have been better off just clinging to rules and structure given all the heartache, confusion and madness my choices have brought me. The only solace available to me is the fact that I am living fully. I am doing as much as I can and this is good enough. 

The world is a mouth opened wide, it is pain and pleasure and awful, sensual experience. Itisme, itisme, IT IS ME. Agnus dei, Hail Mary's and prayers are but an elaborate way of throwing salt over your shoulder. I cannot live in fear of bad luck. I must instead persevere in finding experiences that I can then translate with my art in order to help others with the ordeal of living, the fantastic blurry adventure, the absurd unlikelihood of being.

I would rather spend my time as a firework. I blink, I blink, I sparkle and then BOOM! I erupt in flame and terror upon the world and then leave it just as soon in beauty. A full experience. An incendiary one.

There it is. My truth.

Good day and Adieu.