The King of Carrot Flowers, parts 2 and 3
Now bearing firmly in mind that this is no longer the case, a few years back, there was a period of six weeks or so where I could not do dishes without starting to cry. I enjoy doing dishes: I find it very therapeutic. Well, the problem with therapy is that sometimes it loosens the internal knots sufficiently to allow a bunch of crap to come pouring out. I just kept losing it, about half a minute or so into feeling that warm water pour over my hands, the sponge gently stroking the plates. Like clockwork: dishes = tears.
At around that time, I also had what could be called an anti-religious experience. Call it a pure visual hallucination brought about by a toxic overdose of bad brain chemicals, but I actually saw something - probably the very kind of something that causes zealots to run to Christ, only in my case, it was divine proof of the absolute absence of anything. A few years on, I've certainly accepted that there was no pragmatic reality to any of the understandings I came to on that particularly hallucinatory day. But fuck, it was scary. In fact I'd say only two products of my mind have frightened me that much in my entire life. They work in a kind of neat parallel:
1. When I was a young teenager I had a dream that I discovered a nuclear weapon in the basement of my parents' house, with a countdown timer in the 20-seconds-to-go range. I crouched behind the washing machine and prayed to God to give me another chance at life, and at that moment, I woke up.
In rational terms, I had a nightmare and I woke up from it. In metaphysical terms, God did what I asked. That particular dream remains the single most vividly terrifying experience of my entire life, and the lingering (though foolish) questions about the nature of reality which subsequently haunted me, still sorta haunt me. I try not to think about it.
2. The aforementioned hallucination at the tail end of the summer of 2005, which gets referred to coloquially around here as "the great eye."
The thing is, I don't have any particular desire or need to live in a world without God. I don't think anybody does. I think that's why God was invented: we have fragile psyches which are, in a vast number of cases, possibly structurally incapable of fully understanding a universe without a divine creator/protector figure who has some ability to gather us, parent-like, into His arms and protect us from the Big Bad Nothing. (Sure, Gmork, the relentless terror-wolf from The Neverending Story, was scary... one of the scariest. But that raging cloud of dark absence, The Nothing, and the promise of utter existential annihilation it brings? A bit more on the nose than most people might think on first blush.)
I have seen things in my life that make me want to believe that I am being pushed in certain directions by a benevolent force of some design, be it almighty or otherwise. I have seen other things in my life which enforce with affirming dispassion the utter meaninglessness of it all. I believe in human beings, and I believe in our ability to create and associate meaning. (Look at all the mythic meaning I've created out of, 1, a bad dream, and 2, a misfiring synapse.) The reason I ultimately have to foreground our internal realities before any expectation of external intelligence is the peculiar pickling effects of the things that live in my own brain. I am, as discussed prior, occasionally prone to rather sensational bouts of chronic depression. In these instances, rationality itself unhinges from the spinal column of my soul. I suddenly become very, very aware of how little is actually tied to anything by indestructible means in the meathook reality of our lives. It's not a comforting awareness, but it returns with unsettling regularity often enough.
Inevitably, it's a hard thing to lose any thing that you love, and stay all the way sane. Anyways, it all turned out all right. And that, somewhat abbreviated for time, is the story up to now.
