The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.