“God”*

*for lack of a better word

OR

Are You There “God”*/Me/#? It’s me Vivian

Part zero of an ongoing experiential narrative series. Part 1, “Are You There Me?” was published in the summer of 2011, right before the release of Issue No. 1. We bring you its prequel in advance of our 3rd issue, PUNKS & Scholars.

I don’t disagree with [the idea that] the almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone of Someone above him (or Someone simply indispensable and equal), and so on to the End (or rather, Endlessness) of Time, or perhaps cyclically. – Borges

When “God” “found” me… I sobbed. The last time I cried like that was the first time I got the “it’s not you it’s you” speech in my studio in Downtown Los Angeles.

I felt a wind brush through me that was either imagined or mystical (unless those are the same). The sky was yellow and I felt “God” for the first time in my life.

But let me stop here for a minute to make one huge correction in this essay to be. By “God” I don’t mean “God”…

The magnitude of “God” lies within and without its word…but we must remember that the word is in itself a symbol. Just as words represent our language and language represents our thoughts, the word “God” describes and replaces a concept which is always out of reach. Like the word “infinity” replaces the endless vast future of things we are unable to bear all at once–like how love can never be set concrete. And that brings us back to much rawer and older tears.

I was “a sick kid,” I had a rough time with a bad case of eczema. Picture me, 11 years old, blowing out the candles on my birthday cake and wishing for new skin. Not a bike or toys, but skin; an interesting fact but more interesting to me now is the question–who exactly was I wishing to? “God”? Cake deities? My parents? I’m sure it was cake deities, or I imagined a pleasant scene in my head of me waking up on the bottom bunk, not stuck to the sheets. Either way, I’m sure it was a form other than the “God” I never believed in. There were two reasons I never believed fully:

One – I prayed every night for new skin. Obviously that shit didn’t happen…

Two – My mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic, we were raised Unitarian, “to keep spirituality in our lives” as my abuela puts it politely. When they were divorced, as is the fashion now, they returned to their original religions. This provided tons of theologic information, in a large rainbow of topics, to me at a very early age.

So I grew up thinking that I could control the waves in the Pacific Ocean, watching for my dolls to come alive and praying for a completely infeasible thing. I kept praying and my skin kept getting worse as I grew up hiding behind long layers and hats and developing a OCD which I am still battling against today. When I wished, it was not to ”God;” when I prayed, it was not to “God.” It was to anyone. Anyone who would listen, anyone who would care, anyone who could help me inside of my mind and out.

Let’s stop again. I am using the term “God” a lot, and I want to try and define my sense of the word for you. I honestly can’t think of the word god without seeing in my head a rotary of stock images of “God” from television, movies and art. That Simpsons episode where Homer talks to “God” (Harry Shearer plays the voice of “God” by the way), Michelangelo’s “Birth of Man,” Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, a swan or Zeus, Morgan Fucking Freeman, I mean come on… my own image of “God” never had a chance to form in this sea of pop icons.

Our images of “God” or what we perceive to be, “the answer to the question ‘so whatta you believe in?’” is very important in the lives we live; whether we choose to believe in Harry Shearer or not. The beliefs of our culture and the subcultures around us map the path our spirituality will go in. As William James said in an address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, “If I ask you to believe in Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature… as a hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however, the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive…the deadness and liveness in a hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.” (James: New World, June, 1896)

Boom, yeah. Interesting right? I suppose the Arab analogy is a bit outdated but you get it. Since I never had a live sense of the “God” hypothesis, I started my own spiritual journey. I pulled out crayons, assigned them names, genders and husbands, and drew my own path as I walked. Atheistic hypothesis was a living breathing possibility for me to make in my world of wonder. I remember the day it all started, or rather–the night.

I caught my mother putting money under my little sister’s pillow one night as a kid. I was awake (on the top bunk back then) scratching, or thinking, and in came my mom. I kept very still and silent as my mother crept in and put a dollar under my little sister Yvonne’s pillow and took the little letter she had written. I saw all of this perfectly outlined in our closet mirror doors, my mother’s glasses sparked in the light from the hallway, flashing like a warning or alert to something coming. Finally I broke the silence and squeaked, “Mom?”

“Yes sweetie.”

(“Damnit” is probably what she wanted to say…)

I stumbled over my words, hardly believing what I was seeing, I managed to sleepily say, “Are you taking Yvonne’s tooth?”

“Yes, go back to sleep honey it’s late.”

“Mom… (there was a pause as the universe collected and poured a very important, but light, thought into my head) Are you the tooth fairy?”

She stood up, cornered and said, “Yes honey, we’ll talk more tomorrow.”

We didn’t talk about it, but next week at my father’s house I had a major realization. I was standing in front of the mirrored closet doors in my room while my father gingerly helped to brushed my hair. (Both our rooms in each of their houses had mirrored closet doors, a fact I never thought about until right now…none of this would have happened if there was just normal closet doors…) I told my papá about what had happened and as I explained my new-found skepticism about this tooth fairy conspiracy, I watched his face. I’ve always been able to read people…especially my father. The more I talked the bigger his strange grin became, and I soon realized that my father was in on it. The thought poured itself into the very fibers of my mind and it suddenly became clear, my mind rebooted with this update and I asked my dad–

“There’s no tooth fairy, is there Papá?”

“Well, I mean–”

“I knew it! You know what this means? There might not be a Santa Cla-” My father’s grin grew into one of pride at his little girl’s mind working so quickly on this make-believe children’s riddle. When he looked me in the eye I exclaimed, “So there’s no Santa either! Which means there’s no Easter Bunny and no ‘God’!” It was the biggest ‘a-ha’ moment of my life. Once I knew the tooth fairy was a fake, the conclusion that none of the other make believe characters I believed in were real either became sadly real, it was a live hypothesis.

“Well Vivian… you’re right.” my dad explained. He could never really lie to us. “There is no Santa, or tooth fairy or Easter bunny…but we’ll talk more about ‘God’ later.”

After that, my dolls no longer came to life when I left the room, there were no more monsters in closets and I stopped talking to the waves.

****

[The following excerpts are taken from the journal entries I made while traveling in South America in February and March 2011. The words in italics are what I wrote in cursive, the [brackets] are what I’ve added, the rest is unedited…]

2/6/11  My first brush with a sense of spirituality

I headed [to get food], but something stopped me.

A long forgotten string attached to my heart suddenly became taut and jerked me towards the closest collective primal expression of life. I could only describe it as soul. Which made me think, perhaps none of us have a soul… but there is one large soul that we are all connected to. Be it karma or soul or ideas or rhythm or ether… it connects us all. You borrow from it and give back to it throughout your life and when you die, your energy feeds back into that large group in order to shoulder the burden of those who need to take when they cannot give. It’s the space between the space, the feeling that someone is looking at you and the reason you laugh. When you hear music like I heard… you can’t help but feel the need be part of the bigger collection. I was pulled to the sound out of some unconscious thirst… or maybe I’m just a curious Latina. Either way, with only the map of my heart, I found a street plugged with people dancing in praise of our collective soul. I couldn’t have left the sound even if I had wanted to. We danced–baby, abuelo, chica, wretch and tourist–there was no color age or nation, only the need to be.

2/11/11 8am  A few words on belief versus reality, I’m talking about finishing Heinlen’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on the morning that Mubarak stepped down in Egypt

…It’s these moments in life that make me happy to be sentient. I think not being able to agree, even with myself, about how I feel is one of the most beautiful mysteries in life. Why is it so sad and yet so wonderful? The characters I have come to know so intimately will live on forever in the printed word… And again I am happy, because only our species can feel such passion for something that has never tangibly existed. Yes the ideas and even efforts of Libertarian revolutions have coded, slipped down from balconies and through back rooms; and yes, real humans have expressed feelings and died for more than the words on the pages of my recently departed friend [the book]… but to be able to feel for something that exists in only the metaphorical sense of the word is something that I feel truly blessed (blessed in an unreligious sense) to be able to experience.

When was the last time you felt like that? When was the last time you mourned so loudly that your heart grew larger? Or you touched something so cold that your flesh burned? I will go out today, head filled with visions of star freedom, blood secured and eyes shut forever with such resonance that the Earth will echo cold when it is dimmed.