the oldest story by ashley

Outside of space and outside of time there is a god and in this god is everything and nothing.  This god is life and it is death.  It is woman and it is man.  It is order and it is chaos.  It contains all oppositional forces even though it is no container and as a side note it can be contained and it cannot be contained. 

But above all else, it was first and it will be last.

I will tell you the story of how it was first and what worlds it set into motion.

Before there was anything, the god sat alone.  And although it kept quite good company with itself, braiding its hair (which would become the Milky Way) and making the hollow airspace in its oral cavity pop pop pop (these would become the thunder we hear when we sit by the window wrapped in our mother’s guilt) and grinding its extra bones together (the bone dust would become all the fine grained sand in the open semi-arid-to-very-arid deserts and at the bottom of the deadly heavy oceans and of course ipso facto forever under the sand dollar whites of our fingernails), often the god would wonder whether there ought to be anything else, any ideas (which would become the nightmares of old people) but its own, or any utterances (which would become the guttural wild noises of the birds of prey) but its own, or any odors (which would become Chanel No. 5) but its own.

But it balked and shook its great ugly head (which would become Mount Rushmore) and said into the nonexistence space NO (which would become a Spanish language film starring Gael Garcia Bernal) and shrank back, looking at its hands (which would become Rodin’s inspiration), and, mystified (which would become the way of the Tibetan monks), it fell back on its own sprawling self and broke on itself, like the waves on themselves, and upon itself spilled, like the babies upon themselves, and by this accident was everything set aquiver and aglow, for now everything existed.

The god was a part of everything and still apart from everything, watching through weeping eyes (which were the north and south poles) all of time spread ridiculously before him, all flat and out of shape, screaming VIVA LA REVOLUCION I AM THE ONLY BEGOTTEN SON OF GOD AND MY NAME IS JESUS CHRIST HALLUCINATIONS ARE BAD ENOUGH BUT AFTER A WHILE YOU LEARN TO COPE WITH THINGS LIKE SEEING YOUR DEAD GRANDMOTHER CRAWLING UP YOUR LEG WITH A KNIFE IN HER TEETH MOST ACID FANCIERS CAN HANDLE THIS SORT OF THING BUT NOBODY CAN HANDLE THAT OTHER TRIP THE POSSIBILITY THAT ANY FREAK WITH $1.98 CAN WALK INTO CIRCUS-CIRCUS AND SUDDENLY APPEAR IN THE SKY OVER DOWNTOWN LAS VEGAS TWELVE TIMES THE SIZE OF GOD HOWLING ANYTHING THAT COMES INTO HIS HEAD NO THIS IS NOT A GOOD TOWN FOR PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS REALITY ITSELF IS TOO TWISTED MY BOUNTY IS AS BOUNDLESS AS THE SEA MY LOVE AS DEEP THE MORE I GIVE TO THEE THE MORE I HAVE FOR BOTH ARE INFINITE.

And space, too, sprawled before him, taking up too much room in all the wrong places.  Everywhere there was the California Highway Patrol, sushi, a child starving in the war zone struggling to lift its head from the land and a vulture waiting for it to die and a photographer taking the best picture of this scene, an opera in German translated into French English Italian, a pair of Nikes left roadside as if their runner was zapped out of being, electrons in orbit, a machete in a pawn shop in New Mexico, bad morning breath, a rotting rat in the London Underground, factories that manufacture tampons, Auschwitz, ponies from Mongolia and Chincoteague, geometric shapes, the hard problem of consciousness, Cabernet Sauvignon, democracy, pole dancing classes, flesh, artificial intelligence, John Milton and Ludwig van Beethoven and Helen Keller, the three blind mice, Tyrannosaurus Rex, asymmetry.

And all of this begotten by the god.

The god looked upon all that was it and its.  The god vacillated between all emotions, elation and bitterest depravity, jealousy and confusion, rage and pride.  Most often it longed to kill itself and with it the dull roar of everything.  For everything was all too much.  The god cursed itself for falling.  It asked of itself WHY and punched its own temples with its own fists.  It asked the advice of St. Augustine, who cautioned it only against stealing pears from trees and said maybe don’t steal at all maybe that would be best.  The god said all it wanted was to float and float without thinking.  But in this terrible sea of everything it’d only sink, and the mess would suffocate it and it had no patience to visit the emergency room, let alone to pay fees for the ambulance.

So the god drank a glass of Kentucky Bourbon and solved a Rubik’s Cube and counted all the planets in all the universes that played host to humanoid life.   

The god sighed.  It hated this.

It dragged a prisoner of war across hot pavement by his genitalia.  It unleashed the plague across Europe.  It destroyed New Orleans.  It canceled Arrested Development and led people to believe it would not air again.  It killed a newborn dog.  It burned with a raging southwestern brush fire a park ranger and some small indigenous deer.  It dropped the bomb.  It let a young couple freeze to death on their honeymoon.  It broke a racehorse’s leg.  It invented cancer.  It mauled a boy with bear jaws.  It drowned hundreds of people.  It drove some mad, some sad, some bad.

The god panted.  It grew weary of hatred, even.

It dragged its carcass to the sidelines of a soccer game in South America.  It looked around at all the colors it had drawn and muddied.  The mud would not wash out, not even with Tide’s best stain removing pen.

Suddenly the god felt sorry and sent a telegram in apology.  But it knew it could not right any of its wrongs, and its will to wrong the rest of its rights could not be mustered.  So it let things be and gave birth to Paul McCartney.

And with a final burst of energy that truly came from nowhere it pulled space and time together onto a plane and onto a continuum.  And it made the theoretical lines stretch in all directions so that perhaps these things it had created would seek out every horizon. 

And it tried to masturbate but fell asleep midway through the journey.  And it has been asleep ever since.  And I don’t know how to wake it up, or if it’s even possible to wake it up, or if there exists anything to wake up at all.