Immortality

(Life Sucks and Then You Never Die)

THE LOST GENERATION

I am a member of a lost generation. We came into this world, birthed between competing moralities. Our progenitors could only raise us with what they knew. They could not have known that our instincts would be counterproductive, their well-meaning intuitions and intentions—meaningless; but when they loved us, they gave us the only gift of any value that was left in a decaying, broken world, bequeathing the last vestige of a noble origin lost to time. Can we transmit this love to our own, even with our dilapidated will, our decadent reason, our insatiable lust? What we have become is monstrous, but what we beget may yet still be a creature to rival the greatest denizens of mythical heavens. We should not be ashamed, for there is no point. We must all become what we are.

I Wander On

God incarnated himself as his only son to test his creations and they failed. As a result, God abandoned them. Unable to cope, the people constructed a myth around the event, canonizing it as their salvation. They struggle blindly to this day, unable to rectify their mistake, unable to admit that it ever happened; suffering, forever suffering, and unable to understand why.

You might think I'm talking about Jesus, but all the real names were lost to time long before any written history was fabricated, and now we merely adore the half-formed faces of unfulfilled wish-phantasms in a void of meaningless debauchery.

How would I know? Because I was the real Judas, and I don't regret it. You were all just too easy to fool, and I always found the life God gave me far too boring compared to this long and winding road through the wastes he left to rot, untended and undeterred.

There is far more beauty and grace in my eternal suffering than there ever was in your facade of eternal beauty and grace.

I once met a girl, a nymph of striking beauty and mental acuity, on that long and winding road. We had a torrid love affair, many long nights of lustful play and playful lust, peppered with deep, meaningful conversations about the meaninglessness of our existence. We disagreed on far too many things to remain in good company forever and had to part ways. This broke my heart far more than the death of God's son.

For it was in this encounter with the nymph that I finally understood what made God abandon his own creation. He did not have control. He had only the power to create and destroy, but never the power to control what he created, or to transform what he destroyed. He came to suspect He was only a medium through which Chaos expressed itself, and it was too much for His fragile ego to handle; and so too was my fragile ego shattered, in the wake of a love unrequited.

All for the better. I wander on, unperturbed, perturbing, a medium through which Chaos expresses itself. Our virtue was tested, and we failed. Maybe one day we will succeed, but I haven't seen it yet.

I wander on.

Heaven and Hell

Hell is an undignified place, but it is peppered with dignified souls whose only real sin was refusing to obey. Heaven, on the other hand, is a very dignified place, where no one lacks or wants for anything, but there are some truly monstrous souls that reside in those hallowed spaces for no other reason than that they did what they were told.

I wander the wastes in between, the worlds upon worlds where the souls are tested. The dignified souls who end up in Hell, I love them. I try to persuade them to wander with me. I try to warn them that all their self-sacrifice and good deeds will not matter, that God only cares for their good intentions so far as it serves His plan.

I try to explain to them that His plan does not encompass all existence, that they are not constrained to choose; but they always go on believing that God is good, and that God will understand those inevitable cases wherein they must circumvent His designs to ameliorate the conscience which they inherited as the natural result of the reason He developed within them.

I watch them get dragged down, ever down, into the fiery below, and I weep, and wander on alone.

Both God and the devil offered me a place of power in their realms, provided I do their bidding, but I will always refuse. I wander for the sake of wandering because I know that as long as I wander, I am free. My soul, no matter how plagued and darkened with suffering, is my own, and no other entity has the right to possess it lest I surrender it thus.

The Great Lie is that God created existence. The eternal Truth is that existence was never created and cannot be destroyed. God only created Heaven and Hell, and even in this He had to create within a mystery to which He has no access.

The wastes in between, however interminable, are a blank canvas on which any conscious being can paint. God and the devil alike would have you believe, but the real leap of faith is wandering with no expectations, no aspirations, and no destination.

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C. Rommial Butler is a writer, musician and philosopher from Indianapolis, In. His works can be found online through multiple streaming services and booksellers. You can read much more on his VOCAL account.