I Pray Through Monsters

OK Cupid finally paid off, because some guy had this posted on his profile. It's Werner Herzog narrating a beautiful short film about a plastic bag. I know, that sounds very American Beauty, but this is really wonderful. I could listen to Herzog just say the word Monster over and over again for a decade. I love his voice. I don't know if it's the tone itself, or what he says, but it puts me in the same frame of mind as when you first wake up in the morning in bed by yourself and it's spring and warm outside. Remember what his last movie did to me? I just want to be his best friend. Or I only want to be friends with people who love him too.

I thought about God a lot yesterday, after the comedy show. I was hanging out with 2 people who believe in God, which is actually a pretty uncommon occurrence these days, to be with people who want to talk about that, who I like and respect and believe to be good decent people. I am, of course, atheist through and through. But I'm also a storyteller, and I believe in stories, narratives and magic as things people should use to interpret and color their world. So while I may have lots of problems  with religions, and can sound extremely caustic, bitter, and superior when it comes to living your life that way, part of me wants someone intelligent and curious to talk to me about what God means to them. Not in a "I'm going to convert you" sort of way, but in a "Let's exchange stories" way. I am afraid though, of that point which will inevitably come, where I can't hide the fact I think religion is ignorant and ruthless. I am afraid of what religion wants me to be, and how it wants to control my world and my sex. Maybe also they are afraid of the point where they will look at me and think "this person is lost and wrong". Maybe we are all walking around afraid our own judgments. Or is that only the best kind of people? Perhaps not enough people are afraid of their judgments and that's the whole problem.

I said something last night at the table, he asked "Atheist? not Agnostic?" and I replied "Science shows me everyone is equal." Which is true. Also true, science gives me miracles every day, real stories with vivid details and images and consequences. Science gives me all the miracles I need to try and be a better person. It teaches me responsibility, beauty, and objectivity. Gratefulness. Co-Existence. Curiosity. Maybe curiosity was the part missing from church. Science is more human to me than church, because it wants me to learn things. Which is all I really want to do.

I love the word Monster. It applies so many things, and All things, and it carries for me this vast gorgeous feeling of huge mystery and being, it conjures Bravery and Fear and makes my brain stretch. When I say it, it's like a mantra, it focuses my emotion on the idea that you can't know anything really about the thoughts and life of another being, inanimate or organic. Everything you know nothing about is a monster, and therefore Everything is a monster to everyone but the monster itself. Sometimes they are leering bloody nightmare things, war and betrayal and pain, and other times they are passive slow epic beasts moving in herds across plains, or trees the size of skyscrapers, or tiny little cats hunting bugs, or another person's body. The entire universe, oceans trees stars mountains planets, is contained in the word Monster. And that is the Word that makes me feel Love. That's a storyteller's spirituality, using a beast of the imagination to represent the complex beauty of atoms and chemical reactions.

Under the Cave is the Water, and Under the Water is a Deeper Cave

I saw the paintings in that cave, in this movie, and it was as if someone plugged a memory card into my brain and in the theater people were gasping quietly and the place fell silent in a way that means no really no ones moving, no one's even breathing for a minute. The quiet was amazing.

When you enter a cave, there is this first moment when it breathes out at you, and it's when you realize you are somewhere else. There may be no other sentient creatures in the place, you may be completely alone, but the rocks and walls, even the floors, are alive and growing and moving around you. The darkness is dense, and the air smells different, wet, hard, cold, blind. You are walking into something's mouth. Something so large it is not even aware you are treading on it's tongue.

And then people came in, and they did what people always do, they made it theirs. They found the cave, and they used it. Can you imagine the bravery needed to keep crawling and walking in the darkness, with only a small flickering light to illuminate the bones crunching beneath your feet, and the cave breathing all around you? The fear you must have of the outside world to venture that deep into a rockface, and then because that fear exists out there, you imagine it and scratch it into a wall, and you are the first human being ever to make a figure? To paint a figure? To paint a horse? There was one human being one time the only time ever who drew the first horse. Who saw them, and studied the lines of their muzzles, the curl of their backs, and took those lines in his head and made them with his fingers.

The faces of the animals were the most moving things. They had personality. They looked like individual horses, like individual lions. The ibex looked like an ibex - the wave of its horns and the black patch on it's chest, the white markings on it's neck. Moving fighting living animals. These were things that the artist had seen with his own eyes, and hunted, and ran from. The walls of the cave curved and shook and waved so that if I were to just reach out and touch those lines, if I were to put my palm on the rockface to steady it, the whole earth would stay still just for a moment.

And its incredible, miraculous, holy, that in 2011, on another continent, in another body, I could understand the feeling that they all must have had, thousands of years apart in different bodies, to leave a painted handprint on the wall.

They told me that at one point, 5,000 years passed between painting. That 5,000 years after the first rhino was painted, another rhino was also painted. 5,000 years. 5,000 years. 5,000 years. Where were we 5,000 years ago? And if you and me today were to walk into a room with paintings from 5,000 years ago, which may as well be from another species of man, aliens, we would never dare to just add our own painting. At least, we would know we weren't allowed to. But these people, us, they had no history. There was no concept of 5,000 years. There was no concept of a 100 years. Is it better for us? To not add ourselves to the cave, to instead seal it back up to save it so the future can see it too? Does that make us better people, or does it reek of a presumption that the future will be ours? Either way. When woolly rhinos roamed the hills of Southern France, and people drew them. Either way, reels of film with faces and words.

Fluidity: The idea that any one thing can become another thing. A man can become a tree. A rock can become a man. A bison can speak. A woman may be a horse.

Permeability: Nothing is solid. The cave can accept you or reject you. The man can channel the animal he dreamed of last night. Through the woman comes the future. The rock communicates to you, and you are not in control, but instead these drafts coming from between trees and water and air, these drafts blow the spirits into you, and then the spirits come out of you, and everything is drifting in a wake. The dream world.

A scientist spoke about dreaming of lions. I dreamed of squid. I saw the black purple tentacles of the squid, gathered into the folds of all our worlds, the things that connect us. The internet. Television. Radio. Even the waves of our own voices. Books. Print. Paintings. Every form we use to try and make a bond between us, a shared experience. And this squid curled silently over all of our sleeping beds, breathing.