Vu bistu, vu?

[sovay]

So I've been listening to Blood Money, and a chain of thought touched off by the song "God's Away on Business" has left me wondering about the concept of an absent God. Not a God who was never there in the first place, understand, but a God who's disappeared. It seems to be a popular theme. Off the top of my head, I'm looking at everything from Tori Amos ("God, sometimes you just don't come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?") to Tony Kushner's Angels in America ("Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He") and A Dybbuk ("We will always find Him, no matter how few there are, tell Him we will find Him. To deliver our complaint") to the "absentee landlord" rant of John Milton in The Devil's Advocate. Not to mention a positively dubious canon of Tom Waits:

Don't you know there ain't no Devil
That's just God when he's drunk
("Heartattack and Vine")

Did the Devil make the world while God was sleeping?
("Little Drop of Poison")

God builds a church
The Devil builds a chapel . . .
The Devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand
("Misery Is the River of the World")

I don't believe you go to heaven when you're good
Everything goes to hell anyway
("Everything Goes to Hell")

I'm reminded of some of the plays of Seneca, where the traditional machinery of the divine has clearly broken down. dimitto superos; summa votorum attigi, declares Atreus in Thyestes at the achievement of his unholy plans—"I let the gods fall; I have reached the height of my prayers," as though he has succeeded the gods in their absence. ("Falling Toward Apotheosis," anyone?) The eponymous Medea promises something similar: Invadam deos / et cuncta quatiam, attack the gods and shake everything; and no gods come after her in reprisal for either her presumption or her acts of murder. Or take Lucan's Pharsalia (or Bellum Civile; pick a name), where the only supernatural manifestations are from the malevolent shadow side: Furies, ghosts, necromancy. Whether through national cataclysm or personal disaster, the world has gone all to hell: so clearly the gods are nowhere to be found, because the alternative is that much worse to contemplate. And tell me, how does God choose / Whose prayers he does refuse? ("Day After Tomorrow") But neither Seneca nor Lucan, so far as I am aware, wonder where their gods have gone.

The title of this entry comes from a poem by Hirsh Glik that strange_selkie introduced me to, which she translates freely but emphatically: I really do want, God, to tell you my troubles, but I can't exactly find you anywhere, and inside me there's this fire I don't understand, and in fire I spend all my days. In cellars, in stairways, I hear my death calling to me, and I run high as I can, to the rooftops, and I call for you, God, where the hell are you? I suppose, in some incoherent fashion, I am wondering where this motif begins. Or does every generation imagine it's been abandoned anew? There's a wealth of literature between Silver Age Latin and 20th—21st century music and drama of which I am wholly ignorant. But I'm curious.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

In some ways ToPaW (which is the collection we have, and I really can't decide how I feel about it) fits the aesthetic I'm talking about; in some ways it doesn't. Kiernan has always seemed to me to be a quintessentially goth sort of writer, and the aesthetic I'm talking about is more punk. Now, I use those words differently than many people do, but what I see in goth fiction and music tends to be a very innerspace-centered sort of way of thinking about things, with the rules of society and/or people in general not so much having a negative impact on the viewpoint character/speaker as barely having an impact at all. Society is irrelevant, or an annoyance, and other people are dealt with on a person-to-person level. Punk, on the other hand, tends to have a very utopian-centered social-action focus deep, deep down, which is expressed by a desire to tear down the rules and works of the present society completely and can hence slip very easily into nihilism (where there is nothing to put in the place of what has been torn down). At its best, punk attempts to question the innate assumptions that people have internalized and taken for granted without knowing that they have, and this kind of questioning produces a reaction of laughter, shock and terror.

And so you get this sense of vanished glories in both aesthetics, and the attempt to build with or further destroy the wreckage, but there's sort of an introvert/extrovert difference between the two genres-- the goth reaction being 'God is irrelevant, what does that do to my life/art/loves?' and the punk reaction being 'God is irrelevant, what does that do to everybody's lives/art/loves?' And I think both are necessary, really, and would place Kiernan firmly in the goth camp. This is probably why I can't decide what I think about her stuff, because she's working with innerspace elements that don't parse into personal meaning for me, but I can tell there must be something there for her and probably quite a lot of other people, so it nags at the back of my mind.

[sovay]

You have clearly put far more thought into the respective aesthetics of goth and punk than I have. Thank you for this.

Another author question, then: Simon Logan? (fetishpunk, cold and alone) By your definition and by what I know of his influences, his industrial fiction—especially his later work, which is unfortunately all forthcoming so I can't refer you to it until the summer—falls far more clearly into the punk category. His only extant collection is i-o, from which I especially recommend "Ignition" and "Akin to Insects." I'd be curious to see what you think of him.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec, and I'll look into his stuff-- sounds interesting.

[sovay]

Well, you gave me Lipstick Traces; I had to return the favor.

[sovay]

This is probably why I can't decide what I think about her stuff, because she's working with innerspace elements that don't parse into personal meaning for me, but I can tell there must be something there for her and probably quite a lot of other people, so it nags at the back of my mind.

If this is an answerable question, what does parse into personal meaning for you?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Basically there's a set of symbols that people have to work pretty hard to keep me from finding intrinsically profound. Some of 'em I know why, some I don't. The symbols Kiernan uses don't overlap with my set, or only overlap slightly. I think of this kind of symbol as a sort of shorthand to my subconscious, a tag or trigger that makes me start pondering. Some of mine are: roses/thorns/blood, masks, the distance between two mirrors, spiders/webs, feathers, the moon, owls, hair and the cutting and/or taking down of hair, bleached bone, trains, the sea/shapeshifting, tattoos. Any work of fiction containing more than three or four of the above is going to have to be impressively and appallingly bad for me not to find something interesting about it. Quite often I can read things without the symbol set I use and find the reading meaningful, but with something dealing intrinsically with inner space and trying not to establish a fictional objective reality, it's a good starting point if I have at least one metaphor usage in common with the story, and the more the better. With Kiernan, for example, I only overlap in startlingly peculiar ways, and there are few of them-- spiders and tattoos in Silk, but she seems to use tattoos there to symbolize previous scars, whereas to me they mean something more along the lines of previous victories, and her spiders are much more benevolent than my idea of spiders. So I can understand her stuff, but it's hard to tell if I enjoyed the experience, because I have to keep holding onto mental postulates like 'Okay, spiders are good at the moment'.

[sovay]

roses/thorns/blood, masks, the distance between two mirrors, spiders/webs, feathers, the moon, owls, hair and the cutting and/or taking down of hair, bleached bone, trains, the sea/shapeshifting, tattoos

You should make of these a deck: they sound runic.

I'm with you on masks, the moon, bone, trains, the sea, and shapeshifting. Thorns interest me more than roses; scars more than tattoos. Autumn and winter, especially autumn and leaves falling. (You can see why Moonwise caught me.) Underworlds; otherworlds. Shadows, I think, and senses of the past. And likewise, I can trace some of these and some I have no idea. But I'm not sure that whatever difficulties I have with Kiernan's work are because her deck and mine don't match. It's less the intrinsic symbolism than the pacing and plotting that troubled me about Low Red Moon.

Any work of fiction containing more than three or four of the above is going to have to be impressively and appallingly bad for me not to find something interesting about it.

So has this ever happened?