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Current Music: Tom Waits, "Misery Is the River of the World"

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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?

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I just wrote a story a few weeks ago that turns on the notion of a god who created the world and then immediately lit out for parts unknown, leaving only a few signs of his presence behind (the divine equivalent of dirty dishes left in the sink). I think it's a fairly powerful notion, at least in part because it reflects somewhat common parental-abandonment issues.

May I see the story?

Sure, I'll e-mail it to you.

Thank you! I really liked.

I am reminded of Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, which is one of my personal touchstone books, and a book you should read if you haven't. It's a history of punk and dada and nihilism, and that theme of that kind of absence runs through it: those who believe they've been abandoned and are forsaken, those who believe they've been abandoned and are delighted, those who only wish they could be abandoned by God, and the art that comes from all of them. It's powerful art.

If you're looking for more books that have this theme, the Newton's Cannon trilogy (J. Gregory Keyes) gets into it in the third book. Also, the movie Dogma (though I don't want to say more than that for fear of spoiling things).

As to the more interesting philosophical question: Why is this a continuous theme? I thing the deep reasoning is something like this:

Claim 1) Many people can go through life and not see anything truly miraculous and personally beneficial.(*)

Claim 2) It seems that if there were currently a powerful deity in the world with our best interests in mind, that deity would perform miraculous actions to help us.

Conclusion 1, via modus tollens: There is no powerful deity in the world with our best interests in mind.

Claim 3) Our ancestors tell us there was such a deity in the past that helped them.

Claim 4) Our ancestors are telling us the truth.

Conclusion 2, via modus ponens: There existed some deity in the past with our ancestors best interests in mind.

Claim 5) A deity with our ancestors best interests in mind would have our best interests in mind.

Conclusion 3, via syllogism: At some time in the past there existed a deity that would have our best interests in mind.

Conclusion 4, from C1 and C3: At some point between our ancestors' time and our own, that deity left the world.

(*) I'm talking parting-the-Red-Sea miraculous, not had-a-baby miraculous. Certainly people can convince themselves the latter is as amazing as the former, but I'm going to ignore those people.

So that's about the structure of how the argument would go, I think. This is an even stronger problem for those who believe in an omnibenevolent deity, but I think at that point it gets tied in very tightly with the Problem of Evil.

But even for people for whom the problem of evil isn't a driving force, merely believing that there was a deity that has miraculous power and would help you should generally be enough for most people to cause this sort of problem.

There is also the possibility of rejecting any of claims (1)-(5), of course, but I think there are at least some people who can imagine all of claims (1)-(5). Once you can do that, writing about somebody who does (and who does rightly) can be a very interesting proposition.

Well, there's the Narnia version, where God is sometimes here and sometimes there and damned if we know why but he seems to know what he's doing.

And then there's the Jewish-theology version, that God's presence goes through periods of being closer to or far away from earth, and that either we just happen to be in a withdrawn period, or we're in one for a damned good reason, because if you were God, how impressed with the current state of the world would you be, and why would you hang out here when you have all the other options in the universe? There are probably some other variants on this, too.

(And then there's the Yiddish proverb, "If God lived on earth, people would break all of His windows." Maybe He'll come back if we buy him some good property insurance.)

And then there's the Waiting for Godot version, in which God is not so much absent as bizarrely detached and hard-to-get (I've only seen the first half, though I assume nothing major changes in the second act, at least not anything explicable). Though I've had trouble taking the play seriously since I discovered that Beckett intended the name of the title to be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable. I mean, really, can we have SOME attempt at subtlety here? I've read Endgame; I know Beckett can be capable of so much subtlety you don't even know what happened.

I've also heard one person suggest that the New Testament narrative seems like a cop-out, because how hard is it to die for the sins of mankind if you're immortal anyway, and a more interesting scenario would be if God has to choose to die for good, thus saving humanity but leaving them on their own.

Fascinating. Are there any myths in which this occurs?

And then there's the Jewish-theology version, that God's presence goes through periods of being closer to or far away from earth

Heh. I hadn't heard this. What's its origin?

Not sure, though in its fully-developed form it's probably kabbalist, since it involves lots of focus on the doings of the shechina. But I think there's a general rabbinic understanding that after a certain point in history, God stopped operating in the world by way of prophecy or obvious miracles (maybe all miracles; I'm not sure). Which does explain a lot about why we don't see them.

I don't know of any, though it would seem there would have to be one somewhere. Probably more likely in the realm of iconic heroes than of dieties.

What point in history?

If you're looking for more books that have this theme, the Newton's Cannon trilogy (J. Gregory Keyes) gets into it in the third book. Also, the movie Dogma (though I don't want to say more than that for fear of spoiling things).

Fear not, I've read Keyes' Age of Unreason (though I think there are four books: Newton's Cannon, A Calculus of Angels, Empires of Unreason, and Shadows of God) and seen Dogma, so you may discuss them at your leisure.

I have not read, but I will: it sounds fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation!

Somewhat tangentially, but a synapse fired off at your description of Lipstick Traces and I attempt to pay attention to my brain every now and then: are you familiar with the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan?

I think somewhen shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. But there are others who would know better than I.

You're right, there are four books . . . oops :)

Actually, I'm pretty curious about this too, as I've never heard about it either . . . can you recommend a few sources?

We have her first short story collection, which I thought was extremely uneven, and I read her first novel (Silk) in a bookstore and was not impressed. I don't know what she's been up to lately, though, and have been hearing vague grapevine buzz of Something Or Other Good. May be worth looking into.

Reminds me of the three years I spent as a Christian apostate/agnostic in which I wrote a play on a similar theme. I'll show it to you this summer because it's on my old lap top, which I left in Utah.

I like that proverb. It reminds me of a story about St. Theresa of Liseaux. After a particularly rough journey in which she prayed she'd get home safe, she asked God why he didn't help her.

"But Theresa," said God. "I treat you no differently than I do the rest of my friends."

"Then it's no wonder you have so few of them," she said.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer this because I haven't felt that people have ever been truly abandoned by God -- even if they think they have been. But for the record, Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence delt with this question in the final installment Silver on the Tree.

Tales of Pain and Wonder grew on me over a summer, and I am very fond of Silk and Threshold; I have serious issues with Low Red Moon and to a lesser degree with Murder of Angels. On the whole, I think I prefer her short fiction to her novels. (For the record, From Weird and Distant Shores is her other collection; and her new one, To Charles Fort, With Love, is coming out from Subterranean Press.) But I mentioned her because especially ToPaW has a very strong sense of a vanished age—perhaps not necessarily a God who has withdrawn, but a better time that has abandoned us—and we're all picking among the wreckage; in the case of most of Kiernan's characters, trying with middling success to salvage something from the scraps. I wondered if this was perhaps related to the aesthetic Lipstick Traces describes.

Well, you don't need to believe personally in a divine abandonment to study the social and artistic motif, I think . . . How do you feel The Dark Is Rising addresses the issue? The books were a staple of my childhood, but I haven't read them in years.

That's true. I guess I should rephrase. It's not something I have a lot of experience in, because the theme doesn't personally interest me too much. I have noticed, however, that these themes typically only rise after a time of great crisis -- think the Dadaist response to World War I. That's an obvious statement, yes, but the fact this comes up less in times of peace and prosperity says a lot to me.

Now, Dark is Rising. (Here thar be spoilers). At the end of the book the Light leave humanity to govern themselves, and make them forget they were ever there. I think in some way this can be seen as a positive abandonment by god(like) figures, as we've discussed in this thread.

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.

Interesting. I don't tend to think of the Light as godlike, I suppose, so I class their leavetaking more with the withdrawal of magic as seen in The Lord of the Rings, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, and Babylon 5. Also, I think I'm looking at abandonment more in the straightly negative sense. Nobody really goes around afterward saying, "That Merriman, where the hell was he when my life all went to pot?" (Although I'm sure somewhere in the universe of fanfic, someone has . . .)

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.

Is okay. I couldn't find anything wrong with the proof. : P

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?

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

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

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'.

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?

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