We set out toward the mountain with oblations in hand. A bottle of Pinot for Dionysus, some pretzels for Apollo, three bottles of water for Poseidon and a few bananas for Aphrodite. Three guys, six bananas, you do the math.
Like a band of buccaneers, we sought to lay siege to the trail, blazing the trail like stoners on 420, we started our ascent to the heavens. Q regaled us with stories of some poor fools who had brutish brushes with poison-oak, their eyes and anuses inflamed and incensed.
As we climbed in elevation, it became necessary to immerse ourselves in distraction, to ease the burning in our legs, and in our loins. We interrogated the relation between imagination and reason. With our minds alight, we were transformed from a band of mercenaries, Mongols on the Silk Road, to three wayward wayfarers, wandering through the darkened forest, contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos. We were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. I asserted that imagination gives rise to all things; it is the precursor that provides reason for reason. Imagination the inception, reason the execution. I conceded, after initially renouncing reason, that reason was necessary in order to provide a semblance of intelligibility to things dreamed - that reason and imagination were inextricably bound up in one another, like lovers in the throes of passion. Q continued to resist my assault, though I could tell I was wearing him down based on his rate of perspiration, strained breathing, and his continued need to sit and cease all movement. It was then I realized that he might be suffering a series of mini-strokes.
Q then invoked the aid of Jesus, either seeking salvation - seeing as he was having a near death experience - or seeking to confuse and misdirect, he made a leap from the topic of imagination to the topic of god. I believe his thinking was that humanity has a need to imagine god, to distract us from our mortality. To envision something enduring, placates our fear of death. Q advocated that imagination, then, is that which saves us from our horror and inability to cope with our inevitable ends. I suggested that imagination can inspire as much fear as it dispels. Just recall a time you've received bad news concerning the health of a loved one. Your phone rings. A call from a cold and detached voice at the end of a line, informing you there's been an accident. Your mind, like a blender full of shadows and sharp objects, whips itself into a frenzied mayhem. Shrill sounds of twisting metal and destruction grate against the inside of your skull. A maelstrom of torment drowns you as you imagine the myriad ways your love may have been maimed.
Leaping again, like a giant sweating frog, Q moved back to the topic of god. He asked what my concept of god was. I told him I embraced a kind of Eastern view of god. That god was the totality of all things, and as a result, present in all things; everything is one. To me, god is existence. Being. I added, that I believe god is indifferent (given god is all things), and has no vested interest in our happiness or unhappiness, nor does god seek to provide order to the universe. As the sun exits, oblivious to the machinations of the solar-system, it continues to burn - unconcerned whether we feel its warmth.
Q then tried to confound things by asking how god could be in all things but allow murder - which I found (and still do) irrelevant to our conversation. I explained that I did not believe god to be omnipotent, and reiterated that god does not care to stop murder, because god cannot start or stop anything. He asked how god could be in all things, and not want to stop murder. I had no real reply at the time, but what I could have said was that murder is a thing, and if god is in all things, then god is in murder. To disallow murder would be to deny a piece of god's existence. I think murder can be explained reasonably with a quick analogy. Let us say a man is the likeness of god, in that he is a cosmos, composed of infinitely discrete parts that comprise a whole. Man then, is the totality of all things contained inside his being, and is then congruous with my notion of god. When a man's immune system detects a threat within the body, it will murder the pathogen to preserve the body. The man is not aware of the murder; the man is unaware that a battle is even being waged. Murder then, and death, are explained as essential to the function of that body. In some cases, mistakes can be made where the wrong cells are attacked and destroyed, as can be the case with organ transplants and other auto-immune disorders, but on the whole, the murderous immune system, I think, serves a purpose.
Our dialectic was cut short by a rustling in the bushes beside us. Q had warned us of the dangers lying in wait; the dreaded Acari, mountain lions, bears and perilous precipices. Moments before, I had remarked on a large accretion of feces on our path that looked like it could have come from a bear, but Q had said he was unsure whether it had fallen down out of his shorts - he had gone commando due to the oppressive heat - so we paid it no mind. Now though, combined with the commotion coming from the woods, we all braced ourselves for the emergence of some foul and ferocious beast. James lunged and grabbed a thick stick - I told him he had grabbed the wrong one, and told him to let go of my penis - and then looking for something bigger, he ripped a great wooden limb from a tree. Q fumbled through his pockets for his bear-mace, but he was too slow - the creature burst from the brush and was upon us.
A man, naked and deranged, with giant swollen eyelids, and a body decorated with an assortment of scrapes and scars, came at us thrashing violently and screaming in an unknown tongue. James, Q and I looked at one another and we all knew: we were face to face with the most dangerous prey. Swift and agile, James swung the the tree-trunk like a baseball-bat and connected with the beast's cranium. The cracking sound of a home-run echoed through the woods, and roared out above the canopy. As the creature lay prostrated, we saw a great ulcerated pustule on its sphincter. It looked like the man was in the process of giving birth to a giant testicle through his anus.
Finally, after hours of struggle, we arrived at the summit. We uncorked our libation, and sipped sweet succor. Drunk as loons and exhausted from exertion, we glimpsed the gods.
To our dismay, the gods of this mountain were not only balding, but impotent. All the Cialis in the world couldn't save their sorry rods. As perspicacious travelers, we realized that the gods had erected themselves upon this peak as a grandiose overcompensation for their shortcomings. The equivalent of an old man speeding in a sports car, blasting Aerosmith at deafening decibels. These gods were not even omnipresent, their authority was relegated to the small realm atop the mountain. They were indifferent to our arrival and vainly adjusted and readjusted their toupees and garish hairpieces over and over again. We never once saw them look up from their mirrors. Their omniscience, held entirely in the flat silver surfaces before their eyes.
Who could have reasonably imagined it?
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