Genesis

My favorite story in the Torah is Genesis 1.

After that, things get exponentially less interesting.

In fact, I really only like the first ten verses in the Torah.

The chaos unformed and void is cool.

But the best state of affairs for the universe is when everything is water, with an inexplicable, indescribable expanse somehow separating, in directionless existence, the water above from the water below.

I imagine that this would be prime real estate for me.

Polarized. Expectant. Full of potential.

Charged with paradox. Ripe with concept. Impossible and pure.

And then land and vegetation comes in, and animals, and, worst of all, humans, which ruins everything.

I start to lose attention about then.

Give me the abstract any day. 

Broad strokes. 

I wonder why, in this story, God decides to create.

Why He did not stay content to dwell in the space of that second day. 

I prefer Him when He is at his most creative, before He starts to destroy anything, or take an interest in the affairs of man, which could be the same thing.

In the Kabbalistic tradition, God is Light without End, and creates the universe by receding, leaving space for us to exist.

If God were to return, He would obliterate everything, because God is total.

When I was a kid in Sunday school, we were asked to draw what we thought God looked like.

I drew a white man with a white beard.

Other people drew wind blowing and shit like that.

It was then that I first realized that I had a problem with authoritarianism.

With believing what people told me, and following what they told me to do, and actually believing that I myself had originated those commands in the first place.

And that I was not, in fact, the most creative person in the room, but just as capable of closed-mindedness and fear as anybody else.

But I still believed that God talked to me, and that the leaves had feelings and thanked me for not crushing them on my way to school.

That my imagination was as real as anything else.

The world was so much more alive back then.

I played with plastic robots I had made out of tinker toys, and invented a television show for us to star in inspired by Deep Space Nine and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I called this show, which I was obsessed with, Space Out.

After years of this, I eventually realized that my toy robots were never going to be onscreen, and so I sadly let them go.

It took too many more years after that to let go of the idea of God.