The God Reflex 2 - The Son

Afterwards the light reached itself to every corner of the new found existence, stretching and yawning its way across the once invisible universe bringing the first vestiges of life with it. There was stillness, aside from the change from black to the unnamed not-black, and there was silence. Everything was still empty, but the emptiness has potential. A potential which, eventually, was filled with the movement and noises of shuffling, snorting creatures, the penultimate of which stumbled on two legs and was named Adam, forged in his creator’s image. The first son, the forgotten son, the less favoured child than his younger brother.

The God Reflex, if it even exists at all, means that in those moments of despair and panic, much how Adam would have felt awakening in the garden, we cease to be rational beings. Suddenly we, if only briefly, are prepared to believe in that which we’d previously dismissed. For an instant we have faith in the stories we learnt as a child. We believe in more than just the moral principles of religion, but in the mythos and magic that lie at its heart. Those stories that have been told and retold, shaped by events and agendas. And us. And then, like the moment before existence, like the silence before the Large Hadron Collider actually works, when all life pauses, ends and restarts, we return to our previous state. Just twenty-first century cynics again.

It’s not so unreasonable to believe in stories that are clearly impossible, is it? I used, once. When I was a child I believed in everything I read. In the past, before we came to the cusp of the future.

My belief, my faith, in the future changes almost day to day. Sometimes it’s easiest to just think that everything will work itself out. More frequently, the coming hardships, and therefore the need for some sort of life plan, seem unavoidable. New studies show that most people think they will be worse off than their parents; the unrelenting growth pattern where the next generation always enjoys more frivolous fun and a healthier lifestyle, appears to be ending. Strangling personal debt and unemployment beckons for the young; a housing market that climbs further away; longer working lives; worse pension benefits; soaring costs of basic commodities like fruit and vegetables, gas and electricity monopolised to maximise profits before the resources dry out; a swallowing, gaping refusal to accept that the planet is dying and every word I type, every song I listen to, every book I read all contributes to the capitalist, consumerism, selfish self-destruction of all life.

In such circumstances who would want the future, who would bring more living beings into the world?

And yet I can see the joy in the faces of my friends and family who have children, who have future. The pride and devotion they feel towards one whom came from them, but perhaps for the unconvinced, it is better to remain without? After all, provision for myself is likely to be difficult, why should I knowingly cause a dependant to suffer? To place the burden for my old age onto another who never asked for anything, who never existed until I chose to release myself into the gene pool?

My girlfriend and I went to see We Need to Talk About Kevin the other Sunday night. It’s a rare incident for me to see a movie without reading the book first - although, to be honest, I’ve no real inclination to read it. My girlfriend refers to this animosity towards best-sellers and popularism in general, as cultural snobbishness. Well, okay, so it sort of is, but I also feel that, since those books will be around to read in the future, and others might not be some sort of prioritisation is in order. Besides, somewhere along the line Lionel Shriver just started to irritate me. There was something strangely aggressive about her approach to marketing which I found disturbing.

Anyway, it was hardly relaxing end of the weekend viewing. Whilst it was indeed prettily directed and neatly acted I found the sense of foreboding doom difficult to ignore. It was like a relentless voice from above signposting the devil in all our spawn, a thundering arrow jutting down into the middle of the narrative declaring that was possible would be inevitable. It’s just what happened to people, okay?
The movie did, once we’d pulled apart the plot and style, force us into a vague conversation about children and the complexities of being a parent. My standpoint has always been unashamedly ambiguous sprinkled with cruel jokes about keeping infants in plastic boxes in the cellar, but this has only ever been a distraction technique. All the gags and socially unacceptable statements can’t hide my internal unease, my lack of a plan.

Maybe I’d have more decisive clarity if I had a life plan. Maybe, maybe not, but the world keeps getting in my way. Events, dear boy, events, conspire against me and I’m not single-minded enough to plough on regardless. Those that do have that drive also seem to have this faith that the world will always, stutteringly but ultimately actually, improve. That’s something which seems to be as flawed, or at least as unproven, as a faith in divinity. Huh, I make myself sound like life has been one long hardship, but then I look up from my keyboard as glance around my world. In the main it looks pretty damn good. Different from how I once expected, but very fine indeed.

Is there any point in having a plan when the pace of change over the past hundred years has left a world utterly unrecognisable from the one our great-grandparents were born into and who’s to say it’s going to slow down. Society and the ways in which we interact with reality have shifted into something inconceivable at the end of the First World War. But, whilst change still advances at a pace I find almost impossible to keep up with, the expected end point has shifted from a utopia to a dystopia in the same period of time which I spent at infant school. The lucky few, the so-called one percent, will continue their personal advancement whilst everyone else finds themselves relocated to down amongst the Morlocks in the sewers.

Perhaps this in itself helps to explain the God Reflex? That when the world’s demise appears inevitable in one form or another then at least there is another life to be embraced, an afterlife of perfection and enchantment, once you’ve negotiated the oft forgotten notion of purgatory. Everyone, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, passes through that temporal punishment, where the good and evil are purged from one another, torment tests the worthy for the advancement up the divine ascent to heaven whilst the others spiral down to the fiery pits. But for all of us there is the opportunity of perfection, something better than an ever degrading human existence, to be snatched.

Whatever his personal opinions on the church, Dante lived in fourteenth century Italy and so the concept of a better world in the next was pressingly desirable. Life would have been moderately short and filled with far more difficulties than running out of coffee or a jam on the motorway so what came next important. In the same way, a son was crucial to continue the lineage. They came next too, only on the Earthly plain. Legacy and the next life; the lines become blurred as the two interlock like reincarnation.

Perhaps that explains my reticence. I worry that I expect a son to be better than me. Not exactly a hard feat, but still an unnecessary burden. Is that what Jesus, Adam’s sort of younger brother, was supposed to be? Better than humanity’s creator, its saviour?

Whilst I am in no way trying to compare myself to anyone else’s deity or the so-called son of God (although I’m sure there are those out there who would expect me to do just that), I worry that I have been something of a disappointment, or at least a mystery, as a son. I lack a career; I lack offspring of my own; I am far away and unable to engage with family responsibilities fully; I feel as though I am yet to do anything of worth to justify this self-indulgence.

No, that is not fair. I know my family, my Father, love me and are proud of my meagre achievements. They don’t begrudge me my independence and nor do they expect me to feel guilty for it. Kevin is guiltless, that’s what seems so alien about the character. He’s so utterly free from remorse whilst his mother drowns in a sense of self-indulgent shame, a personal affront which implies immaturity below her years and experience.

I wandered through the protest camp outside St Paul’s the other evening, on the way home via London Bridge station after a few beers with Ben. It was eerily quiet and yet defiantly full of people sheltering inside their tents, deep breaths echoing out into the open night sky. The plastic pseudo canvas flickered in the reflected up lighting illuminating the domed tower high above them. As I walked, I remembered an anecdote I’d read recently. The main complaint about their protest against capitalism is that they don’t know what they want instead. If you go to a restaurant and your steak is disgusting you don’t have to eat it. You also don’t have know how to grill an amazing steak to know you want something different to what you had before, something better.

You don’t have to know exactly what you want in life, but it doesn’t hurt to always want something better and sometimes helps to acknowledge that you can be more than one thing. It is possible to be both the son and the father without losing traits of either.

Which makes me wonder whether you can also be the final component of the trinity?