God's Judgement
Mortal souls, both real and imagined, judged by God, both real and imagined
Life, for him, developed as a puzzle to be solved. He recognized this early on, and some operative part of him regarded events and characters with a deeply engaged disinterest, keen to miss nothing lest it later be important, keen to never judge lest he bias his research. The first sixty years of his life passed with conventional chaos and mystery, but even whilst in the throes of things he noted each phenomena strictly as a phenomena, his feelings and failings very much included. One typical day he stopped walking, and thought strangely for a second as if trying to blur his vision. Over decades, the cast of all characters he’d ever known had slowly been designing a single, unified stress expressing itself in a thousand different ways. It was unresolved, tense, and so baroque its contours could well have gone unrecognised had he simply not stopped to ponder. The stress was reaching a crisis from which nothing could be recovered. A critical intervention was necessary. By way of a few words here, and a hand on a shoulder there - subtle steps deduced through decades of attention - our man cracked it. He relaxed and observed the consequences of his actions spread like movement through a rube-goldberg machine, but socially, until each outcome was discovered and these people he’d known each felt a little better. He lived the rest of his life like a tennis champion returning to the camp that made him realise he might one day be great, and he eventually walked into heaven as if he knew the bouncer.
HE was blessed with a recurring dream of a single frozen moment in the future, which he explored every night for many years until the moment came to pass. He life really became about this one, guaranteed future instant: he made himself ideal for it, and studied it to put himself in the perfect position to do the most possible good for mankind. Rather than fumbling in the regular foggy dynamism, he’d leverage this one crystalline instant to massive effect, God-willing. Although his foresight did give him clues for becoming rich and esteemed, and although it gave him an abstract otherworldly emphasis on personal morality (a little like the effective altruists, but more idiosyncratic and less prone to total humiliation), he was largely swept up in the passage of time like the rest of us, forever too late in understanding to do the truly good thing. Unlike the rest of us, he had the opportunity act right in the clear future instant promised to him. The day of the moment came, and he started his plan to be in the perfect place at the perfect time to do one perfect action, and he met eyes with someone and, having five minutes leeway in his plan, they came to talk. The plan out the window, they fell in love that day and continued to flounder through the future, but together. His action was imperfect though the option of perfection had been given to him. Watching the man’s mind as he forgot about the grand plan, God punched the air. The stands erupted. Trumpets blared. Pop the ambrosia. That’s what it’s all about lads. Beautiful. That’s what it’s all about.
MY STORY
HE insisted all his life that he could do whatever he wanted. and that no-one could tell him what to do. This thought was in his head so strongly that he became certain that freedom and duty were totally incompatible, and that obligation was oppression itself. He wanted freedom, rejected all duty and had no motive for his action. He was free and it was lonely, so he’d take petty indulgences more than most, do things for others less than most, and find people with full, happy lives to be fools, chained to that which gives them joy. He’d rather be chained to nothing, and have nothing chained to him. It was foolishness as much as narcissism, but it was wrong, and the Judeo-Christian God passed him to Hades who had him unchained, falling through blistering heat, free, forever.
THE usual, highly necessary process of limiting sensory input by way of the sensory organs, thereby excluding the total cosmic mass of information that would otherwise be available, has been blundered more than once. The senses are like a paper mask cut with eye, nose, ear and mouth holes - and a hole all over the skin for haptics, and holes inside for the secret senses like balance and limb awareness, if you’re happy to contort the metaphor - that allows some stuff through and masks the rest. In one particular instance, the soul’s paper had all sort of different apertures, as if eaten by woodlice, shot through with shrapnel and exposed to the elements. It wasn’t fit for purpose, and all sorts of other totally irrelevant information got in. On one level the soul’s avatar on earth was a pensive retail worker with embarrassing hobbies and the look of a permo in his eyes. On another level, he was a pseudindividual attentive to fields circumscribed by indescribable forces. Certain tree and digital networks regarded him as a trustworthy oddball, certain locations were charmed by him, and a causal chain linking the death of punk and some untold future catastrophe saw him as a great romantic rival. The shared object of their affections - feline grace itself (oh babest of babes) - saw him as a love-rat. Upon his death, his life was voided - death, for him, was an annulment rather than a divorce - and he was granted a re-do once his sensory issue had been patched, which, I believe, went well.
