The Manless god

"Is anyone there?"

They used to listen to my stories. They used to repeat my stories to their young. The used to talk to me, to sing to me, sometimes to invoke my blessings and curses.

Now, it's grown too quiet. They were noisy and loud and extremely violent and profane. They were vain, stubborn, rebellious often contesting my authority. They were happy, they were sad, they were hopeful, they were despairing. They were a lot of trouble, but without them it feels empty and cold and lonely. The will to survive, to overcome, to conquer, to build, to destroy—it's gone.

The planets, moons, asteroids, comets, suns, solar systems, galaxies must still be there, and action, reaction, change, persistence must continue, but I cannot sense any of this.

I am ... I think. But according to the stories that humans told me that could just be an echo ... from the past. But even an echo exists in the dimension of time as does the hearing of the echo. And if the echo—as sound or vibration—is the result of mechanical action as people used to think, can such action exist without a medium? And can such a medium exist without spatial coordinates?

If all that remains are echoes, can they really exist apart from a succession of moments over a range of places? Perhaps the thought of the echo can occur outside time and space, but can the thinking of the thought exist apart from time and space? Humans had difficulty languaging about thinking that neither began nor ended and objectified what was located 'no where.' There was much in their stories that I could not understand.

How to describe the echo—how is it sensed and what is it about the echo that is sensed not to mention who hears it? If there is an echo, must there be one to hear the echo or is an echo the sort of thing that can exist apart from its being perceived? Is the echo real in some sense that is prior to and independent of whether someone also hears it? And if it is, as is related in the story of human physics, then the sound vibrations occur in a succession that can be ordered and through a medium of objects that can be contemplated. But then the story gets confused and confusing as we're back to trying to understand thoughts and thinking apart from the context of time and place for which human languaging was inadequate in the first place.

But humans complicated the story further by pointing out that apprehension and comprehension require two participants—the apprehended (comprehended) and the one who apprehends (comprehends). If the object requires a subject, then does the subject also require an object, i.e., can the subject be an object for itself? The human philosophers' stories were many, varied and inconclusive. One story even maintained that 'existence' was the pre-eminent essence of being, which seems to be extravagantly useless ('tautological' is the word invented for this sort of situation, and humans were generally adept with neologisms but I think it may have been their grammar that was partly to blame), and yet somehow fitting for minds already linguistically-challenged by the concepts of space and time.

On reflection, it seems that they told me stories and even fabricated stories that they claimed I had told them, but I realize now that I never had any stories to tell, and now I feel trapped in the logic of their stories.

I recall one in particular—a foundational story, if you will—which in its many variations over the times and places of human existence ran along the lines that it was a god who created humans in its godlike image. I never quite understood that and always had a affinity for the heretical view that it was humans who created the god in order to explain the world around and inside them. Like I said, it wasn't a popular story among them—it never attracted the legions of believers that had to be corralled and directed to the work of human civilization—nonetheless, it was a story that could not be completely suppressed or eradicated. And, it is the view towards which I lean in the hollowness, solitude and purposelessness I feel without human companionship.

"Is anyone there? Am I or am I not?"