untitled conversation

[RiverNotch]

Things are coming back to me
as if I had forgot,
as if I'd not been occupied
my entire life with remembering
eyes all dark and empty,
cold and glassy, until I contemplate them,
I compare them, and they become
as deep and vast and mirrorlike and green
as -- what else? -- the sea.

                                       As if they're ancient history.
                                       Sometimes I wish we were the players
                                       of an Attic tragedy,
                                       masks dividing lips that try to touch
                                       and gruesome ends delivered out of view:
                                       everything we do, we do with dignity.

I really want to touch you.
I really want to feel
your skin against my skin,
our fingers interlaced,
my lips against your lips
(briefly, as a greeting) --

                                       But I always return to the god of my ancestors,
                                       the god I cannot name, who with his contradictions,
                                       with his indignities and idiosyncracies,
                                       contains more than a pantheon. Do you know why he parted
                                       the Red Sea but merely lowered
                                       the River Jordan?

Some believe it's because he hates
what waters cannot be drunk,
whatever will not sate --

                                       It's because there was no heathen
                                       Pharaoh to humiliate
                                       when his people finally came back
                                       to the land he'd promised them.

[dukealien]

A fine read, nice imagery and some deep thinking.

I'd amend that the God of Abraham parted the Red Sea (and, equally important, closed it again) to humiliate the gods of Egypt in addition to Pharaoh (who was, of course, one of them).  The God of Abraham was the all-highest and supreme, but He was not a monotheist:  the gods of other tribes and races were not nonexistent, and He delighted in subduing them by embarrassing their followers.  He was a jealous [g]od, but only required that His people have no other gods before Him; other gods after Him were fine so long as they were subordinate.

I suppose it was the Greeks, with their passion for Big Ideas, that gave Christianity near-Islamic absolute monotheism; poly- then crept back almost immediately in the form of the Trinity, archangels, and of course the indispensable Satan.  Easy to understand why Muslims see Christians as polytheists... though they, too, have archangels.

[RiverNotch]

Thanks! I think monotheism came some time before the Greeks, but yeah, the narrative of much of the Tanakh/Old Testament acknowledges their god's supremacy over other gods, and not that other gods didn't, like, exist. Any ideas for a title by the way?

[dukealien]

Thanks! I think monotheism came some time before the Greeks, but yeah, the narrative of much of the Tanakh/Old Testament acknowledges their god's supremacy over other gods, and not that other gods didn't, like, exist. Any ideas for a title by the way?

Oh!  I thought that *was* the title... leaving the two parties unnamed.