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Asbestos Head
by Eric DubayAsbestos Head
-How to Write Original Music-
God is the infinite existence or causal creation of all matter.Asbestos Head is a finite congregation of super-specialized matter capable of creativityand rationale, through which he deduces that God is the infinite existence or causalcreation of all matter.Asbestos Head’s read Hoyle and Hawking and one of them is right; either everything thatis has always existed or came into existence at some point in time. One disjunct is true but Asbestos is unsure which because he himself is merely a semi-mobile subjective perception unit incapable of knowing objective truth or comprehending infinity.What he does know is consciousness of God’s existence is contingent upon suchcongregations of matter, as is matter’s physical existence contingent upon God.Therefore either God is causal, singular and separate - an outside entity somehowresponsible for His own existence, the creation of the universe, and the creation of other beings to recognize Him, or existence is non-causal, plural, parts and whole of all that iswith nothing outside Us because We’re all infinite self-reflexive pieces of Godinteracting, changing, acting out eternity.Asbestos’ best guess is God is non-causal and thinks once Ockham’s razor slits the wristsof an unmoved mover We’ll all be left moving alone together forever, for without God,Asbestos is condemned to Godel’s incompleteness and without Asbestos, God is thesilent sound of trees falling in solipsist forests.-Asbestos is very concerned about religion so he tries attending the local
God’s Anonymous
meetings every week where every weak soul sits in rows, mouth closed,listening to some guy’s interpretation of twelve guy’s interpretations of some guy’smetaphorical teachings from two thousand years ago. He finds this as useful as a hole inthe head only more damaging to his brain, so he starts studying theology, philosophy, andthe history of metaphysics for himself and finds that it’s this manner of introspection, thisquestioning of the unanswerable that expands his spiritual awareness and fills him withwhat some call God’s love, some call peace of mind, and others call crawling from theallegorical cave and seeing the light.For him the light manifests as a series of realizations regarding the nature of knowledge.Mainly that he knows nothing, and neither does anyone else; including priests,mathematicians, scientists, and all other people using God, Numbers or Formulas to
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magically boost their ideas from subjective interpretations to Objective Truths.Asbestos decides it’s his spiritual responsibility to study the thoughts and beliefs of everyone around him and throughout recorded history, because arbitrarily choosing achurch or simply inheriting religion is lazy, limiting, and inconsiderate. It’s lazy becauseyou leave spirituality up to genetics or geography. It’s limiting because you loose faith inanything outside your pre-packaged box of beliefs. And it’s inconsiderate because bychoosing any exclusive religion you make the decision that all others are wrong.Even members of the few religions that encourage open practice of other religions are bound to their group identity like poster-children, constantly defending the individualityin their collective faith. But that’s like bragging how modest you are. If you wish acollective relationship with some group’s conception of God, go find the next Holy place,read it’s Holy text, perform some Holy rituals then go home alone feeling like Holy shit,spitting out someone else’s existential excrement. If you wish a personal relationshipwith God, there’s no religion to follow, no group to join, and no book to read. There’snothing to do but wander the world ever wondering why, and never decide.Ultimately, any system that gives answers to metaphysical questions is suspect because itgrants Truth to things We can’t know through experience. A more educated approach tothe unknown is utter agnostic apostasy: accept you don’t know and couldn’t even knowyou’re right if you knew it. Spiritual questioning is best left unanswered and simplyexplored throughout Our lives as We all exist in the mystery.-
After twelve weeks of God’s Anonymous meetings, the pastor doth spaketh with Asbestos:
“Have you accepted the lord as your savior, my son?”“No. Dad. I don’t understand how he saved me from anything.”“He died for your sins.”“I thought he was publicly beaten then executed for claiming to be related to God.”
Every head in the congregation simultaneously spins about-face. Every iris dilates and fixates on Asbestos.
“Or, that’s one way to look at it. Your opinion is God creates humans free and pure, butthe first people wreck that condemning everyone thereafter to original sin. God waitsthousands of years then decides to remedy the problem by manifesting some celestialsperm and shooting it into a virgin peasant who immaculately conceives his human son.God’s son gains a small cult following and is ultimately tortured to death for blasphemy.Then attributing this divine irony to pre-planned martyrdom, his execution is expressed inthis book as God’s gift to humanity. If We believe his book, all Our evils are forgiven
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and We’re assured afterlife in heaven. If We don’t believe his book, We’re damned toeternal hellfire.”“That’s correct, my son.”
Asbestos fakes a nervous smile and backs toward the door. Hundreds of heads behind pews stare with sad eyes and upside-down frowns. Then as if possessed by an attention- starved ego, one of them jumps up and screams “Halla Hoola Jesus!” Asbestos seizes theopportunity and runs away as fast as he can.
-He immediately becomes suspicious of all large groups of people united under one name- each their own little niche community with mini-hierarchies and questionable agendas.Such group identities are dangerous because they claim to represent everyone, but at bestrepresent a majority whose power fallaciously includes that of its dissenters. And whengroup irresponsibility results in disaster those mini-hierarchies disperse into democracy.His suspicion extends from religion to all systems of government, countries and militariesunder the haze of patriotism, police, school boards, corporations, pro-this and anti-thatgroups.He also becomes suspicious of his senses because spirituality and his sense of self lay beyond them. You see his senses are selfish so he spends all his time appeasing their wishes. Everything he thinks comes from his senses and most everything he sensescomes from everything he isn’t. But at some point he came from some of the somethinghe wasn’t and became everything he is, so somehow everything he isn’t is inextricablylinked to everything Asbestos is, including his selfish senses. This makes him think there’s something selfless beyond his sense of self and he calls it
love
. But he so loves
love
that sometimes he thinks that’s selfish too. Luckily it turns out everyone else loves
love
as well, so if he’s ever to transcend his selfish senses, that’s his best guess how.These and other suspicions lead him to the library where he learns to speed-read. It turnsout the human brain can process one hundred thousand words a minute but most peoplesettle for under a thousand because a silent voice in their heads repeats every word itsees. The trick is to eliminate the voice by scanning text too fast for individual words tostick; Widen your eyes, scan without focus forth and back down the page, then takechunks of meaning from your periphery and make a mental motion picture. With practice, Asbestos’s quest for knowledge carries him from a page a minute, to a page asecond, to finishing books as fast as he can physically flip.Reading random books by various writers taken out of their chronology feels muddledand impersonal so Asbestos quickly stops reading books and starts reading Authors,reading everything they’ve ever written in the order they wrote it. Approaching literaturethis way, he discovers secrets lurking behind the Authors words, between the bindings,the white space encompassing everything unwritten, an evolution of meta-expressionswhich collectively follow Author’s life-long creative struggles through the human
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