For the past few years I've been enchanted by the idea of the divine as intrinsically horrific and dehumanizing, but not in the usual assumption (pun intended), where the intrinsic dehumanization and horror comes from something like "A god looked at me and I turned into stone" or "I, a mortal, looked at a god and got turned into a laurel tree".
I've been thinking about it in the opposite direction. Where being a god is intrinsically horrific and dehumanizing.
To put it another way: I've been writing a lot from the perspective of divinity where the god experiences godhood in the way a haunted house experiences househood. You were created by mortals for comfort, for condolence, for safety, for sympathy. You were built with all the care and special attention to ensure that you would last a long time--longer than your inhabitants would live, but that's fine, because they'll leave you descendants.
Except you, unlike the average house, have a brain. Have hands. Have a stomach which can hunger but never starve. You cannot die, but you know what death is. You see humans and raccoons and spiders and trees and rocks and everything else in this whole world die all the time, but it will not touch you.
How many years do you think it takes before your mouth starts to salivate like your gut's gone sour? How many endings do you have to witness before you begin to stop caring when things you paid attention to die? How many times do you hear your name contort and twist under the weight of different empires' languages before you stop recognizing it as yours anymore, and cease answering when they call?
How long does it take before you stop being capable of interacting with the rest of the world in a way that a person can understand, can safely comprehend, would ever want to experience?
And how much of that, do you think, do you let happen on purpose, because the alternatives were all too much to even begin to imagine after one too many mountains turned to sand before your eyes?
Tags fron @nil-the-glitch who has yet to give me a tag essay that didnt end with "idk maybe im missing the point" while the essay nailed every single feeling i put into the writing on purpose
