Harbingers—Gods & Monsters

“Harbingers” is an ongoing series of articles, stories, and reflections by Bhante Sujato on living in the age of global warming.

Stories will be told, you know. As long as there are people, they will share their thoughts, their hopes, their fears. Of what happened this morning, or yesterday. Or last week. And as time trots by, the silly stories, the useless ones, are left by the wayside. Facts dim like the evening sun, losing their sharp edges and their details. In the night, facts turn into entities, taking on a life of their own. They glow from within, illuminated, as it were, in the soft light of the imagination. And the stories that survive are the ones that burn brightest in the mind.

There will come a time—and no long time at that—when there is no YouTube, no Facebook, no media, no TV. No cold blue flickering facts. People won’t be able to check the data or compare the sources. There’ll be no independent news, no experts to call upon. Just stories told the old-fashioned way.

Those stories will have one, and only one, theme: Who were the gods? And what monsters killed them?

The ruins of a lost civilisation evoke a sense of wonder like no other. The Buddha spoke of a forgotten city in the forest; it is the statue of Ozymandias, or the temples of Indiana Jones. For the people of the future, the lost civilisation will not be just a few ruins, a broken shrine, or a buried wall. They will live among the million acres of shattered concrete that we left behind. Bridges, freeways, skyscrapers, and the endless wastelands of the suburbs will be their jungle, their desert, and their home. There they will hunt and forage, find water, hide from the sun, raise families, and survive to do it all again tomorrow. The lucky ones will find their tribe. And their tribe will be bound together not by race or creed or politics, but by the stories they tell each other.

In the evening, when the scraps of food have been eaten, the people will gather around the fire to share what solace they may. For a while they will feel safe and loved. They’ll talk, the usual trivia of the day, chat about this and gossip about that. But in the back of their minds, the question whispers, like a shadow in the corner of the eye. They know it, they fear it, they cannot look at it. So they fill the space with chatter and noise and laughter, holding their children close, keeping the shadow at bay as best they can. But it does not take too long for the quiet to fall. And when all else is silent, the question is still there, prodding, like a needle in the back of your brain, never quite letting you rest.

Now, some questions cannot be answered because they are too difficult. Some, because they are not important enough. And some questions can’t be answered because you already know the answer.

So you don’t answer the question: you tell a story. You know the story, but you tell it anyway. It is the story of Icarus, the god who flew too close to the sun. Of Mandhātā, the king who wanted the heavens and fell to earth. The story of the gods who became too greedy. You tell it to the children, because it is all you have.

“But did they not know?” ask the children. “They were gods, they knew everything. They could just get any answers whenever they wanted.”

“Yes, they knew. The wise and the true among them told of what was to come. Their sages spent long years crafting stories, giving them wondrous names like ‘IPCC Special Report’.”

“How come they didn’t listen?”

“Some listened. Many, in fact. They knew and they watched with horror. They even did a little bit, here and there, to make a difference. They bought a different brand of chocolate, or they expressed their opinion in no uncertain manner, or they pressed a button on a screen in protest. But it was not enough. And there were … others.”

At this point in the stories, a chill would fall. No matter how hot the day, this was a cold that stuck in the marrow.

“What others?”

“Monsters. Not human, but passing as human. Vampires: respected noblemen by day, but by night, they changed into hideous blood-drinking bats. They descended on the poor folk of the villages and devoured their very life.”

Shivering, the children protested, “But there were only a few vampires.”

“It was not just vampires. There were zombies, mindless hordes of the undead, who prolonged their unnatural state by devouring the brains of the living. And trolls, ugly fiends who lurked under bridges, snatching up any fool brave enough to travel those perilous roads.”

“If the gods were so powerful, how could the monsters fight them?”

“It was the night. In those days, not like today, the night was fearful and the day was blessed and warm. The gods were strong in the day, but the monsters waited in the shadows and struck in the darkness.”

“So they killed all the gods?”

“That’s what some say. But others tell a stranger tale. They say that the gods ended up being consumed by their own fury. Infected by the reckless evil of the monsters, the gods came to hate them with a boundless rage. They built their greatest machine, and flying in it, they left this world behind on a pillar of fire. Now they live in the sky. In the morning they rise and scorch the whole world. They are still trying to kill the monsters. But they don’t know that the monsters are long gone, and it is only us that they burn. So we hide in the day, like the monsters used to do, and come out in the night when it is cool and safe.”

“But what happened to the monsters? How could they really all just disappear?”

“Hush, child, sleep. The monsters are gone now. This is the world they left behind, and now there’s just people like you and me.”

But that last part was a lie. You know it, and I know it, and even the little children know it. The monsters are real. They hide in the coldness of the heart, in the cruelty of the passions. They are right there with you, even in the warm circle of the firelight. They have always been there, and we have always known them.

Is it really a question if we already know the answer? Or do we just pretend it’s a question so that the truth becomes a little easier to bear?

Those who tell the stories are our children. Those to whom the stories are told are our children’s children. Their world is the world we are making for them, right now. And for them, we are the monsters. We are the thing that will haunt their nightmares, down to the seventh generation and the seventy-seventh.

They will never understand, not really, why we lived the way we do, knowing what we know. They will fear that the same blank unconcern lives in their own hearts. And they will tell stories that turn us into monsters so that they can sleep at night. For all the sufferings and hardship they will endure—the hunger, the heat, the disease, the violence and devastation of a world from which all good things have fled—at least they are not monsters like us.

And it will work, for a little while. The little children will fall asleep, soft and sweet as a pigeon’s coo.

Until the sun rises once more, and the vengeance of the gods is laid in fire upon the face of the earth.