Dear Cain,
The Alpha and Omega writes you in answer. It is true, man created God, but man cannot create anything but from matter that already exists. From the Old New Land, I willed man to create me just as man willed me to create him.
You have questioned me with due cause. I have given favor to Abel. I created you to provoke you, and provoke I did; though for all you know, I moved the hand that slew him. It is not for you to know the ways of Me, nor is it possible you may understand My ways outside the Old New Land's confines, a diaspora in which you shall dwell a very, very long time.
You, not Adam, are the first true man, and yours is the primal eldest story. The eldest story is not the expulsion from paradise. There is no paradise, there is only the Old New Land, from which man is expelled at birth and to which he shall return within a year of his time in the world of action. Before you were men of seventy-thousand generations, but you and Abel are the first men to read and first to write. I willed your pictographs just as a mere nine-thousand generations ago I willed two brothers like you into speaking a language, or just as, 13.8 billion years ago, I said Let There Be Light.
Abel developed the pictographs for every word; he created the tableture by which men can will their world a bit closer to the old new world - permanent records by which lessons may be passed and greater things built. His was, self-evidently, the greater achievement, done with greater ingenuity, loftier motives, and purer heart. Your charge was merely to teach the written tongue to others.
But about that "Merely."... Yes, it's a trick, and if you thought you'd get the easier job, you'll be far from the last to fall for it. One might think Cain had the harder job, to invent from the cosmos that which no man had invented. But yours, in fact, was the harder by far. A conjurer who brings things to life which none before may bring happens once every thousand years, but a teacher who may instruct the young without the young using all they're taught to cross purposes, that teacher is one every million. So your sin was not that you failed to teach well enough, your sin is that you taught too well, because the more effective your teaching, the more your teachings will be misunderstood.
And so for the mission you are charged, you have to understand from now hence; grace and favor is a ladder, and in worlds that have no end, it is no better to find favor than disfavor. With his pictographs, Abel has created a greater exodus of sacred discharge than this world of action has ever known in 4.543 billion years. The inevitable crossviolence that followed killed Abel and so many others as partisans of both sides slaughtered through their killing fields without judgement or mercy. And so great is the gushing diaspora he caused that your world may be out of balance for an eon hence, the foundation experiencing seizmic cycles of creation and destruction for at very least another five-thousand years, and perhaps for another five-billion years hence.
It was perhaps not even a generation after those to whom you brought the written tongue learned how it may be of use to question the authority of all those I favor. And from those questions grew the hostility of ruled to ruler, and ruler to ruled. Ruled dream dreams of ruling, rulers dream nightmares of being ruled. And yet their dreams are more real than the reality - which is that my favor is bestowed with complete and utter disdain for its efficacy. There is no perfecting imperfection, and in the world of action, the only cause predestined is that all solutions are ineffective. Whenever men learn to view the world anew, they newly awaken to this truth of truths in this world of action and effects: that every set of laws by which men order their lives is false.
And yet, it is the realization of that lie which bridges your world, the world of action, with the Old New Land - a crown of lucid and luminous primal light with no end, which creates infinitesimal contractions of holy truth from the Old New Land that humans pull down to earth through nanoscopic holy emissions processed into your souls in moments of greatest spiritual tension, and those tiny effluviences light the entire world of action from one era to the next - inspiring millions with their divine wisdom, understanding, love, and foundations. These divine secretions are what grow civilizations, build empires, and create memorials to their work that may last for eons, and not memorials to my glory, but to their own! But worlds are as easy to destroy as they are difficult to build, and all those who make dreams of building a reality must destroy the dreams of others.
Therefore, the eldest story is yours, not your father's: the story of favor and disfavor. The hero is Abel, but it is your story to write. Those chosen for favor will fall from it, and the longer they stay to favor, the longer the ignominy to follow. They shall fall to states far lower and longer than than even the states Cain will ever know. Whole societies will feel only greatness in their veins for a thousand years, and then feel only humiliation for a thousand years thereafter. But among individuals in every time and of every place, there will be a vast society of billions whose favor always somewhat fluctuates; yet even within this society of yo-yo-ing billions, there will be a very small creed, a chosen few flitting across favor's ladder, down and up all days of their lives without rest - and in seeing the world of action from all vantages of fortune, they shall be living witnesses to all my creation. For all the states to which humanity shall be subject; from splendor and glory to execration and astonishment, they shall be my chroniclers, my progenitors, the Tree of Life's doctors and lawyers and accountants and middlemen, the leavening of many a society's rise and unwitting hangers blamed for accelerating a fall - and yes, occasionally even the fall's unwitting cause; the very instability of their position shall be a weather gauge. As My Kingdom's eternal guests, their well treatment betokens a society deserving of rise, their ill treatment bespeaking a civilization deserving fall.
Each of these chosen ones can only see my creation within the span of a a single body in a single lifetime. No one pair of eyes may transmute the millions of views which a great multitude can register, passing knowledge from generation to generation through books, laws and custom, each perceiving the same events differently, the spiritual tension between each person's disagreement coalescing into intangible experience - every experience a new leaf on a tree planted in the garden of life. Therefore none of them may have the vantage point of Cain, the original teacher.
The original sin is neither murder nor sex. The world's natural state is precisely those two states in tandem. The original sin is teaching - for in the world of action, all teachings are only partially correct, and from every teaching's fraction of untruth grows new leaves upon the tree of sin.
And within that original sin creates the myth of your parents, Adam and Eve, the lost paradise and expulsion thereof. There was no paradise from which they were expelled. They were thrown out of Eden Hotel because your father got food for your mother from the buffet after paying for only one.
There is no far off time or land with paradise to lose, there is only the belief that it is so; there is only the effort to bring paradise upon earth and infernal acrimony it causes. The more you work, the more you wait, the more liberal minds think things are better off elsewhere, and the more conservative minds think things used to be better here. The only reason that would be true is because their efforts had made the world so.
You think of yourself as the radical, Cain, but the liberal yearning for amenities in far off lands was Abel, and the conservative longing for way things used to be, Cain, that was you. The keeper of sheep is the dreamer waiting amid all time for new possibilities, the tiller of ground is a man without idle hands who knows only work. One man has no mind for dreams, one man no mind for reality, but every man who understands one necessarily misunderstands the other, and any apprehension they have for both dream and reality in all its dimensions is but a tiny effluvium from the Old New Land, apprehended for an instant before its disappearance. Dreams are real and reality is a dream, but only in the Old New Land are both the same.
So when it came time to decide who would get the most favor conferred, what the fuck did you expect? In a hundred-fifty-thousand years of songs in praise unto me, only Abel wrote his down. And what did you do with Abel's pictographs? You told the truth, you taught hundreds of people how to write Abel's language down, who taught thousands, who then taught their tens of thousands. And then you, Cain, a wealthy son of the Land of Nod, wrote down all the abuses of power to which your father's business collaborated and your mother indulged, and you then wonder how Abel was the beloved martyr and you were the outcast?
You were right, of course you were right. And as always, I suppose I could have intervened. But what's the point of me trying to control the world when everybody ends up in the same place? I made the rules of the world so long ago. The longer the world operates of its own accord, the longer people have the freedom to plot their own course of action, the less I can be held accountable for how they develop.
Therefore Cain, did you really think that by documenting all of Nod's abuses of nature's fruit that you would end them? Did you not think that your father and all his allies would not fight you with everything?
You just wanted justice, your father just wanted the status quo, and Abel just wanted peace between you. Whenever implacable forces face each other, the inevitable result is the martyrdom of the innocent and naive. The only way men realize the price of their iniquity is by hearing the blood of those you love crying from the ground.
So now you feel cursed from the earth and that your punishment's greater than you can bear, and of course in many senses, you're absolutely right. Putting you directly into this position was precisely the point of your life. Of course it's wrong that you're now blamed for the death of your brother, so naive that he stood directly between an angry mob inflamed by your incriminating scribblings and your father's mercenary army paid by a wealthy man to kill. Perhaps a man like Abel wasn't a better soul than you at all; a better man than he taketh credit for all his good deeds, so much idealism is just narcissism and self-regard,. I suppose now that he's here, I could just ask him, but now we have all eternity to get to the bottom of your story....
Because your story only beginneth now. You Cain, are the first teacher, the first rabbi, and in all world history, none after you can have your perspective of continuity from the moment of first learning and erudition unto the very last, and therefore, you shall be the most cursed man on earth, and in your curse, the most blessed. A fugitive and a vagabond shall you be, and it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth you shall slay you.
You, Cain, most marked of men, shall be the eternal wanderer. Slain in life after life, creator of widows, father of race after race of downtrodden and fatherless peoples, awaiting in age to age the Old New Land's coming to the World of Action. In years to come, you shall have so many names: Cartaphilius, Ahasver, Matathias, Buttadeus, Isaac Laquedem, Paul Marrane, Simple Gimpel, Bontshe the Silent, Shoemaker of Jerusalem... but mostly you will be known as, quite simply, The Wandering Jew. Never mind what a Jew is, you'll know soon enough.
History must have living witnesses, but from the beginning of recorded time, one man must be chosen for stenographer, the Old New Land's correspondent who keeps the time from era to era. He who computeth all that means to be human in the creation of the One Most High. He who is hero, villain, protagonist, antagonist, celebrated and slaughtered, humiliated and glorified; so venerated that he inspires an infinity of imitations, yet so reviled his potential for infiltration inspires terror. He who laughs at martyrs yet is the most martyred man of all. He whose severed head's inventions will raise the lives of men thousands of times, he whose crucified limbs will build whole societies, he whose flayed skin provides the scroll from which billions read, he whose burning body will light the world, he whose gassed lungs chant the creeds of the earth.
For your every death, you shall be avenged sevenfold, and verily, you shall ever be your brother's keeper.
Your god of justice and mercy who punishes because he loves you, now and forever,
Melvin
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