* * *
“There’s a great deal of thought about this very question,” said Themis Branch, head of the philosophy enclave. He was sitting outside the enclave’s fire pit, still wearing his pajamas. He had a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, and there was a percolator full of hot coffee sitting next to the fire, but he hadn’t offered them any.
Agler strode into one of the philosophy tents, gesturing to Sawyer and Nora to sit down across from Themis. “Yeah, I remembered hearing a conversation here a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t remember everything that was said.” He reappeared with some mugs and began pouring coffee into them.
“I don’t want to have a conversation,” said Nora. “I just want to know which gods are real and which ones aren’t.”
“Real?” said Themis. “Well, how do we determine if anything is real?”
Agler handed Nora a mug. It was hot. She set it down on the bench next to her. “Well, I guess if you see it, you know it’s real.”
“You assume it is, at any rate,” said Themis. “But haven’t you ever seen things that weren’t real? Has a trick of the light ever convinced you that a pile of clothes was a dog or have you ever looked out of the corner of your eye and seen something that couldn’t possibly be there?”
“I guess so,” said Nora. “But what’s that got to do with anything? You aren’t trying to tell me that Dionysus isn’t real even though I’ve seen him, are you?”
“I’m merely trying to illustrate that seeing something does not always mean that it is real. In those instances in which you have seen something that wasn’t there, how did you know it was indeed not real?”
Nora took a drink of her coffee. This was already starting to be a little confusing. Maybe she needed caffeine. “Well, I guess I knew that it wasn’t right. That I wouldn’t have seen that. I looked again and realized I was wrong. I saw what it really was.”
“Aha!” said Themis. “So you have an expectation of what reality should be.”
“Yeah,” said Nora. She turned to Sawyer, to see if he was as confused as she was. Sawyer was snickering into his coffee, clearly enjoying her discomfort.
“I suppose so,” said Nora. “But this isn’t really answering my question. If Dionysus is real, and Loki is real, are all the gods real? Every single god ever? Because that would be crazy. They contradict each other.”
“Did you have an expectation of what Dionysus should be before you met him?” asked Themis.
Nora thought about it. “Maybe. And he wasn’t much like what I thought.”
“Yet you still think he’s real.”
“Because I talked to him!” said Nora. “He exists. Are you trying to tell me he doesn’t?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” said Themis. “I only enjoy pointing out patterns and thought-processes we have. Let’s try a different tack, shall we? You know Dionysus exists because you have interacted with him. If you haven’t interacted with someone, does it mean it doesn’t exist?”
“No,” said Nora. “There’s lots of things I’ve never seen before that exist. Like England, for example. I’ve never been there, but I’m sure it’s real.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Themis. “But you don’t necessarily feel that way about God.”
Nora shrugged. “I’m not sure God is real the way I’m sure about England. God doesn’t make television shows like Doctor Who, you know? There’s no tangible evidence.”
“But if God didn’t exist,” said Themis, “then how would we have any concept of him?”
That was hard. Nora looked at Sawyer for assistance, but he was stifling a grin and avoiding her gaze. She glanced at Agler, but he was listening to Themis with open-mouthed awe, as if everything coming out of the man’s mouth was a revelation. Nora gulped at her coffee. “I guess if God didn’t exist, then we’d only have heard of him because people made him up.”
“Absolutely,” said Themis. “So, there’s one school of thought that argues that we can’t have made something so perfect and intense and otherworldly up in that detail. It claims that if we can conceive of an idea, the idea must exist.”
Nora drank more coffee, running that through her head. “So, it’s kind of like ‘I think, therefore I am’? If I think of God, therefore he exists?”
“Essentially,” said Themis. “The theory posits that humans couldn’t have created an idea so alien to themselves. That God must have revealed himself to people for them to be able to think of it at all.”
“So then God does exist?”
“If you’re an ontologist, then certainly,” said Themis, smiling. “What do you think of the theory, Nora?”
She shrugged. “Well, it sort of makes sense. I mean, making up something that never existed seems like a pretty difficult thing to do. But all I wanted to know was if God had ever showed up in Helicon, the way Dionysus and the fairies did. Has he?”
Themis chuckled. “Not to my knowledge. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist, does it?” He turned to Agler. “What do you think of the theory, Agler?”
“I don’t know,” said Agler. “I think it’s a little problematic.”
“How so?”
Agler took a drink of coffee. “Well, it seems to me that the concept of god is really just a better, more powerful human. And I think people could think up things that didn’t exist if they used the basis of something that did exist. Like, if I told you to think of better tasting coffee than this, you could.”
“But is that really all God is?” asked Nora. “A better human? I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not now,” said Agler. “But at first, maybe. I mean, think of the earliest gods. They all acted like humans. They had wives and children and got jealous. But then, over time, people kept thinking up better gods. So by the time we get to the present, the concept of god has been embellished over and over, so that now there’s only one, instead of a bunch, and he created the whole universe by speaking, and he controls everything, and he’s above jealousy and pettiness.”
“Quite an intriguing response,” said Themis.
“Maybe the whole argument’s wrong anyway,” said Agler. “Because here in Helicon, we make things that never existed before all the time. We create. It’s what we do.”
“Hold on,” said Nora. “You just made an argument that negated the existence of Dionysus. You said he was just an embellished human being that someone could have easily made up. But we know Dionysus exists. People didn’t make him up.”
“How do we know that?” said Agler. “Just because he exists doesn’t mean someone didn’t make him.”
“You’re saying that people created gods, not the other way around?” Nora looked at him sharply. “And not just created in their heads, but gave them actual flesh?”
Agler took a deep breath. “Well, I’m not really saying anything. I don’t know. The next time you see Dionysus, ask him where he came from.”
“Oh, I have,” spoke up Themis. “He told me he came from his mother, like the rest of us. In fact most of the Greek gods have at least one parent, and they all descend from Gaia, the earth mother.”
Nora covered her face with her hands. “So you’re basically saying you don’t know. You don’t know whether or not there are other gods. You don’t know why the gods that come to Helicon exist. And this doesn’t bother anyone?”
“Of course it’s bothersome,” said Themis. “We spend hours in the philosophy enclave talking it through and trying to figure it out. No one has yet, but I’m confident we might someday.”
Nora stood up. “But this is Helicon. You’re muses. How can you not know? I mean, where did this place come from? Where did the muses come from?”
“Good questions,” said Themis. “What do you think?”
Nora groaned. “So everyone is just as clueless as the people in the mundane world?”
“Listen, Nora,” said Themis, “the idea of an absolute answer to a question is a very simple idea. Frankly, most things do not have absolute answer
s. For instance, if we all tried to recount this conversation independently, we’d probably give very different accounts. Our perception filters everything. One man’s truth is another man’s lie.”
Nora’s brain felt as if it had been stretching, reaching to grasp all the twists and turns of Themis’ logic. It wasn’t a familiar feeling to her, but it wasn’t exactly unpleasant either. Still, she felt as if she’d worked very, very hard and ended up nowhere. “Maybe,” she said. “I might have to think about that more.”
“Please do,” said Themis.
“I think that was enough for now, though,” she said.
Themis laughed. “Do come back and see us, Nora. This has been quite delightful.”
On the walk back to the tweens and rebels enclave, Sawyer spoke up. “You know, Nora, while I was listening, I remembered something. A story I heard when I was a kid in the story enclave. This really old muse told it to me. It was about the gods and Helicon, and how the gods used to come and go as they pleased here, but for some reason they stopped. I can’t remember why. That muse was probably old enough to remember if the gods really did come here.”
“Even if they did,” said Agler, “it doesn’t tell us where the gods originated, does it?”
“Is that what you wanted to know?” Sawyer asked Nora.
She shrugged. “No. Well... I think I only wanted things to make sense. And now it’s become clear that nothing does.”
Sawyer laughed.
“But that’s why it’s awesome,” said Agler. “Because everything’s complex, not simple and black and white.”
“I don’t know if that’s awesome or not,” said Nora. “Maybe it’s terrifying.”
“We could go to the story enclave later if you wanted,” said Sawyer.
Nora didn’t know if she really cared about the gods anymore or not. The whole thing was too big for her to really comprehend. Maybe no one could really figure it out because it got too complicated if you tried to think about it for too long. On the other hand, if she wasn’t thinking about that issue, she’d have to think about Owen again and what he’d done to her. She nodded. “Sure. Let’s see if Maddie wants to go too.”
Dancing Days Page 32
