Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.

Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.

As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?

Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.

Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.

Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.

Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.