GOD: A Metamodern Epic

Online Release of The Annotated Icon

In 2010, at age 20, I experienced an existential crisis as a result of losing faith in traditional Christianity. This forced me to give up on my career path (seminary) and break off my marriage engagement (with a young Christian woman). Instead, I spent the next four years living in a bohemian artist collective writing a 500 page epic poem in iambic pentameter about the death of God.

As the poem came together, though, it actually wound up becoming an exploration of the rebirth of God in a new form. I self-published this in 2015 under the title GOD.

I then began to use the poem as a scaffold for added layers of annotation. I worked with the conceit that an entire regenerative civilization in the future had grown up using the epic as the basis of its scriptural canon (called The Icon) and over a millenium had accreted commentary, marginalia, notes, and other reflective content from multiple perspectives. This led to The Annotated Icon, a “study bible” version of this future sacred text in 3 volumes (though only 2 were completed).

I imagined this project as a Gesamtkunstwerk, including painting (the covers), music scores, literature in multiple genres, etc.

This multi-media approach and the desire to present an oral performance of the poem for easier comprehension led me to imagine how it might be presented in a hybrid audio-visual form for the digital age. I concocted a rough storyboard of the first canto using drawings and music I composed in 2019.

Too onerous an effort, I abanonded this idea. But, with the recent rise of generative AI, I saw an entirely new way to approach such a project. Here is Canto 1, which I secretly completed last July.

This whole endeavor is clearly an eccentric creation and probably quite niche. Still, its best parts (specifically the middle cantos and mystical visions) remain, in my mind, the finest and most profound stuff I’ve ever produced. I’m not sure if there’s a future for it, if it deserves more time or should just be left incomplete like Jung’s Red Book, but I have published the existing 2 volumes of The Annotated Icon with the first few AI-based videos at www.TheAnnotatedIcon.com.

I’d be curious to hear what you make of it. If people found it worth pursuing, perhaps a small team could help me finish it.

Still looking for fellow artists to join me in the studio, helping give form to the emerging GOD…