I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  For Piuma Lange,

  who having passed on a weakness for the page,

  then bequeathed me her indomitable fragility.

  Is it not a paradox that the Christian Religion has in large part been the source of atheism or more generally of religious unbelief? Yet I think that is the case. Man is not naturally incredulous because he does not reason much and does not care a great deal about the causes of things.

  Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

  Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, eds.

  Whatever their religious affinities, many today don’t seek a God they can comprehend rationally, to whom they address themselves as to a person. They seek a more mysterious, more impersonal God, one that eludes the human intellect.

  Frédéric Lenoir,

  Les métamorphoses de Dieu

  Contents

  I Have No Need to Think

  Sodomatrix on a Bike

  The Self-Serving Side of Religious Afflatus

  Lab Two–Zero

  I Am Perfect

  The Supper of the Crucifician Immolation

  I’m Having a Blast

  Moonmilk

  Humans, Their Preposterous Conceit

  So-Called Love in Gestation

  The Poetry of Mathematics

  A Paleobeatnik’s Transcendental Silences

  The Night of the Horny Toads

  Salving Ecologist Consciences

  Big Hands All Over the Place

  The Repose of the Galaxies

  Beauty Contest

  My Immense Esthetic Sense

  The Iguana’s Prehistoric Eyes

  Human Language Overwhelms Me

  The Sinking of the Titanic

  I Don’t Know What’s Happening

  Harbinger Rituals of Sex

  A Stroll Around the Cosmos

  The Amorous Liturgy

  Bedeviled by Strange Thoughts

  Demon Sex

  Diabolical Collateral Damage

  Where the Snakes Live

  Thinking of Nothing Again

  A Terrible Planetary Injustice

  Alone for a Night

  Hidden Security Cams

  A Titanic Struggle with Myself

  The Registered Letter with Many Stamps

  I’ll Be Mute as a Fish

  Supermarket Checkout Clerk

  Man’s Existence

  The Carrots and the Hoe

  The Angelic Indian from Paradise

  Exterminate the Thoughts

  The Not Quite Dead

  The Pedophile Bishop

  God Again

  Cottage in the Briars

  Men Are Irredeemable

  Everything Seems to Get Set Right

  Extinction

  I AM GOD

  ‌I Have No Need to Think

  I am God. Have been forever, will be forever. Forever, mind you, with the razor-sharp glint of a diamond, and without any counterpart in the languages of men. When a man says, I’ll love you forever, everyone knows that forever is a frail and flimsy speck of straw in the wind. A vow that won’t be kept, or that in any case is very unlikely to be kept. A lie, in other words. But when I say forever, I really do mean forever. So let that be clear.

  I am God, and I have no need to think. Up to now I’ve never thought, and I’ve never felt the need, not in the slightest. The reason human beings are in such a bad way is because they think; thought is by definition sketchy and imperfect—and misleading. To any thought one can oppose another, obverse thought, and to that yet another, and so forth and so on; and this inane cerebral yakety-yak is about as far from divine as you can get. Every thought is destined to expire from the moment it’s hatched, just like the mind that hatched it. A god does not think—that’s the last thing we need!

  A spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy, a white dwarf is a white dwarf, a platyhelminth of the class turbellaria is a platyhelminth, class turbellaria, while I on the other hand am God. These are the facts. Don’t ask me how I came to be God, because I myself have no idea. Or rather I do know, just as I know everything, but it would take eons to put into words, and quite frankly, I don’t think it’s worth it. My rank (let’s call it that) alone guarantees a certain degree of credibility.

  A god does not watch, does not wait, does not listen. Does not feed, crave, or belch. A god is engaged in something human language cannot express, composed of all the actions (and all the non-actions) that all the languages together can pronounce, but also all those inexpressible in words. And thus surpasses both the first and the second. You might say that a god is, if only the verb “to be” were a pale shadow of my real existence (call it that), which is above all sense. I am the meaning of everything.

  Of course the platyhelminth and the Sun, which as everyone knows is a yellow dwarf, are in some ways also divine, given that I created them. If someone were to call them God I certainly wouldn’t be offended. But if many past civilizations considered the sun a god, so far as I know not even the most radical animists among humans ever made a divinity of a necrophagous worm. I wish someone would explain to me why; the way I see it, there’s no reason at all why a paltry little star (the sun) can be a supreme being, and the platyhelminth, no. I mean, we need to talk about this. But for simplicity’s sake (start nitpicking here and we’ll never get anywhere), think of me as distinct from the red dwarfs and the platyhelminths. Think of me as God, period. Anyone can picture God.

  I myself don’t even know what made me decide to speak (or more properly, write). No one forced me, it wasn’t a question of burning need, I wasn’t feeling lonely, didn’t have anything to give vent to, or to hand down. Wasn’t bored, didn’t feel a desire to hear (as it were) my own voice. Wasn’t in search of a new experience (for me, a meaningless expression), wasn’t hoping to become a media star (the latter-day Paradise that humans now lust after). Wasn’t even seeking to be understood. God has no need of such trifles. So let us say: I do not know. In truth, omniscience means that I do know. It would require about ten interactive encyclopedias with billions of entries and cross-entries to explain the matter with enough clarity and simplicity so that humans could understand (humans are not all that smart), but it could be done. I just don’t see the point of such a hermeneutic exercise.

  ‌Sodomatrix on a Bike

  A god does infinite things, as everyone knows, but at the same time, paradoxical as it may seem, a god has nothing particular to do. He’s no layabout, but neither is he a bean counter punching a time card morning and night, and even less a workaholic. He does what he must without stress and without fatigue, without making too much of it. In some ways without even being aware of it. A god in the first instance is simply busy being god. He watches, he listens, although his watching and listening have nothing in common with that of humans. I am god, he thinks.

  I contemplate, I listen. I observe, for example, the galaxy called the Milky Way, and more precisely what is called the Solar System, and even more precisely, the planet Earth. My eyes (if you know what I mean) fall on a very tall girl (everything’s relative) in a high-tech cowshed, the polar opposite of a bucolic nativity scene. I see her introduce her gloved hand into a cow’s anus and with a rapid rotary motion of the wrist, extract a handful of feces the consistency of mud from the big rectum. She then cleans off the animal’s swollen vulva, spreads it open and inserts the point of an instrument that looks in some ways like a syringe, in other ways like a handgun, pushing to penetrate the beast and rotating her hand from time to time. Then she once again sticks her left fist up the backside, this time following through with the entire arm, right past the elbow. The way you might lean way over to pick up some object that has fallen behind the sofa.

  I really can’t explain why, among the many, not to say infinite, possibilities out there, my
gaze always seems to come to rest on the Milky Way. And why within the Milky Way, which is really not so tiny, my sights are trained on the Solar System, and particularly on that two-bit planet that’s barely visible, Earth. And why on Earth, infinitesimal as it is and provided with many other attractions, my eye zooms in on the tall girl with two purple pigtails who at every opportunity is shoving her arm up a cow’s ass. The universe teems with dazzling inlets and vast panoramas, with rarefied interstellar wastes, abrupt flourishes of incandescent gases, wells of blackest void. And yet without my being aware, my gaze (let’s keep calling it that) darts down to the Milky Way and homes in on the arm in the backside, and the long, bespectacled face of the giantessa performing the operation, who wears the grave expression of someone carrying out an important task, of someone praying.

  The big beanpole in farmworker’s overalls has her arm deep in the cow’s entrails, right up to the shoulder. The bovine allows herself to be sodomized (I can’t think of another term for it; fisting sounds pornographic) without even a sigh, being a peaceful animal. Among all those I created (even before the so-called domestication, which is to say, slavery), cows were and are the most pacific. Many another beast would have mauled the sodomatrix or injected her with a deadly venom, or at the very least delivered a big, hind-leg kick, but the cow stands there patiently like a human waiting for the bus at the bus stop.

  This is no gratuitous act of sadism, though. The big girl, poking around in the rectum, is guiding the pointed instrument forward toward the cervix. Her fingers correcting the trajectory, she directs it past the fornix and the endocervix to the uterus, where her forefinger has located a follicle nearing dehiscence (having watched this at length, I too have become an expert). Only at this point does she engage the instrument’s plunger. When you are a god, you see what’s taking place both inside and out, that’s your fundamental prerogative.

  Let me repeat, and certainly not to boast (that would be absurd for a god): the cosmos is absolutely the most unbelievable work of art imaginable, and also the most tragic, most comic, most fabled. All flaming tropical sunsets, steely seas, glittering glaciers, and mighty waterfalls are by comparison mere tawdry sketches by some amateur dauber, poor, dull landscapes. The beauties of the cosmos literally take your breath away (a purely rhetorical figure of speech for the undersigned). Not even the divine eye (let’s call it that) can ever have its fill of the infinite variety of shapes and unending metamorphoses, the ever-changing choreographies that give life to its farraginous complexity. I have spent millions of years, billions, looking at the universe, and I’ve never had enough. And now I’m staring blankly at the Earth, its devastations and its dumps, staring at the sodomatrix biker.

  The die-hard unbeliever takes another dose of semen from the portable refrigerator and snaps it into that contraption that resembles a pistol, a ruthless assassin. She pokes a hand into the behind of another cow and removes its contents. Then back in she goes, aiding and guiding the progress of the pistolette (so it’s known) toward the cervix. It’s obvious she has done this many times, for her gestures, though measured and precise, are somewhat mechanical. Every so often she’ll peel off her surgical gloves and go roll herself a cigarette outside the barn. With each puff, she tips her purple head back slightly as she exhales the smoke, almost as if she’s blowing it in my face.

  Cows are made to copulate with bulls, it’s all been foreseen right down to the minutest details, and instead today humans masturbate the bulls, and once they’ve obtained the seminal fluid, they dilute it and dilute it again to reduce the unit cost of each fertilization. Then they freeze it, like you freeze peas, or fish. Everything is rationalized and optimized (their terms) so as to get the best results and highest profits; they don’t give a hoot about how yours truly has organized things. Now I am not one who has to decide everything (contrary to what you may have heard) and in fact I’m open to any and all proposals for change. Yet it irks me to think they want to systematically alter everything I’ve done. How would they like it if I came to their house and moved all the living-room furniture around or used the toilet brush to stir a truffle-scented béchamel? I mean, a little respect.

  Even so, the heifers are fortunate. Most of the junior bulls end up in the frying pan (with that system of theirs one bull is enough to impregnate thousands of females). I’d like to see their reaction if someone organized the same method for them, if the normal sexual act were replaced by a plastic syringe to the uterus guided via anal penetration, and there was just one male to every thousand females (the remaining nine hundred ninety-nine destined for steakhood). Not to mention that out on the street you’d see mobs of children all looking familiar: thousands of half-sibs, or at best cousins. And the widows, if we may call them that, all sleeping solo.

  When she’s finished plunging her arm up cows’ backsides, the beanpole straps the case containing her instruments onto the bag rack of her priapic twin-cylinder motorcycle, and removes the blue overalls, beneath which she’s wearing her normal neo-punk biker’s gear. She puts on her helmet, mounts the bike, and takes off like a hypervelocity star (the typical frenzy of the atheist, if I may offer a personal—call it that—opinion). Pausing at a pastry shop, she wolfs down two cream-filled cornetti and a sfogliatella without removing the helmet. Back in town, she heads for the Institute of Molecular Genetics, where she works.

  Statistically speaking (I’ve always wanted to employ that agnostic expression, it makes me smile) the probability that my eye should come to rest on that particular girl is far less than the chances that a particular grain of sand should twice end up in the hair of the same camel-driver.* My eye could surely find many more interesting human specimens out there, with less repellent occupations. And instead my gaze falls on her, precisely as a laser beam. You’d almost think it was seeking her out. As you might imagine, my gaze is not the exclusive and monomaniacal stare of a human being, who when (s)he fixates on something (all the more when sexual hormones are involved), it’s all that exists. The fulcrum of my attention is however always her. It’s something in many ways incongruous that’s been happening to me for some time (I use those words even though technically speaking it is I who make all things happen). I tell myself I must stop staring at her, and yet I stare at her. Of course it’s absurd that absurd things should happen to a god; but these are the facts. I myself imagined I was immune to any sort of aporia, and was convinced that certain crackpot medieval theologians† were just making mountains out of molehills.

  * The comparison might have been more apt two thousand years ago, given that freight, including illicit freight, travels by truck and air nowadays. But that’s how it came to me and that’s how it stays.

  † Pardon my frankness, but if there is one discipline I’ve always considered nit-picking it is theology. Theologians reek of superiority, as if the gods (in their surreal deductions) were them.

  ‌The Self-Serving Side of Religious Afflatus

  For tens of thousands of years men worshiped river spirits, fish spirits, tree spirits, stag spirits, the spirits of hares, mountains, clouds, and rain: every type of spirit apart from that of yours truly. Some raving tramps had the gift (they thought) of communicating with this mob of spirits, and so were held in the highest esteem (like rock stars and athletes today). They would leap and spin around, waving their matted hair until they lost their senses, then, eyes rolled back in their heads and foaming at the mouth, intercede for their clients (or so they thought) hoping to obtain heaps of game, cures for diseases, assistance with various everyday problems. A pathetic spectacle. And meanwhile there I was, just waiting for them to notice I existed.

  And then they finally did notice. Better late than never, I said to myself. For a few more millennia they still had a very limited notion of my capacities: they believed I had hung the sun in the sky to light up their days and the stars to make their nights more splendid. An eternity went by before they realized that their blessed Earth is a mere speck in the Solar System, in turn a piddly li
ttle mite in the Milky Way, one negligible molecule in the vastness of the universe. Only my great patience kept me from taking serious umbrage. And to top it off, rather than finally recognizing my merits, rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s (that boy of mine, the one reputed to be my boy at any rate, had a knack for catchy sayings), now they’re spreading the rumor that the universe created itself. That it sprang forth from nothing, like a mushroom: Big Bang, and there’s your rabbit, folks.

  And let us not forget the days of the votive barbecues. The intentions were excellent, don’t get me wrong, but it was as if they truly believed their next-door neighbors would be pleased to get a blast of exhaust from their sacred pyres. The more smoke they made the happier they were, the more purified they felt. Sometimes they even grilled up girls and boys; it was gruesome. All these offerings of their primitive culinary arts were in my honor, or anyway in honor of my supposed colleagues (they thought of us as a flight squadron). And they were convinced we would be tickled pink (what a turn of phrase). Not to mention that they almost always left me just the offal. Filet for the gentlemen; for me, acrid exhaust fumes and bloody innards.

  There are many other more recent liturgical customs that irritate me. If there’s a class of buildings I never liked (for example), it’s churches. I find them dark and gloomy, too tall, too truculently monumental. Depressing, macabre. Full of chilly marble, ghoulish statues, sanctimonious paintings, furnishings and symbols in bad taste. And I could never bear the smell of incense; it gives me a headache (as it were) even to think of it.

  But what leaves me most baffled is the self-serving side of their religious afflatus. It’s obvious that they pray because they want something in return. They bow down to me and try to get on my good side the way you would pay an insurance policy, so that you’re covered whatever happens. Or worse, they think of me only when things turn really awful, the way you call the fire department in an emergency. They praise me, pay me compliments, flatter me, but in fact their only concern is to cover their asses (apologies, but that is the most appropriate term), and of course to improve their material situation. They’d like to be able to acquire larger quantities of shares and real estate, they’d like to have access to more liquidity, they imagine this will make them happier. Above all, they don’t ever want to die.