The Nature of My God

My god is virtual.  As virtual as a website, digital time, playlists and participles, nightmares, Blairism, gamma rays, memories, smog, desire, sublimation, and you.  My god is virtual not because it cannot deposition but because it will not; it is my god for its refusal to condense and freeze, instead allowing solids to be solids, infusing them with itself under conditions that still remain—despite our reputed advances—largely inexplicable.  If my god were a solid—or even all solids in sum—it would not be a god but simply a dump of solids.  And my god is no dump but a fart.

My god is a fart and lives no longer than a fart.  It smells like a fart, is as unpredictable as a fart, dissipates and eternally recurs like a fart, and is as joyous and iconoclastic as a fart.  My god rhymes with heart and art but does not rhyme with news or business or money or marriage or time.

If it offends you that my god is a fart—maybe even the sum of all farts—we (my god and I) might very well politely suggest that you leave the room and visit your local museum, perhaps renting those special guided-audio-tour headphones and muttering, in that particular way, hmm-hmmm from time to time.

Being the sum of all farts, my god everywhere always exists—in potentia, in formaldia, in speedia, in purposia—and this is what theologians mean when they refer to the omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternal nature of God.  But my god is slipperier than the theologians’ cheap and easy god.  I dare the tome-laden smirkless god (or no-god) of Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Tillich and Van Buren to meet my god (or no-god) on Mount Caramel in a cow-lighting competition.  Oh … my giggly farty god would win.

You might say, if you wish to use the old language, that my god is spirit, but any competent philologist knows that spirit is booze and spirit is wind and spirit has 33 entries in the OED.  The Internet is spirit and the Internet grew from spirit and spawns spirit, but spirit­—in the corporation of words—is a major global subsidiary reporting to the Fart Division.  That my corporation has no CEO, that its divisions have no stable leaders, that my god is but one element of one division in it … shouldn’t surprise you.  Farts are tricky.  This, at least, you know.

But we don’t wish to use the old language, do we?  My god doesn’t want to use it, I don’t want to use it, and you don’t want to use it unless you’re a schmockity-schmuck.  We all—all three of us:  I, my god, and you (which covers all the bases, truly)—can use it if we want to, but we don’t often want to, do we, being, as we are, members of the nouveau flatia of language, leaving the ossuariacical functions to the zombies who comprise society?

My god is a servant of language and language is a servant of flatulence and flatulence is a servant of my god and if you accuse me of circularity, I say to you—my god is a circle or maybe my god is an egg or a cloud or a game, who, being in the form of farts, doesn’t think it’s unjustified to become a fart which, seeming to be of no reputation, no name, little duration, being found in the fashion of the mammal, exalts itself, and puffs itself up like a puffin, and gives itself an aim which is above every aim, that at the aim of itself, presidents should bow and starlets should swoon and every lung confess that my god is my god, until the last star melts and the last bear pirouettes.

To speak of the nature of fart may seem to some to be unnatural.  To break wind with my god, to divine with my wind, may seem to some to break faith with faith.  To shift the paradigm from lip to sphincter, from word to turd, from art to fart, from ego to eggo, from Jeez to cheese, from God to bod, may seem to some a transmogrification not worthy of somber traditional theological pursuits.  To take the faux pas and elevate it to the true dance may seem to some gauche.  To transform the transgression, the mutation, the offense, into sacrament, aesthetics, relief, may seem to some uncalled for.  But a call is a call and one who misses the call an ox and a moron but one who catches it an oxymoron and a pleonasm and a retronym.  My god doesn’t care and this is why it is my god.

My god rises above the petty concerns of pants and skirts, de-naturing nature, de-divining the divine, de-deing de-.

Discussing nature in an age (in an egg?) when nature no longer exists is to align ourselves with the nature (with the fowl?) of our god, which exists in an egg when chickens no longer exist.  This is why my god is born in and lives in and dies in air—the media of pantheons and progress and nothing.

Have you not smelled?  Have you not heard?  How you dream of the hard human harrowing, that underwear descent, sweet sonatas of the golden ass, the nanogod?  How you dream, when you dream, of all society isn’t, all your life and life has not become? 

The only ground is dream, my god my only dream.  My god turns farts to dreams and dreams to farts and this is why it is my god.

That the one who loves my god doesn’t distinguish between the breaking of bread and the breaking of reality is an argument for, for the discerning, my god.  The flatulogical argument.  (Ontology, like God, is dead.)

Does my god have a nature if its only nature is gas, vague electrons streaming from the universe’s silent bulgy buttocks?  What nature is this that has been denaturized?  What god is this that has been degodded?  It is my god and I see it as plainly as I see the night.