A Recreation of God

Gretchenetta von de Hatten is an inmate in the House for Psychotic Mystics, founded in the 11^th century by a Spanish cardinal after being excommunicated by Pope Sylvester III and presently believed to be located in a Los Angeles suburb.  The Secular Sadoo thanks Gretchenetta for releasing the introduction and first nine vignettes of her new collection, A Recreation of God; she intends to release future vignettes, also in blocks of nine, according to proclivities not entirely understood by anyone.  Ms. von de Hatten’s distinctive post-theological and post-psychological approach may very well be a first step toward discussing a blueprint for possibly building a tentative bridge between theology and psychology.  Or, in other terms, to articulate brahman-atman from within the traditions and languages of the West.  She anticipates having 81 vignettes and 81 introductions; numerologists will also find it significant that each of von de Hatten’s vignettes contains, according to Word, 1027 words.

Introduction

Roughly, in 1883 or so, God died.  The basic obituarial facts are well known and have been painstakingly analyzed:  He had to die, He was a He, He was capitalized, and we killed Him.  (Whether the twentieth century was us putting ourselves on trial for his death is still, some might say, open to interpretation.)

Or, at least, in 1883 God had died to such an extent that a lonely man in Turin could say that God had died.  Which is to say, in other words, that the word God had died and, seemingly conversely and perhaps to an equal extent, that the god Word had died.

I wish to recreate god.  Since it is my desire that wills this—or, as certain dreams and visions seem to suggest, some inchoate embryo that seeds my desire—I experience this not only as a new creation of god (thus cyclically furthering the divine) but, as the name suggests, a caprice.  God is play and I who creates god creates in play.

The stridency and blood and ecstasy of death are tired.  The fulminations and lies of copulation are done.  Technology permits a birth that, while hardly painless, is, by historical comparison, quite straightforward and risk-free.  The pain is understood, rehearsed, and incorporated; it is not something alien and surprising, but accounted for and even not unpleasantly anticipated, not through some autonomous masochism but rather through a radical, dark-light acceptance of the corpulence and reaches of life.  If this is a primary function of technology—to allow new gods to be born without the Sturm und Drang, the medieval barbarisms, typically associated with the divine—we should accept and explore this function, even as we accept and explore urls and iPads.  (That our understanding of the spiritual functions of technology is still in its infancy should not particularly surprise us; technology’s physical functions have been sufficiently manifold, rapid, and ubiquitous so as to bury us in their whirring glories.  Who would see and hear through their loud excitements to the barely articulate voices wormed through the roots of all things?)

I do not wish to resurrect some dead god.  The Elohim or Krishna wandering along Fifth Avenue, reeking seaweed dangling from their nostrils, rusty poisoned barbs jutting shamelessly from their aching cocks … how macabre! how gauche!  Likewise, I hardly am so inexperienced in the wiles of the divine as to expect that I can create something utterly unlike that which has preceded me.  Humans are humans and if we evolve we do so slowly.  So with maple trees and jurisprudence and etiquette and spinach.  So also with the forms and circumference of the divine.

Where this divine resides is relevant only to pedants.  That I use the word divine in an age of immanence and horizontality is offensive only to the unimaginative and inexperienced.  If you are so incarcerated that you associate divine with daddy or superego or something the Russians couldn’t find … well … that’s your regression.

It is not a new Adam I seek, but a new Yahweh, a new Buddha, a new Brahman, a new Tao, a new Allah, a new Christ.  One that is as unlike the originals—if originals they in fact are—as I am to whatever wandered in Eden at consciousness’ cusp.  I name this new thing god from convenience, from convention, from caprice.

From convenience, for any new word (what should it be … Glompf? Histamana? Ooof?) or borrowed existing one (Carrot? Jezebel? Garburator?) would inevitably be ridiculous; from convention, to acknowledge the beauty of the past and the strange continuities of all things, continuities that surpass death; from caprice, to equally acknowledge my necessary love of destroying that beauty, not from a love of destruction itself—which is tedious and infantile—but from an immersion in existence and its consequent demands.  This new god is transsexed, living (though perpetually being born), lower-cased, and mine:  the farting wide-eyed child of now, who eats religion for breakfast, scats yoga, and has no need to distinguish between building towers and destroying them, for towers are words and words are gas and gas is what this god’s about.  This smelly greasy glabrous god.  My god.

My god is not a god of nature—as the old gods were—but a god of technology.  As, in the true and verdant days of the old religions, spirit, tree, bark, leaf, and canoe were inseparable, so my god is indivisible from sidewalks, twisted dumpheap wires, deduplication DASD, and brain pacemakers.  I listen for its voice in subways, I wait for revelation in abandoned gas stations.  My gadget god.

I have no more desire to convince you of the reality of the god I am recreating than I do of the reality that I had a bath last night.  Who cares if you believe I had a bath last night?  Does my telling you about my baby god change anything?  I simply write down what I’m doing—the experience of what I’m doing, the experience of recreating god—in the manner of a child blowing bubbles.  Anyone who wishes may attempt to nail those bubbles on a wall, throw them at the heads of others or their own, stack them to form some edifice, sell them online or in Greenwich, eat them daily as a bedtime snack, or leave them to their fragile fates.  Whatever.  I wish to recreate god and I shall do it according to the murky proclivities that seem to circumscribe my life because it’s my god and this is what I’m born to do.  Psychology, irony, be damned.

Notes on Method

I don’t have a method.  Method is for dead gods and scholars and programmers and people who don’t have very many interesting things to do.  Methods may arise in the process of recreation, as it is difficult and not necessarily even desirable to entirely suppress them; however, if they do, I shall do my best to kill them or turn them into toads.

Notes on Principles, Definitions, Axioms, Lemmas, Propositions, Proofs, and Corollaries

I acknowledge their existence, as I acknowledge the existence of bathtubs, beer, and masturbation.