prayers to aliens

if theres anything i feel strongly about its that any novel worth its weight in digiglyphs should have prayers in it

so heres prayer number thirtynine

 

                  dear aliens

                  we know a lot of us have been suckerpunched by lines like

                                    a little lower than the angels

                                    made in the image of god

                                    subdue the earth

the goal of the human soul is conquest perfection security superiority

the human subject is active and therefore exercises agency while the nonhuman object is passive thus nature and nonhuman animals are available for human exploitation

humans are intentional rational premeditated while animals are instinctual

unless you become a warrior youll be crushed and forgotten

humans are exceptional due to their superior language and toolmaking capacities

humans are manifestly the highest rung of the animal order

oh alieni

we know you laugh at us

we diminish oppression in one sector only to transfer it to another

we do and think the most horrible and irrational things and then surround them with virtuous clichés and this confidence game is society

we narcissistically believe whonymitys more entitled than other creatures and artifacts

we accomplish nothing but destruction but are so inept we cant restrain ourselves even when weve lost faith in our accomplishments

we know our institutions loves families religions philosophies arts actions attitudes thoughts are built from the elemental particles of fear deception indolence and greed and stories and ideas so infantile were wholly unworthy of the comforts that grace our lives and the walls that keep the darkness out

were endlessly fascinated by our lives  our every petty joy and misery  that new pimple on our butt  and care more for the comfortable cat that suddenly appears by our back door than we do for the millions of animals we incarcerate torture slaughter and devour each year

we are a worthless and disgusting species  not even a blip in geological time or a modified register in the consciousness of the universe

 

and the aliens shrug and briefly materialize

from their abstract geometric planes & games

and vaporize the one who prays

gott gedanken denken i

i speak of god, though god be dead.  i speak of god for in its death we eat of the divine corpse through the earth and in eating know it in the knowledge that is not the knowledge of articulation but of flesh before it speaks.

so these words are nothing unless the reader has gotten on its knees and put its face in the earth and eaten of that corpse.  even then, they are nothing, but of a different kind.

in this knowledge – of divine flesh in animal flesh – we see – see with that vision not of words – that god was not god, and that not-god had to die.

i speak of god in its living death, for in our eating god reanimates and death becomes again the molecules of life.

i have so much to say of god and all of it is untrue.  i have so much to say of god and i will say it in its untruth.  for it is only through untruth that we walk the way of truth.

i would rather speak of god than humanity.  and if you say being human all i can speak is the human, i would say, on what grounds even can we speak the human?  on these grounds then i speak god.

the pronouns i use are false.  i say i.  i say it.  i say you.  i could call i they and it we and you she and he.  in god pronouns trade clothes like actors.  and glyphs and phonemes are clothes on what we cannot say.  not just pronouns, but prepositions, adjectives, nouns, verbs – the entire anatomy of speech, naked in its speechless glory, constantly robing and undressing.  words are robbers, aren’t they?  like god.

god is most adept at stealing from itself.  it has stolen so many clothes from itself it forgets what it owns.  and this forgetting is intrinsic to god, this slipping of ownership away.

that god doesn’t exist, that science can’t find it, that psychology doesn’t want it, that religion bypasses it, that philosophy murdered it, that art decreates it, that the crowds as always assiduously ignore it – all this proves nothing, for god disproves.

if god has been sufficiently crafty and bold to take nine billion names, to sacrifice its child, to morph itself through the evolutions of the divine, to twist ladders into running wheels, to lay claim to no merit, it can also stage its death.  non-existence permits such flexibility.

to say that if i speak of god i simply speak of a projection of my own image is to miss that i may not have an image and if even i speak of a projection of an image that hardly falsifies less other speakings and that if i do not speak of god – who will?

the most compelling – often the only compelling – aspects of the human are the inexplicable, aesthetically generative, expansive and boundless, visionary, detached, holographic … what we think of when we think of the compelling aspects of god.

god is just another word, like cabbage, and one is surely not wrong to say god is as in a cabbage as cabbage is in a god.  we grow both, we eat both, we worship both, we kill both.  cabbages evolve as gods do, and both may well outlive humanity.

when it is said – mysticism is truer than i can tell you – we speak of god.  we speak of it in the inability to speak, in the eternal inarticulation of truth.  and we speak of it with a word that is commonly and uncommonly mocked among and not among those of the knowledge classes.  mysticism is not a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy or science; it is a differently rigorous mode:  one can argue a centrally rigorous mode as it uses the central artifacts of life – flesh, breath, and as extension words – as tools.  it relies primarily on the spiritus of the technoanimal that gives itself over to the relation between and among spirit and flesh.