Teleology

Another one’s god suggested to her this—

It had occurred to me that if a composer creates individual 'pieces of music' that at the end of his/her life there will only be a finite number of musical works by that composer. I had found myself wishing I could discover new works by long-dead composers whose music I loved but already knew too well to be able to have the pleasure of first hearing of any of their music. If instead of composing individual, finite length works, a composer could encode in computer software their personal compositional methods, preferences, processes and ways of making musical decisions, and somehow their aesthetic sensibility too, then they could go on composing and generating new music long after the biological human had ceased to exist.

Gods speak with gods in the secret burrows of our flesh, and it is this odd conversation that sustains—and maybe is—the most vibrant and distinctive human project.  So her god and mine sat down on a couch in my soul and chatted, over Olympian and pretty biscuits, steaming and sassy, of the task suggested by what had occurred to her.

her god:	Pleasant weather we’re having.
my god:	Where do you get a beer in this soul?
her god:	The consortium of discursive gods has placed …
my god:	Nice.  Yeah, a Westvleteren … nah, make it two.  Want one?
her god:	… has placed the technological urge in the human for one purpose and one purpose only:  …
my god:	Thank God monks are good for something.
her god:	… to facilitate the human’s placing its highest creative functions—which they call art and we call ourselves—into it to incarnate and extend the divine spark in what they call time and we don’t call anything, so that they have what they call hope and we call comedy that others, after human annihilation, will discover us or them or something.
my god:	Two more.
her god:	My human, for example, …
another god:	Speaking of naming, people routinely call my human intelligent, but she is truly only artificially intelligent.  A cat, a tree, a wombat, a hurricane … these are naturally intelligent.  No wonder, then, that the human has been embarking on its little project of making intelligence in its own image, presumably adding the adjective artificial as a nostalgic nod to its mythological roots in the garden.
my god:	Hey … give me back my fucking Westvleteren.
another god:	You still have an unopened bottle there.
my god:	You deranged cuntface degenerate.
her god:	Now, now, have another biscuit.  My point is this.  I have placed in my female human, as some of our compatriots have done in theirs …
another god:	It’s a fad, it’ll be over in two or three thousand years.
another god:	I’m placing in my human the necessity of severe finitude:  of producing only one work—a single villanelle—in her lifetime, but the most perfect villanelle—indeed the most perfect poem—that a human will ever produce.  I prefer this to this crass fad of infinite reproduction.
another god:	Isn’t your method just another form of her god’s?  Aren’t we falling prey to that all-too-human fallacy of inappropriately conflating the specific and the general?
another god:	Huh?
another god:	My human’s obsessed with puppets.
another god:	I see this as simply another five million monkeys on five million keyboards sort of problem.
her god	… I have placed in her the urge and capability that many of us believe is not a fad but the objective, end, and being of the human:  to essentially replace herself with a digital copy of her impulses, eternally creating, replicating, interacting and merging with other copies, producing an infinite variety of new forms.  So the human rebecomes spirit, from whence it came.  In short, it returns to us and nature is, thankfully, once again, left to its own devices, without the pretense of consciousness or goal.  This teleological experiment of ours—the human—will have fulfilled its purpose:  it will provide us with many kalpas of entertainment and a basis for future research in incarnating ourselves.
some other gods:	fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! …
my god:	I like flesh.  It’s strange.  {belches loudly and for many minutes}
her god:	You will still have the memory of residing in a soul in flesh, which will be no different for you than the experience of residing in a soul in flesh, as for us gods memories and experiences are identical, as so many things are identical.  The only difference will be to the human; although it will not notice its demise, at least not in a biological sense, it will continue to explore its biological non-existence in digital form.
another god:	Pass the pretzels.

Although the conversation went on interminably, for months—my soul sodden, ripped, and wretched by the time the others left (how many gods had there been in that hoppy and philosophical debauch!?), my god asleep in a bathtub in one of my soul’s lower spas—the gist of the conversation seemed to come to me in a dream some nights later.

Fifteen ovaltine daguerreotypes crept down the valley of the Korean armistice, waving slightly.  I was nowhere to be seen.  The most welcome aperture, notwithstanding its lithographic allusions to the Hilton Arc de Triomphe Paris hotel, was rejected in favor of seven singing sirens, reminiscent of very little.  Mammals were being bludgeoned, though happily, while Joe and I sat in Leopold Café and painted squirrels on the five-limbed body of a Bollywood starlet, who bored us with stories of a second century on another planet.  Where is my teacup? someone screamed.  A battalion of Yukari Royale fountain pens floated from the ceiling fans, shooting magi in liquid efflorescence.  Get Kurtz.  No.  The Weebles didn’t wobble.  What?  What was that?  A woofle?  Three woofles.  Quaffing mammals in a singing lesion.  Quoting legion to the blimey annals. Oh!  A star! A star! Setting like a satellite to tinkles from a Juicy Fruit or bum.