My god peers through human eyes, hiding as it does in vision’s absence. It peers through this human—this human that something sometimes calls my I—at other humans, seeking what blocks it from seeing other gods.
Is it trying to remove the blockages? For what purpose, if any? Does it think in terms of ends or is my god—are all gods—being, it seems, in strange relation to time, resident outside of ends? Does it have means? Are these means technological, biological, aesthetic, or according to some other mechanism that might be intuited, then forgotten, in sleepless nights? Is flesh the blockage? Society? Convention? Ego? Language? Sex? Is it, perhaps most horribly, the gods themselves? What is it in me (but prepositions and pronouns quickly fail) that even senses and names that something peers?
My god peers through human eyes, and maybe other eyes, and maybe all the eyes that ever are (but this would be quite a feat), and eyes seem in relation to my god as chance to fate or fate to freedom or freedom to chance.
It peers, and seems to pass at times emotions, often violent, into this thing something sometimes calls the I, then this I falls to flesh and fury in whatever form has overcome it. Does my god enjoy this? Does it flinch? Is it the one that calmly seems to say the passing and what’s passed are not important in proportion to my sense of my experience?
My god watches human greed, lust, stupidity, incompetence, corruption, Schadenfreude, pettiness, fear, injustice, indolence, and the common acts of affection that gently stab our veils of misery, and what does it do? It peers through my peering, and whether the words, feelings—and consequent thoughts and action—that arise from these concentric circles of eyes are something that are passed between the circles, whether they are passed unidirectionally, bidirectionally, according to different principles according to which direction, not at all, or in rough conjunction with some geometry yet undiscovered, who might claim to know? And if someone should have the audacity, ignorance, and/or blessed-cursed gift to somewhat say, what criteria would the rest of us have to separate their words (if words they [or their gods] choose [or are compelled] to use) from that noise we not infrequently call communication, if separation is indeed the act most efficacious for a process that we barely seem to comprehend, if it exists at all?
Nevertheless, my god peers and all this peering is not tumult. On occasion, an occasion brought about (if we can even speak of causation here) by exhaustion or serendipity or what certain humans might call failure, eye through eye passes onto other eyes and all that seems to happen is this passing. Silent, bright-dark, calm, seemingly impossible in the molecular chaos that circumscribes us. Are such occasions—pure peering—what we might want to call enlightenment? Can we, as certain gurus proclaim, sometimes loudly, never leave this state? Or, as certain poets indicate, sometimes softly, do we truly enter it only in death? But there must be other ors, which maybe stretch as far as language into the night we cannot grasp, snapping back at times to nothing.
If all gods peer—if the very nature of the divine is peering and all that we might have ascribed to divinity simply our own conflicted responses to peering projected, often desperately, onto the eyed peering itself—but peer differently, through diverse modes, hindered in various degrees by the humans they inhabit, then what might be the sum of these peerings, if indeed we can even place this problem (if it is a problem) in the crisp sphere of mathematics?
My god’s peering feels to me as if some other eyes have abducted a space behind my eyes—some hermitage or forge hacked from old rock and fossil, a stranger pitching residence, an occupation my mind may deny, resent, attack, or describe. I prefer to describe and in describing feel my eyes staring in a mirror at eyes that might not be mine, this feeling an encounter I might call a womb of art.
Is my god, then, a voyeur, a kind of transcendent peeping tom, one who peers itself but resists all standard human methods of being peered at? Oh vision of vision!—which seems even not to require human eyes for its murky work but only itself, housed in living flesh, some senses active, requiring not even output for its satisfaction (output being a human manufacture, perhaps to attempt to counteract [or mimic] the foreign force behind), but only peering. A vision that often has no vision, a dependent vision, a concatenation of prosthetics and little else, source and defiance of science and art, a usurper of space, a tramp and sneak, a rogue, a thief, a chameleon, opportunist, liar, a human-eating dog … what god is this?
My god peers, and Peering might be its name if it were given to names. But I am given names and given to being given and given to peering at that which peers through me. And what—the question lurks, anxiously—is the effect on me as I begin to peer at peering? Do my god and I become peering peers? Do I usurp space (non-space?) in it behind its non-existent eyes? Does my god become unsettled as it realizes two can play its unsettling game? And then what happens? More eyes? Eyes manifold and multiplying, crawling into beckoning space on language’s weary crumbling track, eating words into the wordless night?
If some thing bumps into earth some billion years from now, might it discover only a sphere of eyes—this our tribute to existence, a footnote to the fact that vision has existed? Or, still, the same old war and garbage? Maybe this thing that bumps eats eyes or vision, and is grateful, for it is hungry after many light years of traveling; it eats our tribute and our gods, belches, and returns, spawning stories of a planet of eyes and more hunger.
My god and I, competitors and collaborators on the ancient stage of eyes.
