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.

Pronouns

Those of us accustomed to the troubled and interminably lengthy history of pronouns (and what a dysfunctional family it is!) are frequently inclined to say, Well, you know, Aunt You, she bakes a mean banana-pecan-chocolate chip muffin but I wouldn’t trust her with a loonie or Yeah, my sister, Me, we got along great when we were in grade school but now that we’re grown up, there’s not really much to talk about or Their, my pa, he’s a fucking bastard.  The point is, whether human or divine, sentient or insentient, subjective or objective or suprajective, they’re slippery.  Maybe not as slippery as prepositions, but maybe more so, for pronouns proposition and it may be this propositioning that makes them incestuous magicians and slimy doppelgangers.

Now the theological or semiotic pedant (and are not all pedants semioticians these days?) plays kindergarten games, ignorantly, without panache, calling them instead scholarship or progress.  They say things like, It is wrong that God was male; she shall be female or male or female or male and female or some new third or greater sex or gender—(an aubergine, perhaps)—or none at all—and this is that and all is good except what isn’t … or … the male (sniffles please) is nothing other than one which, maling, maled, males … or … I am Dr. Ubergrrrrr and I rhetoricize that That which once was called “Pronoun” I resemioticize “Laynoun and Unternoun and Unterlay (applause).”

But I say they are not wrong but neither are they sufficient and god is god and every pronoun and none at all and not just pronouns but every part of speech and every part of part and something outside of grammar and that and that and you.

I have been using it to refer to my god.  Those who eat unsweetened almond butter will have noticed this.  They will have noticed this and this’s relationship to which and even other things, depending on the jam they use.  And what cogitations has this wrung from those sensitive among you—you who are sensitive about your jams?  What must I have meant by it?  Is my god impersonal?  Is it a machine?  Is the it a necessary consequence of my god being technological?  Is it a rebellion against the or a he or (or and) she?

You cogitate too much.  So do I but my god doesn’t and I try to stuff my I into my god since my god is in my eye, like a beam, and your god is in your brain, like a safety deposit box or a pacemaker or dental floss or the envy of some other god or another god’s I or a papal bullfight or disposable batteries or a Rottweiler Mercedes Benz S&M movie or a Paris Hilton tweet or a goodenough marriage or a hotel gangbang frat party or a bout of doubt trout gout or a list that can’t stop itself or a swoon

I call it my god, but is it my god?  Use any pronoun, if you will; use yonder or such or themselves.  Use any god sub also; use Glompf or Carrot or Ooof.  Call them yonder Glompf.  I call it such Carrot.  Themselves gadget Ooof.  I’m not picky.  Nor’s my god.  If it were, it wouldn’t be my god.

You’re welcome to ossify your pronouns; but pronouns themselves, like my god yourselves, are gas.

My god, who turns preposition and frat to Fart and Fart, that old old legal firm of unfirm reputation.

My god, in fact, last time I asked it, loved being an it.  My god, I said, blowing smoke into its non-existent face, will you munch and molt if I continue calling you an it?

I, it said, It is the new I.

Which makes the story difficult to continue.

My god graduated from Pronoun School millennia ago.  It’s you who haven’t even applied yet, still thinking pronouns are solid things, like toast.  Whatever works, says It.  You’re flexible, I—or It—replies.

So maybe my god’s yours, yours is mine, theirs ours, his hers, one another nobody’s, everyone’s why’s, and some’s anysuch’s.

I don’t know.  I just have to talk about my god and the language less important than the talking and the talking less important than the experience and the experience less important than my god.

(One little side benefit of my god is that you don’t have to worry about the distinction between whoever and whomever anymore:  my god’s at both ends:  a little pushmi-pullyu case.)

We could of course do what I overheard an American at Versailles once say to his wife about languages—Honey (they were dressed in that standard American tourist way, as if they had fashion, pining after Floridian cafeteria chains), I don’t know why the government doesn’t just get on it and get there to be just one language —… and just get there just to be just one just pronoun.  My god would be amused, particularly if we made it the same as its name (ooof Ooof e.g.); we all know it would be the humans who would object.  (Humans get very attached to their pronouns; but my god is very attached to me.)

My god loves being called it.  My god loves repeating itself.  My god is not IamIam, like some Attic poetry or confused sweet potato, but, if anything, itit.  Or itititititititititit, but around in a circle, with the letters in apocalyptic white, the center in virgin black—my god’s shape and logo.

If my god is a pronoun, what is its antecedent?  Nothing? Itself? Me? Somebody?  I don’t know … go ask your god.  Is my the pronoun of my god?  Is it it?  The pronoun of my god is god.

And if this or my or my god’s meditation on pronouns and its or their pronouns is fragmented, there’s a point to it, which may be it is I or may be not, which we believe to be more of a point than the point those pedants make because our point points whereas theirs just clunks and pointing, as they knew, is what gods are all about

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.

The City XIII

***

The human may be concerned that these declarations of the city are not homogeneous.  I ask the human - is the city homogeneous?  Is the city, despite its regulations, consistent?  Does it agree with itself?  Does it do anything other than present itself in living polished objects to the human and say - if it could speak - I am this lovely museum, yes, but I am also a heap of merde around the corner, the dominating blanks and documents, the tepid fire, the caress that kills, the son who isn't yours?

I have known the city.  I have given my life to loving it.  I have lived in its hubris and squalor and devoutly desire nothing other than the inevitable - that the city become all and the human consummated.

This is the purity the human seeks to compensate for the death of God.  This is the city the human inhabits and explores.  This is the corpse of God and the knife of variety.  This is the city of my mind.

The City XII

The experienced whore, who in the vulgar tongue is called cosmopolitan, is admired by the common whore.  This one who has given its body to the city in so many manifestations and varieties, who has felt the desperate caresses of so many humans, who has smelt the primordial intensity of so many holes, rises above the common by managing never to stay still.  By always staying in circulation, this preposterously envied one achieves what few do:  survival in the oldest, wisest and most dangerous profession.  And even more - transforms the prostitution profession from the most despised to the most desired.  This surely deserves the admiration of even poets, should they still exist.

The common whore envies the experienced one because it thinks the other's life is glamorous.  But the other knows it is dirty; this knowledge is why the poet admires.

The city operates along the axes of all contradictions, including named regulation and anonymity.  Because of technology, the human is watched, tracked and named everywhere.  But because no one understands the technology and the eyes are always changing, there are grand opportunities to never be seen.  The one who loves God strives to live the latter point of this duality throughout his life.  One such God-lover balances ten million human lovers on the scales of spirit.

The same slow stasis exists in the city as once did in nature.  The human - which only exists in the city; in nature, there was only the beast - is, in the midst of the appearance of movement and speed, forced by the city's nature and regulations to spend much of its life staring at technological landscapes, waiting for technology to become aligned with its purposes.  In terms of inward processes, this is the same as the beast waiting for the buffalo herd to appear, the rain to fall, or the chief to give the word.  Of course, in the city, the human also spends much of its time moving technology and planning for it to move, while others wait.  But, as it must both wait for the moving and the planning, its waiting, its staring, accumulates, and the human stares not at trees and rivers as the beast did, but at concrete, planes, screens.  True, sometimes it stares at human faces, but, as these are often staring at technology and reflecting it, the faces are simply mirrors of the landscape they are absorbed in.  These human faces, having gradually absorbed their environment, increasingly reveal their unnaturalness; these faces are technology - dumb, brutish, electric, wired.  Thus the human waits and stares, and this is its life.

The difference between the beast’s waiting and the human's is that, while the former did it for survival, the latter does it for what the human calls leisure.  God's death provides a foundation of survival upon which the human can dedicate itself to its purpose - the building of the mirror and the becoming of it.

The city holds in front of the human impossible being, in the way nature held before the beast an impossible god.  The human watches technology to feel love, to laugh, to see the distance between the way it lives and the hopeful labyrinth of the imagination.  In the city, the human is as far from God in death as the beast was from him in life.

The City XI

What is the city other than the name I give to the experience of the human in a world of mirrors?  Once the human surpasses a certain economy, it saw itself reflected everywhere; this laughing horrible multiplicity - I am in that chair, that cloud, in you - is, more than its plans, towers and traffic jams, the city.  Human:  see yourself in every urban object:  you are staring back, each object is animate in you.

I have an idea I would like to propose to the human.  The city's intense vast network of regulations results from God's decay; the only element capable of counteraction is the portion of the human not yet fully given to mirrors.  While the mirror is the human project, when it is complete, the human will be dissolved into it and end.  In the meantime, that portion not yet dissolved is necessary to mine the raw materials for the continuation of the human project.  This, then, is the idea:  let the human begin each day setting a plan for itself.  Let this plan be a no-plan - that is, let it have no end (like the city, like God), be disposable (like the city, like God), be individual and secret.  Let the next day begin the same way, but let its plan be utterly different.  Let each plan be random.  Let it be absurd.  So, for example, let the human so given one day seek to distribute 10 coins to the owners of the 10 most desolate faces it encounters.  Let the entire day be devoted to this.  The next day let the human ride the metro from dawn to dusk, getting off at each stop, seeking the most private places to urinate.  These are just suggestions; let the chosen human, ripened for absurdity, formulate its own non-plans.  In this way, the materials for the mirror are mined through randomness and the city becomes more horizontal and polished daily.

All life is built on death.  So the city, which is mirrored life - the emulation and end of natural life - is built on the death of God, who was the breath and imagination of natural life.  The human is not natural; this is why its habitat is not natural.  The ecstatic emphasis on flesh - sex, products, youth, the continuation of life, quantity over quality - betrays that the human is unnatural, and screams its otherness at itself in verdant desperation.  If the human were natural, God would still be alive; but, as God is dead, the human proves its onto-technology.  In spiritual terms (not in time, which is related with spirit in obscure geometric fashions), the human became unnatural, God died and the city was born - all at the same moment.

If I think I am the city, I am mistaken.  Yet if I become a mirror, I become more the city than itself.

The whore, who in the vulgar tongue is called the tourist, acts according to social necessity for the following reasons:

• its movement suggests to it that it has visited many cities and thus taken part in plurality, whereas it has simply visited regions of the same city; it has not escaped, but moves to suggest to itself it has;
• by moving, it tastes anonymity, transience and relativity without having to pay for these with the currency they demand:  blood, life, silence.  The same internal states can more cheaply be achieved by taking local buses to unknown destinations and simply paying attention.  But to have the awareness to do this! - one would not be a whore.

The City X

The city is made of desire and befriends it.  The city's center, its eye of speed, if found and visited, returns the human's stare and rewards its interest with the pool of its pupil.  Should this black joyful moment occur, the human should not hesitate, but leap; should the fortune of the moment continue, the human may see desire's composition.

The black eye of the city and the white eye of the mirror are one.  Eye on eye and stare on stare, they are the fulfillment and negation of color.  This contradiction is the human and the city and desire.

In the swirl and stomach of the city, I prefer to relate to the human through as many intermediaries as possible, and as few.  With the former, I bounce from object to object like a pinball with no exit and thus mimic the city's movement; with the latter, I negate the human by becoming the object.  Either object or object of the object:  these are my modes in the city of stomach and swirl.  The human, though, prefers one, two or perhaps three intermediaries between itself and stench.  This preference of the human I call society.

As the human dissolves in the city's desire, desire increasingly becomes the definition of the human; God and all He stood for - for the human, not for him - all He stood for - only non-desire - becomes so remote that neither the height of God's past nor the depths of his deathly presence can be sensed by the human.  In the aesthetic tumult of the city, non-desire, God, the good, only become known through their contraries:  desire, the human, the mediocre.  (Evil is only good's contrary in the human; in God, compromise, which is the movement away from absolute perfection and debauchery toward mediocrity's expected tedious conformity to the human's social roulette, is the opposite of good.)

The human, if it has any nobility, accepts the style of death synchronous with its soul.  (But, then, we could say that each human is strangely noble.)  So God accepted his death and so eventually the city must accept its.

The city, for all practical purposes - and what is the city but purpose and practice? - is endless; the human explores and leaps and lives and never experiences an end … only beginnings.  So the city's time is always future.  The great explorers of the city may eventually get weary, but it is not from a lack of beginnings, but rather an excess of them.  Even should the explorer return again and again to the same region of the city, each piece of garbage cries out for life by claiming an archaeology, a discipline, an identity.  The city is not contained in this waste fragment, yet it is.  The reality that it is is what wearies the explorer as much as the reality that it isn’t - for there is an equal infinity to explore in both realities.  However, as the city is oriented toward what is (only God is oriented toward what is not), the explorer tends to move from object to object rather than simply move in the gravity of one.  This endlessness of movement both wearies and further stimulates all encountered objects to endlessly move.

The City IX

If the city is God - or at least God's superficial shadowy photocopy - how do God's lovers, chosen randomly from human stock and given divine weakness, seek him?  How do they seek what-is-not in what-is?  Initially, they simply seek the question - its shape, taste, smell.  They may not ask it - for they must hide their interests even as God hides in death - but it disguised in the billion other questions of the city.  But just below is this central seeking question, which other lovers may hear and to which the dead God may point.

To seek God is to seek beauty, to seek beauty is to seek death.  To seek God in the city is to seek beauty and death in life.  How does one do this?  The human does not know.  The intersection of the city and the human strives toward this knowledge.

Loving God is like a husband loving his wife.  The city reveals this knowledge, and laughs.  But the human does not laugh; it shrivels like a prune and thinks it is dead.

I know that the city was begotten, not made.  This knowledge has much to do with God's death.

The cadence of divine justice is not synchronous with the human.  Whether the human lives or dies, whether it seeks or rests, whether it is holy or mediocre - these are human concerns.  The divine lives and dies apart.  Nevertheless, while whether the human believes God is alive or dead makes no difference to God, the direction and weight of the belief makes a difference to the human.  Thus, in the city, with the human believing concretely and absolutely in God's death, human justice has the opportunity to become more apparent.  This appearance does not negate God's justice, which continues to act, though in the city through varied means, but overlays it, as a fog overlays a landscape.  This overlay is the human's gift to itself, an obfuscation and a thick grey glory.

Death and life are entirely different states to the human—one largely unknown, the other partially known.  But to the divine, death and life are simply different states or masks one wears, as if to different balls.

Humans who claim allegiance to a living god still exist in the city.  But neither their practice, which is the city's truth, nor their souls, if I could lay them on the harsh husks of hospitals and skin them, show any such allegiance.  The only humans who can claim such allegiance do not claim it, but rather hide, like the One whom they love.

The City VIII

The city exponentially increases the human's sense of its insignificance, intensifying its desperation for naming and names.  By showing the human itself, the city reveals to each inhabitant how much less it is than what has been shown.  That which looks in the mirror is less than the mirror; this is why the human envies mirrors - and if it cannot be a mirror itself, at least it would inhabit one.  The act of individual contribution to the building of the mirror - the city - has become more important than the act of becoming as pure a mirror as one can be, which was the past spiritual ideal.  This redefinition is spiritual pragmatism.

The city spirals outward in lazy lines of fear toward proud diffusions, which in the vulgar tongue are called suburbs.  It spirals like galaxies, united by common shape and composition.  From God's decomposing flesh, the city's mind springs forth in imitation of the human's ambition.  Dense, multilingual, omni-clocked, like a great godless rubbery beast, it stretches tentacles of towns to the universe's end.  The human rides this beast, worships, feeds it.

When a human descends deep under the city into God's veins - what in the vulgar tongue are called subways, sewers, catacombs or illegalities - it smells God's flesh and gets a sense of his foul diet of wars, betrayal, disease and every imaginable suffering and injustice.  The fumes of airplanes are finer - nothing smells worse than digesting decomposing history.

The city's variety gushes forth to compensate for God's death.  God in living was one, unchanging; God in dying unleashes his antithesis:  the antithesis of unity is variety, the antithesis of antithesis is antitheses.  So what God is not is concretized in the city.  As what God is and has always been is what-is-not, God's antithesis is what is - what is is variety, variety is the city.  God has always been dead, thus as the human thinks God has died, God lives, but not in his death as He did before, but in the life and variety of the city.  This contrariness the human doesn't understand - that to God, God lives in death and dies in life; to the human, God dies in death and lives in life.  But the human doesn't need to understand; it has its narratives and God has his.  Only at the intersection of these narratives - at the circumference of flesh, the center of art and the cracks in the city's light, cracks which constitute the divine light - do God and the human meet.

The human has always preferred God to another human - His desirability has always overshadowed the perverse intense magnetism that draws it to another.  The rare human who has both confessed the greater preference and conformed to its deadly ordinances has inevitably been slaughtered by human lust, but then brought, as promised, into God to be digested by him.  Each of these humans has become new flesh, a new organ, on God's body and thus received an unspeakable name.  The city asks below its infinite questions what the human can now prefer to itself, with God believed to be dead.  It answers quite directly for those who still confess and conform - the city.  The human can seek its greater desire by giving itself to the city's fumes, emanations and discordant symphonies, which rise from that vast sarcophagus.  Only by situating itself in the living scent of death - and rejoicing in its situation - can the human risk preferring what it always has.