Peering and Peering

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.

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.

DSM 21

Despite God officially being declared dead, his funeral long past, its attendees too dead, and the marketplace partially swept of the drunken funereal debris (though a surprising number of priests and churches seem to be loitering, lurching, lying, among the living), we continue to act and think as if we were still his undeveloped children, unable to come into our own, perhaps even unable to know what “our own” is, dependent as we were for so long on that heavenly paternalism.  Our strident belief in our freedom, despite little evidence of its practice, is one sign of our unacknowledged insecurity about our prolonged and perhaps eternal childhood.

One of the many areas in which we seemingly unwittingly perpetuate God’s continued dominance over us is psychology.  Not surprisingly, psychology being theology’s golem, our dark freakish attempt to consciously create spiritual life.  (Yet it hobbles, doesn’t it, this lump of desperate fumbling theories and methods, and may end up attacking its creators.  Perhaps it already is.)  One of the many areas in psychology in which we see God’s continued pervasive presence is that of disease—particularly in the taxonomies, hierarchies, enforcements, enculturations, linguistic solidities and artilleries, evolutionary and maturation norms, and dogmatisms with which we typically relate to what is typically called mental disease.

But if we wish to get beyond Our Father and create ourselves in our own image, might we not want to experiment a little?  Might we rather think that diseases—particularly psychic ones—must become individual, transient, and capricious with individual names and descriptors?  Might we not want to grow up?

I don’t have schizophrenia, bipolarity, or depression; tardive dyskinesia, kleptomania, dyspareunia, Münchausen syndrome, or DID; ADHD, adjustment or depersonalization disorder, bulimia, or onto- or etio- or epistemophobia.  I have the disease of myself.  And that’s it.  That’s all I have.  That’s all anyone has.  My disease is inescapable (and so beloved), ineffable (and so numinous), and inarticulate (and so naturally potent).  It is my responsibility—my primary responsibility in this schplot of a life—to search for the best possible way in the moment to precisely describe my illness … a description that is perpetually shifting.  The ossified disease—collective, static, borrowed, imposed—is wholly passé; it is psychically analogous to witch-burnings and racial and sexual inequality.  An ossified disease is tedious, clinical, and dead.  A living disease is vibrant, creative, and flexible.  Living disease is individual, free (in the sense that I may describe it in any way I choose), original, and thoroughly transient.  Yet it is also as whole and constant as myself.

My job is to self-diagnose myself, write papers analyzing myself from as many perspectives and in as many forms as possible, and attempt to sustain myself vitally for as long as possible, primarily if not exclusively to prolong the amount of time I can study my diseases.  Self-disease creation, analysis, and management are the future of the psyche and, if enacted, would be a prime indicator of our capacity to evolve.  I am my disease and therapist.  There are no diseases and therapists other than me, other than in the sense that everyone is a disease and therapist.

I never wake up with the same disease, other than the disease of myself.  My diseases never have one name or one that lasts; sometimes a day’s disease is the sum of all the words used in that day … and the disease perhaps might be the words.

{Hey, you psychiatrist who’s never gone nuts, who sleeps with needle-sellers, who walks on the souls you claim to heal, who doesn’t believe in the soul … we’re all fucked up.  And that’s our crown and lubrication.}

That this infers the acceptance—even celebration—of disease is obvious … but not in any way typically associated with these words.  This is not some self-victimization, some whiny withdrawal, some geriatric capitulation … just the opposite:  it’s humanity becoming itself:  confronting itself:  accepting imperfection as a necessary condition of perfection:  assuming the necessary multiple roles toward our essential condition (participant, observer, therapist, artist, researcher, circus performer, machine …).

I long for disease, for new diseases, for new descriptors, new mutations, new remedies.  You treat your diseases with pills and purchased pomposity and pedantic pity if you want.  I treat mine with disease—a little vaccination (homeopathy, if you’re the placebo type) of the spirit.  The best treatment for any disease is itself.  A spiritual inoculation strategy.

Healing is hell.  People frequently ascribe a teleology to it.  They make it a substantive whereas it’s a participle.  They assume too much:  a disease’s goal is unknown, arbitrary, and tautological.  They sanitize the process:  healing is dark, destructive, ecstatic, and may cost you your life.  If it doesn’t carry this risk, it’s coddled kindergarten healing.  Adult healing has been to hell and loves it.  It knows healing is just a path to another disease.  Life is a disease-collection ritual, an afflicted ceremony, and those who collect the greatest number of interesting and novel diseases and survive the longest are closest to god.  Diseases add more surfaces, more ways to articulate darkness, to play with life.

And if someone should say, None of this sounds like freedom!  For freedom is surely escaping disease and fleeing freely, smilily, to the sunny meadows of health and healing! … I say to you, You understand nothing of freedom, says my god, for you pretend you have no god.

What then is my god’s relationship to my disease, my diseases, my diseased state, my ambivalence and love of disease, my endless talk of and research into it?  Is it the cause, the effect, both, some other thing?

I don’t know what my god is.  Maybe it’s my disease or my therapist, maybe that which allows both to co-exist in one body, this body, my body … home of my god and my love.  My disease, which I do not call my disease, but my ease—my inspiration and my comfort.  My disease, which I don’t try to heal but instead transform into a liquid I blow bubbles with.  My disease is my god, my disease is myself, my disease is you.

The New Shamanism

Not some network, some organization, principles formed of committee, a light and fluffy healing, as if we were running a marshmallow spa, not some ISO spirituality or social-scientific temperament quiz or hallucinogenic or pleasurable tent, but those pioneers of the modern techno-spirit, who disdain society to love it, have unalterably eternal and tumultuous and sometimes deadly affairs with art and whatever, who throw everything away with regularity and hard sorrow, who sleep on bleak beds, who believe madness is health and health is madness, who know everything is alive (subways, falafels, notebooks, dishwashing detergent, ideas) and dialogue with everything alive and know the voices of subways, who see the burning darkness at the center of things as you see your dentist, who don’t particularly distinguish between them and you, who care for money as you might care for a bedbug, who are genetically incapable of working in any manner you might normally call work and yet are equally genetically incapable of indolence in any manner you might normally call indolence, who are their own gods and yet know no gods yet know all gods, who fear nothing but mediocrity, who eat fear like chocolate chip cookies, who howl at anything if the mood is right and the mood is not unoften right, who drink whatever they must drink, who have strobes for hearts and hearts for eyes and eyes for strobes, who know there are two kinds of laws, two kinds of education, and two kinds of love and in the second myriad kinds and in the first only one, and there is a law the masses and their masters build around them like a suburb and one the others use to traverse the wasteland of themselves, who might be anything, who conjure curses as you might make fast food appear and think both more and less of it than you, who must obey silence, those of legion and maybe spinach, of that horrible and only true certitude at the center of doubt, of ice and zen, dice and then, shapes in dark skies, vision in sewers, desire in death, sweetness in betrayal, of the this is that before the this is that, who does not know the difference between a cat and a court, who eructates on demand… no no no no no no:  not some new nude new age lickspittle nor some unctuous psychobabbler with a Fulsome Scholarship nor some mummified academic nor some lobotomized lobotomizer nor some one-track vegan anarchist but those …

Is it progress, really, that we have eradicated the one who sits in its situation—temporally atemporal, gnostically agnostic, sanely insane, in a mudhut or mudpenthouse, to whom the schlock and wealthy go with their whatevers, and—put in its place possibly—tweets and genomes?  I—or my god, apparently—am hardly one to throw out genomes, but we both—we’re one on this, it seems—think, like Freddy Mercury[1], why can’t we have it all:  tweets and shamans?  Why must we be so tiny as to think darkness is ever dead, that we’ve slain it with something as wimpy as electricity? Where did electricity come from, Chimps?  Darkness.  And its infinite eyes of fire streaming from the hydrants.

The New Shamanism is not some institution, some professional association, some list of accreditations, some piety or anything growing from a natural tradition (herbs and wails and totems), but a twisted metal hybrid, a construction dump, still perhaps without a name, manufactured—not begotten—in the data center of the urban present (the best name may not be shamanism but some other bastard name—something capricious, bold, obnoxious, heretical, necessary … something ecstatic, sad and true and new too, too new …), … and its practitioners …

… whose eyes verb and never noun, whose bodies roam the grave and who never leave the grave, who build bridges from the pain of themselves between madness and society, who spell dervish any way they want, who are snakes to snakes and lemmings to lemmings and ducks to ducks and for this divine flexibility they are sometimes shammed!, for the new shaman is a new Noah’s Ark bouncing on the flood of the global psyche—Noah! his wife! his drunken daughters! the sinful memories! all the crazy animals mating like there’s no yesterday! the boat itself! the rain! the stupid hope! rainbows! that bossy god! the whole fucking hopeless soggy mess—, who has forgotten the taste for land, this voyage out, through the unknown, the sky and sea black as your mortgage, our hearts drowning in the abyss, drinking poison as if it were mango juice from deliquescent tits, some oracle to oracles yet always somehow oracled, who really don’t see the difference between a mushroom and a caterpillar, made half of maggots, half of pomegranate dreams, and half of other things:

we are the new shamans and yes we’re stealing because that’s what good ideas are for and we’re stealing everything we like from everybody and everything but it’s not ours just like it wasn’t theirs just like it’s not yours because the earth’s the earth and factories are factories and these are what we’re made of and, like them, a shaman is whatever I want it to be:  warped, garbled, incompetent, corrupt, possessed, ennui’d, pure, curious, rigorous, amoral, contradictory, impossible, a little screw in a dirty cubicle, virtuous, productive, ecstatic as the stars, rarely clear, a liar in a lair some say, a miasma of melancholy, whimsical, indolent, a little granola with your tea? a schlump, an imposter, a thorny horny corny whiny porny wornout sage, a barometer of nothing and a stroll down Madison what is it? yeah yeah you’re one too and so am I and so’s my god amen.

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[1] ([{Who are some modern shamans?  You want names, you who love to acquire names, who stack them like money, thinking this will give good account of your souls?  I’ll give you names.  Artaud, Weil, Nietzsche, Whitman, Bozulich, Baudelaire, a poet or inmate here and there (no shaman will call itself a shaman), all nameless naming ones, of the cry in the dishwasher, of titillating night}])

A My-god-sanctioned Funeral

My god, being a companion of death, like all gods, twisted into transience, whispers its fantasies to me in the wormy glory of night.  (What language does my god speak?  English? Sanskrit? Godic? Silence? Brik?  Only my god knows.  I only know I understand.)  One such recent fantasy suggested a perfect aesthetic-physical union, joining eros (art in its purity) and thanatos (flesh in its purity) on the social-historical stage.  (My god excels at such metaphysical copulations, being my god.)  The fantasy spectacularly consummated Jerusalem and Athens, time and eternity, in an orgy of calm and seasoned histrionics, the archetypal Artaudian[1] Théâtre de la Cruauté, the dream of every civilized human if humans were civilized, which they aren’t, civilization simply being to be in love with one’s god and, yet, when we look around, so many aren’t in love and this is the only thing to mourn.

The fantasy was this.

When I’m ready to die[2] I hold a great feast—13 grand courses, which I prepare myself, outrageously aged and expensive wines researched and paired for each course, the entire enterprise being decades envisioning, years planning, months executing, and weeks in kitchen chaos … indeed, we could say that my entire life would be devoted solely to its meticulous enactment.  I invite 100 people to it:  the 100 people who have been most important in my life—not determined primarily by recent influence, by time, but by the deep algorithms of the soul.

Five minutes into the feast and every five minutes thereafter one of the guests leaves:  beginning with the least important to me of the 100, and so on, until only my four children remain.  While I objected that the selection (and, most particularly, the order) would cause friction (both in myself and the guests), my god just shrugged—What, I heard, is fiction,[3] other than a seal on the desk of the divine?

The meal goes on through all of this:  hours and hours and quaff and quaff while the driff and hours and droff depart and the quaff lingers like an opaque and circuitous joke.  Then, finally, bliss and gorge united, at the end of the twelfth course, I kill myself in an innovative and comic way (my god leaves no detailed prescriptions as to method), my children prepare my body in a suitable manner and eat me as the thirteenth course.  A fulfillment and parody of Christ, of Athens, London, a live parody play of the play and parody and life … and, so, art and religion, art and death, art and everything, everything and everything, are consummated.

My god!  What impossible perfection! What seductive fantasy! What smooth and edible ends!

Yet, should you respond less than positively to this plan, should you be enticed and bubbly by the happy victuals but less so, quite less so, by the hierarchies and blood (yet were there not hierarchies and blood in so many of the courses, in the genealogies of wine?), might you be tempted to interpret your responses as a sign of your virtue?  But might your temptation (like so many temptations) be a comfortable invitation into a cushioned corner in a closet of the mind, away from the searing bonfires of flesh?  Might this not be a sign of our cultural pathos about pathos?  Might it be cowardice wearing an expensive coat of intelligence?

Our funerals are pathetic, kinspeople in death!  Funerals should be orgies of doors, searing portals of imagination, the raw truth of the body stuck between our teeth, vaudeville and leaping … they should go on for years.

We are a people who do not celebrate death; is this not because we fear, in the absence of God and the overweening presence of pharmaceuticals, the lack of any semblance of solid hope … that is, we fear ourselves, whom we must know, if we know at all, are hardly any avatars of dependability or certainty, but, if anything, vague gusts in a mottled and eternal dusk or dawn (we don’t know which or what!)?  Death is what we are, kin-coffins and sockets of vision.  Homo homo thanatoi.  What pansies are we not to paint pirouetting colors on our verdant mortality, on that substance of substances, on our fear?

Perhaps we have swallowed—yet not adequately digested and shat out—the Christian god’s teleology and think (most perversely!) that we now live on the golden bricks that pave the path to Heaven or Oz (or Redmond … what does it matter?).  Can we play a ruse on time (this our trust and gamble), using technology (that god’s firstborn son), encoding ourselves in worms and algorithms and satellites (where does it matter? it matters! everywhere!) so that we shall play endlessly—mirrors of math, morphing amoebas of art, encapsulated cold divinities—to the gasping stars?

Ah, my cool and cooling rationalists, who shall celebrate the sparkling doubt of molecules on the banquet table of their body?  Who shall climb the ladder of the stars?

I have listened to a fantasy my god whispered to me in the wormy glory of night and when I am ready to die I will prepare a feast and invite 100 guests and be eaten by my children.

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[1] See Dr. Foof β. Spätlese’s article, “Correspondences of Artaud, With a Notable Absence of References to B*********” in Non-Baudelairean Correspondences (LXII:18), in which Dr. Spätlese examines the dialectic of art and toad in Artaud and its relationship to a proposed Tanzanian literature on suffering intimated in Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles.

[2] A certain indicator of our lack of civilization is that we don’t know when we’re ready to die, but think that we must cling to life with whatever savings plans and vials we can muster.  The elder monk in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is the noble and stark antithesis of our decadence:  he knows his god—his body-spirit unity—and thus knows equally when his god is ready to seek a new home.  What arrogance! What humility! What union of eyes! What evolutionary bliss!

[3] It’s true—I heard fiction … but what’s an ar or an or between heaven and earth?

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 human¾is 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 say¾if it could speak¾I 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 inevitable¾that 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.