HUMANS, THEIR PREPOSTEROUS CONCEIT
A good many human beings believe God’s at their service. Billions of them, even the most dismal failures, the least presentable, bask in the ludicrous conviction that God has nothing better to do than indulge their petty, insignificant point of view, see the universe from their perspective. Which, you understand, would be technically possible: the ability to perform multiple tasks, to identify with an infinite number of subjects—to seven billion human beings we must add billions of billions of billions of protozoa, insects, arachnids, myriapods, sponges, annelids, mollusks, springtails, and so forth and so on—the exponential multiplication of points of view, that is, and the filing of all the necessary information, are just some of the basic tricks of the trade.
So I repeat, it would be doable. But I don’t do it. A god must keep his distance, if only to maintain his image and avoid spreading himself too thin. But also to allow each of them to show what he or she is worth morally. It would be pointless to set up the Last Judgment (supposing I were in fact to realize that tribunal my alleged son is always going on about—in short, to calculate the bottom line). My philosophy, to use a word I’ve never liked, is this: Grant everyone the maximum freedom, then do the accounting.
Others—many, too many—make the opposite mistake. They are convinced I don’t exist. These are the fundamentalists of reason, science, and progress, the fanatics of logic, of the French Revolution, social leveling and democratic procedure. The type who go around saying God is just a drug, that minus God human beings could finally realize themselves and be content (as if anything would satisfy them for long). Emaciated philosophers and poets who grin nervously, swelling with pride to think they can face existence without a shred of meaning or sense. And above all, billions of wise guys who take advantage of my absence to wallow in materialism, with no thought for anything but consuming as many goods as possible, pleasuring themselves to the max day after day. In place of the old rites (but in need of some liturgical celebration) they mount noisy musical performances and ball games, these too steeped in commodity fetishism.
And then there are the in-betweens, the chronically undecided. The way they see it, maybe I exist and maybe not, maybe I’ve got the cosmos in hand and maybe I don’t, maybe I’m omnipotent and maybe I’m a figment of somebody’s imagination, like Sancho Panza and Emma Bovary: they don’t know and they can’t be bothered to find out. They shrug their shoulders, they’re proud to be so open-minded. Quite often these opportunists dabble in certain fanciful religions that hold I’m an Immense Intelligence, a Supreme Postulate, a Cosmic Essence, the Big Poo-Bah. In some ways these maxi-vacillators are even more of a pain in the backside than the infidels, if I may say so. I wouldn’t mind suddenly materializing before them wearing my big beard, hair receding at the temples (according to the painters of the Renaissance and the Baroque), to see how they react. Somebody looking for me? I’d snarl, like the Most Wanted dude in a crime movie. Anybody want a kick where the sun don’t shine from the Universal Hive Mind?
Of course it’s not easy for a human being to understand who I am, how I think (as it were), what I’m capable of. It’s like asking a protozoan to describe an elephant: he could tell you about an infinitesimal portion of one hair on the scrotum, or about a single epidermal cell from the auditory canal of the right ear, in short whatever was right there before him, but he’d never be able to describe the elephant in all its majestic entirety. Obviously the difference between (wo)man and me is a billion billion times greater than that between a human and a protozoan, and an elephant does not embody the meaning of all things; mine was just a rather vivid example.
If you want to gauge how discerning they are, just look at how well they understand one another. From scraps of information, misunderstandings and misinterpretations, they stitch up a crazy quilt of inferences, enhancing the picture with bits of their own unrelated experience, void of logic, far from the facts, often quite contradictory and even perfectly antithetical. Wrapped up in this Harlequin’s coat they spin mad plots and fairy-tale fantasies that explain little more than their own obsessions and failures.
And yet, most things (wo)men do are peculiarly in accord with the way they’d like to be seen. They spend most of their time misleading, pretending, feigning, and dissimulating. Truth is, every human being is a shrewd professional liar, a seasoned actor capable of great performances. Faking it is one of their native talents—also necessary and characteristic—just as nightingales are born to sing and kangaroos to hop. Every species has a specialty; theirs is charlatanism. In short, they were created defective, and things have only gone downhill with time. My self-appointed son, I mean the emaciated hippie who claims he came forth from third-party insemination, tried to sort them out, but he seems to have done more harm than good.
I have to admit, though, at times they’re entertaining. Not that a god needs amusement, God forbid, but these clowns are so full of themselves, they’re such hucksters, so reliably unpredictable, immoral, and nuts that anyone observing them is soon transfixed. They’re devious, like television: you end up glued to the screen even if you’re not interested, even when you know it’s just an indiscriminate ploy to grab your attention. Lucky for them they have no competition. There’s not a single form of organic matter in the entire universe that even faintly matches their sly industriousness, ubiquitous meddling, clumsy-but-cunning illogic, their skill at getting something out of every new situation.
SO-CALLED LOVE IN GESTATION
The following day the giantessa with the sideways braidlets wakes in a good humor. As dawn breaks under the raised awning, she waves good morning to the Indian across the street, who’s now busy converting his bedroom into a shop. Outside, mounting her twin-cylinder, she takes off. At the Cattle Breeders Federation she selects, from the vials nested in liquid nitrogen, doses of the semen of a German bull that’s all the rage that season. Then she’s off for another Alpine valley not far from the city but not wrongly considered quite backward.
The owner of the dairy farm is a typical denizen of this valley of pre-digital cavemen, and with a cigarette clenched between his teeth, his muttering is hard to understand. She removes her helmet and he can’t believe his eyes: not only is her hair purple, she’s not a man. An artificial inseminator who’s female, wears a ring in one nostril and a black leather jacket with studs is quite a novelty. Paralyzed, he hovers next to her throughout the entire operation, eyes bulging at her every move, ready to let out a scream. As she always does in these situations, she pretends not to notice. From time to time she has to cope with one of these lobotomized farmers. She doesn’t treat the matter lightly, though; she knows she must perform better than the best male around if she wants to be judged his equal. She can feel the yokel’s tribal gaze burning into her hands and skin. If he had the nerve he’d confess his doubts, the way you complain to a trusted friend. She’s had that happen too.
Our tall sorceress doesn’t wonder why she’s so cool about this oaf literally breathing down her neck, she doesn’t ask herself why she’s feeling euphoric. She’s distracting herself using a tried and true human technique, thinking about the night before. Not about Prince Charming’s ravishing good looks, but about his girlfriend. That medieval peasant outfit she had on was lovely, and she looked good in it, she has a natural elegance. The giantessa doesn’t usually go for the thrift-shop look, it reminds her of old photos of her mother. But this sticks in her mind. You don’t have to be a mind reader, though, to know that pretty soon, she and the fellow with the hieratic hairstyle—drawn together by their mutual Darwinian fundamentalism—will gang up and eliminate her rival. Not that they’ll necessarily be an item for long, mind you.