The bespectacled geneticist, all bones and pointy asymmetric angles above and maybe a little too plump below, is convinced that science can explain everything. How the universe was formed, where it’s going from here, the meaning of everything that happens. In her mind, there is just one true explanation, one single transcendent entity, and that is the Theory of Evolution. She believes that one day very soon science will reveal how life itself came forth. Peering into her test tubes with those far-apart bird eyes, she dreams she sees the first spark of the reenactment. You’d think it was some heirloom recipe: one good solid or gaseous ingredient, a defined sequence of chemical reactions, and poof, there you have it, a living being.
She’s not the only one, heaven knows. As time goes by human beings grow more and more inebriated by what they think is their unique talent: their so-called reason. They don’t see that whether it’s rational or irrational, cerebral activity is always faulty and misleading. Reasoning, by definition, gradually homes in on one particular aspect, revealing, in that foolish arbitrary focus, how fallacious and worthless it is. While the only truth is All, the whole, that is to say, God, the undersigned. And so-called reason is only an illusion—slightly less fickle perhaps but still utterly fanciful—of unreason, of the hardwired need human beings have to believe in something. But this they cannot know because they are unable to think about thought (human language makes it impossible to say that better).
Humans throw themselves into their tiny scientific breakthroughs to distract themselves from their finite condition, the way elderly women sew cross-stitch patterns on table linen to keep the aches and the pains and the approaching end at bay. And yes, they have achieved some modest results: for example, they can photograph bacteria, exchange kidneys, fly from one part of the planet to another, even if painfully slowly (the vapor trails their vehicles leave in the sky remind me of snail slime). But in order to arrive at those tiny conquests, they have wrought devastation everywhere, and put their future in question. And at every step of their so-called progress they conceal the consequences, the looming catastrophe.
It was obvious to me from the days when they began to employ their rudimentary telescopes and their Torricelli tubes that, just as the investigators of the Inquisition had perfectly understood, the aim of these scientists (their term) was to compete with me. So that one day they could take my place. If however these wise guys considered that a nuclear-powered rocket would take thousands of human lifetimes to cross a small-to-medium-size galaxy—not to mention clusters of galaxies—and that the temperature inside the most peaceable of stars is a couple million degrees above that of the water in which they boil their pasta, the pressure several million times greater than the cooker they use for artichokes, not to mention the fact that Andromeda is heading straight toward them at a speed of 430,000 miles per hour, well, they might be less cocky. Instead they’re convinced they are advancing by leaps and bounds, that the future holds amazing promise.
And yet, and yet. I must confess that scientific discoveries have always intrigued me. Does that seem strange? Well, I never claimed to be consistent. I enjoy watching matter and organisms be ground up and digested by human intelligence (however limited), seeing complex phenomena reduced to austere algebraic formulae, to gelid equations. As you can probably imagine, the various scientific disciplines with their high-sounding names offer me no novel discoveries—given that everything was created by me with my own hands, I’d be tempted to say if I didn’t mind sounding bombastic. I know full well what they are and what they contain, but still, I find them amusing. Paradoxically, I find that scientific laws, so awkward and insistently insecure, almost always have a graceful side. But above all it’s the enigmatic poetry of mathematics (which for me is just a vague approximation, a baby’s confused babbling) that I like.
Incongruous as it may seem, a god likes to keep up with his times, he’s interested in what’s new. You might even say the new galvanizes him, if the term, which makes me think of frogs’ legs twitching, weren’t so impossibly un-divine. There is really nothing new for a god; nope, it’s all as ancient as the beginning of time, given that past and future are one. Still, those human novelties stir him to stay informed. To review various notions that have grown a bit vague. It’s like opening at any random page a great encyclopedia written a long time ago. Anyway, I’ve always been curious, although that adjective needs to be purified of all its human sludge.
When I was young (allow me) I was crazy about animals; I could study them for years, for centuries. Damn, I’m great, I would think, impressed by how many I’d made and how different each was from another, with the strangest of habits and the most unimaginable particulars. And of course they’d change over time. They’d evolve, as the biologists say: these people see evolution in a pot of pasta cooking. Sure, it was all prescribed from the beginning, but there were undeniable coups de théâtre: fish that stood up and walked on dry land, big lizards that sprouted wings and began to fly, all kinds of stuff. I didn’t need that Darwin fellow with the chronic depression to point it out to me.
As I grow older, though (as it were), I have to say it’s the humans who interest me most. They bug me, that barbarous cult of technology of theirs and their contempt for the things that matter; they enrage me; I’m always thinking I must teach them the lesson they deserve. But I can’t stop looking at them. I have no idea what’s happening to me; it’s like a drug. (A god on drugs!)