At times I don’t feel like myself. I was, and continue to be God, I possess all the prerogatives and faculties of a monotheistic deity—and you can take that to the bank. Although how you take a statement of fact to the bank, as if it were an endorsed check or a jar of pennies, I couldn’t say. There are moments now when I fear that things are no longer right with me. I’m annoyed at the snakes (poor things, never did anybody any harm except to get mixed up in the notorious expulsion from Paradise—assuming the story wasn’t made up by some bard with a galloping imagination—I myself don’t remember anything of the kind). Instead of some more worthy occupation,* I’m here staring, like a fool scientist bewitched by the microbes at the other end of the microscope, at those three in an ugly kitchen on the multiethnic urban fringe of a tiny planet whirling around a starlet in a little galaxy fancifully named the Milky Way.
* There’s a range of possibilities, from 1) watching from the presidential box while a star that has run out of gas gets badly crushed by gravity, 2) standing under a shower of X-rays from a white dwarf; to 3) surfing space-time on the back of a gigantic gravitational wave.
In theory it shouldn’t matter one blessed iota to me whether this merry-go-round of sexual partners (for that’s what this is all about) spins faster or slower, or whether all three of them throw themselves off a cliff or perish in a horrendous car crash. Instead I have a feeling I’ve waded into something new, something connected with those tawdry mood swings, or rather endocrine swings underlying the bipeds’† melodramatic yearnings, and the messes they make, their stubborn and incurable and tedious unhappiness, preparatory to the great collective suicide they’re approaching. I find this hard to believe, naturally.
† It should be said that in the beginning, they weren’t bipeds: most everyone’s seen the vignette with the ape on all fours, then crouching, then gradually standing upright until finally he’s wearing a necktie. Oh well, I doubt that many theologians would feel comfortable with Adam in the ape phase.
I should stop writing. Stop writing, stop thinking. Things would improve instantly; I’d stop staring at the so-called Milky Way and return to contemplating the cosmos, which after all I’m so fond of. Millions of years would go by without me even noticing, as it used to be. I’d be in heaven once again, as they say.
It’s a titanic struggle wrestling with a language that wasn’t made for a god. Everything I say distorts my thoughts (that word!), leads me to utter further nonsense that I don’t mean to say and find repellent. My supreme visions and sublime notions emerge as profoundly petty, self-interested and vulgar, not to say dishonest—pronouncements in which I don’t recognize myself at all. I try to dodge every trap, every ruse, to pay more attention, and the result is even more alarming. Some god I am, if human language can overpower me. It’s a shattering experience in many ways. As if a god could be shattered!
If I find myself in this regrettable situation it’s because I’m a monotheistic deity. If I had some colleagues (or whatever), we would certainly have devised our own irreproachable language, billions and billions of words that zoom around in all directions like sparks rather than follow one another in slavish single file like dumb ants. A three-dimensional language with a syntax that even a hundred thousand years of superhuman effort by the most brilliant linguists wouldn’t be able to decrypt. An ethereal parlance, crystalline, utterly free of the sordidness, the ugliness, the pestilence that trails after every human action in a fateful train of electrons. A language that expresses peace and order and harmony. Not one that makes me feel like a deposed king in rags, rooting around in the garbage bins in search of some usable remains.