For a change of scene I went out once again (metaphor!) for a stroll among the galaxies. I didn’t want to know another thing about the big girl in heat and what she was up to or not. I am God, not a peeping Tom, or some kamikaze friar raring to detox the little planet from its poisonous techno-consumer drug habit, its allergy to transcendence in any shape or form, and its obsession with sexual gratification. She can copulate with whomever she wants, that godless creature with her far-apart bird eyes. Let her be tortured in bondage gear or sodomized by a rhinoceros, it’s all the same to me. I’m going to calm down now, I thought, but in fact I was getting even more upset.
However, once I’d put a couple billion light years between me and the Earth (and its inescapable familiarity with evil) I began to feel better. The way a person befuddled by stress abandons the chaos of a metropolis and slips into a peaceable forest (I’m trying to draw a parallel here that can speak to everyone) I was able to rest my eyes and ears and empty my brain of every last thought. It did me good, as getting down from a train benefits the passenger—and wormholes through space-time are not so different from a railroad train—it did me good to idle through that awesome gallery of gargantuan abstract paintings, or perhaps I should say surrealist. Full of innumerable chromatic nuances, but as always violet and emerald green, watery ocher tints shading into pearl gray: my favorite colors as far back as the Creation. Among colors I include infrareds, which bring a pleasant warmth to the skin (those that have skin), and X rays, so energizing, like intravenous caffeine, a soft drug. And then there are radio waves and their odd, enigmatic cacophony, like contemporary electronic music played at the bottom of a cave heard by an ear plastered to an aperture at the mouth. When I refer to colors, it’s merely a figure of speech.
Dillydallying without any precise destination, I came upon a blue star. Blue, like Daphne’s eyes, I found myself thinking. It was magnificent, a precious stone set in the cosmos. Splendid in a way that was also heart-wrenching, that made one apprehensive, perhaps because blue stars are such ephemeral things: four or five million years and they’re gone. Contemplating them, it’s impossible not to think of this tragic fact. As I’m sure you’re aware, a god’s not compatible with a cell phone, or I would have snapped a photo.
I then passed near one of those elderly stars on which humans have slapped a name that might better suit a discotheque out in the sticks. Supernova. The light coming off that colossal explosion was so blinding I almost regretted not having my sunglasses (truth is, I never wear them, so New Age). Even an amateur stargazer knows that these old boilers host deadly fission explosions compared to which the nuclear weapons that humans are so afraid of are harmless firecrackers.
It was quite hot, although I don’t suffer from the heat, and I don’t sweat either. The stellar storm was so devastating it would have ripped out my hair, if I had hair. Immateriality does have some advantages. The chemical scents—roasted manganese, and especially sulfuric acid, with underlying notes of methylcyanoacetylene—were nice, admittedly, but truly very strong.
It does make you think: that immense ball of light brighter than hundreds of millions of their Suns, apparently the quintessence of life, was actually in its death throes. A blazing and utterly splendid demise, but still a last hurrah. Why things appeared this way to me, why it made me so uneasy to think of death, I couldn’t say. Maybe all this expressing myself in the human mode had contaminated me? It distressed me (and I’m the first to be amazed here) to think that Daphne would very soon be deceased.
Now don’t let yourself succumb to melancholy thoughts, I told myself: the dust spat out by that fearsome Roman candle will give birth to other stars, maybe even more beautiful, and those will bring forth others. Oh, and check out the cheerful happening involving that group of black dwarfs to my right—in front of the ravenous mouth of a black hole—pulsing, spinning, shrinking, extending their arms and shaking their hips like great dancers. One of them had psychedelic concentric halos, like a phosphorescent onion wearing fifty brightly colored windbreakers one on top of the other; another with huge owl eyes, great reflecting mandalas; a third like an hourglass full of neon tubes of all colors. It was like, correcting for proportion, being at the Carnival in Rio, or one of the Gay Prides.
Just look at all the gorgeous galaxies I’ve created! I thundered, thrilled with what I saw and very proud to be God. I am God, I said, enjoying that feeling you get contemplating something you’ve made with your own hands, the satisfaction of a job well done, of time well spent. Of course the euphoria of a god has nothing in common with human pride; it’s steeped in perfection, it’s perfection itself. However, the immediate sensation was in some ways similar, and a whirl of great ideas spun through my head, a myriad of plans for the future.*
* Before I began this diary, I’d never been aware of having highs and lows, or maybe I was simply always in the same gelid mood. Talking and thinking, one ends up getting confused.
Wandering about, nowhere in particular, I came upon two spiral galaxies of about the same size, engaged in that step back they take after they’ve completed the courtesies of the first approach, a step that portends actual fusion. As often happens at this stage of the collision, they already had a tender brood of just-born stars between them, the little ones palpitating and bickering like chicks bursting with infant energy. Even the high-pitched crackling sounds they made from their nest, protected from the great stellar winds provoked by the embrace of the parents, sounded like the cries of famished infants. Later, one at a time, each would set out on its own solitary way, at times a fatal one even in the prime of life, but for now they were reveling in careless youth.
That family portrait, so joyous and tender, touched me deeply. For the very first time I felt an indescribable turbulence inside, something like a father’s yearning, or perhaps a great-grandfather’s. But when I examined the feeling, there was in my languor (I can’t think of a more suitable word I could pick from the lexicon’s shallow little cauldron) a sort of nostalgia for something I’d have liked to have and didn’t have. I don’t know, someone to chat with once in a while, a friend to talk to in despondent moments. If not actually a family, children. They weren’t very divine emotions, banal as they were. But they were such sweet sensations that I couldn’t shrug them off.