Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

Casanova meanwhile thinks it’s time to split from short stuff. The more he thinks about it, the more he finds her ecological fetishes and her dreams of playing the medieval peasant intolerable. But it’s a delicate situation; he’ll have to move carefully. If he does everything properly, he thinks, she won’t cause him problems.

Truth is, she’s already smelled a rat , because when it comes to this type of thing, the antennae of a human being can out-sense those of a cricket. She saw the games he was playing to stay close to the tall one on the night of the toads, she noticed his testosteronic turmoil when he reappeared, she concluded he’d probably kissed the other, just as he’d kissed her a couple of years ago, as he’s kissed many others even while they were together, swearing when found out, never again. She ought to be jealous, maybe she is even a little jealous, but much, much less than she had expected. She has to admit she’s the first to be surprised.

If you think God has no esthetic sense, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Nope, if there’s someone who appreciates beautiful things and will do anything to preserve and promote them, that’s me. [20] Primitive man knew this: they used to make me touching likenesses and nice votive objects. They thought I was a fat lady with abundant thighs and Fellinian breasts and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise, although they worshiped me as best they could. When they got a bit closer to the mark, they began to turn out altars carved in the rock, temples, churches, cathedrals, statues in all kinds of materials, frescoes, paintings with sumptuous virgins and bearded saints, rosaries, ostensoria. It’s always a pleasure to receive nice presents. You know, if I didn’t have this passion for nice things I would have put my energy into function, not form: trees of shapeless gelatin broth, made of a revolting goo like industrial waste. Neon lights that suddenly flick off, instead of sunsets. Bundles of rusty tubes instead of waterfalls; hideous traps baited with smelly hormones to attract insects instead of flowers. Pardon me if this sounds like vanity, but I think I can say I’ve made a ton of wonders.

Not one tiresome philosopher (there have been many) has ever maintained that the earth is repulsive and nature dreadful, not one scowling naturalist ever argued that the animal or vegetable kingdom needs to be redone. No twisted poet ever hailed the ocean, or his beloved, as nauseating. All the great men (I might as well say, all the great ants , or all the great lice ) have insisted upon the unbelievable perfection and magnificence of creation, turning out shelf upon shelf of verse and orotund metaphors. I count it this a great success, considering how fussy the humans are.

Frankly, it all stunned me, too. I created and created, unable to stop, and what blew me away, even more than the enormous quantity of species and their crazy variety of shapes and sizes, was the splendor of every single component. Sleek panthers, enchanting palms, hieratic giraffes, proud plovers, gorgeous orchids, the softest, greenest moss, shiny ladybugs, adorable daisies. Was it really me who created all this magnificence from nothing? It’s all very well being God, but it’s one thing to turn out cheesy stuff even if it’s perfectly technically sound; it’s another to produce pieces that belong in the best art galleries.

Here, it would be nice to be able to calmly view every single element, as people do in a science museum. Keep in mind, though, that it’s one thing to come across a lion when you’ve seen busloads of them on television, another to encounter one at close range when you still know nothing of lions. Will it bite? Lay an egg? Hibernate? Of course if I were to think about it I would know the answer, because I know everything, but in the frenzy of creation, I’m no longer sure. When you’re creating, there are no cigarette breaks, no union hours. You have to keep turning it out.

Contemporary so-called artists display washing machine parts, driftwood, bodies that have been run through, scrap iron, stones, photographs of genital organs and aged corpses, polystyrene chips, medicine bottles, naked women, even just their own excrement, and the public pretends to be mildly interested. In this age of screens and globalized idiocy, nobody seems to know how to hold a brush. I like paintings where the harmony reminds us that the universe has order, and behind that order, Me. Now if the Architect were someone else (crazy idea) I’d step right up and recognize his/her merits—this isn’t vanity. They mesmerize me, the electrons whirling like tireless dervishes around the nuclei of certain minuscule atoms. They send me into raptures, the transparent molecules of water, the perky, stubborn X–rays, the warrens of neat tree trunk cells, the vortices of white hot magma in the heart of the planet. I adore making myself very, very small to zoom around among the quarks as if they were great, majestic weather balloons.

But it’s the cosmos that holds the most unforgettable beauties. Lysergic acid, perhaps, might give a human being a pale idea of the glorious sparklings and phosphorescences, the shimmering, kaleidoscopic, ephemeral geometric patterns; the savage smells, some far too strong, others tenuous and vaguely mineral, just slightly more lingering than the faint memories to which they’re attached. Who could deny my grandeur before such pageantry? Certainly not the astrophysicists, who insist on peering at the universe from their ridiculous observatories and those spyglasses they think are enormous, who try to get the picture with radar and other feeble instruments. [21] They’re like those who think you can appreciate a beautiful woman from a series of X-rays and sonograms, never sampling the warm fine-grained, elastic skin, the sweet harmony of her curves, the minute but heartrending crevassing of her lips, and so on, all of it made more lovely by her delightful clothes and pleasing trinkets. At times I think I should take them for a spin around the terrifying, fascinating mouth of Sagittarius A*, no need to go much further. They would understand that their sterile sums and calculations are no more illuminating than knowing the number of atoms in a rosebud, they would surrender to beauty, which always comes with its ballast of mystery.

Recently, though, I find myself wrestling with strange questions. What is beauty? I ask, for example. From my point of view, is a beautiful girl (what men think of as a beautiful girl) really beautiful? Obviously not, I tell myself, because when the concept bella is applied to a girl, there’s a component of trivial carnal desire that offers insight, for anyone who needs it, into the instinctual slums of the human psyche. And I’m not referring to politically incorrect, though frequently employed, expressions like bella gnocca , “a nice piece” you might say, to avoid saying something more vulgar. Now if I were to say to someone (although it’s absurd to think I might say anything to anyone) that I’d seen a beautiful girl, it would represent an absolute guarantee of integrity; my pretty one wouldn’t be just pretty, she’d be morally certified. A virgin, a saint. However, a nice body remains a nice body. How to be sure every element gets its proper weight? How to pay tribute to the moral gifts without denigrating the physical side? How to avoid being poisoned by the moral side, which in the blink of an eye turns to moralism, bigotry?

Ms. Einstein, for example, is she beautiful ? According to human criteria her hands and feet are too big, her shoulders too broad, face too long, eyes too far apart, mouth too wide, and above all her rear end and thighs are too ample for her to qualify as a nice piece . The heavy egghead glasses and the punk Lolita pigtails don’t do much for her either. But in my view she has magnificent eyes, splendid hair, great ankles. For me she’s infinitely more beautiful than most actresses and models considered super .