Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

The iguana occupies the apartment’s lone bedroom, now converted to an iguana pad complete with an infrared lamp to warm the beast. Poised on the highest branch of the leafless tree wedged between floor and ceiling, the thing seems to be asleep; she doesn’t move a millimeter, although she stares at them with her prehistoric iguana eyes. Can I touch her? the tall one wants to know. The short one says just avoid any brusque movements, you don’t know each other yet. She strokes the reptile’s back the way she does with her cows, feeling their warmth. The iguana, however, is barely room temperature. The way the beast gazes at her protector, the way the latter in turn plays with the spiky mane behind the reptile’s head, it’s pretty clear they’re involved. It’s the cockatoo who’s not over the moon; he’s plastered himself to his servant’s head (that’s how he sees her), the feathers on his neck standing straight up.

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, [23] 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. 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.

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’ [24] 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. 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.

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.

Back at the table the three youngsters are eating millet pudding with organic cactus pear garnish that short stuff has prepared, washing it down with the non-organic Turkish wine provided by the neo-punk researcher. It’s just delicious, this timbale with boar ragù , quips the tomcat. He seems to want to play the comedian to please their guest. This lamebrain is carnivorous , sighs the little one, as if she’s speaking of something truly gruesome. You’re the only one here who’s herbivorous, the rest of us are omnivores, Vittorio snaps back, looking for complicity in their new friend. She smiles at both, face frozen in a mask of discomfort, as one does when couples pick at each other in public.

The soon to be two-timed zoologist explains that she stopped eating animals when she was still a girl; she couldn’t bear to swallow, whether raw or cooked, bits of the corpses of beings that are humans reincarnated, or one day will be. Dead fish have the same effect on her. I come from a tribe of cannibals, alas; my father was crazy about baby fingers , her cocky companion butts in. I know what you mean; I’m not wild about eating meat either, although sometimes I do , says the lanky one in shorty’s direction. The jokester, meanwhile, has turned to stone, his fork frozen in midair.

The wee warrior is radiant. Three-quarters of all the grain cultivated, she points out, is transformed by livestock into manure, obviously inedible, and the animals that produce it also belch out methane, a foul greenhouse gas. Fish are caught and ground into meal, then fed to farmed fish, chickens, and pigs to become millions of tons of more feces, drenched in antibiotics and other highly polluting muck. And the number of the world’s carnivores continues to rise, as spirituality declines in poor countries and they convert to globalized cannibalism. And now they’re even cloning farm animals, although it’s kept hush-hush. The young man, brushing a suffering nineteenth-century artist’s lock off his brow, says that cannibalism or no cannibalism, whatever last-ditch solutions people put forward are like trying to resuscitate a dead body. All the climate indicators suggest that the sinking of the Titanic is imminent, even if the dancers in the ballroom are enjoying themselves too much to be aware.

Ms. Einstein gazes at her wineglass as if it were a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. Science will come up with answers for all these problems, there’s no need to be overly pessimistic, she says. Scientific research subservient to the interests of the transnational oligarchies will merely accelerate the speed of the driverless race car, soon to smash into the Great Wall of reinforced concrete , says the tomcat, his brow traced with existential lines. His reaction is unexpected, but he’s no shrinking violet, and the hormonal storm underway only boosts his combative spirit. You do nothing but preach; I’ve never seen you move your ass one inch, short stuff snaps back.