Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

So maybe we could all go on an outing to the cave together? The fierce atheist is in an ecumenical mood. The tiny one, shoulders quivering like a tender fawn, says that caves give her claustrophobia. She’d gone in one once but felt like she was back in prison, and nearly suffocated. Thinking that she’d been rude to their host, she is now trying to compensate. (A reader may wonder how the writer knows what a character’s thinking, but in my case the point’s moot.) Don G., in a typical petty male reaction, takes his girlfriend literally, and remarks that she much prefers an iguana to a cave, that’s the problem. We’re all free to find iguanas more interesting than holes in a mountainside , she replies, revealing her gum-colored gums. At least my caves don’t bite , he shoots back, showing off a scar on the side of his hand. [12] If there is one sphere in which humans reveal their lack of perfection, it’s the couple . I personally have never seen a pair of penguins shouting vile accusations at each other about mothers-in-law or nail scissors. Humans on the other hand are forever dissatisfied, they seem to go out of their way to find reasons to squabble. Or rather, after a brief pacific idyll comes a crescendo of misunderstanding and reciprocal intolerance until full-scale war breaks out. Not a pretty picture in a species so devoted to crooning love tunes, one that considers itself a thousand times superior to all others.

After she pours them coffee with cardamom pods, the lanky microbiologist throws two hefty blocks of wood on the fire. The spelunker, testosterone thrumming, wonders if the logs came from a crucifix, and she says they were beams swiped from a nearby building site, next to the Indian who sells cell phones supplied by the Camorra. She answers as though she regrets no crucifix was involved.

Now the iguana-lover speaks up, her voice as pure as a jet of water, languidly caressing the words. Has she always burned crucifixes? Oh boy, I knew the reptile-hugger would soon come to hate her tall rival—hate her with every neuron of her brain, every cell of her myocardium—but right now you might almost think she likes her. Rosa Luxemburg of the purple locks replies that she’s been burning them for years, only when it’s cold, of course. If everyone did, it would solve the problem of the Catholic Church’s overweening power , says the seducer, currying favor. His wee friend asks where she found all those crucifixes and the other looks blank as though she doesn’t understand the question. Nailed to the wall , she says finally, seeing no polemical intent, just plain curiosity.

A good many human beings believe God’s at their service. Billions of them, even the most dismal failures, the least presentable, bask in the ludicrous conviction that God has nothing better to do than indulge their petty, insignificant point of view, see the universe from their perspective. Which, you understand, would be technically possible: the ability to perform multiple tasks, to identify with an infinite number of subjects—to seven billion human beings we must add billions of billions of billions of protozoa, insects, arachnids, myriapods, sponges, annelids, mollusks, springtails, and so forth and so on—the exponential multiplication of points of view, that is, and the filing of all the necessary information, are just some of the basic tricks of the trade.

So I repeat, it would be doable. But I don’t do it. A god must keep his distance, if only to maintain his image and avoid spreading himself too thin. But also to allow each of them to show what he or she is worth morally. It would be pointless to set up the Last Judgment (supposing I were in fact to realize that tribunal my alleged son is always going on about—in short, to calculate the bottom line). My philosophy, to use a word I’ve never liked, is this: Grant everyone the maximum freedom, then do the accounting.

Others—many, too many—make the opposite mistake. They are convinced I don’t exist. These are the fundamentalists of reason, science, and progress, the fanatics of logic, of the French Revolution, social leveling and democratic procedure. The type who go around saying God is just a drug, that minus God human beings could finally realize themselves and be content (as if anything would satisfy them for long). Emaciated philosophers and poets who grin nervously, swelling with pride to think they can face existence without a shred of meaning or sense. And above all, billions of wise guys who take advantage of my absence to wallow in materialism, with no thought for anything but consuming as many goods as possible, pleasuring themselves to the max day after day. In place of the old rites (but in need of some liturgical celebration) they mount noisy musical performances and ball games, these too steeped in commodity fetishism.

And then there are the in-betweens, the chronically undecided. The way they see it, maybe I exist and maybe not, maybe I’ve got the cosmos in hand and maybe I don’t, maybe I’m omnipotent and maybe I’m a figment of somebody’s imagination, like Sancho Panza and Emma Bovary: they don’t know and they can’t be bothered to find out. They shrug their shoulders, they’re proud to be so open-minded. Quite often these opportunists dabble in certain fanciful religions that hold I’m an Immense Intelligence, a Supreme Postulate, a Cosmic Essence, the Big Poo-Bah. In some ways these maxi-vacillators are even more of a pain in the backside than the infidels, if I may say so. I wouldn’t mind suddenly materializing before them wearing my big beard, hair receding at the temples (according to the painters of the Renaissance and the Baroque), to see how they react. Somebody looking for me? I’d snarl, like the Most Wanted dude in a crime movie. Anybody want a kick where the sun don’t shine from the Universal Hive Mind?

Of course it’s not easy for a human being to understand who I am, how I think (as it were), what I’m capable of. It’s like asking a protozoan to describe an elephant: he could tell you about an infinitesimal portion of one hair on the scrotum, or about a single epidermal cell from the auditory canal of the right ear, in short whatever was right there before him, but he’d never be able to describe the elephant in all its majestic entirety. Obviously the difference between (wo)man and me is a billion billion times greater than that between a human and a protozoan, and an elephant does not embody the meaning of all things; mine was just a rather vivid example.

If you want to gauge how discerning they are, just look at how well they understand one another. From scraps of information, misunderstandings and misinterpretations, they stitch up a crazy quilt of inferences, enhancing the picture with bits of their own unrelated experience, void of logic, far from the facts, often quite contradictory and even perfectly antithetical. Wrapped up in this Harlequin’s coat they spin mad plots and fairy-tale fantasies that explain little more than their own obsessions and failures.

And yet, most things (wo)men do are peculiarly in accord with the way they’d like to be seen. They spend most of their time misleading, pretending, feigning, and dissimulating. Truth is, every human being is a shrewd professional liar, a seasoned actor capable of great performances. Faking it is one of their native talents—also necessary and characteristic—just as nightingales are born to sing and kangaroos to hop. Every species has a specialty; theirs is charlatanism. In short, they were created defective, and things have only gone downhill with time. My self-appointed son, I mean the emaciated hippie who claims he came forth from third-party insemination, tried to sort them out, but he seems to have done more harm than good.