Chapter Sixteen

1

And she is always eluding me through these monuments and ruins.  I try to hold her closer, but she will not stay in one place.  I watch Rome fall beneath her sightless eyes in the temples of Venus.  I watch the Greeks set fire to themselves.  I watch them pile the victims of her plague.

I tried to make those people so civilized, but she brought her barbarians down from the north to thwart me.  She cast the pieces of the puzzle to the four corners of the earth.  She allowed them time to wallow in mysterious cults, and fed them circuses instead of grain, instead of bread.

You wouldn’t have believed her audacity.  Several hundred years of stoicism, marble statuary, and military conquest.  Romans arguing in forums, and all the while they are distracted by her charms.  I would have raged against her temples.  I would have played the part of Zeus, but she was so elusive.  She was not there.

        And as a god I ask myself if I am divided from myself, or whether there remains some feminine part to play.  Am I a god of one gender, divided into my own mirror image, reflected in the concave?  Or am I instead some holy androgyny, with a push for every pull, and forgiveness for every grudge?  The thought of gender slips into my selfhood again, and I gaze down upon genitalia that are too remote for my viewing, too long in duration to be found out.  An insane god, perhaps, wishing for some place to interpenetrate.  

        Where are we?  Myself or Himself or Herself?  Where are we going?

But I am everywhere, and she is nowhere, and so there is nothing left for me to pierce, save my own well-developed sense of order.  She is laughing again, she is, and I can hear their murmuring.  I am not insane.  I do not want to be insane.

        I wonder what they say about me behind my back.  All of these Mayans and Centurions and Christians and Manicheans.  I know that they are all whispering about her, but the hallways of antiquity are wide, and I cannot make out the words.  I think that they are talking about me as well, and I would turn to her for solace, but she is not there.  I know that she relies upon me somehow, but every time I reach back to grasp her she has slipped away.

        In every grain of sand, a universe.  Smaller and smaller and smaller until smaller and smaller and smaller becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.  Upon the surface of a planet I gaze out upon the stars, but those stars are not stars.  Those stars are just other molecules in a finite system, finite system upon finite system, somehow adding up to infinity.  God has no part in the world, they say.  He or she or it or her is a clockmaker.  Or a god touched by emotions.  A god touched by lust.  Or a God infected with evil.  Or a God that is a theory, bounded by human prejudice, and pressed down by historical method.

        I wonder at Atlanteans, huddled away before the onset of books and papyrus.  Have they known her as well?  Have they performed the same rites?  Was she the seed of their undoing?  I talk to these other humans for five minutes, and they’re proclaiming me a monster, or a shadow, or both.  I am not sure which way to turn.  I might turn backwards down the length of History, or I might turn fearfully to the present uncertainty.  To her.

        It is well enough to talk about the weather today, and how our stocks are doing, and wars in distant places.  It is well enough to think of these as all happening now, concurrently, without our willing them into existence.  There is a role for an observer, but it is too much for anyone to bear all the time.  There is a memory lapse into the present tense.  There are fingers that clutch at ticks, and the clock ticking behind.  The wake is already behind the boat.  The ripples made by fingers over the surfaces of time have never happened.

        The barbarians are raping in the streets.  I see her beneath one of them, and she is in ecstasy.  That is no rape at all.  I watch her take on man after man, and in the end they are all limp before her.  They are all ashamed.  They cover their shame with papal robes.  They preach the coming of a messiah.  I want them to look to me for guidance, but they can never quite decide who or what I am.  Even small words escape them.  Small words shouted in the agoras.

        When Jesus was upon the cross he was not Jesus yet.  Not until someone wrote it all down.  When Philo mentioned Jesus he may not have mentioned Jesus at all.  If God walked as a man it must have seemed like an eternity in Hell.  If God, the limitless, could impose such limits on Himself.  But messiahs are never endowed with breasts.  Only the hindmost part.  Only a tail without a remedy.  Were you not my Mary then?  And how could you have been God, if not to bear it all quietly?

        I followed her into the exotic East, but her glory eclipsed my own.  It was only in the end that those emperors and penitents came my way.  Languages pieced together from a Mother tongue, and that is the entirety of the problem right there.  There is no Father tongue.  There is only me.

        He spits out words.  Careful there.  He bites.  We try to contain his outbursts, but the weight of the truths he has swallowed is writhing in his belly.  I once thought of spilling out all these guts upon the clean tile floor.  I wanted to see what I was made of.  I wanted to see the fragile part.  I wanted to see all those things that I could never gather back to myself, all of the poisons I had ingested, encased within all of the pale bloodied flesh, vulnerable to the light of an afternoon.

        Mayans and astronomical observation.  I am counting now.  I was counting.  I was counting the centuries until I might see her once again.  The Arabic approach to government.  Algebra is discovered and lost, discovered and lost.  I think that perhaps I have eluded her in the realm of numbers.  I am waiting for her inside an equation.  But when I turn around I see her work in everything I’ve done.  I see a goddess in the Sefiroth.  Archimedes complains over calculus, and his glory – like mine – eludes him.

        Five years from now you’ll be five years older.  Ten years from now you’ll be five to ten years older.  Twenty years from now you’ll be a fifth of a century closer to your expiration date.  In forty years most of you faggots and assholes will be bones, and the faggots and assholes that you’ve spawned within my wake will have inherited the Earth, meekly.  There is no way out with you people, is there?  There are only the sins I have eaten and the time left between breaths.  And he was such a lonely, broken one at the end.  He mourned her.

        You know the problem with people?  No?  Well let me tell you.  They have this fatalistic outlook.  They always think that things have always been the way they are, and that things will always be the way they have been.  They can’t really imagine a time when the world was different, and they can’t really imagine a future that they can give shape to.  Free will is terrifying to them, no matter what philosophy they espouse.

       Mercury or Thoth, they can’t decide.  Trismegistus by name, passed through the eye of Isis.  He wrote a book.  They want to believe it.  He wrote a book.  And the pages of the book were the bark of trees, and the words were the moss upon the bark on a cool morning.  In every pebble there lurked an unintended meaning, while the worms worked their way through the words.  Over the book the sun passed, and the branches sprouted from the trunks, and a forest was built.  Leaves emerge from the branches, livid green and whispering in the exhalations of the mountains.  The sun was a quiet sun.  It was benevolent.  It passes over still.  It is forgotten.  It is remembered.  It wakes and wakes again.

        I’ve already been to see the forest you talked about.  I’ve already seen the trees where you played as a girl.  Yes, and her image was found even in that.  I figure that when I get ready to retire I might settle down there and raise a family, in the midst of my books.

        Even if in the end you will escape me.  Just like her.

2

The year 750 marked the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad.  The Abbasids had replaced the Umayyads, who, like the Abbasids, traced their origins all the way back to the Prophet.  At its height, the Abbasid Caliphate controlled the Near East, North Africa, and parts of Spain not far from Cadiz.  The reign of the Abbasids was briefly interrupted by the invasion of Hulagu Khan and his armies in 1258, though the Caliphate was restored in Egypt three years later, and it continued to hold authority in religious matters up until 1519, when this authority was transferred over to the Ottomans in Constantinople.