Cover art…
Ilja Sirčenko, Lumière intérieure, acrylique sur toile, 80 × 60 cm
In writing this, I aim to clarify certain matters. In particular, I am referring to the lately hatched controversy seen on the subreddit entitled Existentialism: Being and Nothingness, in which the optometrist Dr. Allie Sheets made her rather unsettling claims regarding the anatomy of the human eye. Claiming, in essence, that the true story of human history is nothing but a grand deception, an illusion carefully crafted and sewn together from so many spinning discs of prejudice. She claims that life is a study in the mechanics of expectation. Drivel it is, this optometrist’s theory. I write today with every intention of setting the record straight. The true story of human history has nothing whatsoever to do with the eye. Instead, it is a story best told from the vantage point of your bathroom mirror. It is a sad joke, really—a mockery of your once-idolized god.
I should like to beg your forgiveness ahead of time if my choice in words reads at times a bit blocky, cumbersome even. The languages here have always been so inefficient. Thus far, I have expended approximately twelve hundred pen strokes in compiling these truths. In my language (that in truth is less like a language than it is a series of knots tied across the surface of the space-time continuum), a single gesture is all that would be required for the communication of this entire message. Like the extension of a single digit, or else the solitary shuttering of an ocular organ. Or even in the shadow of one of my thoughts, the outline alone is sufficient for filling in the details. Where I come from, the language has been maximized in terms of raw efficiency. I rather wish that I could use it now, but can’t, on account of there’s no way you could ever be made to understand the multifaceted nature of its tenses. To you, the adjectives of your best poets may shimmer, but to me they have the grace of so many wounded ducks falling from the sky. Nevertheless, seeing as it would require the better part of a million years just to teach you our ABCs, clearly I’ve little choice in the matter but to discard the hand of time and adopt instead your earthly syntax.
Why English, then, you ask (wondering, no doubt, if the god of your childhood is but another cog in the gears of world hegemony)? The answer to your question is quite simple, actually. Not long after finding out about the controversy brewing on Reddit, in which the optometrist Dr. Allie Sheets has expounded at length concerning her alleged discoveries of hitherto veiled anatomies located inside of the eye, I fell to thinking about how best to respond. More or less, the bitch was attempting to steal my limelight. I wanted to set the record straight, not just on Reddit but for the world at large. But first, I had to decide upon a language. That was when I made a phone call to the International Monetary Fund. Inquiring after exchange rates, I learned that the world no longer trades in the denarius (for frankly, it had been some time since I last bothered checking up on things). Now it is King Dollar, the threatened despot over a world grown increasingly republican. English, I saw, had become the language of business. With important business of my own to settle, the adoption of the English tongue was a natural enough course to take.
Having settled on a suitable medium, I would like to take this moment to address the altogether absurd allegations being made by the optometrist Dr. Allie Sheets:
First of all, I would like to begin by declaring that Ms. Sheets is an incorrigible slut. She is a liar and a thief, and at the age of seven even went so far as to have stolen several dollars from out of the collection plate at the Presbyterian church in the small town where she grew up. Worse still, she is a closet racist. A petite thing, Ms. Allie Sheets believes that, since she is physically weak, it is okay for her to lie to men, or even to strong women, however much as may suit the occasion. On the third Thursday of every month, while stopping off at the Ring-a-Ching dry cleaners in pursuit of her delicates, she parks her car in the only handicap spot despite being able-bodied. Believing that her qualifications as an optometrist necessarily elevate her above the morass of human mediocrity, she long ago perfected the wicked angles of a condescending smile. She thinks that everybody is in her way and that, as a person, she is inherently special beyond compare (this lattermost observation no doubt having much to do with how she came to fancy herself a prophetess of sorts, the first person ever to have glimpsed the secret workings of the inner eye). Allie Sheets would happily sup on prime rib while consigning the rest of humanity to cold porridge. If she smoked, your glass of thin milk would inevitably become her ashtray. That is the sort of person we are dealing with here. That is the optometrist, the Dr. Allie Sheets.
As god, naturally I stand excellently positioned to uncover the sordid truths hidden in human hearts. A telescopic insight is the privilege of divinity alone. A temporal insight, too, though that sort of thing is rather difficult to translate into English and so, therefore, I’m attempting to avoid all talk of time. You humans are helpless before time as barnacles before the scraper. But where it comes to affairs of the heart, now there you stand infinitely better suited. I’ve always found your kind an attentive audience when communicating in the language of the heart. In this, I fear the International Monetary Fund may have gotten things wrong. The dominant currency on earth has ever been calculated in the gram weights of so many quivering hearts. The universal language here has ever been that of a desire for love. Let me drop the conventions inherent to a proper strain of English, then. For today, your god makes its confession to you in the plain-spoken language of an undying love.
It isn’t true! I tell you that it isn’t true! Nothing at all of what that stinking bitch has dared to post on Reddit. Everything of her life has been a slander, a lie calculated towards culmination in a grander deception. As your one and only god, your creator, the root origin of both your cool-sided pillows and your smartphones as well, I beseech you now, listen—I have entered into the realm of your affairs in order to set the record straight. What Dr. Allie Sheets saw that morning, when she looked into the eyes of her patient, was nothing more than sheer phantasm, an imaginary shadow cast by the ice-queen edges of her own immense ego. Contrary to her claims, she saw nothing more profound than the slightly opaque retina of a fifty-five-year-old Caucasian male with a mild case of cataracts. There was nothing at all illusionary contained within that eye, no lenses of prejudice spinning nor machinations of evil. It was just an ordinary eyeball, plain and simple as that. The doctor only claims otherwise on account of her being a fame-hungry slut; the whole controversy is as simple as that, really. As a woman who is unmarried and fast greying, her middles grown increasingly plump in anticipation of an early onset menopause, she wants desperately to be remembered, and so devised this whole cock-and-bull story about having glimpsed the truth of humankind’s spiritual condition in the eye of one of her patients. Her claim that the true story of human history is the story of an ocular deception could not possibly edge any further from truth. Even poets in the days of Abraham would have struggled to come up with something so fantastic. In at least this one sense, Dr. Allie Sheets has more than demonstrated her mastery. For she is a top-shelf storyteller, a liar to compete with no less a figure than the silver-tongued Satan of Christian lore.
What is the true story of human history, then?—you ask, wondering, no doubt, why your god has counted so many passing eons before bothering to let you in on the secret. In all fairness, I ought to have let my stench be known from the very dawn of time. Wafting in the nostrils of unprepossessing cave people, in hyperbolic grunts they might have told their children the truth. And I, god, would have become but another of your many oral histories, a children’s bugaboo consigned to the shores of either brackish swamps or else anywhere the atmosphere lay bedecked under the combined odor of sulfur and raw onion. We celestials are made from the stuff of stars. You humans have noses for dirt, which, though of the stars, is still not the same thing. Not technically, anyway. The odor that emanates from me explains why I always knew you humans would have a hard time accepting me.
But what about finding me? When I write of humanity seeking after me, now there we edge closer still to the truth of human history. More or less, it has been an epochal cluster in the art of hide and seek. I dwell forever in the midst of a labyrinth nest of mirrors. The labyrinth spans both time and your silly politics, too, and the only way to navigate it is by interpreting through the language of the heart. I hid myself here on account of my body odor being so wretched—fucking awful, really. My hope, in the primordial eons, was that none of you would ever come looking for me. But in the hollows of your hearts must have been interpreted a need for me, for ever since the stringing of the first set of vocal cords your kind has been crying out nonstop, beseeching me in the midst of all manner of calamity, from the battlefields of mass slaughter to the slow-moving checkout lines at your local grocer. Night and day, your kind call out to me, never suspecting that I might not want to be found. Even less, that you humans, once having uncovered me, might rather wish at once for a return to the eons of godlessness.
Most that profess to seek me do so for the sake of appearances alone. The Sunday service Christian, along with those fairest Friday Muslims, have never posed much of a problem for me. Meanwhile, the religious fanatics, convinced as they are of a goodness in me that doesn’t actually exist, inevitably become lost in the peripheral parts of my mirror nest. By far and large, the vast majority of your god seekers have strayed wide of the mark. I am not to be found in your destiny, however pitiful or grand it may be. And just as I do not know you now, nor did I know you when in the womb. Just as I am a mystery to you, so you to me. You may charge that such is a cruel calculus for our cosmos, but trust when I tell you things are much better off this way. Only the most horrible of things may come about when you dare approach the many-mirrored nest of divinity.
Case in point: your mutant species known as king; your dictators and tyrants, now there are the true spiritualists of this universe. More than any other, it is they who have proven themselves the truest seekers of god. Time and time again, while sitting ensconced inside of dizzying reflections, I have looked up from studying heel-bound stars to discover my position gravely threatened. Many eons ago, it was the young tribal chieftains, their eyes narrowed and hearts set upon the accumulation of a continental-sized glory, who most often came seeking after my blessing. Later on came the more modern and thus recognizable of your dictators. Like Mao, for example—he once tried visiting me here. Then Stalin. Hitler, too, of course. And on and on the list goes; the names are really not all that important, insofar as you understand they were suffering from a spiritual condition.
From the far side of a thin mirror I watch, motionless, as once more the dictators draw near. Always they come looking for me when they are still quite young. A long ways yet from power, nevertheless they are mature enough by then to have become conscious of a gnawing void within. There must be something more to life. This can’t be everything, I overhear the seedlings of a latent cruelty, thoughts that, if left unaddressed, will surely blossom into a series of so many wars, pogroms, and five-year plans gone awry. Trapped in a prison built from my own self-consciousness, too humiliated by my own body odor to dare speak up, I leave them to the protracted silence of their spiritual sojourns. Slowly, little by little, they infiltrate my nest of mirrors, turning this way and then that way, graduating from life’s mysteries in the search for wholeness. The closer they draw, the more I must focus on remaining still. For though my body remains forever veiled in reflections of self, so that in truth there’s no risk whatsoever of my being spotted, still my body odor is of such pugnacity that, for fear of letting loose some inadvertent waft, I dare not move an inch.
The dictator, meanwhile, will soon draw to within inches of the innermost circular mirror, the mirror that conceals me. From that vantage point, I can see them, though they of course cannot see me. They can only see themselves, mirrored back as a reflection (and that, in essence, is the truest story of human history).
Inevitably their breath will catch; they gasp while stumbling around, wrestling with the enormous implications involved. “But that, that means that—that I am god,” the future dictator announces predictably, then turns and marches off towards the sowing of worldwide catastrophe. Having peered into the spiritual depths to find only oneself looking back, what other conclusion could they reasonably have made? None is what. For me, in the mirrors, I faithfully see to the destruction of all you may hope to someday build. You can’t speak my language, nor fathom all that’s been lost in translation here. Suffice it to say, the missing message is inherently odorous. This, of me behind the mirrors, is the true story of human history. Anything to the contrary must necessarily have come from the lips of a filthy slut.
