I never tire of using the creator as my target: he is fair game
for a skeuromorph detective. This is why: the two gods I know of,
whose tenuous fusion is the schizophrenia of western civilization,
the Flood Plotter of the bible and Plato's, both created the world
in their own image; ecce their creations: imitations of the gods
themselves, yet in a cheaper material.
According to Plato god made the world
as a copy of an ideal world; for instance, if you had a chair and
you sat in it, it would be only an imitation chair, an imperfect
copy of coarse material which matches, but only imperfectly, the
Ideal copy that only god can sit on. This hierarchy is incomprehensible
in a democratic society, where everyone should have the opportunity
to sit in the very best of chairs, each according to his or her
taste in furniture. This idea of the Ideal chair is a disgrace,
an unforgivable scandal: why should we walk around feeling inappropriate,
inferior, incapable? Why should there be a chair which is always
out of our reach?
What I mean is, if we are going to
have a god at all, why should we have to suffer even more on account
of him? If we're going to have a god, he should be of value and
benefit to us, no? I find this arrogance of god's demeaning: if
it's not ok for us to be arrogant, why is it ok for him?
The god of the bible made man in his
own image. So the bible says. But, clearly then, there are a few
different gods who made men, humans; perhaps all followed the patterns
of making them in their own image, and then placed them on earth
in their designated areas awaiting the development of trade and
transportation so as to discover their differences and thus a good
reason to despise each other; this is not our fault but the fault
of the gods who designed us in their image, as a Jewish God would
not have copied himself as a Chinese, nor a black god as a Jew,
and so on. These gods clearly despised each other, but out of delicatesse
perhaps they designed themselves as copies to fight out their differences;
my friend John, who is in tenth grade and reads Nietzsche and Dante,
e-mailed me the other day to inform me he's killing people on-line;
he meant he was playing computer games with pre-designed heroes
and anti-heroes, etc; perhaps we are on-line too, the on-line agendas
of a few disgruntled gods who are using their copies to fight out
their issues; don't laugh, this is easier than you think. The "Invention
of Morel" by Bioy Casares presupposes a world, albeit a limited
one, where the happy events of a few individuals vacationing on
a resort island have been holographed and preserved inside a projection
machine which at high tide causes these events to incessantly replay.
What is perplexing, more, what is disconcerting in the story is
the ease with which Morel extracts the souls of his friends, what
animates them, and infuses them into the holographs. How casually
the perceived becomes perceiver. How effortlessly the experiment
becomes experiencer, a being infused with animation, with consciousness.
"The thing that is latent in a phonograph record, the thing that
is revealed when I press a button and turn on a machine - shouldn't
we call that 'life'? Shall I insist," insists Morel, "like the mandarins
of China, that every life depends on a button which an unknown being
can press?" What is disconcerting is Bioy Casares' apparent nonchalance
regarding this metamorphosis. I wished to question it further but
in the prologue Borges claims that to "classify it (the plot) as
perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." I don't wish
to quarrel with Borges. Still, it continues to haunt me.
Could it be, I reasoned, that John's
on-line superheroes and villains are infused with consciousness
as well? Do they too worship or resent John? (Or a combination of
both worship and resentment?)
Still, Bioy Casares (or Morel) was
kind. He recorded only the pleasant events in his friends' lives.
I wouldn't say the same about the entity we have been trained (duped,
really) to call god, madman of Morel's sort only madder, less kind,
who programmed us and then left us, so that we may never find our
true source, with a faulty instruction manual (i.e., the bible,
etc.).
Plato said this cannot be a very good
world; his spokesperson Socrates was glad to vacate it, even if
it meant using hemlock, for an eternal vacation with the immortal
gods, maybe the same ones who didn't do such a great job making
us, or who are working out their problems through us, and who are
perhaps tired of us and planning for a new breed, cyborgian in essence;
an upgrade, if you will, with some of the bugs ironed out. Julian
5.1 is no longer out in the stores. Julian 6.0 is now all the rage,
get it on-line from www.humans.com. Anyway, we sincerely wish Socrates
the very best on his journey. Meanwhile, the short-tempered, intransigent
Bible god makes us recall Picasso's quip: I just put things in my
paintings; it's up to them to get along.
Yes, it could be that God realizing
how badly he failed with us, abandoned his work like an artist giving
up on a project. And what is to happen to us then? Borges speaks
of a place where things forgotten simply disappear; maybe that's
what Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead. We, abandoned children
of the god or gods who left us, unable to transcend the limitations
of the model he/them created, are forever stuck with the limitations
of the software; no one around to come and create an updated version.
Skeuromorphs are always made of a cheaper material than the original
anyway. All that is left for us to do is go on destroying ourselves
and each other, unable to improve upon the software we were originally
endowed with.
So then it's not so much a matter
of we being forgiven by god, as we forgiving god. And considering
what the bastard wrought, I doubt anyone will. It's not ever a matter
of loving God, a pure and sincere desire to please him. If we could
fearlessly peer at his behavior for these last few thousand years
in the face, it would be a glare of contempt; it's really a matter
of the fact that we're afraid of him, rather than a salivating need
to worship him. (And this goes for you too, o masqueraders, o so
sincere rehearsers in the brain of panegyrics to your bosses, it
is not admiration but fear that propels you. You're only couching
your salivating slavery in the cloying aromas of simulated doxologies.)
As long as we feel that our lives are in his hands, that he can
do anything he wants with us, such as for instance condemn us to
eternal hell, but even more, what we're really frightened of is
our businesses failing, our dates not showing up, worse, becoming
candidates for Viagra, or sexual abuse by an unpleasant stranger.
If suddenly, say, we captured god and caged him, put him on display
behind bars in a zoo, if he suddenly were helpless, powerless, how
many of us would still love him? If we could cage god in a zoo and
put him on display, it would outsell any pilgrimage site; and if
god were placed under guard, how many of us would risk life or limb
to free him? I doubt if you could even find a lawyer to defend him
pro-bono. I bet the religious right would be first to line up to
cast the first stone. I for one am staking my bets on egg and tomato
stands along the road to the cage: it would be only a matter of
days before I get stinking rich.
As my lids are about to close I pick
up my copy of "Mysticism and the New Physics" by Michael Talbot
as part of a campaign I'm on to study for five more minutes after
I know I can go on reading no longer, and open it at random. I read:
As Charles Muses puts it, 'We live in a projection world of solid
neuro- "wired" holograms - a world of simulacra.' I think I'm
really onto something and will slide into slumber without commenting
any further on the propitiousness of chance encountering the name
of the writer of the content in quotes.
to be continued...
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