Pick a God. Any God. Go on: pull one out of the drifting white lace. Or catch at everything cosmic that’s floated in through the cracks in the back of your mind, then assemble your own majestic lord-of-lords from theological arms and legs, eyes and eyes and eyes, celestial tentacles and the burnt ends of metaphysics and your very own pet eschatology. Seal your belief with the alchemy of a linguistic kiss, swear you’ll never die, and then worship every hand you shake, saying, “Hi, God!” to every raindrop, struck mute by the mystery of the thunderstorm, dropping to your knees and sobbing in gratitude before the altar of the High Holy Riddle.
That is certainly one way of coping. Well and good. Have fun! But if you want me to believe, you’ll have to give me a firm reason to think so, other than just pointing at unsolved questions and saying, “We don’t know.” I guess if you absolutely must, you may attempt to show me God in a handful of glitter—but I’ll still insist that the only magic is consciousness itself, the only spells written in syntax, and the only celestial tentacles those of the sun writhing through the clouds to reach us: lo! the layers of light in which the light comes wrapped: behold this all-too-mortal morning unpackaging itself in the eastern sky, its gulf-ribbons streaming and fluttering over the horizon, the clouds like a military parade rolling out to conquer the heavens, and human me with my hands stashed in my pockets and having an in-depth discussion with a particularly lucid and well-read pigeon. She wags her sage beak: yes (she agrees), the earth is indeed an eye rolling at the universe, and the sun reels around only because it has nothing more efficient to do, and the shore yawns at the ocean, and the ocean falls over itself in its anxiety to please, rubbing its forehead on the beach; while exclamation marks pile up on the sand, the next wave turning them into italics, the next erasing nature’s mindless speech; and the swallows unfurl like equations proving each to each; and that’s that’s that: it just is.
You see, many years ago chaos was dropped into chaos, and it ramified out logically, all this quixotic spacetime just the consequence of what one quark said to another; and ever since then, the yoctoseconds clock in lockstep as the program runs through all its iterations toward an end determined by the beginning. Even I, the self-called author, the constellation of atoms steering the wheel of these words, am only a caffeinated algorithm working out to my inevitable conclusions; and now, after my death, I’m the ghost cast by the light of your mind sliding along this zoetrope of verbs and nouns. Yet here’s the rub-a-dub-dub: I may be a bunch of skeleton code jammed into a blood-balloon and then forced into the tiny, hot, and cramped compartment of the minute—but I have faced this fact; I have built my castle on the void; I have changed what my window sees; I have pinched the zero until it turned into infinity. Peering out from my well-fenestrated head, surrounded by breakdancing clouds, I have watched a drop of knowledge form on the tip of a faucet, fall, turn into a sparkling globe and explode. I have climbed spiral staircases of predicates up through the trapped door into the supraconscious, where I tied a sentence tightly to its meaning, slapped its shoulder and drove it gaily through a city of refurbished theories and fantastical lies, in search of a district that I’d only ever glimpsed from the distance. Propelled through every place by the perpendicular pounding waves of the past, I have hugged to myself this hideous and handsome truth: that the only rule is that you need a rule. I have embraced creation.