On 9 June 2021, I had a vision and in that vision I interviewed "God." (The quotation marks will be explained in due course.)
What follows directly is a verbatim transcript of the first part of the interview, with my questions omitted to enhance flow and continuity. The format of the second part of the interview is my own variation on the Proust Questionnaire, and so the questions have been retained. The interview transcripts contain occasional annotations from me as editor [Ed.—].
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People think I wrote the Bible. Either I told the Bible-writers what to write by speaking to them in their hearts, so to speak, or, uh, I did it by guiding their hands as they wrote. Did you know Shakespeare was one of the Bible-writers? Would you tell Shakespeare what to write?
Well sir, uh, in spite of your deplorable taste and judgment, you may partake of my champagne. The champagne flutes are on the table. Help yourself. No? It's very good. Would you believe a few minutes ago this wine was a liter of water? Just kidding.
No. Alcohol has no effect on me. Caffeine, same thing. Food doesn't make me full. The sun doesn't burn my retinas. I have heard that Earth people get—what's the word?—loopy—I've heard that when they consume alcohol they get loopy. And they go blind if they look too long at the sun. I just like the taste of good champagne. And I could look at the sun if I wanted to. I once looked at it for thirteen straight hours, just to see what would happen. You know what happened? I fell asleep standing up.
Anyway, let me be absolutely clear on this. I didn't write the Bible. Full stop. I didn't write it, co-write it, dictate it, ghost-write it, rewrite it, edit it, revise it, guide the Bible-writers' hands, or speak into or toward anyone's chest cavity. Why do you people still talk as if your emotions were in your internal organs? You are aware that if you vent your spleen you'll bleed to death in 5 minutes, right?
I had nothing to do with the Dead Sea scrolls either or any other antecedent to the Holy Bible. I've never had any contact with any ancient—by your standards—ancient authors, including Moses. The Jacobean Bible-writers might've thought they were channeling me as they were writing the Holy Bible, but I swear——. I almost said 'I swear on a stack of Bibles'. I swear I had nothing to do with writing the Holy Bible. King James had more to do with writing the Bible than I did. And he didn't do shit.
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| One of the 150-180 Bibles printed on the first run of Gutenberg's press in the 1450s. |
Now, which do you prefer—Raymond? Ray? Something else? Ray? Good. Ray, please don't ever address me, or refer to me, as God. My name isn't God. I am a god. My position is "god," it's my job, it isn't my name. I have a name and it isn't God. We have thousands of gods now, and none of us has ever been named God. Do you realize how demeaning it is to be addressed by your job title? 'Hey busboy!' 'Hey caddy!' 'Hey clown!' 'Hey god!' 'Hey soda jerk!'
It's Curious. I am. Me. That's my name. My name is Curious. I'm serious. I mean I'm being serious. My name is Curious. I'm the god of inquiries. I prefer the British pronunciation, with an eye in the middle. Any kind of inquiry, actually. Research. Paper versus plastic. Looking in the mirror to check a mole. A printed or online form with blanks to fill in. A child breaking a toy to see what's inside. Sometimes the thumb of a hitchhiker, sometimes not. Sometimes 'Can you take out the trash?'—when it's a legitimate inquiry and not just another way to say 'Take out the trash.' They all fall within my jurisdiction.
No, no. Rhetorical questions are not inquiries. Neither are 'Jeopardy!' responses nor exclamations like 'What the fuuuuuuuck!'
Well, in the beginning we didn't have names or titles. We didn't have anything, really. We had the clothes we were wearing.
We all arrived at the same time and seemed to have traveled here together on the same conveyance. We were left completely unattended. No staff, nothing. Hungry? It never occurred to us that we weren't getting hungry or thirsty. We didn't know what hunger or thirst was.
We made do with a lot of pointing, gesturing with our heads, our hands or arms, pantomime. We had the power to communicate by telepathy, but we didn't have language yet and so the telepathic messages were basically photos or video we captured with our mental cameras, so to speak. Of course we also had many powers beyond telepathic communication.
No, I'm not all-knowing and all-seeing. I can be a bit of a know-it-all, though, because I do have an eidetic memory. And I've read so many books since I discovered books, everyone from Hank Aaron to Huldrych Zwingli and Aeschylus to Zweig and everything from aardvarks to zymosans and back again. I started with The Codex Atlanticus and the Gutenberg Bible about 700 years ago, just after I began personally observing and studying your planet.
Hermes had such trouble sneaking copies of those things to me! I didn't ask him how he did it. But I only kept them long enough to turn all the leaves as I looked at them. They were back in their places before their absences could be discovered. Anyway, I do know slightly more than a little about almost everything. Oh, and I watch 'Jeopardy!' religiously. No pun intended.
I thank you for this opportunity. I finally get a chance to correct the false information out there, some of it out there for 4,000 years, information that's only recently come to my attention. I know that sounds like a load of crap, but I swear—almost did it again—I swear to God, until recently I hadn't paid close attention your universe since I created it 13.8 billion years ago, which was, uh, 13.79995 billion years before anything human-like appeared.
Oh, I said 'I swear to God', didn't I? That's funny.
Anyway, all of that time, planet Earth was on its own, so to speak. Still is, really. Oh, remind me later to talk about Epicurus. It'll be important background for all of this.
Well, the gods have inquiries too. Even their kids are so curious they break open their toys to try and discern how they work. And so we need a god of inquiries. Well, we did. The rise of the university over the past two hundred years, and all the published research as a result, reduced the demand for my services. Google has reduced my workload even further—tremendously, in fact.
Even before the rise of the university, most inquiries were fielded by the other gods. They insisted on getting in on the action. I complained about it for a couple thousand years, maybe more, and then I just gave up. I have no hard feelings. In fact, to keep sharp we break up into groups and watch "Jeopardy!" and "College Bowl" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", all the question-and-answer shows.
For what seems like an eternity, all inquiries have gotten tossed into the hopper, so to speak, and whatever doesn't get caught by another god, falls all the way through to me. These days, the other original gods still send inquiries to me. They're old-school—still a lot of pointing and nodding and shaking of the head, a lot of telepathy, every now and then a fountain pen. My days are numbered.
No, no, no, I'll just be given a different name and different job duties, maybe something in a technology that hasn't been developed yet.
Anyway, the moment after what I call 'the Big Bang' I moved on to the next project.
The Big Bang went bang, the creation took on a life of its own, and I went my merry way for the next 13.8 billion years. The creation is the result of a chain of events that are still ongoing, and, uh, if you Earth people radically reverse your destructive behaviors, your universe should continue to evolve and be in a state of creation for billions more years. I'll continue to take credit, but I'll just take credit for getting it all started. That's right—maybe not so much a creator as a first cause.
Planet Earth was formed about, uh, 4½ billion years ago. Put another way, it took about 9¼ billion years for planet Earth to become planet Earth. As I said, for nearly all that time, none of us gods or goddesses went anywhere near it except to observe and learn or to have Hermes run errands. I did receive periodic field reports from angels over the last——well, since the end of the last ice age, or rather the last glaciation period, about 10,000 years ago.
Anyway, I'm now sorry to say I've never intervened in the evolution or daily life of planet Earth. There have been no miracles, no reversals of history, no manipulation of events, no telepathic messages, no speaking into chest cavities, as it were, no answered prayers. You, uh, look mildly amused.
What galls me, though——. Now I'm doing it. Gall in this sense is a synonym for bile, human bile, which in days of innocence and ignorance was considered the source of a person's anger and bitterness. Fresh start. What angers me——. No that's too strong. What irritates the hell out of me is the repeated canard that the Holy Bible is 'the Word of God.' It's especially galling—irritating—because except, possibly, some of the begats, the entire Bible comprises false assumptions and fictional stories—at least the stories and assumptions that involve me, Your Heavenly Father!
I don't fault the Bible-writers for their ignorance of human anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, hydrology, geology, cosmology, etc., etc., etc. It's interesting to note, though, that the ancient Greeks had figured out the particle nature of the universe before the births of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. What really irks me is that the ignorance of the Jacobeans and the ancients—and the fictions they wrote in place of the facts—have caused so many millions of good intelligent people to believe there is no god who had a hand, so to speak, in creating their world and universe. And who can blame them? Except, well, there is such a god—me. Not the 'God' of the Holy Bible, but close enough. I exist, don't I! I'm their creator! Uh, sort of.
Look, the Bible-writers were the ones who thought planet Earth was the center of the universe—not me. As out-of-touch as I was, I knew better than that, and I don't appreciate their ignorance and incorrect guesswork being ascribed to me. It was the Bible-writers who thought your sun revolved around planet Earth—not me. Not I. Whatever. They were the ones who thought the creation occurred in six days. Depending on how one defines creation, it either took an instant or it's taking forever.
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| Salt Lake Temple, Utah |
I should've been able to put this behind me hundreds of years ago. But I'm just petty enough to keep getting angry. Meanwhile, those Bible-writers are coming out of this as clean as Disneyland, as clean as the Salt Lake Temple, as——. Hang on. Hang on. Shit, I just broke my anger sobriety. Goddamnsonovabitch. I have anger issues.
I need to get off this subject, but I'll just add this. Maybe the Bible-writers do deserve some blame, especially if Francis Bacon was one of them. I would've expected more from him. He must've read De Rerum Natura.
So help me god, Ray, if you fall asleep I'm going to whack you over the head with a yardstick. Stand up. C'mon, stand up or I'll turn you into a pillar of salt.
De Rerum Natura is the Latin title of a long didactic poem that was written in the 1st century B.C.E. by the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius [Ed.—B.C.E. 94-50?].
B.C.E. Before the Common Era. Don't teachers bother with the basics anymore? Okay, B.C.—Before Christ?—is passé. It's culturally insensitive. B.C.E. is culturally neutral. We'll talk about him later. Anyway, the title De Rerum Natura translates as On the Nature of Things or simply The Nature of Things or The Way Things Are. This poem sets out the ancient atomic theory of the universe, a.k.a., atomism. How atomism became modern is a story of skullduggery, buried treasure, and a phoenix rising from the ashes. Take a minute to wrap, so to speak, your mind around all that. Meanwhile, I'm going to open another bottle of champagne. Are you sure you don't want any? I hope you don't mind if I talk and work at the same time, do you? Good.
I'm going somewhere with this, Ray. Ever hear of Epicurus [Ed.—B.C.E. 341-267]? I mean before I mentioned him six minutes ago. Thanks to Lucretius; thanks to the manuscript preservation practices of the early and medieval Christian monks; and thanks to a certain manuscript hunter during the Renaissance, Epicurus has become the chief exponent of the ancient theory of atomism, although in his own time he would've been known as someone who had put his own stamp, so to speak, on the work of, uh, Anaxagoras [Ed.—500-428?] and, uh, Democritus [Ed.—B.C.E. 460-370]. Only fragments of all three's writings have survived antiquity¹, but Epicurus survives, so to speak, through Lucretius and his long poem De Rerum Natura.²
1. All three live on, as it were, in their biographical sketches in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers , Vols. 184-185 in the Loeb Classical Library Series (Harvard University Press, 1925) and in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu).
2. De Rerum Natura is over 7,400 lines in length and as many as 238 published pages in English translation. See, for example, The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics, 2007).
Lucretius was an Epicurean. Thomas Jefferson was an Epicurean. 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' is Epicurean. Epicureanism today is known primarily for its ethics and hardly at all for its physics.
Atomists believe there are only two things in the universe: matter and void. And all matter is composed of atoms. There's a lot more to it, but, uh, that's basically it.
And after more than 4,000 years of rarely-believable bullshit peddled by others, starting with Aristotle, Epicurus finally began to be vindicated in the 16th century, one or two groups of scientists at a time for a long while. In fact, it took a very long while for the particle nature of the universe to be taken for granted. And despite another 400 years of scientific inquiry, Epicurus remains substantially vindicated.
All matter is composed of particles. We all know this, we take it as a given. And yet 2,300 years ago, atomism was a bold departure, as it were, from the view Aristotle had: that matter could logically be broken down, so to speak, only to the simplest compound forms like, uh, flesh, bone, rock, wood, water, etc., etc., etc. Thinkers and influencers were faced with a choice between the Epicurean view of matter and the universe and the Aristotelian view. Both were theoretical propositions because science hadn't evolved a method for confirming either one. And partly as a result of a, uh, uh, an unrelenting propaganda campaign against Epicurean ethics, Aristotle's view of matter and the universe became the dominant view into the 20th century! Atomism—the theory of matter and the universe that was closer to the truth than Aristotle's—was rejected because of a powerful disinformation campaign. For nearly all its life, the atomic theory—or a fairer phrasing, the particle theory—of the universe has been an asterisk, so to speak, to history.
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| Hagia Sophia, Istanbul Turkey |
Is this making sense? I realize I'm giving you a lot of information without a PowerPoint presentation or even a chalkboard.
This propaganda campaign—I'm not calling it a conspiracy—they all had their own motives—began with the Stoics and continued with the Christians. They oversimplified and perverted Epicurean ethics in all their writings. The acceptance of the Aristotelian universe by the Greeks and Christians, and the Stoics' relentless brickbats hurled at Epicurean ethics, caused the particle theory of the cosmos to disappear, so to speak, from the conversation, as it were, with the exception of De Rerum Natura.
Since Epicurus's time, his ethical philosophy has been inaccurately depicted as hedonism—licentiousness—and nothing more. 'Eat, drink, and be merry,' etc., etc., etc., itself a perversion of Epicureanism and inconsistent with the restraining Epicurean virtue of moderation. There is no evidence that Epicurus ever said anything like it.
Oh that. 'Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily.' Ray, he was referring to the general pain-pleasure principle. And in that construct, of course, pleasure includes the good feelings brought about by seeing the bed you just made or the lawn you just mowed or the car you just polished. It includes the good feeling brought about by your act of generosity. Pleasure is not synonymous with decadence and gluttony. Too bad nothing more than fragments of Epicurus's own writings survived antiquity—unless the archeologists find salvageable scrolls at Herculaneum.³
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| Herculaneum, Italy |
3. Herculaneum, an ancient city south of Rome on the Gulf of Napoli, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., the same event that famously destroyed Pompeii. A huge library was discovered at Herculaneum in the 18th century. It is believed that this library was stocked with all the great writings from ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, and early Imperial Rome.
In the 18th century, archeologists tried to unfurl some of the scrolls, but caused catastrophic damage to them. And so they stopped examining the scrolls. Archeologists tried and stopped again in the 19th century and again in the 20th. Now, however, they're using X-ray technology to read the scrolls without having to open them. It's a painstaking process. But many of the writings that have been considered lost might survive antiquity after all, and might some day be put in a readable form for all of us to enjoy.
Anyway, De Rerum Natura barely survived antiquity, was then suppressed by the ever-powerful Church, and then was forgotten through the middle ages—lost, quote unquote, seemingly putting the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, of particle theory. It might still be buried in Earthly hell had it not been for a so-called manuscript-hunter named Poggio Bracciolini—I believe I'm pronouncing it correctly—Poggio Bracciolini, who resurrected it, as it were, in 1417. He found what's believed to have been the only surviving copy of De Rerum Natura—in the library of a remote monastery in southern Germany.
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| Interview site |
Let's go outside and get some fresh air. We're going to the right—yes, down to where the light is coming in through the door window. Think of it, Ray! Think of it! Before Bracciolini found it, this poem had been suppressed and then buried, as it were, and forgotten for a combined 1,500 years! It might as well have been buried all this time under the ash of Vesuvius at Herculaneum!
Here. It says push. There we go. It shuts on its own. Look at this! Isn't it beautiful? The weather changes quickly here, so be prepared to go back in in a hurry. Anyway, thanks to Bracciolini, particle theory rose from the grave, so to speak. It is modern—and more associated with Einstein than with the ancients—think of the atom bomb!—it is modern only because it was lost for 1,500 years! After a scrivener painstakingly recopied the entire poem—all 7,400 lines by hand—with fresh ink onto fresh paper, it was circulated first in Latin and then translated into foreign languages. English readers got their translation in, uh, 1650.
I personally don't believe in miracles, but if I did, I would say this resurrection, as it were, was a miracle. And some of the great minds of Renaissance Europe—maybe most of them—read De Rerum Natura in the original Latin. We find evidence of this in the essays of Montaigne, in the plays of Shakespeare, in Don Quixote, and in the works of, uh, Michelangelo and Raphael. It is almost certain that Copernicus and Galileo read Lucretius before their astronomic epiphanies. Ray, who knows what degree of cosmological and other scientific advancement we might have seen in the past 2,000 years if Epicurus had been revered instead of reviled and ridiculed.
Yes, that's right, I have an eidetic memory. And I read a lot. I've been reading like a madman for quite a while. Do madmen read? Never mind. I have a Barnes & Noble membership. No, Amazon doesn't deliver here. We don't need a delivery service. We have Hermes. As quick as lightning. Hermes picks them up and delivers them to my doorstep within minutes, except sometimes he makes an entire day of it and goes shopping in SoHo. He loves women's bags and scarves. But I digress.
Let's sit over here in the English garden.
Anyone can access this information. I read it all last weekend in a book, The, uh, Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt. Published in 2011. A true book of revelation! I read an English translation of De Rerum Natura at the same time.
Yes, the arm rests are iron. But the yew bench feels warm enough.
I found out that I had unknowingly put a swerve into the universe—Poggio Bracciolini! If I hadn't done that, we probably wouldn't be sitting here chatting. So thank God, right?
It isn't the scientific ignorance of the Bible-writers that bothers me: it's the labelling of all that ignorance and fiction as 'the Word of God.' I know I said that already, but I'm trying to make a point. That 'Word of God' thing is, uh, uh, libelous and slanderous! As if. As if Joshua and his horn could've 'stopped' your sun and moon in their tracks, as it were. You think I don't know that's impossible? That even if it had been theoretically possible, it could only have happened if the sun revolved around planet Earth? As if! As if Jonah or any other human being could've survived three days inside the digestive tract of a 'great fish.' As if Moses could've 'parted' the Red Sea. As if there really had been an Adam and Eve and Eve had been made from one of Adam's ribs, and on and on and on.
That's right, there have been no miracles on planet Earth. So none of those things happened.
And Noah? That didn't happen either. I realize the Jacobean Bible-writers didn't know that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of new species had been created after the time that the flood supposedly occurred. They didn't know that planet Earth had weathered ice ages either.
So what would I say to the Bible-writers today about the flood story? 'Good guess . . . but wrong'? Ridiculous! It's ridiculous! It sounds like something a six-year-old kid would invent. Seven-by-seven? Two-by-two? Which is it? Both? And two mosquitoes? Two fleas? Two tics? Really? He took the time to seek out brown recluse spiders and black widows? Where did he put the pairs of the deadliest snakes in the world and how did he tell the difference between males and females?—sawscaled vipers, Australian eastern tiger snakes, banded kraits, boomslangs, Mozambique spitting cobras, King Cobras, barba amarillas, jararacas, wutus, and black mambas? How did he get both the polar bears and the penguins? There's no telling how many people stopped believing in my existence because of bullshit like that. I have to reset my anger sobriety again. Goddamnsonovabitch. [Ed.—Exhales loudly.] Anyway, I guess timing is everything. Between 1611 and the present day, scientific inquiry and technology have taken nearly all the guesswork out of planet Earth's creation story. If your species had only waited till the 21st century to write your Holy Bible, you would've had a lot more facts to rely upon.
This so-called 'Word of God' has some nasty, insulting things to say about its Big Cheese, doesn't it? Good lord. It says I ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and, supposedly, just as he was about to kill Isaac I told Abraham I changed my mind. Can you imagine what Isaac would've been feeling? What he would've been thinking about his father? What he would've been thinking of me? How he would've felt about his father after that? Think of the untreated trauma that would've saddled Isaac all his life. And supposedly I was proud of Solomon for his ingenious threat to slice a kid from neck to nuts to determine who his real mother was. The wizzzzzdom of Solomon! One frightened, innocent child, one distraught mother, and one power-mad sex addict! And I supposedly turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt because, as she fled Gomorrah for her life, for her life, she turned back and looked at the scene after I'd told her not to.
And supposedly I'm damning billions of people to eternal hellfire for their inability to believe I exist. Hell, if I didn't know any better, I wouldn't believe in me either!
OK, let me see if I understand this correctly. I bring you into your world without your consent. And then I'm going to save you. From what? From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me save you! What the fuck! What kind of an asshole do you people think I am, anyway?
No, not angry, just animated. Maybe the champagne has affected me a little. Let's go back inside. It's gotten cold all of a sudden.
We now have over 3,000 gods and goddesses. We've added most of them in the last, oh, hundred years. We have a god and/or goddess for every thing, every event, every cause. We even have a god of atheism! What do all these gods do? I said there had been no intervention on planet Earth. I didn't say there has been no intervention at all.
We have gods and goddesses of planetary conservation, dozens of gods and goddesses of inter-universal waste disposal, dozens of gods and goddesses of inter-universal and interplanetary relations, gods of, uh, cold criminal cases—again, not talking about Earth—and gods of microwaves.
Well, none of us remembers how we got here—the original 50. We just got here, all at the same time. We probably arrived by the conveyance that brought you here.
Oh, well, universe creation happens with a snap of the fingers. The difference between my creations and other gods' creations is the difference in our designs and our intentions. The instant you snap your fingers, what do you want to have happen? What do you want to have happen after that? How do you want the universe to look after the creation is finished? My short-term, middle-term, and long-term plans, the details of how I hope things will occur and the order in which they occur, if they occur—all of that gets loaded, so to speak, into the act of creation. I put more than sixty years of thought into the creation of your universe before I snapped my fingers. But instead of putting all the details into the finished product, I put all my design work into the process. All the other gods had to baby their creations to make things work out in specific, predetermined ways. They're still doing it. They'll be doing it for billions more years at least. I didn't do that. I set everything up so that your universe would create itself in its own way. I figured, what the hell. At this point in the creation process, every other god's work would just be beginning. Mine was over. And so after I snapped my fingers I immediately moved on to the next assignment. And yours was the first and, so far, the last universe to create itself.
Universe creation today has gone high-tech and very deep. No one would be foolish enough to repeat what I did. Today we have a fully-staffed four-year college as well as a 40-volume encyclopedia, Creation Science, in hard paper copy, on discs, and on our intranet, replete with tens of thousands of 3D graphics and interactive features. Today, most gods put months, even years, into their preparations. You pull this time. Let's make sure it shuts all the way. All right.
If you shout 'Oh my God!' around here 3,000 heads will turn in unison. Watch!
No, better not. I'll get another warning letter.
Yes, but I only answer to the elders, of which I am one. I recuse myself when I'm the subject of discussion. Ocean is currently the chairperson. He's a Titan like Zeus. We, uh—well, he was. I heard he seduced Hera, Zeus's wife of course, and then rejected her. And as the rumor went, he and Zeus crossed swords. Anyway, I wanted to say something.
Oh—we have certain customs for elections. I'm changing the subject, but I want to say this before I forget it again.
We don't solicit our nominations. We don't campaign. Officers are nominated by others and chosen by a simple majority vote. Once nominated we don't decline the nomination nor the post nor any assigned tasks. The creation of your universe was an assignment.
In a crazy way, my creation method was a little like bowling. In bowling you approach the foul line along a specific path, following specific dots, and at the foul line you aim for a specific arrow in the lane, and everything you do takes account of what you know the ball will do once it touches down on the lane. I set up your creation with a carefully staged Big Bang so that the universe would create itself gradually, evolve, and continue to create itself almost indefinitely, till it ran out of steam, so to speak. I won an award for that!
The other gods unofficially named my strategy after me: the Curious Maneuver. And, officially, they elected me president of the new college and named that after me too: the Curious School of Creation Science. I wanted to name it the Curious School of Creation Arts and Sciences. There's so much artistry in the design. But I was outvoted. Too wordy, they said. Then I wanted the Curious School of Creative Intelligence. Too wonky, they said.
There are around 200. I've created four. Each one is huge. I'm sure it's common down there to believe your universe is infinite. Universes are huge but finite. It's the firmament that's infinite. Zeus goes way back there to practice his thunderbolt hurling so he won't disturb anything.
Yours isn't a perfect universe. I would sell my soul to create the perfect one. But I won't use the Curious Maneuver again. So much can go wrong. That's why it hasn't been tried again in 13.8 billion years. Your universe is very good, though, believe me. You were lucky. When you do it the way I did it, you don't even have control over the eventual movements of tectonic plates. So much of the finished product is foreseeable only in hindsight, if you follow me.
Gravity, the Grand Canyon, the human species, the rings of Saturn, the redwood forest, the Brazilian rain forest, Greek civilization, moveable type, the Aurora Borealis, the surfing waves at Maverick's Beach and Durban, South Africa, Poggio Bracciolini, the extinction of the dinosaurs—all happy accidents.
I tried to get involved in the writing of the creation encyclopedia. But our god of writing, Cadmus, wanted to write it all by himself. I had to settle for senior contributor and chief fact-checker. The president of the college playing assistant to a scribbler long past his prime.
He has become a god-awful writer. God-awful. He used to be a blessing to read, clear and concise like Hemingway and James Baldwin. Now he's unreadable. He writes as if he were talking with marbles in his mouth. He says he learned to write the way he does by reading the novels of Ayn Rand. I believe him.
None of us is perfect. Apollo comes closest, though, with that perfect physique and his perfect hair and those perfect teeth. But even he farts in his sleep. And he too has screwed up, just like the rest of us.
I don't answer prayers. I don't even hear them. No, there is no afterlife, no heaven, no hell, and therefore no Judgment Day, although just last week I was rethinking heaven. A heaven would be nice, wouldn't it? I don't think I could do it, though. I'm not going to set up an afterlife. It would be a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare. Besides, I'm not going to micromanage the living, and the dead are dead.
Oh, the inquiries. The toy thing? Well, we have children up here. Gods have offspring. Hercules is the son of Zeus and an earthling mother. The inquiries from young people keep me in my job.
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St. Paul's Cathedral, London UK
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In any case, heaven—the idea of it—might already be ruined. Heaven should be a complete surprise to be a true reward. If it's held out as an incentive it just encourages the wrong people, a kind of entrapment for earthlings. Candidates hellbent for heaven are motivated by self-interest and not selflessness and fellow-feeling. They inevitably behave badly while believing they're going to heaven.
And hell? Who the hell came up with that? It hasn't been much of a deterrent for bad behavior, has it? I'm not all-knowing or all-seeing, but I would've known that would fail. It might have stopped a few million petty thefts and a few billion lies but the thought of hell didn't stop tens of millions of murders, rapes, robberies, kidnappings, child molestations, and spousal beatings. And then there's genocide. If hell were a product I'd bought at Costco, I would return it for a refund. If it were a racehorse, I'd shoot it. Any deterrent effect is negligible. And without deterrence, it's just vindictiveness. And with all due humility, that's beneath me.
The Book of Revelation? Pure fiction, like the rest of the Holy Bible, but probably entertaining fiction if you are under the influence of the opium poppy root extract John must have ingested. He was hallucinating, he was out of his gourd.
Under the circumstances, I'm almost sorry I had anything to do with your universe. You people have dug yourselves into a deep hole. You cut down 3,000-year-old redwood trees and make patio furniture and decking that end up in landfills thirty years later. You move into deserts and then have to import your drinking water from other parts of the world. You commit genocide. I wish, now, that I had been paying attention to your universe. I would've intervened 10,000 years ago to give you bigger brains. You see, your brains are big enough to get yourselves into catastrophic trouble, but not big enough to get yourselves out of it.
With bigger brains, maybe there would have been no wars, or at least fewer wars. Or maybe not. But it would've been worth a try. You probably would've taken better care of planet Earth. Maybe each other too. What a wonderful world it might have been. Anyway, the Holy Bible is my biggest pet peeve, and I could probably come up with a way to do something about it. But you people made the mess, you clean it up. 'The Word of God.' Really? As if I didn't know the laws of physics. As if I didn't know it's impossible to walk on water. I know! I tried it myself! It can't be done!
© 2021 Raymond Prewitt. All rights reserved.
For this second part of the interview, I proposed that we use my version of the Proust Questionnaire, based on the set of questions used by the great French writer Marcel Proust in a parlor game he invented 135 years ago. "God" graciously accepted the challenge. As in the earlier interview, he was not shown the questions in advance.
Ray
All right, let's begin. First question. Where were you born?
Curious
I don't know. I don't remember anything before I arrived here, and I arrived here in the same state in which you see me right now.
Ray
What is your fondest memory?
Curious
My fondest memory is probably my earliest one. After the first 50 of us deities arrived from God-knows-where, I came out of a mental fog, as it were, and found myself seated on a bench between Apollo and Athena. I could instantly tell they were leaders. Their charisma was palpable, so to speak. It was 15 billion years ago, but I remember like it was only a thousand.
Ray
What is your greatest fear?
Curious
I live a charmed life as a god, Ray. I have no fears. Wait a minute. Yes, every year I hold my breath for what seems like twelve months, waiting to see whether sparkling wine grapes in Champagne and California have survived the fires, heat, and freezing temperatures.
Ray
What is your favorite curse word?
Curious
Goddamnsonovabitch. It sounds like six words, but it's only one.
Ray
Which person in history do you most admire?
Curious
Tough to narrow down to one. Abraham Lincoln. Sojourner Truth. Jackie Robinson. Gandhi. Joan of Arc. Mother Teresa. Socrates.
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| Abraham Lincoln's Bible |
Ray
Which housework task do you enjoy the most?
Curious
Why the smirk? You think I don't do housework, don't you? O ye of little faith. I like laundry—sorting and washing. Folding?—not so much.
Ray
What are your favorite works of literature?
Curious
Crime and Punishment. These are in no particular order. And I reserve the right to augment this list after the interview, after I've had the chance to think about it. Le rouge et noir. [Ed.—The Red and the Black] Uh, Madame Bovary. The Canterbury Tales. Inferno. Oedipus Rex. Prometheus Bound. Hippolytus. Tartuffe. Hamlet. Macbeth. King Lear. Uh, Metamorphoses [Ed.—by Ovid], not to be confused with Die Verwandlung [Ed.—The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka], which is also a favorite. Göethe's Faust, not the dreadful Barbier and Carré opera. Á la recherche du temps perdu [Ed.—In Search of Lost Time]. Ungeduld des Herzens [Ed.—Beware of Pity]. The Sound and the Fury. Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Remains of the Day. Uh, Song of Solomon. Morrison, not the Old Testament. Pride and Prejudice. Jude the Obscure. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Uh, The Lady with the Little Dog. Ward No. 6. Evgeny Onegin. Uh, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The Aeneid. Paradise Lost. A Shropshire Lad. War and Peace. Uh, Aesop's Fables. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Ode to a Nightingale. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. David Copperfield. Moby-Dick. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in the Mark Twain Library edition. It has a fascinating background story on the recovery of the first half of Twain's original manuscript, which had been missing for more than a century. Where was I? Oh, uh, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. [Ed.—The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge] Fleur du mal. [Ed.—The Flowers of Evil] Uh, The Master and Margarita. Akhmatova's Requiem. Uh, that's it for now.¹
¹ Augmentation, favorite works of literature—Shakespeare's Sonnet 144. 23rd Psalm. Antigone. Die Blechtrommel. [Ed.—The Tin Drum] Breakfast at Tiffany's. Collected Essays of James Baldwin. Die Sonette an Orpheus. [The Sonnets to Orpheus] Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Tennyson's Ulysses. In Memoriam. The Lady of Shalott. The Waste Land. The Wreck of the Deutschland. Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. And Wordsworth's Daffodils. Miners. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley. Une Saison en enfer. [Ed.—A Season in Hell] The Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Invisible Man. A Frolic of His Own. Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom, My Back Pages, and Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Ray
I'm glad I asked! That's a lifetime's reading list. All right, next question. What do you consider the most underrated virtue?
Curious
Humility. This is so far ahead of whatever's second, I don't know what's second.
Ray
Which words or phrases do you overuse the most?
Curious
'Goddamnsonovabitch.' I have anger issues. 'Uh.' I say 'uh' too much. 'I swear on a stack of Bibles.' I know, ironic. 'Anyway.' 'Really.' I say 'really' too much, always dripping, so to speak, with sarcasm.
Ray
Really?
Curious
I beg your pardon.
Ray
I just wanted to see how you would react.
Curious
[Laughs]
Ray
What about the expressions 'as it were' and 'so to speak'?
Curious
No.
Ray
If you could choose any five people in history to dine with, who would they be?
Curious
Uh, let me think about that one. Let's skip it for now.
Ray
All right. Next question. Which housework task do you enjoy the least?
Curious
Cleaning up after other gods. They think they can do whatever they want.
Ray
Which trait do you most admire in yourself?
Curious
I would love to say humility, but that would be too ironic under the circumstances. And it's for others to decide. Let's see, let's see. I know. Fairness toward others.
Ray
What is your favorite piece of music?
Curious
You're going to have a field day, so to speak, with this.
The original closing theme to the American kids TV program, Sesame Street. I'm also a huge fan of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Ray
If you could live on planet Earth, where would you live?
The Ritz-Carlton, New York or Paris.
Ray
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Curious
None is overrated.
Ray
Which talent would you most like to have?
Curious
Uh, lip-reading. The other gods talk about me every chance they get. I would like to know what they're saying. I would also like them to know that I know what they're saying.
Ray
What is your most notable characteristic?
Curious
Adventurousness. Maybe open-mindedness. I'll try anything once. I tried to walk on water, didn't I?
Ray
Who are your favorite writers?
Curious
Shakespeare, Lincoln, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus, Dickens, Coleridge, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Stendhal, no limit? Rimbaud, Proust, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Chekhov, Yeats, Housman, Eliot, Rilke, Akhmatova, Zweig, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tsvetaeva, Borges, too many to count, Capote, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Baldwin, Bolaño, that's enough, I could go on, Bruno Schulz, Lydia Davis, Kafka, E.B. White, Bob Dylan. I want the record to reflect that I didn't hesitate once on any name.
Ray
What is your favorite movie?
Curious
La grand illusion or maybe Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de commerce, 1080 bruxelles or maybe Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans. Wedding Crashers is my guilty pleasure.
Ray
Which trait do you most deplore in others?
Curious
Deceitfulness.
Ray
Who is your hero in fiction?
Curious
A hero much maligned by those who don't understand the book, Huckleberry Finn.
Ray
Who is your heroine in fiction?
Curious
Antigone. Pilate Dead would be next. Maybe David Copperfield's Agnes third.
Ray
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Curious
I would be curious. I know, I am Curious. But I would like to have the curiosity of a child. I've never had that, as far as I know.
Ray
If you weren't a god, what would you want to be?
Curious
I, uh——let's come back to that.
Ray
All right. Let's play Lightning Round. I'm going to give you a series of either-or choices. You get 5 points for every correct answer.
Curious
I don't know what we're doing.
Ray
You'll catch on quickly. Okay, here we go. Yankees or Red Sox?
Curious
Yankees?
Ray
That's correct. Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington?
Curious
Denzel Washington?
Ray
I'm so sorry. It's Sidney Poitier.
Curious
OK, I get it. Let's keep going.
Ray
Meryl Streep or Katharine Hepburn?
Curious
Katharine Hepburn.
Ray
Katharine Hepburn. Superman or Batman?
Curious
Superman.
Ray
Superman. Tesla or Lamborghini?
Curious
Tesla.
Ray
Right again. B & B or AirBNB?
Curious
AirBNB.
Ray
[Ed.—Makes buzzer sound]. The correct answer is B & B. Summer or winter?
Curious
Winter.
Ray
Winter is correct. Burger or cheeseburger?
Curious
Cheeseburger.
Ray
Oh, so sorry. Burger. Lennon or McCartney?
Curious
Lennon.
Ray
Lennon. Magic or Bird?
Curious
Bird.
Ray
Good guess. But wrong. Magic.
Curious
Objection!
Ray
Objection noted. Thanksgiving or Christmas?
Curious
Thanksgiving.
Ray
Thanksgiving. Coffee or tea?
Curious
Both.
Ray
Very good! Both. Chinatown or L.A. Confidential?
Curious
Chinatown.
Ray
Chinatown. Last one. Flintstones or Jetsons?
Curious
Jetsons.
Ray
Jetsons is correct. You finished strong. All right, are you ready to get back to the questions we skipped?
Curious
Sure. I'm going to pour myself another glass of champagne. I'm not even going to ask this time. If you change your mind, you'll say something.
Ray
I appreciate that. All right, if you could choose any five people in history to dine with, who would they be?
Curious
Charles Dickens, John Brown, Epicurus, Helen Keller, and Groucho Marx.
Ray
That was worth waiting for. All right, next question. If you weren't a god, what would you want to be?
Curious
Park ranger in the redwoods.
Ray
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Curious
For a god, just living the life of a god is perfect happiness. But for the people of planet Earth it would be being who you want to be, being where you want to be, and being with who you want to be with.
Ray
Last question. What is your motto?
Curious
'No one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.' Dickens said that.
