Extract No. 3

The book is titled 'Of Gods and the Like' after a bit of fantastic word-buggering of Spinoza's fabulous Ethics's first part 'Of God.' It is likely I am revising this next bit while you read. The incoherence might frustrate but it is difficult to revise the entire book every time I inject an idea in somewhere. The following bit is the very beginning, which like a funky succubus is still sucking away at the firmness of my ideation after the three years since I started writing for it. Mating Gods with distastefulness might seem distasteful but if it is to be done, I will do it gracefully. This perhaps is more important to me than my squandered supply of love. If you must swear at and curse my ineptitude at impotency, go ahead and include me in your process but keep away from metal penises and do read on for I love you o reader for your act of reading more than you could hate me for whatever it is that I have done to you. Do return. I update frequently.

I

The Numbered

EIGHT: One died. Two died. Three to Thirteen died. Fifteen died. Sixteen died. Seventeen to Twenty all died.

TWO: Rises now from our want for self-preservation a want for witnesses to wait on us in the wake of the demise of our previous self.

FIFTEEN: The want inflates our shrivelled corpses and we are afloat again.

TWO: Addressing the want’s want, rising with its rise, by breathing life into these few words we state the obvious and by this, in another manner of being, begin volleying salvos of stale fartwind into the expectant and patient quiet that would still us if we stilled.

EIGHT: I have long believed that there lies in the forgotten depths of creation an obscenely self-referential metaphor, a meta-creature that is stuck to the firmament and from whose mouth bubbles downwards through these oceans of Being an endless stream of spite. I call it Zero. It is perhaps the firmament. Perhaps we are. It matters little now.

NINETEEN: Like a wicked bar of soap that pleasures itself near Zero so its own vile bubbles may join the interminable stream of spite to issue forth from forgotten depths, our first emission of the stale fartwind--that now tries to flood the surrounding emptiness to make it habitable--pushes us up and out of the fundament. It brings with us the carcass of all that was already suspected susceptible to demising. Having conveniently lodged itself into our coalescence before hand, it too floats up from places too terrifying to know better.

ONE: Despite our best efforts, we have died and so we are certain now that free will is an illusion.

NINETEEN: Perhaps we were meant to die.

THREE: That is quite enough of that all-powerful spittle of spite monster nonsense.

TWO: But who else could stand to gain from robbing the universe of what gives it meaning? Must we now suppose there is such a thing as meta-meaning?

EIGHT: Spite does. How could you be so blind? Our very existence is a continuous struggle against Zero’s breath. Where would we be without the gentle breath that pushes our feet into this soil here? That plants us in the meaningful? We never gave meaning. We only ever distributed it.

THREE: Or perhaps we unknowingly maintain the illusion of free will in some exotic dimension of our existence.

NINETEEN: Or perhaps I alone do.

EIGHT: Perhaps I ought to kill you all out of spite.

ONE: Perhaps we ought to kill you.

NINE: Oh do be of good cheer Eight. Good cheer will probably save us all.

NINETEEN: Eight bites Nine. Now to return to our purpose. . .

THIRTEEN: We are all that now remains of the kind conceiver of all kinds . . .

EIGHT: . . . of all other kinds.

THREE: . . . of all kinds and though it is for us and us alone that a solipsistic world-view is permissible, now that their hands no longer join ours as we try to cup the universe away . . .

EIGHT: I take a bite out of Three. While I masticate, I will be quiet.

ELEVEN: . . . and now that they and their hands have slipped away to the unknowable unknown leaving behind the gaps they leave in our shield of cupped hands . . .

TWENTY: . . . and now that the universe has poured through these gaps and thoroughly offended us and our boundaries . . .

SIXTEEN: . . . we find it hard to disregard their lack, the lack of the lacking two, because perhaps this permissibility can only belong to the whole of our kind.

TWO: Without their napes to nuzzle into, without the soft flesh of their hips to firm our hips against, and without their spread cheeks to bare frothing, pulsating assholes to join ours as we pound away at the quiet, our small circle of the Numbered finds it even harder than before to hold off the innumerable hordes of Unbeing that circle us and the cowardly Universe that has sought refuge in us by violating us.

SEVEN: To remain incomplete though we have been filled to the brim and passed on into irrelevance by whatever it is that promises to complete all that dies, we pile our hopes onto our self-love because it is what primarily causes us. It is an object. Perhaps we gestate it or perhaps it gestates us. We hope our hopes will weigh us down and keep us from being floated further downstream. But self-love is a hungry child. Or perhaps we are the hungry child. We must suckle it all out attention and so we try to dismiss the missing two from our minds, push them into the furthest corners, place their memories behind the folds of a thousand other unpleasantnesses, and find a new whole in our depleted numbers. But we are weak, too weak to take shovels to our hearts and empty ourselves of them. And so in the lifetime of the moment that absents them, till whenever the moment deigns to stop multiplying, we are forced to number nineteen not twenty one. We are to lick the wounds they left when they left.

ELEVEN: Now of the two, the one we can miss more . . .

THREE: And one we must miss more!

EIGHT: Assholes.

SEVEN: . . . partial to staying the only one entirely absent from this something, is the lastborn of our kind, Twenty One. While common sense does its part and calms the flapping gums of our wounds by reasoning she could have fared no better, that she too must have been pulled from slumber and oyster and run headlong through the same abattoir that chewed us up and shat us out so into the safety of this limbo that wholly depends on the beating of a new heart that bleeds none, leads us nowhere, and beats on only because it lets relit desires desire on, crash on like unrepentant drumrolls on the slack skin of our impotence that tries in turn with its slack to stifle them, quiet them, and stymie their attempts to tear it open, break out, and somehow kill us a second time, for the sake of our continued suspension in this limbo, we must be both impotent and filled with longing in equal degrees. So it is that we can do nothing but desire on and wait for rationality to magically redeliver her to us.

NINETEEN: Waking well past our deaths, knowing little of how we came to this end, and being a bit inquisitive about it all, we train the eye of reflection inwards and reflect. Death (whose multiple visitations now seem more likely) and whoever sicked her on us must have found the only weakness we all inexplicably share. This supposition is perhaps far enough from being accurate to be accurate and perhaps it is not but it is ours and as an extension and an exertion of our love for our self-love, it performs and buys us a place to dump our hopes on. We brick in our hopes so:

They take a feather to that most easily tickled bit of hers, the bit that shields the tenuous conjugations of her many manifestations with the universe from the less pleasing of lies. By brushing the sleep off each eyelid, they wake her from the toil of her dreams and then with fingers little, carrots large, and blandishments foul, lead her away from her bed where her inertia could still have weighed her down and kept her from floating away with a pleased vanity’s giggles. Awake and aroused, she finds herself in their bed where an alien inertia spews forth its tendrils and binds her extremities down. Her will is lost to her and almost all of it crumbles when she cannot pleasure away her arousal. Then, a relentless stoking of her incontinence sends shivers of electricity down her spine and blushes squeeze dry her limbs and push all her juice up into her beautiful head till she--like a wet sponge hung from a gentle pinch--is caught in the utopian ideal of repetitive, unyielding pleasure and trembles in incapacitation. Once her limbs cannot drag her away or the mind will itself clear and once the last of her will slides into place and lets her see the only way out of this excruciating ecstasy, she slips off her defences and invites them inside her and our friendly friends--aping Moses in the least literal of interpretations--take her soul to safety by parting her body and plucking out the soul, removing it from whatever harm her vitals might do her and so by shearing away her head, tearing off her arms, hacking off her legs, and punching out her torso, they bind her skittish soul to the refuge of a shrivelled neck where she is reduced to a flipitty-flapatty that can offer sufferance to existence just as well but cause not as much harm and at long last could be returned, like we have, to a self unsoiled by the need for purposefulness and temperance, to a remainder that could return to our love.

Our supposition ends thus. In it she perseveres like we suppose we still do in the universe’s supposition. If she did die, it is likely she is now somehow hiding and if she is now somehow hiding, it is perhaps because some unnecessary remorse saddles her with fatalism and then like a selfish lover mounts her and rides her away from seeking shelter in the windowless sacristy of our forgiveness.