God, An Autobiography of the Missing Years

 

In this little known work, God divulges numerous details from the hidden years of his life.

 

Chapter   One:   Earliest   Memory

 

I am God, but I’m not a know-it-all, as is usually assumed.

For instance, my beginnings lie in a white fog of ignorance. I’ve no memory of it. And I have no entirely compelling theory as to how I came to be. The notion that I am the author of myself defies even my kind of logic, and so I cannot believe that I am self-subsistent. So, as to my origins – since I simply cannot recall ­– I simply do not know.

I could hazard a guess. Though it might take some faith for me to believe such a thing––I can guess about my origination. Here’s a conjecture, or perhaps a deduction: Maybe another God created me, a greater God than I. I have had inklings of that, feelings––tingly feelings.

But how did the God who created me come to be? Did another greater God create the God who created me? And who made the greater God? A greater one still?

That must be the answer. It’s Gods all the way back––back in a never-ending regress of God creators.

I could be satisfied with this but, as I say, it takes a bit of faith on my part to believe it. The idea does not absolutely compel assent.

I myself have made no Gods. Am I the last in a long line of them? Am I the best for being the last? Or am I the worst? I must be the weakest, since I cannot create Gods.

****

My genuine earliest memory is the awakening of my senses all at once. I saw blackness. I smelled burning orbs. I tasted the honeycombed luxury of my tongue. I felt the delicate surface of my being. I heard a vast stillness.

My interior life commenced with my sensual arousal. And by interior life I mean my intellectual life.

My first thoughts, so far as memory permits, were as follows. I thought taste supersedes smell, smell supersedes touch, touch supersedes vision, and vision supersedes hearing.

(I have since reevaluated these in almost reverse order).

I was immediately aware that I was using words to think these thoughts (though the origins of words in me is as mysterious to me as my coming to be).

The first word I recall saying aloud was GOSTOSO. How I was able to utilize the Portuguese word for Tasty I’ll never know. My facility with languages, as I’ve said, is inscrutable, even to me. (Note too that the language you’re reading me in right now was not my first).

My next thought concerned the scent of what I now know was burning hydrogen, helium, chromium and iron. It is odd that I did not think of the names of those chemicals at the time; perhaps I did not know the words, in any language. My thought, however, was that the aroma (a word I’ve since acquired great fondness for) was altogether stiffening, spine straightening, but not unpleasant to me in the least.

Subsequent thoughts were further mental commentaries on my baby-like sensuality.

Touch, I thought, could amuse me forever.

Sight lacked variety, of course, with all that blackness. But the grainy circular all-encompassing darkness imparted its own philosophy to me, one of merriment and of (here’s an antique word) glee. I thought that that word glee actually mimicked the feeling I had upon seeing black. After black, I saw the blushing effect of my babbling initial vocalization, which made, or made for, the entire jaw dropping spectrum of color. (I’ll explain this shortly).

Concerning the sense of hearing, I thought that it’s possible to hear even without sound, for the sound of silence is in fact sound. I then heard another sound: a noise, something louder, melodic, smoother, more mesmeric and consoling than the acoustical silence I was listening to.

What was it?

It was my voice saying the word GOSTOSO ! There was an echoing of that utterance and my immediate thought was that I had produced some alteration by the act of talking, as if a word spoken by me, without gesture, without facial expression, without movement, and without much in the way of intonation––in other words, without those important ingredients that propel most communicable expression––had caused other things to exist.

And so it was. This is exactly how all the dizzy universes came to be. Such was the (unbidden) ability of the word GOSTOSO in my mouth.

Accidentally kicking over a bucket of mud and calling the drippings creation would be a misuse of the term creation. Likewise, creation is too lofty a word to describe the coming to be of things on my account. My act was not strictly creative. If the coming into being of things must be named, perhaps mishap would better serve, or fluke. But I prefer no word at all. It was a deed without a name.

****

These are my earliest memories. These are my earliest thoughts. And as thought became speech and speech became things, these are my earliest productive activities.

It seems only yesterday.

(As I relate the following, imagine me not in a gloomy disposition, but see me with a smile).

I would take it back if I could: take back the moment, relive it, revive it, and keep it to myself, immerse it within my interior life, my solitary confinement, without need to speak of it, without the accident of production, without the universes, without the helium and the hydrogen and the chromium and the iron, without the colors, and even without you, my inquiring reader.

I could do without.

But I cannot take it back. I cannot go back. I can wish, but I own no potion to make it so. I am the weakest God. Remember?

****

The leap ahead to my next available memory may very well be an eon (or two).

E o n.  Now that’s a word I remember inventing with effort.

Eon, to my ear, like glee before it, was onomatopoeia: it sounded like the thing it referred to. When pronounced slowly, eon sounded to me like time elapsing.

It took me so, so very long to think up that word.

And it took me so, so very long to say it.

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