Homily After Uncovering the Scrapped Blueprints of Early Designs of Man

The story goes that a one-armed monk wheeling his squeaky cartdown the sub-basement rows tripped and toppled a few millenniaof Coptic parchment and scrolls like brittle, dust-caked dominos.You know the rest: the latex-gloved clean-up, the plucky tortoiseshelledacademic obsessive who couldn't believe her bloodshot eyes. And weimagined with seven fingers a hand. A furred ossicone on the medialbrow-ridge. A tail made, apparently, of wood. The college of cardinals

later confirmed the lord's aborted plans, as well as the secret deletionof mermaids, centaurs, dinosaurs prior to the invention of organismswho could realistically wield belief. What springs to mindis that old saw Nietzsche proposed about a "God of the gaps";you can almost see a deity squeezed in between subatomic matrices,neglecting the reversible chalkboard and formulae in favor of blinkinganother pointless star into existence. Tell you what I'd do: plate our bones

in gold so by the age we know where and how to touch each otherwe're dinged as counterfeit coins beneath our flesh. So it's worthopening ourselves up. Or so death appears a revelation of Heavenly Beauty,how we'd position our skeletons aboveground on the edges of cliffsto desiccate and catch the sunrise in a gleaming haystack of time.I'd do away with the heart. I'd tincture the hair a chlorophyllous green.In 27 AD, the Romans of Fidenae loved murder to such a degree

they erected an amphitheatre for their gladiators out of knotted,weather-beaten timber, which summarily collapsed, deleting 20,000bloodthirsty screamers. See? We are too mortal to distinguish comedyfrom tragedy, intelligent from incompetent design. Laugh at the platypusif you want, but realize it could have been your king, could still be, if onlyits webbed foot had the strength to raise a bejeweled scepter. How would youdecide the length of a life if you could contemplate forever? Opening up

your build-a-man kit to find a few pieces missing—a toe, the third eye,a purple, chevron-shaped organ to house the soul—it might be possibleto overlook the bickering of multiple unfinished dimensions and focusyour frustrations on where to put the spleen, on mashing the wisdom teethsideways into the skull. Like the Germans, your resources are limitedonly by your ability to prioritize; World War II, they spent 2 million markson the Krummlauf, a bent-barreled rifle that could shoot around corners.

God was on both sides of that war, remember. And in the mouthof that Ugandan leopard who dragged an untended child into tall grass,never to be seen again. Some mistakes pounce right up from the lord's planas though planted around a blind bend of the tunnelways throughthe stomach. If you'd also whittled the shapes of distractionand neglect, you couldn't rightly call anything a mistake. Or, rather,mistake is a name for any reasoning which shirks its obligation

to your understanding. These blueprints weren't crumpled and thrown away.They weren't reduced to cinder by a god's snap and blink. It's an either-or:I've been so bladder-evacuatingly scared of certain dreams coming truethat rising from the sweaty bed was worse than whatever its opposite.I've stepped into waking day uncertain how many of me there were.So either we're supposed to know what we're not—poured brimmingwith immortal light, or odorless, or moldable as pink putty so the throes

of passion tack and fix us together into sighing gobs—or what we are,which is lesser. And then, under the auspices of the laws of lesser, to saveour work in case there's a god. And god to save in case there's a god of gods,and then a god of god of gods, and on, on, like the refracted beamsin a house of mirrors in the Infinity Carnival. I know you don't believeyou were doodled in the...