I AM: What I’ve permitted you to see is an allegory of that event intelligible to your contemporary human understanding. Had I given you a reenactment of the event as it occurred, you would have misinterpreted it. More than likely, you would have utterly missed its sacred aspect.
LOYD: But you were there, weren’t you? You made yourself manifest in the otherwise mundane history of the planet. You appeared to a small band of habilines whom most of us today would dismiss as protohumans.
I AM: I did.
LOYD: Why?
I AM: You’ve already anticipated me here. To demonstrate my love for them. To affirm them. To validate their struggles to survive and evolve.
LOYD: Can your appearance to them have had any measurable effect? At first, you terrified them. Momentarily, you made them forget their terror by appeasing their hunger. That’s all, surely.
I AM: The Rutherford Remnant—Adam, Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi—demonstrates that it did have a lasting effect. They continue to celebrate my earliest quasi-human incarnation by observing Voodoo Saturday Night. Indeed, you’re celebrating that event with them. Possessed by Agarou, god of ancestors, you’re a vaudun devotee in spite of yourself, Mister Paul.
LOYD: But what if there were no Rutherford Remnant? What if the species known as Homo habilis had died out about when paleoanthropologists supposed, namely, two million years ago?
I AM: Does a falling tree land with a thud if there’s no one there to register the thud? Yes. The thud exists as a receivable potentiality in the sound waves generated by the tree’s impact with the ground. Because I was received by creatures now dead hardly suffices to demonstrate that I wasn’t received at all. I appeared to them, and they knew themselves blessed—validated, if you like—by my holy concern.
LOYD (shaking his head): Impossible.
I AM: It wounds your vanity to think that Homo sapiens was not the first hominid species to experience a sacred disclosure event?
LOYD: You wrong me, Yagaza. Frankly, I’m by no means certain that Homo sapiens has ever experienced its own such event. Frankly, I doubt it. I’ve always doubted it.
I AM (laughing in a melancholy-merry hyena voice): Then what about this, Mister Paul? What’s happening to you now?
LOYD: I’m possessed. I’m dreaming. I’m talking to a sardonic corner of my own consciousness, not to—God forgive me—God.
I AM: But God has a corner of your consciousness, doesn’t he? If God created you, why, then, he has a lien on all the physico-spiritual systems making up your identity. You’re one of my most valuable means of comprehending God—along with all the other self-aware entities, terrestrial or otherwise, of an ever-questing creation. You should take advantage of your dreaming—your possession—to help me in this self-reflexive quest.
LOYD: You called yourself Adam’s God. Why? Because you appeared in hyena-hominid form to his ancestors?
I AM: In part, certainly. But also because in searching for an element of the sacred to append to his Batesonian philosophy of evolutionary holism, which lacks such a dimension, he decided to repostulate God. I’m the God That Is, but I’m also the God that Adam humbly repostulated. Your species’ hunger for the sacred, going back even to the Pleistocene, doesn’t arise in the absence of satisfying spiritual meat, but in response to its availability in the miraculous slaughterhouse of creation. I AM that meat. I AM the architect of the sacred abattoir. Those who refuse to ignore their hunger will at length find me.
LOYD: Adam told Alistair Patrick Blair that you have both a timeless aspect and a temporality that involves you in the time-bound doings of the material world. Is that true? It sounds paradoxical, probably even impossible.
I AM: Like a man who both has a head and doesn’t have a head?
LOYD: Exactly. That was Blair’s precise objection.
I AM: Well, my temporal aspect hardly requires lengthy justification, does it? In that aspect, or one manifestation of it, I am talking to you now. And in one manifestation of that aspect, I possess both a hyena’s head and the mutilated face of the man who killed your godson. And, if you must know, no head at all.
LOYD: All right. Fine. If you’re conversing with me, then you obviously depend on the flow of time to achieve such communication. But how can you simultaneously—ah, but that’s the wrong word, isn’t it—how can you also have a quality of timelessness that places you either outside or above the ongoing mayhem and muck of the physical universe?
I AM: Because you’re a captive of time yourself, Mister Paul, this will be hard to explain. Timelessness is not an attribute you’re well-equipped to understand.
LOYD: Oh, I see. You’re gearing up for a cop-out.
I AM: Not at all. If you can accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in its specific application to quantum theory, confessing that one may know either where a subatomic particle is or how it happens to be moving, but not both attributes at once, why can’t you adopt a like uncertainty principle for a concept as grand and ineffable as that of God? Or, to employ another analogy, if light can be either particle or wave depending on the perspective and the intentions of the observer, why can’t God be a temporal being within the context of creation and a timeless entity in his orientation above, or outside, the universe of matter and mutability? The supposition that he must be one or the other is a reflection of human limitation, which arises not only from finite human understanding but also from your existential immersion in time itself.
LOYD: This isn’t fair. A man who’s spent most of his adult life concocting recipes for cheesecake and pasta dishes should not argue theology with God.
I AM: Who better than you, Mister Paul? A person who has fed publicans and sinners, sociologists and habilines, knows something of what it means to satisfy hunger—as well as to fail in that task.
LOYD: Okay, okay. You’ve mentioned subatomic particles—our ability to know either their location or their motion, but not both. And you’ve mentioned that light can be either a particle or a wave depending on what the observer wishes to find out. But these analogies break down in this situation because atoms and light are temporal phenomena. They have no atemporal attributes at all.
I AM: Congratulations on stating the obvious. Can you think of any phenomena that aren’t finally time-bound or time-determined?
LOYD (chagrined): I’m afraid I can’t.
I AM: Then maybe you can see the difficulty of what I want to explain. If you could think of any examples, I’d try to work them into illustrative metaphors for the coincident timelessness and temporality of God. But since you can’t, I’m stuck with phenomena at play within the dimension of time. Thus, everything I tell you is an approximation of something largely inexpressible.
LOYD: Go on. I’ll try to follow.
I AM: Only in my timeless aspect—my supratemporal identity—am I utterly without blemish. There, I AM perfect and fulfilled and all-knowing and, yes, changeless. What I know never alters because it encompasses—until the “end” of “time”—the totality of changes past, present, and future in the physical universe. At my impetus, time—space-time—began on the edge between timelessness and temporality. And one day, in figurative temporal terms, I will put period to time by letting it run the course I’ve already omnisciently calibrated and clocked. Then I will necessarily subsume my temporal avatars and once again simply BE, perhaps from Everlasting to Everlasting. I can’t be more specific than this because my own immersion in the flow of universal time clouds my clairvoyance. Trapped here with you, Mister Paul, I see through a glass darkly—but with a vision, in comparison to your own, pristine and pellucid.