Nevertheless, to clarify, it can be said that it’s not a natural occurrence like the spring thaw or an eclipse or the migration of ducks. It’s a social event. It doesn’t have to happen, should the Master of the house decide that He doesn’t feel like having a Tea Party. Up until now, the custom has been observed and will, most likely, continue for all eternity. Even He respects the old established traditions, perhaps simply out of habit.
Like every social occasion, this one has its formalities. The first, which is really a sine qua non, is the issuing and distribution of the invitations. (This too could be different. Were the judgment to be rescinded or the sentence commuted one day, the guests might be human.) The invitations, addressed “To Evolution,” are automatically transmitted to the ape’s instincts, like the sound of a doorbell. They are sent out all at once, en masse, and the operation may consist of no more than the divine enunciation of the word “apes.” That is enough for all concerned to know that the day has arrived.
But what day is it? When does the uncreated Creator celebrate His birthday? Any time at all. It could be today. Except that “today” could be a lapse of countless eons or a slice of a microsecond — it depends what plane you’re on — since His universe is a puzzle of days, hours, months, and centuries, all of different shapes and sizes, locked together in a polyhedron without end, on whose faces dawns and midnights, emptiness and plenitude, ends and beginnings coexist. Naturally, He who created time has the right to celebrate His birthday if He so desires. All the same, “God’s birthday” has an odd ring to it, and the slight surprise provoked by the expression is the reason why the whole thing is so odd.
II
MORE THAN ODD, IMPOSSIBLE: a five o’clock tea impossibly happening outside of time, in a realm of pure fantastic invention. Were a witness present, he’d see a sheer frenzy of senseless movement. The apes can’t keep still. They leap up and down as if possessed, on their own chairs and those of the others. Incapable of staying put, after barely a moment in one place, they’re looking for somewhere new. They squeeze in wherever they can, and there’s always a space, because the others keep shifting too. They are possessed, truly possessed, by an enthusiasm without object, as if they knew that, just for a while, eternity was theirs to play havoc in, and were determined not to waste the opportunity. With their giddy diagonal leaps across the table, they knock over cups, send the spoons and forks flying; their stamping feet scatter the pastries, their tails swipe at the cream-laden cakes and come away spotted with white. What do they care! Their faces, hands, and chests are sticky with cake, tea, crumbs, and chocolate. The cups of fine porcelain implode in their clumsy grips, and to counteract the scalding tea they splash themselves with cold milk. They’re constantly fighting; there’s always some pretext, and if they can’t find one they go ahead and fight all the same. Sometimes it looks like a battlefield: they bombard one another with sugar cubes, spit marmalade, hurl trays of scones. Inevitably one of them rises above the melee by swinging from the chandelier, until he gets distracted, lets go, and comes crashing down in the middle of the table, devastating the china and scattering the confectionery. And how they scream! The racket is so deafening, a fire truck’s siren would be inaudible.
Exercising His omnipotence, God pours tea into all the cups at once. And while He’s at it, He repairs some of the breakages. In a circus like this, of course, His good intentions only aggravate the chaos, giving it a velocity it wouldn’t have in the natural order of causes and effects. The cataclysm becomes as inextricable as a tangled-up thread a million light years long.
And yet it’s as if there were an order of ceremony, because every time God has a Tea Party, the same things happen. Every leap, every stain on the tablecloth, the trajectory of every slice of strawberry tart thrown from one end of the table to the other, exactly repeats what happened the time before and anticipates what will happen next time. The whole thing is identical. But there’s really no reason to be amazed, because, after all, every event is identical to itself.
This identity explains why the party is repeated over and over. Without it, God may well have decided not to invite the apes to tea again, having seen what an awful mess they can make and just how badly they can behave. But yielding the initiative to the automaticity of the same takes all the risk out of repetition. The bad manners of the guests become a given configuration of reality, like a landscape. Nonetheless, the question of whether manners are subject to evolution does arise. Detached one by one from the apocalyptic block in which they manifest themselves at God’s Tea Party, and isolated like signs, perhaps they could develop, becoming part of a story, and after a great many centuries or millennia, we would arrive at a divine, unprecedented spectacle: a gathering of apes sitting quietly around a table, lifting their teacups in one hand, their little fingers pointing at the surrounding void, dabbing at the corners of their mouths with napkins, perfectly demure and genteel.
III
THE PROBLEM OF THE BAD behavior might be due to the fact that God doesn’t preside. Or rather, He does and He doesn’t. As we know, God is omnipresent, which turns out to be very handy for carrying out His functions, but it has the drawback of preventing Him from being visibly present in a particular place, for example sitting at the head of the table, keeping things under control. His absence (if His omnipresence can be counted as an absence) could be regarded as a discourtesy that legitimates all the subsequent discourtesies of his guests: a host who fails to turn up to his own party thereby authorizes his guests to behave as they like (this is the household version of the well-known saying “If God does not exist, everything is allowed.”) But taking a wider view should allow us to see that His behavior is the transcendental form of the solicitude that characterizes the perfect host, who “thinks of everything” in order to guarantee the well-being of his guests, ensuring that plates, cups, and glasses are never left empty, all the provisions are of the finest quality, sweet and savory, hot and cold are balanced, the lighting and the temperature are just right, the tablecloth is well ironed and doesn’t smell of mothballs, and the conversation never languishes or strays toward inappropriate topics. There are so many details to attend to! Only God could keep track of them all.
By making an appearance He could put a stop to the uproar, but if He were to be in one place He would cease to be in others and would thus betray His essence. So one of the apes stands in for Him. This King of the Apes is a legendary personage. Nobody believes in his real existence, for good reason: he exists only for the duration of God’s Tea Party. He does what God would do were He to take a fleshly form, but he does it as the misshapen caricature that he is. Standing on the chair at the head of the table, frantic and raucous, intoxicated by his own impatient and capricious majesty, he distributes punches and kicks, yells his head off, hurls everything within his reach, and in his determination to impose order ends up being the most disorderly of all. Sometimes he is so maddened by his own energy that he is the one who starts a new brawl or launches a new campaign of destruction, which he then insists on quashing with renewed violence. The other apes, displaying an atavistic respect that seems to have been instilled in them by the light of divine reason, refrain from challenging the king’s authority (not that it has much effect on their behavior). Indeed, if Supreme Command is diffusely present everywhere, it follows that it must be present in the King of the Apes, and it could even be argued that, while remaining evenly distributed, it is, in a sense, more present in him than elsewhere. However mechanically or automatically God’s representative is designated, a Will is involved, and Will is beyond the reach of calculation and conjecture.