The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

64 Humanity 2009

It’s strange to think this old-age machine can still produce tears. I just don’t get it. And wipe my ancient cheeks. Rancid, darn sentimentality. And the fact that this ancient bag of a body is forced to keep up its shit-making all the way to the nailing of the coffin is clearly nothing more than a celestial mockery, some kind of divine punishment to keep us needy to the end.

Spurred, spurred, spurred, till the very last turd. But man is kinder than his monstrous Creator, because man had the decency to invent rules that allow people to stop working at seventy, whereas our cruel God grants no exceptions, never gives us a break, keeps us traipsing to the toilet until our very last breath.

In any case I attach no importance to God. It’s nothing more than arrogance for us humans to consider ourselves any more significant than all the animals, flowers and plants. Cows never created a bovine Jesus for themselves. Not even a dandelion believes in God, and that’s the most stupid plant of them all. They possess an intelligence that is superior to humankind’s, what I call earthly wisdom. Yes, those blessed animals and plants know how to live. They know what life is. And that’s why we’re so terribly scared of them, the beasts. Because our souls know they know more than we do.

I just say: if anyone is God, it’s got to be me, someone who has survived eighty years without losing her wits and has woken up in four different continents, on top of hundreds of men, who’s had and lost children and created an entire solar system of problems, but managed to solve most of them with perseverance and above all stoicism, plus the drop of generosity I managed to squeeze out of my grandma’s desiccated corpse.

Old people talk about soon going to the Lord, how they look forward to finally meeting their maker, without realising that this is as close to him as they’ll ever get: to have experienced human existence and overcome all the trials that life places in our path and to now face up to the most human thing of all, death. To bow to the god that dwells in the core of every man. Because when we die we don’t vanish into the air but into ourselves, into that human kind of divinity called humanity.