This short story is an *IA Writing Competition (creative work category) entry.
In the beginning was the Word... a sound... a vibration that stirred consciousness into matter. Some scholars describe it as "the Big Bang".
Others see this as the manifestation of the Universal Being expanding from a conscious to a physical state, expressing existence as “I Am”. (*Note 1.)
And at that point, as we know, the World began.
It is said that God created the World in six days. And then rested.
This is well and good, but the bit about God creating Man and then creating Woman from his rib on the sixth day does not make sense. We all know from observation and study that every man is born of woman. As with the chicken and egg, we have learned which came first because many millennia ago, the egg contained a (cold-blooded) reptile; then, as time passed by, one day, an egg hatched to reveal a (warm-blooded) chicken.
It is more plausible that the male-centric God of patriarchy created Woman first and then, liking what he saw, he "visited himself upon her", and thence she gave birth to Man.
This may, in turn, offer deeper insight into parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, as occurred when the Archangel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary and announced that she would give birth to the Son of God.
So Jesus, the son of God, turned out to be a pretty decent bloke who tried in vain to explain that we are all the children of God, but the high priests, jealous of their influence and power, would condemn him to death again and again for his ideas if and when he was to return as promised.
This is all well and good, but I digress.
God created the world in just six days. No one is disputing that, surely?
But where was God’s biographer? Who bore witness to these momentous events?
No one knows for sure if it all happened the way it is recorded, but as an earthbound creature, I reckon that it was a pretty good week’s work and would certainly deserve that seventh day of rest. And it would definitely need to be followed up with a good meal and a decent bottle of red.
So, a primary issue of fundamentalism is that sooner or later, we have to come to terms with the Fundamentals and hence, in due course, God would have needed to take a crap.
It is a long-held proposition for many that God created Man in his own image and, therefore, if Man needs to take a dump after the digestive process has run its course, it stands to reason that the same must be true for God. (*Note 2.)
If anything, given that each and every one among God’s other creatures also appears to ingest food in one form or another and later excrete the waste in one form or another, there is a logical case for speculation that they, too, have been made in the image of God.
So, we gird our loins and address the inevitable.
God voids his bowels. No problem, especially if he did it in the forest where nobody saw, except some bears: but the lingering question is how did God deal with the hygiene, or more brutally, how did he wipe his arse?
It is a fair bet that God did not have the convenience of three-ply tissue on hand, but due to that inexorable reproductive quality of humans, there was already a clutch of Man-born-of-woman running around making whoopee and blazing trails and so on and so forth, and God, no doubt, simply grabbed a handful and applied them to the divine posterior.
The next question to spring to mind will be: so then what happened?
Well, the reality is that after God responded to that moment of need, he did not have the convenience of a flushing toilet, so he simply threw the arse-wipes back into the gene pool, where they boldly reassimilated into the emergent human race and, in their turn, went forth and multiplied. This is why there are so many arse-wipes in the world today.
What is provocatively interesting is that these arse-wipes are not unique to any race, culture, creed or society. Indeed, there are male and female arse-wipes, educated and uneducated, master and servant, and whatever.
If they sat quietly, you may not know if a person was or was not an arse-wipe.
The thing that sets them apart is when they speak.
The arse-wipes of our lovely world are the ones who believe that they were chosen by God and, therefore, they feel entitled. They believe that they should never have to wait in a queue and that they deserve more and better privileges than anyone else. They consider everything and everyone else to be beneath them. Arse-wipes are a non-specific collective that circumstantially encompasses the generic sub-groups of racist, sexist and bigot.
If you encounter someone being rude to staff in a restaurant, or a bus driver, or a shop assistant, or being cruel to a child or an animal, you can safely conclude that this person is an arse-wipe.
It is by no means a universal rule, but arse-wipes seem to prefer the job descriptions of social commentator or politician or entrepreneur to the more humble vocations of nurse or teacher.
No one knows why this is so.
Another interesting phenomenon is that arse-wipes become highly stimulated when presented with the opportunity to disproportionately increase personal wealth. At these times, arse-wipes become ever more competitive as they try to outdo one another.
Moral and ethical compasses become disabled as the players vie for a greater share in the spoils in a frenzy wherein the terms "enough" and "sufficient" do not exist. To the arse-wipe there is no common-wealth; there is no free enterprise other than the deployment of any and all chicanery to gain advantage, and there is no concept of democracy as they believe that their opinion is worth multiples of anyone else’s.
One of the sorry losses to the greater good at these times is that sensitive environmental systems tend to incur a monetary value in preference to any intrinsic aesthetic or ecological merit.
Some scholars have observed that arse-wipes periodically become increasingly reckless in their hot pursuit of the "right-here, right-now", intuitively knowing when an invisible line has been crossed.
Others have noted a steady resurgence among arse-wipes in the need to be friends with God. We see this in their rousing claims that "my God is bigger than your God and so everyone else had better watch out".
Arse-wipes are strident exponents of accusing as blasphemous anyone who doesn’t share their myopic vision, which in itself is a convoluted act of blasphemy. (*Note 3.)
We may now be approaching a tipping point whereby arse-wipes are emerging as the dominant strain of humankind in many zealotry-motivated nations long accustomed to shouting “it’s my way or the highway” – coincidentally, those with vast hoards of weapons of mass destruction – leading some philosophers to speculate on the possibility that time has run its course and has begun to turn back upon itself.
The world as we know it – responding to existential threats of climate emergency and mass extinction of species – seems to be furtively increasing the speed at which it is reversing those six days of creation, moving inexorably towards a single sound in a single moment whereupon God, also known as the Universal Being, might give a long sigh of exasperation resembling the forlorn strain of muted trumpet and exclaim:
“Fuck you humans! You’ve screwed up badly and now I’ll have to start over again.”
Notes (*):
*Note 1: Ignored through time in the academia of etymology and semantics is that the entity termed "God" is the "Universal Being". However, in accepted usage the word "being" has been adopted as a "noun" when its proper place is the "present participle" of the verb "to be". Look and learn.
*Note 2: This, of course, is problematic. As if God would create Man in his own image! God has a sense of humour but not narcissistically so, like some people. The likely scenario, free to be understood, is that Man created God in his own image because some ambitious men saw this as an opportunity to gain power over Women, as well as other less dominant Men who were afraid of the dark.
Heaven knows why they felt the need to do this.
God is universally apologetic for this ongoing misunderstanding.
*Note 3: In presuming to know what might offend God, they blaspheme on their own standards by denying God the right to self-determine and hence placing themselves above God.
Rather than acknowledging that every individual has the right to find their God for themselves, the arse-wipes of the world deny the existence of well-documented alternate paths up the mountain and refuse to concede that each path offers an identical view from the summit.
Afterword:
This piece is a Swiftian swipe against the "Right that is often Wrong" — who presume that their taste in thoughts, beliefs and actions is more important than that of anyone else's.
The author rejects any suggestion of anti-Semitism through reference to "chosen ones" and maintains long-held respect for the Jewish cultural contribution to global society through humour, literature, music, film and television. The author rejects the "Right" of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) to manufacture and perversely deny the holocaust in Gaza.
The author adopted the expression "arse-wipe" to describe any person as "not worth pissing on if they were on fire" and takes objection to the usage of other words applying to human biology or any activity pertaining to human love-making as terms of denigration.
Dermot Daley is a fourth-generation Australian, living in Victoria, now retired from construction project management.
* Full IA Writing Competition details HERE.
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