And not just the past, others have argued, not just our history, no, that in truth everything’s been created for B — B as culmination, as the created creating, natura naturans who He hasn’t yet exorcised that particular endowment, impotently, a potentiality shed; B as an apotheosized beneficiary of all mundanity from Bereishit’s beginning to now, an old heresy: that even Genesis had been begun for His sake alone; that water, too, had been created then divided upon the division of the second day expressly for His tears at this, His departure; the moon made only for His night, the sun made only for His day, then the air smoking around Him, it feels to Him, American Him, decadent as excessively holy and holying Him — and then shoes, hymn, them as well, having been created for the sake of His feet alone, though cobbled too tightly, nu, though loosened without laces, the proctologist’s spare pair He’s walking in on His way south through what once was the Village; and then the snap-brim cap on His head, how that’d been taken from the proctologist, that also and maladjustedly tight, had been created only so that it would fly from His head on the wind as He makes His way down toward the Battery — His head uplifted, Him passing questioning unquestioned through the gate new at Wall Street, which had once been a wall erected to keep out the natives of Manhattan raised again with its name remained to limit the traffic of the Unaffiliated from the marketstalls trading Downtown; domain of woolybearded carders and dyers, tanners and tinsmiths, the young, fritcheeked blowers of glass and they, too, who drive no trade at all save that crazy and begging — that indeed, many believe, and though only lately, which is too late for most, that life entire had been created for the sake of His life alone; His existence in the world the world’s justification, its one and only its hosting of Him’s the heretical thought: interpretively, He didn’t die for our sins, and He won’t — it’s even worse, He’s lived for them; and the evil in this is that before He can question, He believes, becomes His own answer, and so swears by His own singularity, this deathly uniqueness, Hanna’s baby boy reflected in the mirror of sewerward ice, Israel’s special son in the shopfront windows that store for a moment His passage — this one life of His that’d once been advertised to all as a model, exemplary as itself emulatory, marketed to ever as symbol; an idol to be held high, Godlike exalted, and there worshipped as ideal, and yet still one life again, immortal, He’s thinking — the alwaysliving, don’t tempt, it’s mine.
