ACCOUNT OF MY DAYS
Sequence: 8
THE TASK
There is a god or goddess for first light and last light, for each
star, each motion of stars, and even for stars not visible. A deity
for remembering and for forgetting, for fire and for water. Farm
animals and wild animals, houses, mountains, storms, and hours have
each his own divinity. And at birth there comes to the birthing room
an individual and obscure god, just for that one child. At death,
the god of decomposition.
We must overthrow them all, each must be proved not to exist, the
evidence questioned until it gives out. And this must be done sud-
denly, not over a period of time, with energy and conviction. The
thousand, the ten thousand, the more-than-countable must be overthrown
and the new explanation given: whether of the one true God, or of
science, or of a trick of language. And see, already, how they begin
to multiply again, and we argue over which has the primacy, thus dis-
tracted from and forgetting our main task: the overthrow, the ar-
guing into dust, the ceaseless and sorrowful effort we give to erasing
the gods we have named.