I wrote this essay to read at the launch of my new pamphlet (!!! my first ever physically published writing, for sale on my website!!!) at Burning House Books last month. I loved performing it to a packed little room full of some of my nearest and dearest but wanted to share it a little further afield! If u like what u see maybe commission me to write something for you?
We walk past a leaflet, glossy and right at our feet. I turn around and pull my kid back reluctantly for a few steps to get a photo because it says ‘God is 100% in love with you!’ and I don’t feel like people will believe this one. The text is red, and the background is taken up by a non-anatomical heart rendered in pink watercolour. I am wondering if anyone else saw this or is it just me? How long does it take for religious delusions to fade? ‘Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own…’ I never got it when people had that sexual overtone to their worship, I laughed quietly at the praise songs when they forgot themselves and went all Margery Kempe:
‘Come like a rushing wind
Come light the fire again
Come like a burning flame
Have your way
Have your way’
This is a real song. No, for real! I’m not misremembering. And maybe if god is 100% into me it’s actually not funny at all but really serious and sexy and I should’ve been singing it back then with a sort of pouty affect and turning around trying to see which angle god was looking at me from so I could give him a real show. Although, I guess he’s omnipotent so it’s kind of irrelevant, and I’m not usually into men anyway. But it must be a pretty heady feeling to be chosen personally. Maybe right now I should be wearing better underwear? Just in case…
When I was little I really thought my body was a temple. If you’re looking for specifics, I had this image of the US Treasury building, the one that’s printed on the back of most American ten dollar notes- it has a bunch of romanesque columns that give it a sort of BC energy.
The structure was ochre, in my head, for a vaguely ancient feel. It was anchored somewhere around my chest- always ready and waiting for God to come and share me at any time he wanted. I don’t think I thought that the Holy Spirit lived inside me at all times, but I really thought that it could happen at any time. I think I have assumed for ages that this was a more universal Christian experience but maybe the idea of God taking up residence inside your physical form is a little more fringe. I never felt like having a body was something that could be done in isolation.
For some reason in primary school they really push this idea that your body is 75% water. I looked it up the other day and it’s not really true, maybe at some points in your life, but mostly a person’s water content wavers around the 60% mark. I think of my body like american bread, you could crush a whole loaf in your fist. So much space for sharing. In her book Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge writes:
‘Since Humans contain less than 50 per cent animal cells, biologist Lynn Margulis has suggested we are more accurately ‘holobiont’, an assemblage of host organism and its microbial, bacterial and viral partners. Stefan Helmreich similarly proposes replacing Homo sapiens with Homo microbis.’
I have this little panic because I’m doing the maths now and it’s looking like I’m what? 110% water and bacteria? What about the fact that I have my mum’s tissue in my body, or tissue from my kid living in my brain? In her book, Matrescence, Lucy Jones calls these ‘zombie cells’. What percentage zombie is my youngest brother? Tissue from all four of us older siblings is crammed into his body alongside our mum’s. I think the statistical mismatch is definitely a matter of my over simplistic reading but isn’t all of this? I like to misunderstand, it feels flirty. Lucy Jones says humans have one of the longest periods of chimerism after pregnancy. I knew it, having a body isn’t something that can be done in isolation.
This guy Bob Hickman has become a bit of an internet phenomenon. He’s a new take on an old classic; an old fashioned heretic. Picture this, a man stands half naked in his dirty basement room, skin pale and beaming, legs bare except for dirty knee pads (has he been kneeling?) The hem of his work polo shirt just covers the smooth curve of his bare white ass. He isn’t posed as though he is being crucified, but for some reason that’s what it feels like. His palms are raised and flat, facing away from his face. He is standing at a ninety degree angle from the camera and turns his head towards the viewer, stringy hair cut into a stiff monk’s bob. The setting has the ominous tone of a televised ransom note, or a snuff film. It’s charged and a little erotic in its discomfort. His feed is full of random nudes.
‘Greetings everybody! God entered into my body as a body my same size!’ His voice has this influencer tone to it and he tells us about his life, arching his feet up to balance precariously on his toes. The thing is you can’t see how it started, he posts so frequently, and there are so many accounts claiming to be him, or are they alts? Does the world’s most holy spirit filled man have a finsta? My sister says she knew about him before he was big and it really scared her. My friends from where I was born say they see his car around Indianapolis all the time. The car is what really gets me though, he paints words on it. I wonder if he got a leaflet too.
The thing is with this online stuff, it’s impossible to know what is real. Everyone in the comments is worried about him, he’s posting fucked up videos of his girlfriend, AI videos of his girlfriend, sometimes he calls her god’s girlfriend. He’s half nude all the time, top or bottom. I look on google for images of his car and there are a few different cars, maybe some are fake. I start writing down all the stuff that’s painted on the windows and I feel moved by it like poetry
God entered my body as a body my same size
God rips my face
Mouth, nek, does
Voices of devil
Shoots in mouth-
Gum disease.
Attaks in dreams
Appears, laughs and
Teases
God rips my mouth
Corners. Jesus
Said I want spit
Runout of mouth
I see 1000s of
Visions a day,
Real sik, with
God in me
God heats my body
Up like on fire
Shoots in - rips my
Face, laughs in visions
Immanuel
God with us
I’ve been thinking a lot about how in my church they would have said straight faced and solemnly that he was possessed by a demon. It could all be real. What scares me is the pure not knowing. What delights me is the pure not knowing. I don’t know what I’d do if God really did choose me like this, if I found out I’d been totally wrong about leaving the faith, if I had no control and god shared my skin like a sleeping bag on a cold night.
God is 100% in love with you!
Robert Gluck gets horny thinking about god’s angels wanting to have sex with him and pauses in the middle of writing ‘Bob’s Fundamentalist Movement’ to jerk off. The essay concludes with this thought:
‘The Bible shows us that the whole fucked-up warring world would be a lot better off if everyone just marched into my butthole.’
I’ve never actually read about Margery Kempe except through Gluck’s interpretation, and I think it’s really a story about him and about how God can be like a really sexy person you are hooking up with if you yearn hard enough. I can relate. We used to get warned that anything could become an idol if you got too into it. All it takes for me to turn full heretic idolator is to be in love with someone who is just a little less in love with me. Picture this, I’m in bed with someone who has to go to work. I put my hands together like a prayer and say ‘Open up, I’m diving in!’ pointing my fingers at their naked ass. I want to be god too, live in that little space between the skin and organs like a rat in the walls. A cosy thought, but they are already under my skin.
‘…offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God…’
I guess god, if you really are 100% in love with me, what I want you to know is that I’m switchy. I don’t mind who gets inside who, as long as someone’s getting filled up.
This is the best thing I’ve read in so long, AND it’s from the icon of the knitting world herself?! What a day!