Concerning the surface of God
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A passage entitled “Concerning the Surface of God” in Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician begins as follows:
- God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however, for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselves with two dimensions so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper.
Based on the vision of a mystic, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, of the cross in the shape of a Y, it is then postulated that God has the shape of three equal straight lines of length A, emanating from the same point and having between them angles of 120 degrees. There follows an impenetrable sequence of algebraic formulas, culminating in the definition that “God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity,” or alternatively “the tangential point between zero and infinity.”
Put simply, Jarry's pataphysics is the construction of a counterworld by means of a counterlanguage and a counterlogic. In this, it is a faithful replication of the key features of classic folly. And this, precisely, is what the theater of the absurd sought to accomplish a half-century later. --via Peter L. Berger –Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, 1997
