Robert Zend: "Office Memo"

OFFICE MEMO

Dear God:

Before presenting your Annual Report on the State of the Cosmos to the Congress of Aeons, we are taking the liberty of returning it for further revision. First, kindly reduce the manuscript to 15,000 pages, as all the other Gods have done. Second, kindly eliminate some of your incidental remarks (as, for instance, on the bottom of page 9,127, where you devote 4 lines to that parasite on Planet 3 you call something like Uman).

Thanks,
Your Super god.

--- Robert Zend, From Zero to One, translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo (Mission, BC: The Sono Nis Press, 1973), p. 54

Robert Zend: God dead?

 Robert Zend (Hungarian-Canadian writer, 1929 - 1985) wrote a number of poems about God, from an unorthodox perspective, to say the least. Here is one from his book Beyond Labels (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1982), p. 52.

   GOD DEAD?

God has not died,
only his name
        which was confused
        with the sun
        and thunder
        and destiny
        and victory
        and genesis
        and love
        and law
        and wisdom
        and fatherhood
begins to fall apart
        into electricity
        and strategy
        and astronomy
        and historical materialism
        and extrasensory perception
        and psychoanalysis
        and the theory of probability --
only his name
disintegrates.

God has not died
because he never lived.

                            January 13, 1967