I blame the gods for what befell me, and claim my triumph for myself.
I am born of dust. The place where water is more valuable than gold. Where the storm is more often dry than wet, and will more easily drown a man.
And I am born of breath. The breath of the gods. At my dawning, when I lay prostrate and unliving, one of the gods put his lips to mine and breathed life into me. And lo, I rose and saw the sweeping hills and desert rock from which, over eons, the wind and sparse rains had ground the dust that was my making. I am not of the moment, but of the age; even before I was forged, I was, in the very render of the earth. When the earth was made, so was I.
You are what you are. I am of the dust. I eat the product of the dust. Goat, lamb, emmer wheat, almonds, lentils, grapes, pomegranate, dates. I till the soil, I pray and watch that water be pulled from the air and treasured in the lumpen earth where the bitter seasons might leach some sweetness into the fruit. It is all as old as I. All the soil where roots thread their unstable reach, the valleys where the rare rivers flow, the perpetual wind: all slowly, slowly, in the distemperate discourse of the gods, forge the plants and living things that stretch before my eyes.
I appeared, on the hills, below the steppes, and saw, and breathed, and bent my back to the spark of my beginning. I am of this dust.
But you see these marks on the back of my neck? I do not: my eyes do not turn that far. But I have heard, and feel the indentation. The passing birds have remarked, that, like the colours in their plumage, I bear the marks of the gods’ intermeddling. They too know it, the effect of divine interference. Why else would the lion hunt the sheep, the eagle the hare, or the jackal the kid? Without it the earth would abound in simple pleasure. Yes, I blame the gods for what befell me, what befell the earth. Purveyors of evil, knowers of good and wrong! I claim my embattled victory with my clenched fist proud about both sword and scythe.
For I had spilled my seed on the dry earth. In this single cacophonous act, the mind is released into the haunted world, and dark is as welcome as light. I eat, I pray, I stroke the ears of my cows, and I find relief in the squalor of the flesh.
And the gods said, He is lonely. He needs a companion.
Fools. It is not loneliness to be tethered to the land in which you were born. It is not loneliness to work its crude soils and bear its harsh sun. It is a communion most natural, most human in its essence. I am the dirt, I am the soil. It and I are companions, we are our mutual substance, our common making. I was content here. By what authority did you claim the right to taunt me with exotic and unhomely pleasures?
The gods are insidious devils. They work through inner lusts and hungers. This is how they despoiled the beasts of air and land. Hunger drives their hunt, drives their talons through pitiable flesh, their jaws through bloodied guts. Lust, not loneliness, can drive a man to dream of the other, the possible, the lure of paradise.
Through lust the gods lifted me, like a mewling cub in its mother’s jaws, and led me to that strange, lush place, that alien world of over-worked imaginings and its dark thickets of want. I was voyaged, unbidden, to the place of flagrant opulence.
It was emerald walled, with groves of fruiting boughs, stupendous trees and flowing rivers whose waters were so clear I only saw them by their sound. Birdsong echoed throughout the greenery, musk deer skipped between the trunks and fish leapt in the fresh waters. The scent of flowers turned my mind to softness, and their reds and yellows and oranges carpeted the forest floor with a brilliance that overburdened my eyes.
A desert man has no place in such a torrid jungle. He is born of waste and vacant space, not the tangled mesh of paradise. To him, its fruit is overripe, its grasses snag the step, its shadows breathe suspicion, and the hidden is ever present. To him, the ease of endeavour is untrue, the abundance and growth a riot of the mind and the freshness of the air an untrustworthy vacuum.
It is seductive and sensual. A man goes mad there, his every indulgence granted, his every longing fed. The touch of leaves upon the skin, the harmony of bird cry, the caress of a breeze upon the cheek, the perfume of its resins, none of it is real. It is sensual to the extreme. A man loses his compass here, not knowing where he is, what is real, what not, or where solid ground can be relied upon for his standing. It is a forest of vaunted sensuality, a wilderness of narcosis and dreams.
Every step I took was pleasure, every breath I inhaled a salve within my body. I wandered about, and the trees bent their elegant limbs to shade me, their foliage whispering enticements in my ears. I do not know what mischief the gods had conspired for me, but I ceased to care. I plucked a fruit. I do not know what kind it was; its skin was an orange pink and sumptuous velvet, its scent luscious and stupefying. When I bit into it, I fancied I heard a moan of delight, and looked about me to see who might have made the noise. A cow was watching through the trees, idly chewing its cud. It nodded its head as if trying to tell me something, which I immediately thought was insane. But the moan? Perhaps it was the fruit itself, as if it were intelligent and knew its purpose had been fulfilled by my eating it. My mind reeled at this mad thought, but was distracted as its juices ran down my wrist, and its pallid cream flesh dissolved in sweet murmuration upon my tongue. I sighed with the pleasure of it and my head was filled with an ecstasy that I had never before contemplated.
I dared not pluck another: like hearing a piece of fine music, one tasting was enough. But I did explore others and feasted on a wealth of nature’s promise: long yellow gourds that peeled open to reveal a firm and voluptuous starch, hirsute spheres that concealed a creamy gelatinous centre, red and yellow orbs that crunched and sprayed succulent juices about my chin and hands. My mind reeled, my senses were overborne, my soul was lost in the panoply of earthly pleasures. I was estranged.
I began to feel drowsy and wished to sleep. As if reading my mind, a thicket of soft branches folded open to form a berth where I could lie. I lay within it, unconcerned for my safety. As I closed my eyes, bird song embraced my hearing, the scent of myrrh filled my nose, and the leaves, softer than the finest down, enfolded about me like comfort to a weary traveler.
I slept. I do not know for how long.
But when I awoke there lay beside me a being of such beauty and grace that, but for the promise of further communion with this exquisite creature, I would have resolved to conclude my days there and then, as a fully satisfied man. It was like a man, but not like a man, man-formed but different. It had no hair, save for long tresses that fell from its head like streams upon the leaf pillows of our bower. Soft mounds of flesh bestrode its chest like the gentle foothills of my home, all the more captivating for their presence beside me. The slender valley of its belly sank towards a pudenda covered with delicate and perfumed tendrils. It lacked a man’s organs, but there appeared in the join of its thighs a set of layered folds about a tender gash. I was enrapt, and ogled at this beauty as excitement fired throughout my entire body, most of all in my raging member.
It moved. I dragged my eyes away and saw its open eyes and I was immediately stilled. Her lashes were long about dark eyes that shone like the moon and swallowed my heart in the first hint of recognition. It smiled, and white teeth flashed like a willing tigress, its lips a bounteous palisade of desire and opportunity.
Hello, it said, and the birdsong in the tall trees was cantankerous by comparison. Her lilting voice melted in my ears, and I heard in that simple greeting a profound and encompassing love.
That was wonderful, last night, it said. And it rose and its lips touched mine with all the delicacy and violence of the best fruits I had tasted the day before. My member strained, and my breath jumped in my lungs. What bedevilment was this? What labour of the gods had produced this wondrous creature? Its arms necklaced about my shoulders, its protuberances pressed against my chest. Its perfume overwhelmed my senses, and the world spun in an orb of desire and succumbing. I was mad with desire. It pushed me down on to the flower bed and said,
‘You may call me She, the Living One. I am your beauty, your joy, the pain in your side, your spare rib, flesh of your flesh, desire of your desires, your want and your expiation. I am mystery and revelation, tenderness and release, I am identity and distinction. I am Woman.’
Then she flashed a smile more brazen than the rising dawn, more radiant than the sun it welcomes in its breast.
I think I fainted. I really don’t recall. But when I regained my composure I was limp, and the aroma of new congress filled my nostrils. But she was there, asleep again, by my side, the captivatingly smooth hills of her back fresh to the sky.
I called upon the gods.
What have you done to me? I cried.
They were walking among the trees and came to me.
We have given you woman, they said.
But what is this insanity that accompanies her? What is this madness in my mind? You have ruined me, you have saved me, you have deranged my soul.
Be calm, they said. She will wake again, and joy will drown your heart.
I gazed down upon my prize, my gift from the gods. Then I said,
My heart bursts. Longing and care and desire fight within. Will there be an end to this turmoil?
They said, ‘This is paradise, oh Man. You are free to eat from any tree in the garden but one. You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’
Then they left me to my idyll and plight.
The woman woke.
‘Hungry,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. I wanted to hold her, to feed her, to relieve her of any deficiency she may feel.
‘There is food in abundance,’ I said. I held out my hand and we rose and kissed and my mind began to swim again, but she said, ‘Show me.’
We strode hand in hand into the deep forest where the branches were laden with fresh and heavy fruits. We plucked and ate and laughed as the juices ran down our chins and on to our bodies. At one time a brown faun paused in front of us, unafraid, and bleated to us. The woman sounded back at it and I laughed at her mimicry of the small deer. But she said, ‘The faun told me there are even better pickings around the bend in the river.’
I said, ‘You can speak to animals?’
‘I am born of this garden,’ she replied. I am flesh of your flesh, but breathed with the air of this bounty. I am your princess from a close and far off paradise.’ And with this she disappeared behind a large boulder that lay adjacent to the cool river. As I followed, I heard a splash and saw her cream form gliding fishlike beneath the surface of a swirling pool. Her head popped up and she said, ‘Come join me!’
I leapt in. The water was a balm upon my skin. It fluttered about my thighs and chest and dissolved any memory of the dirt from which I had come. Her skin was alive when I reached her, and her hands moved over me like a lutist might his strings. I was alive again, and she held me and giggled and said, ‘Look up there.’
Above us was a grove of the richest fruit I had ever seen. Bunches of red and ochre bulbs were suspended from a tangle of emerald leaves. Dotted amongst the foliage were flowers of silver and gold, each with rare filaments of brilliant yellow thread. Birds dazzled the trees with flashes of azure and scarlet, and plump bees buzzed about the flowers spreading pollen and sweet nectars from within. Above it all, the sun shone bright and clear above us, the warmth of life, the source of heat and sustenance for it all.
‘Let’s climb it,’ said the Woman, and she swam to the pool edge. I watched the water flow off her spine and backside as she rose and strode to the base of the tree. She was agile in her nakedness, her arms pulling her up with simian ease, her toes clinging securely to its bark. I watched her above, her slender limbs, her breasts firm, her shadowed portions, and my heart sang more loudly. For here was a companion who was strong, and elegant, and supple and caring. A companion who could follow me and do what I do and be a complement to my endeavours, and I to her.
I was not concerned when the serpent appeared. I was sure she was safe in the garden; it was a place without risk or danger. Indeed, I saw her whispering to it, and laughing. She called down to me and said,
The serpent asked, ‘Did God really say to you, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’’?
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The gods said to me, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for if we touch it, we will die.’’
I saw her mouth words to the serpent, but I did not speak the language of her garden. Her arm reached out and plucked a massive fruit from a branch, twisting its stem and forcing it from its hold. The tree shook and the branch rocked as, with seeming reluctance, it released its treasure and the Woman laughed and clung to her branch.
She called down to me and said, ‘The serpent says, ‘We will not certainly die. But the gods know that when we eat from it our eyes will be opened, and we will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.’’
In my memory of that moment I recall a tremor ripple through the dusty innards of my being, but it was faint and clouded by the indulgences of our paradise. This woman was, after all, my complete love, and held for me the hope of a future more magnificent than any fruit that flourished in this wilderness.
I saw her bite and felt a flush of hot juice fall upon me like thick rain. Its scent was bewitching, its perfume was the perfume of her body and the intimacies of the garden around us. I was entranced. As was she I suspect. She laughed and tossed me a fruit which landed with a heavy splash in the pool where I swam below her. I was scared lest it had bruised upon impact but I picked it up and it was pure and perfectly formed and unharmed.
I plunged my teeth into it and its essence sank deep into my being. It was rich beyond compare, and stank of a beauty that cannot exist in the mortal world. I supped on it, hungrily, ignorant of the forest about me, the birds, the pool, the bees, the blue sky. I had only two thoughts, the exquisiteness of the fruit and the grandeur of the goddess above me, and they merged within my mind til my soul was honey and frankincense and spice and the rivers of my heartland, its sun, its solid cliffs and steep ravines, the crows that cawed over the dry valleys, the storks with their stick nests on towers, the hunting jackals, and burrowing hares, the snakes and mice in folding fields of barley and wheat, the sounds of stones grinding flour and the flare of hot ovens roasting slaughtered goat.
I longed for home. I longed to return, to take my new bride to the birthplace of my making and show her its sparse and true-won treasures, to climb the hills with her and watch the sun set over the distance, all red and fire and farewell. I wanted to skip down the valleys with her, plunge into rock pools where fish swam into our nets and eels fought for liberty. I wanted her in my tent, naked on coloured rugs glistening with oils and perfumes and ripe like fruit for our proclivities.
My breath had stuck in my chest. This garden was suddenly an excess, an unwanted dross, an unreal palace for the blind-to-life, for the indolent, the soft and over indulged. It was an excrescence, an unnatural thing, a canker on the gods’ good earth. It was not real, it did not exist beyond the dreams of those afflicted by its vain seductions. How had I been so crazed?
I clambered out of the pool and called to my beloved. I grabbed a large leaf from the nearest tree to cover myself, and moved to the base of the tree. But the gods were there, in haughty array, scowling and blocking my path.
And they said, ‘Where are you, Man?’
And I said,’ I heard you in the garden, where you have taken me, and I was afraid because I was naked in the face of its fragility.’
And they said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that we commanded you not to eat from?’
And I said, ‘Yes, of course I have. The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it. And now I see the truth behind the curtain, the fable in the earth. The scales have fallen from my eyes.’
And the gods spat, and said to the Woman, ‘What is this you have done?’
And the Woman called from the tree and said, ‘I spoke, as I can do with the animals of the woods, to the serpent who told me there is no death in paradise, so I ate.’
She climbed down next to me, and covered herself from the wrath of the feeble gods. We stood, arm in arm, defiant in the knowledge we had not erred, but had uncovered what the gods knew all along, that paradise is a dream, a wish for freedom from hardship, a yearning for effortless stimulation.
The gods’ breath was hot and angry. When once it had filled me with life, now it bred vengeance. Anger breeds anger, wrath breeds wrath, and I stood protective of my lover, angrily fronting the sinister rage of the divines.
They turned first to the serpent, and cursed him in bitter tones, that he might crawl on his belly in the dust and be beholden to my heel, a creature of lowest order and most despised state.
Then to the Woman they uttered a fierce and savage curse, that she will bear children in severe pain and be subordinate to the whims of her husband. No longer was she to be my companion, but my subject. Where once she had pleasure in love, now she was to endure whatever whim I might inflict upon her. This despite her innocence, her trust in the place of her creation.
Then they turned their rage upon me, and said with vengeful faces, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree forbidden to you,
We curse the ground beneath you.
Only through painful toil will you eat food from
it all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
And when by the sweat of your brow
you have exhausted yourself
you will return to the ground from whence you came,
for dust you are and to dust you will return.’
And the gods glared at me but I stood firm, chin up, my chest proud, the strength of my arms sure in the savagery of the moment.
Now, what I said is not recorded by the servile banks of scribes who later lent their ink to the mendacity of the gods, but is nonetheless true. I stepped forward and declared,
‘You, gods, are not good,
but know evil as well,
yet in your petty jealousy you proscribed
the eating of the fruit of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil,
for fear that we would become equal with you,
and know also both the evil within you
and the good without.
Cursed is paradise because of you,
for it is the sowing of a man’s soul
with an alien seed,
the temptation of his nature
with foreign dreams.
For your deceit, you will be banished
from our dreams, and erased
from our imaginings.
You will be exiled from our maps,
and replaced by other tenuous divinities,
and you will surely die.
For we have become as you are,
knowing both good and evil,
able to discriminate what is
true and attainable from what is
myth and mere semblance.
Close up your florid palisade,
shore up your knotted garden,
for I am born of the dust,
and to that dust I shall return,
and there, by the sweat of my brow
shall my wife and I establish life.
My wife is named Eve,
the mother of all living,
and we shall be exalted in the
mountains of our labours.’
And their ire was as a flaming sword flashing back and forth in the grip of mighty cherubim as we departed. But it was an impotent rage, and their power incompetent to tempt us to look in anguish away from our direction, back to the barricades of Paradise. We strode on.
We came to the lands that had moulded me, the desert encampments, the sweeping mountains, the herds of sheep and goats, the flowing rivers aligned with swaying palms, and the fruits and seeds that flourished beneath their shade.
Work was hard, but its rewards were many. We toiled and mastered the seasons, and ate a bounty from the plants of the field: wheat, barley, pulses, sesame, honey, dates, grapes, pomegranates, figs and curds from the goats. We dried mud bricks and lashed reeds stolen from the river to make houses, and weaved dyed wool from the sheep for clothes and rugs, and filled mattresses with feather down to make our bed in the shelter of our rooves.
Eve was ever elegant in our abode and dwelt with me with much grace and forbearance. She continued to laugh and work with me in the fields, or at home, sieving flours and kneading their breads, grinding seeds and cooking all manner of pies and pastries and cakes. We kissed each sunrise and sunset, and when the heat of the day had passed fell to conjugal pleasures that far surpassed the novelties we had experienced in the flush of Edenic love.
With screams and wild calls she bore our children. The first of these could not handle the burden of living, but, enticed by inner lusts and the falsities of the easy life, murdered our second born. Thus he liberated the curse of humanity’s shadows, and was exiled to the east, away from the grief of his parents, and the blood fields of our son’s memory. But Eve bore many more offspring, and our lives were enriched in family and renown.
Aging, Eve never ceased to be beautiful to me. Whereas her skin had once been soft and smooth, the harsh sun and the wind of the fields had weathered its marking upon her cheeks, yet through these her smiled flashed brilliantly and her eyes met mine with delight. Born of both garden and dust, of a different world but of my rib, she remained the centre of my dreams and the prime cause of all my deeds. Where once was love imagined as a paradise of exotic growth and rivers, now she dwelt with me, went with be where I went, ate where I ate, slept where I slept, and was true to her last days.
For wherever was Eve, there was Paradise.
