October 24 - There is a place called Eden

There is a place called Eden. They say. Anyway. But see, I don’t like apples, and snakes always seemed to be my friends. I jumped across one, once, as a girl, innocently sunbathing itself on the doorstep, and I was eager to make it to the car, so I leaped right over it and only then did I hear Mom’s frantic cry of, “Oh Oh Oh!” Not understanding, scared she had seen something dangerous, I leaped right back over the snake to her arms, at which point, startled, it slithered off into the grasses of the garden, but he never hurt me, see, and I never understood he was the creature that could elicit such a cry.

And the apple. Mealy in summer, sour in winter, only evoking that just right “aah” in the warm early fall when the streets smell of golden hay and the sun beams are golden, only then is the crisp bite of a Macintosh just right against my rotting teeth. There is a fine season to it. So the apple, no; it hardly seemed right that such a simple, unassuming bulb of red could evince such excitement, or danger, or purgatory even. The pomegranate, perhaps; that felt more apt. The sensuous curve of the outer skin, the sweet red individual seeds within, each begging to be popped with a swirling tongue, puss-filled cavities of sweetness bursting into orgasm between my teeth. There, there, was sensuous. Sexual. The kumquat? The quince? The mango? Mangoes entered her fantasies, once, drizzled in honey. Surely a mango could set off four thousand years of punishment.

So there is a placed called Eden, and there was a girl in this Eden, and she let her hair grow down to her buttocks because she liked the way it tickled the flesh when she threw back her head in exuberance. And there was a boy who saw her dancing naked in her hair, and neither boy nor girl was ashamed, because when they tickled one another on the dew-damp grass it felt good to shriek out giddy screams that lay between pleasure and pain, and both of them wanted it exactly thus. He hand-fed her mangoes. Yes; that’s the way the story goes. And they didn’t jump in alarm at the snakes that slithered by in the grass.

This is paradise, paradise, she sighed into his skin. Heaven, heaven, he moaned against the honey she held in her cup.

But it is not the boy and the girl who were the problem, see, because their elders deemed them too young, while secretly what they wanted to say is they were too happy. Instead, they shook their heads in sorrow and said, “Puppy love, puppy love, it’s only that, you know,” and the dogs who had followed them faithfully for years without asking a single bone in return lowered their heads and their ears drooped and they sighed against their paws, realizing how trivial they were in the eyes of the ones who wanted to be called Master.

Puppy love was not allowed to have such lust. Her first blood on the grass, staining green red, this was something shameful, the elders said, though the boy and the girl knew differently. It didn’t hurt at all, she promised, and she wasn’t lying; he had slithered and slinked in between the soft downy fuzz and she had hardly felt a thing.

Fireworks bursting on skin, this was dangerous, the elders claimed. A woman was supposed to give forth life in shame and agony, and here was this woman moaning in orgasm as she squatted in the bush and brought forth new birth. She waved away the doctors who came to usher her to their metal tables and their medical lamps, and she squatted on her hands and knees and the boy massaged her back and her feet, and the elders moaned and held their heads in their hands and scratched at long gray beards; the hairs had been around for so long they were collecting moss.

It has never been done this way, they muttered, and they plugged up their ears with cotton balls to drown out the woman’s moans of pleasure and the silence of the happy baby she brought forth into the world.

Out, out, the elders said then, seeing this dangerous emotion within their midst, this copulation that was not tinted with shame, this walking about with fingers entwined, the glowing looks they passed back and forth by moonlight, their complexions damp like honey in the comb when they smiled at one another, this they had never seen before, and a new word was whispered among the flowers in the garden.

Love? Love? What is this love?

Eva and her mate tickled one another in the grass, while their baby lay sleeping.

Out, out. The demands grew more insistent, the voices louder, and the bodies were stripped of their clothing in an attempt to shame them from lifting their faces. Eva looked at him and he looked at Eva and they laughed; hadn’t they danced with one another exactly thus so many times, clad only in their flesh and their sweat and each other’s blood? Oh yes, they laughed, and the elders shrieked at the insolence. Out, out, they screamed at the top of their longs, flailing at the naked legs with twigs and branches and whips. The dogs slinked into the corner, self-satisfied. This would teach them to have puppy-love, they smirked. They panted for the bones.

So out, out, they went and a legend grew that forgot the true story. It was not their shame at all, thought the elders, years later – centuries, dare we suggest? – when all had gone wrong, and they saw the error of their jealous ways. Their human jealousy had rent apart the only earthly pleasure that equaled the meaning of life.

We see, we see, the elders sighed, as they died alone in their grasses, and somewhere, far away, answering their cries, was a woman in a desert, on her hands and knees, moaning out the pleasure of birth.