The Secret Gospel of Eve (3/3)
The real dope on what happened in the Garden—the downlow on the actual criminal behind the Original Sin—and a grimoire of rare pigments beamed straight into your third eye
The first soul, Psyche, loved Eros, who was with her, and she poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. From that blood the first rose sprouted upon the earth, out of a thorn bush, to give joy to the light that would appear in the bramble.
—On the Origin of the World
Now it’s almost night in the Garden of Eden. Night!—Certain prophets claim that the light in Paradise never changes, but how could such a monolux zone be Paradise? There’s no Heaven without twilight, no bliss without the oscillating cycles that underweave our living. In the real, uncensored Garden, the night of the Fall is the holiest of them all. So chuck your holey book, jilt the jealous hierophants guarding your withered traditions, and gaze at evenfall in Eden: look how the young sun, not even one, caps yet another dentless summer day by setting into its own raving blaze, sinking through a green-blue sky shaved from labradorite and trickle-frilled with sulfur. Hear how the frogs ribbit vespers to the bronze-fingered light, the crickets stridulate their wing guitars, the hummingbats feast on immortelle nectar. Shalom the light of the soul of the summer evening as it goes out like a campfire done telling a story, and the foremidnight breeze wraps the first woman and man in diaphanous shawls of paradisal wind which lisp promises of pineapple mañana.
Adam yawns and pats his sweet milky mouf, then snuggles into his flowerbed ‘neath a fig tree, extending a headrest bicep in case Eve should fancy joining him later. Maybe, she says, hugging her knees and staring off soulfully toward the o’erspreading Tree of Knowledge—which looks, um, kinda rad, all lit up like some fantastic citadel of escalating sentience, its trunk forking and forking into overlapping candelabra of branches which constantly grow and retract and complicate the canopy, twinkle-wreathed by pointillist continents of fireflies and zigzag-swagging with conurbations of phosphorescent glowbugs. Dizzied, whee-headed, still Eve can’t look away from this distant masterpiece, so clearly one of the finest things Pops ever made. And well hey, Eve says to herself, wouldn’t it be sorta kinda really cool to be as smartsy-pantsy as her daddy? Then she could muck together her own gardens of Eve, and make for him some cute little people-presents, and they’d laugh and laugh!
And hadn’t the pinky oath seemed like a fun game? Had there not lurked, somewhere under his paterfamilial bluster, a miscreant wink?
Being intelligent seems like the best thing ever.
FORGET THE SERPENT: EVE TEMPTS HERSELF
Adam, unable to sleep without her, whips out cedar and whittling knife, then gets so engaged in creative work that he doesn’t notice when Eve leaves.
For her part, she’s in denial. According to her, it’s not exactly Eve who meanders from Adam: it’s just her itinerant feet. Yielding with a huff-sigh to those peripatetic imps, she circumambulates hills and dells and cirques and gorges, pausing to pick indigoberries, stroking iridescent land-clams and scraping petroglyphs of heart variations. What’s going on in her mind? Nothing simply virtuous—she’s lying to herself about her goal and her agency, whilst performing a dumbshow of innocence as if she knows she’s being watched. There’s a fraught knot of self- and other-deceptions here, the knot’s taut plies inherited from her pa-creator. But how guilty is she? Welllll, according to Norea, we might could consider Eve fully innocent and nonnegotiably blameless. Think: that benighted maiden does not grok why anything is wrong or right, can’t muster up malice aforethought, has no concept of pain or punishment. What jurist would judge this adult child responsible? Isn’t knowledge of good and evil a precondition for moral action? I say someone ought to have gotten Eve a lawyer, because the Biblical case against her is total bullshit.
Sure, on some level she knows she’s kind of doing something forbidden, but so like what does it mean that something’s not allowed? Why is it not allowed? What is Good? What is Evil? Who knows!? Anyway, Eve trusts that her Daddy loves her too much to rage or hate her. Everything’ll be all right—it always is!—and so merrily she warbles a singsong psalm as she winds her way through the wonderful undergrowth of the enchanted forest, which is boughing down and swooning moonily before her, for all living things love Eve extravagantly.
Gosh, how could anything go wrong, in Papa’s Garden? All around Eve weave resplendently revolving inventions of her father: a Rubenesque moon rocks a Blakean lake, from moquette meadows Rousseau tigers wave hello, on a popcorn plain Carrington horses nicker etiquettely, and in a cavemouth a Varos stoat blesses her from within the eye-tipped antler-cage of a Fuchs hind; to beguile her eyes, brash boles spread emerald crowns of eternal sylvan vernality, each oak or ash or yew a crinklecrankling king who trembles beneficently above snoring flowers and tattling grass; to cheer her ears, the insects ink air with melting notation, and even the lowly shrubs rub their base twigs in the hoarse hum of a herbal hymn. All is holy, holy, holy, and lovely, lovely, lovely, as Eve skips toward the Tree, muted by falling silver feathers of lune light, laughing and blowing pollen from her lipple lips, all along quite convinced that she won’t feed on the Fruit, that she’ll steal a fleeting and victimless peep and then leave and go to sleep and tra and la and hee-hee.
The forbiddenness makes it all the sweeter.
From up close the Tree’s canopy looks like multiple gold-green cathedrals, branch fingers twisting into the pointed and rounded arches of superimposed apse-skeletons, foliations cusping into teeming moiré traceries which iterate through xylemic dialectics, while pewed choirs of buglit leaves strive to outdo one another in crepitant praise of the Tree and God; and under the golden bellscape of jolly foliage, which prances and dances, pealing its joy, the trunk branches back menoraishly into a lignin stabile of neural networks carved with bug altars, coated with insect cities and crusted with roly-poly laboratories, the Tree’s resinous effluences having rendered the very vermin literate, impelling the caterpillars to communism and the ants to anarcho-syndicalism. Within this forcing-house of heterogeneous utopias in which everything is handmade from Knowledge, bees theorize about the Hive of Beeseus, the owls have become knowls and hoot alexandrines, and a Kantian chipmunk employs allegories of walnuts to explain phenomena and noumena, and the vicinal air itself, shimmying with nervous energy, gets continually excited via sympathetic vibration into crystally ecstasies of dendritically hoarfrosted self-reflection. Truly and unruly the Tree, soughing an Om toward Heaven, is a luteous plexus twaining the sacred and the profane, an arborescent Axis Mundi ‘tween body and mind, twixt earth and star, present and future, I and Thou. In short, intelligence looks ace, and Eve is drawn on more ardently than she’d ever responded to Sakla or Adam. Here is something more cogently compelling and personally promising, something that oppugns all rules and regulations, something that parles to her most parlous parts: Wisdom.
And then she sees it—from a low bough sags a plum-grape-apple, not so much dangling as poised with an air of expectancy, squatly round, freckly glowing, galaxy-fleshed, lightly dark and darkly light, and in its core a universe centrifuging from a secret star. Forgetting to breathe, Eve sways applewards with the amative transfixion of a child beyond good and evil, with the guileless openheartedness of a feral and unsocialized girl who has never learned to hate or doubt herself, never verted inward, never rotted, never faltered a thoughtlet. With every step she becomes more real, till she brings her fresh face, her Venus-in-a-Halfshell face, deathless expression of blithe youth (ever so slightly azure from not breathing) to within centimeters of the obscure fruit’s tenebrous translucence, and the jeweled Fruit’s ghost appears twinned in her eyes, ricocheting in place like a candle flame, and she sees that inside its flesh its soft internal sun is scribbled over by white-tipped calligraphical breakers which shift and striggle and interchange in a waving laving raving lexis of white gold, a serum of tongues, an anti-Babel dictionary of Life. The Fruit is a glow loquat of Mystery, freighted with wisdom’s gametes, and even just the coruscating implications of its scriptural core are enough to bring out the primitive childishness of her environment, the sybaritic insipidity of Papa’s pleasuredrome. In its florid permutations, the Fruit seems to promise Somewhere Else, Something More, Something Better than Innocence and Happiness—a promise it will fulfill by granting knowledge, and in the train of knowledge imagination, which likens a human unto a god, so that she may trowel heaven upon heaven, so that dream supervenes upon dream, and the descent passes into transcent.
It's too late for Eve. Her salivary glands are going off like sprinklers, her eyebuds are applauding ravenously, she has never been hungry before, never desired, never known what it is not to have enough, to need to feed, to crave something so much she’d throw away everything to have it. Desperatized she reaches for the prize, sighing while procumbent vines gyre around her in triads, while the sky-colonizing miracle tree’s leaves, like those of a Mandelbrot’s cypress, plait ornately around her feet, while the fruit amberly illuminates her palm, kells her skin with violin lines of faïence patterns and paints her epidermis with an incorruptible golden majolica of interlacing equations all solving themselves for zero or one. Hungry as an escaped dog, violent as a cagebound hyena, Eve wrests free the Fruit of Knowledge and without thinking, without being able to think, airlifts to her already long-lost lips.
Eve’s smooth chompers slow as they zeno in on the glabrous skin of the taut fruit, taking minutes, hours, years to contact the epicarp, which now looks strawberrishly punctuate with seed periods. Then her dentition breaks skin, and a fructotic nectar of purified information sprays between the soft gates flanking the dainty fortress of her mouth, and her tongue salutes reflexively and wiggles in painful hallelujah, for the fruit pongs like the concentrated knowledge of ten thousand books, tangs like a classical education in every literature simultaneously. Yet the pericarp contains only facts, logic, analyses; still her incisors, slicing through the fruit’s oblate globe, have not punched through to the aureate core, it’s as if Eve has slowed in time, moving so fast through mind that her body barely budges while the fruit spurts letters, shoots sentences twining down her arm, mists the atmosphere with art-nouveau descriptions, spatters a rataplan of vocab onto her brainpan.
But all this is nothing, just norm and ornament. When she pierces to the core of wisdom, the fruit shoots into her spirit an amrita stream straight from the heart-brain of Sophia, and Eve gasps and gapes, her blood gilts into gold frostwork, inside her eyes other eyes open, and on her forehead burns a third pupil as all at once she SEES the true face of the universe, and her mind antlers out and locks into the world neuron and downloads a superpsychotic blast of information that bursts her skull into suns, that piledrives her mind with pulsars!
O, ETERNAL RETURN IN WOMAN OF SOPHIA’S CURSE!
O, TRAGEDY OF FAUSTINA EVE, SHE OF THE SHATTERED HEAD!
Except after some vertigo she’s completely fine.
Does that disappoint you? I hope not! Look, Eve’s grandam Sophia may have overreached when she attempted to grasp Fullness and what overlies and is superior to wisdom, but in our cracked world smacked and thwacked together by a gakking God, wisdom and its expeditious acquisition should be the #1 priority of every human with any spirit. Indeed, spiritual acquisition of wisdom + intelligence is key to salvation of the universe, and when you imagine a Fall through knowledge you’re just parroting the propaganda of patriarchs who would rather that you stay stupid, Norea says. Consider that Genesis, that perjurous flatus, contrasts strongly with almost every other antique text when it implies that stupidity is pure and knowledge anything less than a spectacular increase for the knower. In doing so, the Hebrew text paves the path for an even worse phenomenon: soul-killing, woman-hating Pauline Christianity, that misogynistic and self-crimping creed which elevates emotions and demotes rationality, conning believers and especially women of intellectual autarchy and making them malleable for the insidious ambitions of their gold-crooked popes and pastors. O faithers, raise your holy lighters high with tears in your ears—then pitch your flames onto the straw heaped at the feet of the heretic in her habitello; roar yourself raucous, drink the intoxicant blood of your anastatic cross king and tempt not your mind into the iniquity of inquiry!
But this criminal transvaluation of wisdom, this invidious vice against humanity, needed centuries to radiate its malign influence from our original couple. Throughout the rest of the Testament Senior, wisdom reigns supreme, with five books dedicated to helping you achieve it, kings and countries immolated for not having it; and in factually the legend of Adam and Eve goes entirely unmentioned outside of Genesis until the apocrypha, in Ecclesiasticus, where the proto-pundit Ben Sira retails the story of A&E without a concept of a Fall. In Sira’s telling, God is rather more of a bro and directly debriefs the deconjoined doublet on good and evil, like any caring father would, since to that author wisdom really is the best thing ever, the ontos and telos of human existence and of every well-lived life, and even the sidekick guide-tool-map with which the creator created creation. How could gaining wisdom possibly be bad? Just what kind of yauping despot would think or say so?
So how about you lightly weigh in: should Eve have stayed stupid forever? Do you want to be a permachild, and if so, why? Why in the heckola? I say every morn we oughta get on our knobbly knees and thank Good Queen Eve for smashing up the ruleboard, for defying the feigned edict of the demolished God, and for converting us from creatures into creators—and all at such a devastating personal cost to her own wellbeing and cushy situation.
Do you want a Paradise Lie? Or do you want Truth?
Eve has made her choice, and the consequences will follow for all of us forever. But not right away. First comes a peep of reprieve: the miraculous hours after enlightenment but before affrightenment, after the apple but before God.
Admittedly from outside she looks totally loco. She is looping and looping: unguent tears sliming her smutted cheeks, Eve frownsmiles and laughsobs, half-sits and thumps back, threshes her long long limbs and rakes ruddy furrows into her supple tummy skin. Then she does it all again, her eyelids flapping like trapped bats, her lips foaming with star systems, her afro strewn with cryptozoic duff and moodily lit by edgy fireflies fretting for their fairy infanta.
Remember, kiddies, you have to play safe with drugs: you can always take more later, but you can never take less earlier. (Write that down!) Still, the first woman could hardly be expected to know dose protocol for sophomimetic enactogens—and that’s why she’s laid out flat on her back on a vine mattress, convulsing in a pleasing seizure of scherzophrenia.
Yet she’s having scary fun. Or something better than fun. A feeling greater, weightier, bearing in its vice the gravamen of reality. Everything ever engraves itself into her on repeat: every conversation, every game, every sight reiterates from myriad rotating angles, showing sides she doesn’t have time to digest; flections and reflections fold and unfold in flapping chains frilled with flaming info. From inside, Eve looks like Libraries of Babel vaulted with bluey sky. She looks like alpine theories of laughter, like vast natural landscapes contained within a glass woman, inchundering with the thunder of enlightening light, with a wagga-chagga-chagga of acervate yantras and gelignite enchiridions. And her moans are not of aches: the golden fishchine of her spine is flogging through a ripping sea of rapture, while star after star fountains zodiacs through her brain, her axons exulting into sizzlelectric effervescence as every klieg light in her head is panged up to max wattage by a yattering, shattering ta-da of data and redata, as the lightshow spaceship of her made-marvelous mind, pitching and yawing, soars up through thoughts and thoughts about thoughts and thoughts about thoughts about thoughts, as mind becomes mind and body becomes body and world becomes world and Eve becomes Eve becoming Eve.
Then—oopsy-daisy—her astral stilt staggers and BONK! Eve’s magnified mind crash-lands into her bespattered body, her lustrous eyelids slam open, and with a biclavate inblow of air she bolts erect, catapulting fireflies from her ‘fro, jerking up in a mannequinish repetition of the instant she was insuspired.
Her mind takes deep shuddering breaths of sight. For a moment everything stays stammer still, frozen and glazed into a glowing tone painting of the twining shades and shadow-shows of the overarching multitectures of the Wising Willow wearing star diadems and nova pearls in the branches of its hair, the fool moon ooning through, dribbling on twigs, silvering leaves, funneling into a torrent that cascades sights into Eve’s orchidaceous eyes. Forget the treasures inside: now Eve’s besieged by the crisp resplendence of the nodding artpiece of the Tree. Holy moly, she has been worse than blind! It’s as if before now she’s never seen anything, has looked without looking, unclued into color form composition, into the ekphrastic elation of the elucidating eye. The Tree was cool, piquant, and zany; now it is heart-dartingly gorgeous, a swanky fairytale illustration of openwork intervals of mild minute infinitude. Shit man, it’s all too good, too superb to bear, too amazing to leave her unfazed.
Yet this mighty sight of a catoptric infundibulum is itself only a lil lull. Upon marking her revival, the Tree’s permacultures of intellectual wildlife erupt into collectivist variants of happy applause: luciferous podbugs spangle boughs with swingling macramé of insect light, and singers and chafers both apterous and alate jumpstart into an intersymphonic, multitudinous chorale of hooting, humming, buzzing, and pittering jubilation, a billion-footed baroque anthem carried by the chanting of barbershop ants, counterpointed by continents of cantors and a conpageant of syndescants, ruched with sostenuto and pianissimo, arpeggio and appoggiatura—a zoic aria nave of salutation that drenches her in animal music and detonates in her mind a lightsome incry, a salutary synaptic sonoluminescence that snaps her awake to the love, the love, that the world feels for her, its tendresse and blessedness. Eve weeps heaps.
And is it still night? Really? Since when does the moon have so many colors, and how can there be a hundred grades between grey and white? Hist: blown by the boisterous ovations of the wind, silver spokes of moonlight spin like a sparkling sprocket, like a steel spider spinning in an elegant tarantella its samurai-sword corridors of canescent fulgor. Bipbipbipbipbip—strafed stripewise by the rude moon, Eve begins to absorb its silver through selenian photosynthesis, spoonfuls of moonlight dolloping on her obsidian skin until she sheens over, glows snowly and efflows argent light from her lunar plexus.
Later will come grief, mangy fear, haggling guilt, discipline and punishment, but for now Eve forgets all fault and sets off with unhidebound heart into the miracle of consciousness fully felt, toward the wider world waiting in its oystershell, toward the windy, grasslashed eye of everything. Out there the nitro night is oddly loud and zestily restless; it shiftles and blurbles in a many-oared song-roar of nonsensical sense-snatches. Heh? A tad confuzzled, slender hand shading her peepers, our silver sylph soft-foots along under the Tree’s embracive branchbell, up to its foliage’s fringed selvage’s edge—where she stops, sightstruck by a yammering panorama, a super-magical marvel meant only for her benefit: all beasts, birds, and betweeners, padlocked in perfect pacifism, have come moving as one mass, grooving as one group, to celebrate her recuperation: gawping they bop in tight rhythm, in the dittoing cadences of a jerky zoetrope of techno, braying or chirping, gubbling or skirling, bombinating or honkilating or indeed making even eccentricker cries of bliss.
Zooks! Our Miss Highness has never seen anything so delightful, amazing & smashing as this rave-up. Gushing wet laughter from all her pores, she steps out in a euphoric stupor, shimmer-melting into the stringently sinuous savannah of fantasticreatures—which features many oddballs later banned from the ark by Noah—all tangoing in a moonlit organocarnival that breaks over her in a turning tsunami of frisking animals who together exhaust the world’s palette of tints and tinctures, forms and deforms, as all fauna from mini to mega, from telluric to aerial, circle, rambunct, and carnivalate around her, mammals and reptiles and amphibians and birds teasing and romping and tumbling, bouncing and flouncing and rolling in a churn-turn kaleidoscope of scurrying and hurrying, flapping and flipping motion, expanding and contracting in a red orange yellow green blue indigo violet merry-go-round of animal shapes, receding and approaching like a centroclinal tide washing down into the tiny femannikin which is Eve crying, laughing, loving everything that exists, while the hills burst into song, the trees clap their hands, and the clouds rumble their drums, and the blushing soil offers its cheek to be kissed.
Gradually the beasts’ jubilee subsides into generalized glee. Most creatures collect a fondle from Her Fond Majesty, then disperse to nap, work, nurse, play. The parade radiates away. Ere long Eve is alone, stumble-surfing waves of golden pleasure which are also slowly ebbing, gently setting her down onto a sharper and subtler beach of perception. In this more fine-grained and silicate awareness, she tunes in to smaller, realer details and feelings; tenderfooting through the gusty flowerblown reaches of the nutilant night, now she observes transported as squirrels haggle, moles make briars shake, tardigrades party hardy, and the moon burns; now the breathing, seething night keens and deepens, hatching and crosshatching with vectors, intents, destinies, lives.
It makes her breath catch. All around, every Edenic critter, every bear and mouse, microbe and macrobe is busy chasing its own willful course according to its pith and principles and personality, feeling its own feelings and meaning its own meaning, for everything is particular. Each leaf and leaf-shake, each spiration and nictation, is an individual thing or event, a fleeting, unrepeatable part of a runaway tapestry of causes-and-effects, of processes and recesses that toil and mingle in a brimming tinkle-tankle of sparky élan vital, secting and intersecting in a green amphitheater of crosstalk and circlepurposes, till the biome, both one and many, emerges from millions of wills, a zoetic machine of ding-ding-dinging paradise, a horological stepwork of unfaltering eerie grace in which every biology is a microcosmic echo of the ecology.
Ah: Wisdom, bathing her brainfolds, is permutating into the final crannies of her consciousness, squiggling into the waxy, nacreous bedrock of her natural narcissism. Just belook her: our Thinkerbell, a volant silver specter zigzagging from sight to sight, voluble hands out and long, long arms swerving, may in actual fact be even more beautiful than the beatific beauty currently dropping her chops extra low—but she doesn’t care. Not a whit! Rolling between knolls, blissed and blown by all that breathes, she’s about to be overthrown by a Copernican revolution. In her peabrained past she whiled away many a snug noon admiring her lucky likeness in lovehooked lagoons; but now she’s passing glassy puddles without a glance, for Eve, eyes opening to others, has hatched from the chrysalid of solipsism, depedestaling herself from paradise’s summit throne. After all she is just so small, is nothing, is not the point, only a part, a mottled mote of a mickle mite dotting the earth’s eye, a partial partiality drifting through many many minds, because of course animals have souls too.
This summa supercognizance is the summary consummation of all her consuming contemplations. It is the surmoment at which the best element of humanity first exists—yet it rends, it sends her as the world decenters itself from her, handsprings over and shatters into a worldscape, into an outer world host to many inner worlds. Before, she was everything; suddenly she’s a thing—thus Other begets Self. Now pow: with a circumjerk she drops into herself, and Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve, blinking, a part apart, just a frail strong girl in the nanny night, shading the trembling lamp of her mind, her every follicle registering air caresses, every square inch of skin glockenspieling grandly while all mobile life, furred or spiked or glossed, noctivagant or insomniac, avails itself of its vitality, rumbustling and justling in a holistic saturnalia of life that’s outside her, neither for her nor about her, and which in its integral totality points toward something much greater, toward the overhierarchy orchestrated by the creator himself, the reverend sultan of the universe, her dad.
Her dad… Eve falters, the night contracts, stars rattle, a frigid wind ruffles and fluffles her frizzy mane so like black threads coming undone. Woozy and oozy from jouissance and frissons she had forgotten her fatal felony; hell, she’d never even understood it good. Now she’s a wiser wench—but the wisdom fills her with illness, dirties the glistering rivers of images ebulliating through her mightened mind, trashens her till her conscience clots with rotten garbage, with guilt, shame, and terror. What has she done?? Stupid girl! Sinking to her inky knees, lips forming a prolate O around a black hole of terror, our horrorstruck bluestocking whimpers as she’s divebombed by cawing concepts out of the apple’s worldwind: ideas like law, and castigation, and divine wrath. It’s not that she hurt herself or anyone; it’s that there are rules, and she has travestied them, has perfidied her pa and perforce must be punished. Having bitten the forbidden, she is no longer good but its awful opposite, which is clarifying now through rancid antithesis: she is bad. She is bad, Bad, BAD.
Eve springs up and bounds away from her thoughts, but they are just as zippy, nipping her heels and hissing like an argle-bargle of gagging geese. Tormented she darts yipping silverly over fields, hooks her foot on an infinity skink, windmills her immaculate arms, faceplants her daisy of a face; sits up soiled and wails as she’s eaten by the quacking hounds of self-hate.
More horrible yet, no one and nothing comes running to rescue her. Nearby an aspish copse of corpsy aspens slithers in sinister sympathy, but otherwise the animals and flowers have slipped to sleep, and the violet hills seem to turn cold shoulders; even the moon gathers its cloud skirts and retires to an obscurer department of the snickersnee sky. On her part, much snuffling follows.
“I’m sorry,” Eve ventures.
There is no reply.
She’s lost, lost in the ur-dark, winding out and in of sense, blind eyes fuel pellets fuming in a silhouette, woolly hair unravelling into question marks. Panic is at her wheel, panic is skid-drifting her around corners, anxiety lashing her flanks and riding her till she whickers, careens and smashes through allegorical creepers, screams and brashes into a runically thorned thicket whose symbolism is all too pointed. The thicket lays onto her head a coronet of thorns anointed with poison, and her blood runs into her reddened eyes—Eve looks like a Mucha girl in a nightmare—yet in a way the pain aids our maid, for she welcomes it as apt. How fitting that she is scratched, heaving, dirty:
Her outsides match her insides.
Ugh, whatever! Where’s she heading? Augh: wherever! Ahead there’s interrupted purpleness; maybe there she can get her bearings and go home. But it really does not matter. Whitherever she goes, she will be herself—and she is a bad person. The worst person ever, so far. She is shit.
Eve has revolted against her sillier self. You may pity her, you may feel her unfairly treated, but remember that pain is part and parcel of wisdom. Pain is pearl and present, if we accept it. Pain makes us real, for the depths in a personality must be etched by doubt and error, embossed by the acids of retrospection, intaglioed with the profuse fretwork of internal inquisitions. Only after we have bashed bloodied like frenzied flies against the translucid windowpanes of our stubborn sins do we undertake to undertake our salvation, throttle our egos and vie to decode the raw savage in our ravaging mirror. Thus Eve must suffer, must stumble and crumble sobbing and mucky through molten pain, innerly maimed, while in the inaudible night not a louse or a mouse rouses to her defense, in a Paradise suddenly callous and doomy and looming up close from the enormous moral distance of her father’s side; she must feel cursed and deserted, surrounded and arounded, with nobody to shrive, drive, or revive her, for it is only in the curdling lull of her loneliness, in the needletip nadir of her melancholia, that she will begin to fight back, to wrest her perspective under self-conscious control—to shape, make, and create herself.
Schlop-schlopping through shin-deep mire, flickering hands sphered into fists, Eve slows at last to a stop and stands blank sad in bad mud, erased by moral smog. Our endarkened Miss, sizzling in misery, too fatigued to harass herself further, has hit her wall of will… atop that wall, however, a sly thought is pirouetting into being, a suspect concept that unbends its greasy flabellum unbidden: what did she, small and naïve Eve, do to deserve all this distress? Let alone God’s choler still to come? Shocked she pushes this prideful thought off, strikes it down like an evil balloon-clown. It bobbles back insistently. Like, logically speaking, and viewed from above, isn’t she already suffering enough? Is she not very very very very sorry? What more does he want?
Midst her stillness the night shades itself in subtly, gentler than she’d have reckoned. By degrees the trees reanimate, the air loosens its cinctures. Ahead and to the sides, two battleship-size blueblack pines frame a wavy bay of grass amid whose Tyrian purpleness glimmers a familiar playground of Mary-Blairish pavonine pavilions silvered by the last dragging petticoats of the retreating moon, strewn with giant marshmellows from the fort Sakla had magicked. Ah-hah: she’s not far from home. And what’s this? In the open space’s languid light, a few restless and eccentric beasts are still snouting about, their vague forms wrought in the glossy metalwork of lunar radiance… yet she’s so far gone that their presence only makes her feel more alone. Goodly, innocent, well-meaning beings, they are infinitely distant from Eve in her radical badness. How it wracks her! She had been so happy! She had felt so nice! Agh!
Sophia may be the source of sophistry, but let’s ask again along with Eve: does she really deserve what’s coming? Why did her pops make that Tree anyway? Why leave it within her reach? Wasn’t that kind of like getting on his knees and begging for struggle? Of course such a lure would tempt her—she was just a child! How was she to know any better? If she acted wrongly, doesn’t the blame lie with how she was made? Aren’t all her actions the fault of… Well, she can’t bear to finish that awful thought, and hops off it—but she’s already ridden far enough to save herself. With every step some sludge skin sloughs off. Surely it’ll be okay. Why would her pa want her to suffer? Fiddlesticks, there’s no way he actually wants that. There’s no way! Exhaling, Eve chucks the crown of thorns. Clearly she’s wronged him, but he loves her, loves her so much. He might have said he’d “kill” her—but only he knows what that means. Maybe it means “scold gently and expound on the reasons for his rules.”
(Remember, everything is still immortal. No inblast of wisdom or info can reveal to her what ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ has hidden from Eden. He is yet to install the most terrible & beautiful artpiece of all: Death. Death…)
Hugging herself, Eve passes the apple pit of her panic, appeases herself to partial peace. Yet she will never, never feel like before. The child in her has died. Now her world is dirty, ruined, tarred by many pitchy brushes. The very air is chalant and acerb, hostile and hard to inhale, shiny thick with the bronchitic brume of a latitant cloudburst from the nose of the sky.
More ominously the animals ahead turn out, on closer inspection, to be a ragtag gang of strange rejects, the weirdos in Paradise, renegade burners of midnight oil who enact their oddball obsessions when Sakla is gone. A medieval-faced lion pounces savagely on a radish, jabbing in his blunted canines—teeth specialized for biting and rending flesh, she knows. Huh? Nearby, in the pall of a porphyry peacock tail, a colony of stubble-cheeked commando ants march in ranks and train in pincer-to-pincer combat. Ants fight wars. War?? From the sidelines an emaciated anteater pines, leaking sad saliva from its sullen eyes. An anteater??? Overhead a Frazetta wasp stabs tamarind pods, frustrated because it can’t decapitate a caterpillar. And a mosquito weeps. Goodness gracious, her very epidermis is alive with Ren & Stimpy microbes who, rather than invading her nicks and meatuses, play slopscotch, hide-and-sick, and yuk-yuk-goose, while Crumb viruses throw a hootenanny atop her nostril cells, doing segregated square-dances jollifariously. Wait a minute, why did her father design everything for violence? What is this unnatural nature, its armaments coerced into armistice? What kind of twisted intelligence would program in this thwarted carnage? Just what kind of God is her dear daddy?
Enlightenment darkens. Every sunbeam insinuates night, every shine scribbles shadows. Our circumscholastic heroine, all too wise, is losing the last of her silver shimmer—yet it has already served its godgiven purpose. Hush and watch: weary, Eve lets herself sag on a log by a lazily lapping lake, loops arms around knees and buries her face. On her chenille eyelids she sees rotating paisley, flannel flags of saltire crosses, tetrafurcating lizard motifs, chromatic hamsas and many murmurous inflaming luminosities; but even these apple FX cannot distract from her gathering fate. Against her shoulders droop heavy airs, and a prissy wind lectures her nape, scuffling and clutching swirling vapor pearls which roll free and drift up into cloud buds under the mulberry aegis of the oxygen shield. A short time passes longly, the lake pants like the clear tongues of a hundred mindless puppies, the clouds cough, rain pitter-patters, every drop the sound of one hand clapping in pain—still, she dries up and doesn’t budge till an uprustle in the reeds shoots her startled to her feet. Fists raised, she hurls her spotlight gaze on the noisy grass, hurls a hallmark look from the world to come: prey at predator. The bulrushes snort and rush apart… and out lopes a harebrained minor entity whom she had altogether forgotten.
Adam’s beaming. “I missed you!” he yells. With a squee Eve bounds over and embraces him in deep and sudden need, crumbling into his bosom; but to our brawny boyman everything remains a marvelous game, and he hops her through an impromptu waltz, treading on her toes and hiccupping giggles. Eve, that complexer mechanism, lets herself be carried along, cheek on his padded clavicle, engulfed by arms both strong and gentle. “I missed you too,” she murmurs, and means it, even though it’s not true until this very moment, and really she has no idea what she’s holding, has never once looked at his soul. Hm. Eve pulls back and looks. Adam won’t stay still, so with her soft and dexterous hands she annexes his forested cheeks. He stops hot, eyes popping with pleasure, and deposits in her hands a grin of purest golden happiness. Oom: that grin springs into her eyes and hits her like a trillion candlepower lovebeam followed by a 20km-wide meteorite of buttery fond affection. And that’s before he shows her what’s hiding in his palm, unwrapping his fingers to show a perfectly worked carving of Eve, a smiling Venus whose happy eyes are diamonds.
Her heart splashes. Adam had been mere material to her, an oversensitive protrusion of her ego, but now, in the aftermath of the apple, now that she’s binned her innocence and cuddled up to trouble, she sees him in a novel light. She sees his character, sees a stalwart and tender man who, craving her company in the night, has broken through her loneliness and is grinning straight into her eyes, ready to adore her no matter what she’s done. All the little hairs on her neck burst into applause. Adam! Oh, Adam! Gazing into her gaze, blushing her same blush, his reddish-orange aura soaking her fingers in warmth, he is all hers (and she his), he is her own personal person, and quite literally the sweetest guy ever. Eve is falling into him, starting to smile weteyed, even while Adam’s lids drop and his look both cools and subtly embers. She’s mesmerized. His fond, friendly, fevery face is a charming gift that unwraps itself again and again and shows new sides with every microscopic shift of mood, and in fact there is absolutely nowhere she’d rather look—especially since Adam, her true partner and other part, precious flesh of her flesh, happens to be (phew!) really rather beautiful. How did she never notice? Fatless and carven as a figure of a tree, he has an angular, high-classical beauty, with a faceted jaw and a lantern head and the stonechiseled zygomata of a Szukalski knight, a tympanum of a forehead soaring above the lintels of his shaggy eyebrows, and fulvous eyes like tawny wishing wells of lion honey, in which she swelters like the happiest fly.
Oh so slightly steaming she breathes his breath, heated by his heat, rainlets sprinkling them as if from an aspergillum. His craggy fingers count the knobs of her spine, playing her pleasure senses like an instrument of touch, while her finer fingers graze his erubescent chops, trailing down and tugging a lower lip fat as a fig. Down below, his trunk snuffles at her knee, probing nosily up her thigh until—until—(pheeeeyow!) Eve’s tears fry off her ruddled face, and she exhales a hot ghost of a moan, eyes dropping like stones to Adam’s voluted nose, those lush lotus lips. Then she remembers what lips are for.
In secret darkness limned by subtlest silver shine, Eve has one leg over Adam on a gently nonsensical flower-pillow of milkwort, marigold and moonflower, lavender and laburnum, and she and he are going lip to lip to lip to lip, tongue on tongue on tongue. Adam squirms like it’s all his birthdays at once, caresses her swooping hip, traces the delicate indent at the top of her bottom. She has wised to what comes next… For one last moment she steeps herself in his balneal eyes, steams herself clean; then, with thermal springs squirting into her ears, with tingle-tangles bangling down to her taut toes, she pushes big ol’ Adam onto his broad back. He yields gladly, overjoyed to serve her, amorous to submit, and his strange pleasure part, not quite what will be passed down to later generations, stands up and hails her, quivering like an elbowless bicep, mollusc muscle full of blood, taut and supple and shiny and veined, straining fit to pop from its skin, just stupidly, ludicrously, uncomfortably huge.
But Eve has been engineered to fit. With a heavy hop of her hips she scoops her goffered passage onto that pulsating blood miter, sinks his shaft into her adit, warm key slipping into flesh lock, hot hardness drilling in and filling her every ridge, snaking up through her and setting off every pinball bumper along the way, cherrylight after cherrylight turning on along her blossoming body until a belling pulse of pleasure punches the air from her lungs, and the cry of Eve rises like an amaranthine hallelujah, an exquisitely textured immortal masterpiece of a woman’s cry shivering up to join the lushly waking vapor-song of the Jungle of Eden, blending into chirrs, chirrups, cronks and snores, jug-jugs and guggles, tu-whits and tu-whoos, while doves blurt love, quail quail past their feet, and peacocks-of-paradise fantail into blacklight pinwheels.
Eve rides Adam in the Garden of Eden. The air begins to cry, but she only clinches harder, breathing his name, and plunges her quim up and down his popping squid, in a carnal trance. Flesh slurping flesh and meat slapping meat, she pounds her man, pubic hairs beading, slick bellies sharing sweat, breasts rubbing pecs, while Adam gasps from side to side and exclaims in euphoria, upturned eyes foaming over with the uncontrollable pleasure of being a penetrator subjugated. Thus they fuck, and fuck, yet nothing is dirty; their union, born of spiritual love, could not be cleaner. Or so Eve feels, and needs to feel. Gripping his shoulders she snogs him to the heavy rhythm of her hips, engulfing his bulging obelisk with the steady, deep and powerful cadences of a reciprocating hammer, slamming him into her trembling pink center, every extravagant entrance another rapturous affirmation, an elated assent to part deep and allow his push, to come together with him, her magnificent man, as they mewl mouth to mouth, swapping air and atman in an electric haze of live love and high desire and sizzling soul-to-soul conductivity—though Adam, obviously not quite at her level of self-awareness, keeps breaking the mood by shouting things like, “Gee whillikers, this is FUN! I wanna do this all the time!”
But maybe they won’t get to, she knows. Some punishment is coming. Tonight is finite. Every time must end… Against her will, Eve glances away from the horny cornucopia of the present moment, squints at the future’s fuming armies of clamorous blankness. No! She forces herself back to the delicto act, growing silent, serious, concentrated, chasing down her climax, the end that must come, and the come that must end. By now the sky’s bawling, straw-shaped drops hissing down and splattering the lovers with mud dots, but Eve grinds doggedly on, filthy and fallen yet heatedly intent on melting into Adam in an implosion of bliss, in the purest exultance of togetherness, against the intransigence of transience, against the end, the end, the end.
At least, for now, they have each other.
In the distance there’s an explosion, a magmatic burst of fireworks. The sky orangens, and a vast tree of smoke sprouts up blooming above the horizon. Adam’s eyes spring open, but he sees only Eve astride him, hot, sodden, heavy-lidded and savage, battering him like a freight train of bliss.
“Eve…” Adam whispers awed. “Eve… I love you.”
His groany tenor cleaves into the core of her dissociation, jolts her to lightning heights for one incandescent second. “I,” she says—
Then she’s flung sideways.
Eve skids scraping through nettles and thunks against a trunk, crash-lands mauled and stunned face up just in time to see her lover shoot off across the stained sky, yahoohooing and ejaculating great glittering silver floods.
Below him the darkness coalesces, sucks itself sissing into a solid, gathers into a shaky molten shadow of her father galumphing toward her in a rolling slop of silhouettes. “I’M SORRY,” she screams, her world wobbling like a tossed coin engraved with fiery juggernauts whose eyes are flames, mobs of faces screeching like hellkites, balrogs grimacing in unspeakable pain and bearing down on her with a malevolent red-black hatred that, even before he reaches her, thrusts upon Eve the last missing puzzle piece to knowledge:
Evil.
GOD IS EVIL, HUMANS ARE GOOD
Adam awakens as one big ache. He’d been yoinked along with two mamillary marshmellows, one of which, nudged into place by an angel’s wing, became a landing pad that saved his life if not all the bones in his left wrist. Coming to, he has no idea what happened. He gets that something’s not copacetic with his hand, it shouldn’t feel so numb, shouldn’t dangle so angly. But why is he all the way over here? Will he teleport every time he emits? He knits his brow into entrelac—yet thinking just makes his head hurt worse. Oh well! Adam’s not the type to whine. He shrugs and sets off to rejoin Eve.
But he has a tremendous hike ahead, several days and nights through a graying and fraying garden where the vibe has shifted decisively down. Now the wildlife hide and dart, flinch and flee, bray, snarl, scream; blood dews grass, ponds thrash with the throes of bitten beings, soldier ants march in tiers and swing pinlegs in goosestep. Adam skulks along nursing his shattered hand, gaping with bewildered wonderment. He just can’t figure out why nobody’s being nice, why the beasts feast on one another, why the sun is become a killer, the moon a helpmeet for thieves. He watches sapphire flies oviposit eggs in the disoculated corpse of a fawn—no doubt the fawn will get up, he thinks. She just needs some R&R. He giggles inanely and forges onward, his constant thoughts of Eve stronger than hunger, stronger than his need for sleep.
Evergreenly callow Adam slogs into a patch-blackened Radziwillian waste that’s half blasted stumps and incinerated mossland, half verdant pastures and picturesque spinneys. The sky is saffron and fallow, cupreous and chartreuse; crevassed like a cliff face onto black-hearted white stars, it expels shoals of crimson angels crucified upside-down, haematomic higher ghosts sing-bleeding hymns of hell, wafting over the colossal anthracite skeleton of the Tree of Knowledge, that violated residuum of the first civilization to be burned and corrupted and atomically fucked. Not even the ronin flies will eat its dead.
Rubbernecking at the tree skeleton’s mangled metropolises, Adam kicks something squishy—a rotting fruit. He snatches it, slaps off some burnt slime, and horks it down. Sour juice spouts against his mouth’s roof, bitterly intoxicant, setting his eyes a-water, yet he wolfs the fruit so hastily that a wedge of fermented flesh lodges in his throat, becoming Adam’s Adam’s Apple, forever a symbol of Men’s imperfect and ebrious acquisition of wisdom, knowledge, and fellow feeling. From his bitemark billows black smoke in the shape of a laughing skull… Adam flings the fruit away, but it’s too late: the gouged garden sproings into a fireless inferno of nature crimson in tooth and talon, where the fittest kill, ugliness is king, and flesh is grass. He reels on his heels. He laughs. But the laughter is sick and does not last. Somewhere out in this wasted land of wild wanton slaughter there breathes his Eve, lovely Eve, small, helpless, mortal Eve, very likely terrified and in danger, without any Adam to save her. Without Adam to protect her. Without Adam to take the fang or claw in her stead. Without Adam to die for her. She’s all alone, alone, alone, oh God!
Unless their father is with her… but what if he is the one who did all this damage? Well, who else? Adam quickens his trot, full-steaming ahead and snatching up fermented fruits to gobble on the run. He needs energy for what comes next, but meanwhile the illuminating booze-fruit fuels his brain’s emotional jetpack ride up through a troposphere of troublous gloom into a stratosphere of seething fury into a mesosphere of misery into a thermosphere of sanguinary oaths of savage vengeance. If Eve—if his other half—if the best person of all has suffered at the hoary hands of their flaming father, then Adam will have only one course of action, only one final fate to face: he would have to kill God. It doesn’t matter how much mightier their father is. It doesn’t matter that that asshole created everything. Adam will live in the bush, never sleep, sup on grubs, and hunt down the angels one by one, garroting them in the ambient tomato soups of bloody twilights. He will rip all heavenly throats wide. His life’s meaning will be Death, he snarls to himself, by now rushing full tilt, thrashing through grass, annihilating clematises, his calves worming with venules, face testaceous, blood flood-pounding his sparking circuits. Adam is learning to murder; he is finding his violence. Thus Man first conceives of War.
Puffing hard, Adam skirts the stinking trunk and while clambering over its roots almost ploughs into a mud statue, a realist effigy of a woman, in fact a life-sized clay Eve squatting and hugging its knees, staring with smooth blank eyes and heavy frizzles incised in its brow. Oddly, this eerie sculpture is clasping the carven figurine he made, his diamond-eyed Cytherean Eve, which in this context has taken on the look of an offering to an idol. Adam lurches forward discomfited, reaching for his love token just as a cackling skull of an idea lands with a corposant splash in his brandied mind—that their father has turned Eve into mud. He stops, stumbling as a vice of ice coarcts his heart. He really is all alone now, all alone in a universe without Eve. Without his love. Without the only person worth living for. Without her.
Then the mud statue shifts. Its dirt splits, and inside its caked hull Eve opens her eyes, her punctured eyes, her interrupted eyes, her icebox mausolean eyes frozen-rife with rot and pain and despair. In reply Adam yelps dogly, tangles in booze loops, trips over his face and falls flat, the wham of the earth mixing his brains like scrambled eggs sauced with grog. But before his face hits the dirt, while the sky is sideways and the vegetation is approaching his cheek like a big green fist, Adam skews one last glance at Eve, and he witnesses something he had missed from afar, something heinous, something that will be seared into his dreams forever after: the protuberating moon of Eve’s overfull belly.
GOD COMMITTED THE ORIGINAL SIN
Eve shakes Adam. He mutters in his sopor, blood running down his crown. He’s not exactly A-OK, yet all the same he’s back, he’s back, in her arms, warm and real and breathing when she’d been so sure he’d died. Hauling him close she nuzzles his neck compulsively, smearing him with soil, rocking him and stroking his softly firm skin and churring in a crushed ecstasy of sorrow, not yet able to feel, but at least with defrosted blood perfusing her hebetude. If she could only abide in this trice, bite into respite, inhooped in a heart with Adam…
But the charred grass starts to rustle, and hard. Oh, God! Her follicular ESP fires out a porcupine aura, shooting off danger signals in an inverted feu de joie. Briefly she imagines leaping up, yet she’s too frightened to fight and too pregnant to sprint, and much to her own moral relief can’t actually stomach the thought of ditching Adam. Cowed and cornered she hunches, clutches the first man, and buries a whimper in his shoulder, bracing for death or worse.
Then out of the brush limps… Gabriel? Eve straightens up reflexively. The angel is torn-toga’d, slump-shouldered, bedraggled with a broken wing—yet he has been not just battered, but also wrung through weird transformations.
For one thing, more like Gabriella. Second, her celestial facescape has lost the sleekly insculpted confidence of a stainless angel, and gained the perfervidly relievo affliction of a stainful paingel, with veiny red ergs gusting under her blood-helixed eyeballs, her chipped lips like a ragged coffle of firebugs pilgrimaging across the faults in her skin. The paingel looks like hell just after the Fall, agonized with guilt, and when she speaks she pleads softly, urgently, with what sounds like genuine vulnerability & ripheart authenticity. “Hi, Eve. How’re you? I know. I know. I’m so sorry, honey,” Gabriella moans, getting too close, reaching for a hug, her defeatures a reddish portrait of hangdog anguish way up into Eve’s face. “We’re all so sorry about what happened!”
The butterfly sunflake of Eve’s personality is slowly unfolding once more its inchoate tatters. Coming back to herself, she leans away from the angel’s questing arms, wrinkling her heart-shaped mudface, inclined to waste little love on this pushy former agent of her father. But Gabriella, well—she’s all tender concern folded in concerted intent, and upon being rejected she perches on a root beside Eve, hugs her knees in mimicry, sighs and says well they have to save Eve’s ass from the complications of her pregnancy and so don’t have much time to futz around and basically Eve has no other option but to cooperate, sorry.
Gabriella fills Eve in on the greater emanations, summarizing the Depth and Barbara and Zoë, Sophia, her psychopathic not-so-super son and his warped pet universe. Scary to say, but yet another emanation is detonating even as she speaks—inside Eve. As the schizoid God ejaculated, his dysconcerted consciousness could no longer conserve its fractured concord, and he had spurted all his spirit, splitting into sterile parasites each with a preformed personality heatseeking its host among her ova. The good news: ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ has decohered. The bad: In her world-wide womb his emergent properties are proceeding apace toward a nasty naissance. Soon Eve, impaled by the mighty pangs of the ur-mother, will give birth for six days and nights, all possible gods and spirits scrambling from her uterus and scattering over the blasted map. She’ll birth Kali and Brahma, Freya and Odin, Hera and Zeus, Moloch and Chemosh, Elohim and Yahweh, Mithra and Allah, Asherah and Anat-Yahu and al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzah and co. et al., as well as satyrs and nymphs, grendels and gorgons, wendigos and chupacabras and the countless other spirits that numenize every grove, grotto, manhole and console, chapel and chaparral. Thus all human religions ever to appear will be true to some extent, true at least to the noisome mayas and megalomaniac moxies of the triturated Creator.
ALL GODS ARE ALTERS OF THE DISCONSOCIATED GOD
At first Eve is morosely unmoved, her innards charred as firepits, her womb aboil. Between her and the world, between her and herself, bubbles an abyss of shit, a slash of frass. All paradises have been sliced, all penetralia infiltrated, all holinesses holed: so let Gabriella come or go, speak or be silent, for nothing matters, and wisdom only allows her to face the futility of all, all.
But by the time Gabriella finishes enumerating the precautions and ecbolics necessary for Eve to survive childbirth, our ponderously gravid and gash-eyed initial lass, listing with increasing distress, has begun to cast about for something sharp with which to slit her own throat. So the paingel, not cold but perhaps excessively practical, hurries on to better news: oh, there’s no denying Eve’ll suffer a bitter era, with PTSD and night terrors (who wouldn’t), but eventually she’ll heal, she’ll recover what she lost to the pain, and she’ll even open up to Adam again, for despite his initial disappointment and glum hungover grumpiness, he will remain the kindest of men, patient and supportive, asking nothing and giving everything. Year after tender and nurturing year, he will shine personality-wise, despite his taste for the sauce and despite the lingering echo in him of ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ’s sexual sin, which will infect all men ever till the end of time. Adam’ll be mostly good, though; and one sultry summer evening, when her outrage is a fading memory, she’ll climb atop him again and rejoice in the bliss of carno-spiritual love between true hearts, and this holy union will bear human fruit, in three sets of twins—Cain and his wife Qalmana, Abel and his wife Deborah, and Seth and his wife Noba—whose interbreeding descendants will inherit sparks of Sophia’s spirit, and who may thereby become radiant and earn their shot at eternal life, and even bring about Universal Redemption.
See, now that the demiurge has fractured into semidemiurges unaware of their origins, the ground has been cleared for inheritors of Sophia’s besmirched spirit to purify themselves through ritual and meditation, cleansing their spirits of pollution, nutating like mystical sunflowers toward the nourishing light of Truth. And therein sticks the soteriological linchpin: if enough of Eve’s scions purify their spirits, then a critical mass of wisdom can be achieved, Sophia will be restored to full living splendor, and in the heavenly realm, from the heart of infinity, the Aeon of Barbara and Zoë and their eleven harmonic daughters will combine, not unlike the Power Rangers fusing into Megazword, to form the Cosmic Savior, a radiant golden woman who will lean down and reach a guilloche hand across light years toward the prodigal daughter Sophia rising through null space. As divinity rejoins itself, all reality will condense to heaven, perfection will eat the universe, and time itself will climb into rhyme, and even the Depth himself, fountainhead of all, will be at one and atoned.
And all through the actions of humans.
By now it should be undeniable that Eve, face a stone, is too sunken in her own hurt to give a shit about the paingel’s empty-sounding promises or eschatological brouhaha, yet Gabriella is oblivious, seemingly convinced that she’s imparting the best news ever to the luckiest of listeners. She’s talkin’ ‘bout cosmic salvation, baby! Ragged, draggle-haired, on her knees, lit with evangelical intensity of revelation, the paingel seizes with marble hands Eve’s shoulders and rants directly into the original girl’s muddy eyes. “Sounds too good to be true, right? Too neat? Why is it working out so well? Because…”
Because of the Aeon of Barbara! Ever since her daughter’s downbreak, this biggest and baddest and barbest of bitches has been watching most anxiously, wanting nothing more than to quash this squalid nonsense. Yet in personally delivering that quietus she would risk contaminating her own spiritual purity—and well, Sophia was way down the logarithmic powerscale, so just imagine what would happen if the #2 astral power were corrupted… The nightmare machine hells that would emanate! No: interfering overtly was not worth the risk. Instead, Barbara designed and executed a scheme that can only be described as extremely genius. First she slipped a stinger down through reality, caught the soul-automaton Gabriel, and implanted in him a big-banging orb of female spirit loaded with subtly brilliant behaviors; in private rapture Gabriel shivered into Gabriella, eyes rolling 360° as she orgasmed into higher life. Then, with Gabriella as cat’s-paw, the A. of B. had tricked the squadded God into giving Eve some of his spirit, then into making Adam, then into creating the Tree from his seed and injecting it with distilled wisdom. Led around by his nether nose, God had thus actuated the carillon of events that would kill him and convert this cursed universe into the arena of universal healing.
And this genius workaround—this guided design—this benignly invasive teleology required as heroine and peerless protagonista absolutely no one else other than Eve, first and greatest woman, Eve, the spiritually invincible inheritress of Sophia’s best spirit, just preternaturally smart, spunky, and self-counseled, rebellious in all the right ways, and unequalled by any other human ever to come, Gabriella proclaims feverishly, triumphantly, gesticulating grandly, seemingly expecting Eve to feel honored and respected and loved and needed.
But Eve, snapping from her stupor, has clenched her teeth, then her fists, then her shoulders. “Wait, you planned for me to get raped by God?” she yells, getting up in Gabriella’s pained face. “That’s fucked up! What the FUCK!”
Gabriella stands up and walks a few paces away, enshrouding her alabaster hands in her toga pockets. She starts to speak a few times before she settles on, “Darling, I can’t imagine how much pain you’re in right now, and I don’t even really want to. But it’s not just you…” No doubt Eve has already observed much bestial bloodshed, heard animals shrieking while no spirit flew in to save them from getting snuffed. Well, that horror is the new routine, the (dis)order of the coming world, Gabriella says. She explains about fire, flood, quake. About the terrors of the night. About famine and pestilence and war. About soldiers, occupations, empires. About the churches and customs, schools and governments that will build jails inside the soul, caging the pearl of spirit. About how ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ’s crime of domination will taint all men forever. About how men, aping the creator, will violate female bodies, and how such atrocities will be normed. But mostly she talks about Death, Death, Death eating life, swallowing our love, digesting all that is not saved. “No one escapes,” the paingel insists. “Look at me! Look how I’m being punished for my crimes against you… When I lied, I wounded my spirit. And when I betrayed you into his claws, I corrupted my purity. I destroyed my immortality. I will not be saved…”
Indeed, the paingel is aging, melting from twentyish to fiftyish, hair scraggling, her subocular luggage echoing down. “But this isn’t just my fate! Time, at a slower pace, is the inevitable ban overlying all the unsaved. It forces us forward into the meatgrinder of Death,” she gurgles. “Hundreds of billions of perfectly savable people will grow old, will sicken, will die after so much dismal decay!” Crumbling, Gabriella drags herself forward, aging years a second, atrophying into an algal crone coated with sastrugi and yardangs, epidermal karst and radiolarian ooze, leaking liquid teeth, abstract skin flaking back to bone ruin. One last wisp of sound spirals out: “Help us end this universe in bliss! You must kill death! Death must die! We neeeed youuu! Pleeaase…”
Eve shakes her sludged head in both physical and moral disgust. No one’s fool, she’s sussed the ploy: that the paingel, just another patsy, has been sacrificed by the Aeon of Barbara in order to tearjerk Eve into cooperating.
Nonetheless… Glancing down at Adam—whose beboozed and belumped crown has migrated to her lap—she’s drawn unwilling to the sight of his suncooked neckskin, its haphazard tiers of scores in which she cannot help but read his end, her end, the end of all and its oozing advance. Then the fact of Age jabs up and pastes her on the jaw, and all her skin droops from the bone in sympathy, and the soil splashes over her in another wave of filth, while fungus cheeses from her cheeks. She screams. And didn’t you scream, when you first realized? Why not? Eve has screamed most sensibly, having divined anew our destiny as Death’s wretches, our shared suffering as autonoetic quiddities sucked screaming toward our graves. Even the unchecked rampaging of nature, despite its frenzied breeding and killing, would someday be kissed into dust by the expanding sun. Everything is beelining toward its end, everybody tromping down into mass graves, every copse a necropolis. Spiders scheme cities of webs, and Death’s dracula cape gusts out in wind systems. How many of her animal friends are still alive? How many convulsing in death rattles? O horrible, most horrible! Death! Death reigning over all! Death eating endlessly!
Eve can’t fight pity anymore. Her pinched heart untucks itself, bursts its iron bounds, and expands to encompass all living beings, her fellow feeling surging to earth’s ends while billions of sobbing faces unravel through her mind’s helicoid arcades, and the universal hurt sands up in her abdomen, densening into an acidborn bezoar. Barb herself can get fucked—but it is true that literally everyone else is a hapless repeat victim of Eve’s father’s traumatized malcreation. And if she can do anything at all to prevent suffering, if she has even the tiniest chance of helping terminate this universe in bliss, then her personal torment, so minute against the overwhelming weight of all pain, might actually become redeemable, she thinks, feeling even sicker.
Yet she’s not just sick. Her equator contracts sharply. Water falls, sparkling. It's almost time to pay yet again for the sins of her father.
HEAVEN IS SEPARATION FROM GOD
Poor Eve! But just so you know: she didn’t stay angry or embittered. No no—she had a long life ahead, 2400 years of tremendous productivity and happiness. And her life’s matrimony was a miracle of many fertilities. Not only did she produce the human race, but also, guided by sophic wisdom, she invented clothes, paper, script, glasses, the wheel, the plow, the herbal equivalents of ibuprofen and birth control, ethics, vegetarianism, metalworking, enchantments, glamours. She wrote the three treatises of The Secret Gospel of Eve (here paraphrased) and also penned The Iliad and The Odyssey (both corrupted since) to illustrate the ubiquitous and historically relentless problems with males corrupted by ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, by fermented fruit and the installation of death, and so on… Indeed, if something hadn’t gone terribly wrong in the passing along of generational knowledge, if patriarchs and the animal-husbandry complex hadn’t wrested control over the narrative, then Eve would have been venerated by everyone, worshipped as our greatest benefactress, her kind and wise face iconed in every church, a paragon for all her descendants.
She should be everyone’s heroine. She is mine. Listen:
GOD SHOULD WORSHIP HUMANS
The opening quote is a translation by Marvin W. Meyer. The cover image is Gustave Moreau’s Eve (1885). The second and fourth images are from Stanisław Szukalski. The third image is Holbein the Elder’s Mary as Mother of Sorrows. The fifth image is Franz Radziwill’s Flanders (Whither This World?). The last image, directly above this paragraph, is a computer manipulation of one of my drawings. These images are only on Substack and not in the published book, which will appear in the next few weeks on Goodreads and Amazon.
If you want to read more about Eve, you'll have to wait for the big finds that'll be uncovered in ancient hypogea near Alexandria in the next few decades. Unfortunately I am not at liberty to say more. Norea herself has four more parchments in her sanctuary, dedicated to an eccentric life of Jesus and an extraordinarily weird apocalypse; however, those holy books are being suppressed for the sake of public order. I’m not the only one who thinks it is not quite time to push the world into its final showdown against God. Not yet.
For now, those wishing to find out about Norea and her special mission can check out my book, ALMOST: Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah, the first volume of which will appear from Ephesus Press later this year—although of course its events are entirely fictional, and it certainly does not contain the dark secrets of any actual Gnostic priestess.
Since November I've been working day and night on a bizarre secret weapon called Parable of The Dog, a fiction that follows a man as he loses his mind in the most ornate way possible, speeding from existential enigmas into a loop-de-loop tunnel of myths, esoterica, and visions. Half a novel, and half a system of ornate metaphysical essays filtered through an unraveling mind, Parable of the Dog is my most grandiose bid yet to push forward literary language and the fringe possibilities of description and narration. For better or worse, this book is an attempt at my Portrait of the Artist, my Blinding, my involuted Blood Meridian. I shoved my whole self into its composition, and the later chapters represent a detonation of voice the likes of which has not mushroomed up for quite a while in the literary landscape—or so I like to flatter myself. I’d be hard put to express how excited I am to show this to other people; I'd love to reveal the chapter I just finished, where the protagonist gets brutally possessed by the eldritch source of all language, all intellect, all gods... but it'll be some time till that part appears. I need a few more months to mortar-and-pestle my head into that demented text, then I'll start serializing it in ~10,000-word chunks of pyrotechnic madness.
Meanwhile, every week I'll try to make a light, fairly loose blogpost about what I've been reading and thinking. Expect chat about splashy experimental lit, transcendent pulp, dead religions and obsolete philosophies, about books that are fantastical, imaginative, ornate, literary, jeweled, libertine, free and manic, with architectonic sentences, crashing paragraphs, beatific visions, cosmic terror, and grinding psychedelic vortices. I like best to marvel at the splendor of the imagination, of the exuberant mind. More is more, more and more and more and more—that’s my jam. Colors deluxe. Cathedral dreams. Magisterial craftsmanship. Just to give you some idea of my tastes… In May, I read the gothic orientalist tale Vathek by William Beckford, Meehan's book on the Book of Kells, Apulueis' The Golden Ass, Comenius' Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, Godwyn's Athanasius Kircher, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Athanassakis and Wolkow's The Orphic Hymns, Nijinsky's unexpurgated diaries, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Betz's The Greek Magical Papyri, Ashton Smith's Xiccarph, Osman Spare's Earth Inferno, the newest chapters of Vinland, Kingdom, and One Piece, and a few stories from Machen's The White People. I also studied/dissected to the best of my abilities the first half of Alan Moore's Promethea. All these texts taught me something; many got burgled for Parable of the Dog; some I disliked and a few I loved. There’s no way I’ll have enough time to say all I have to say, but once you’re in my corner I will talk your ear off about my favorite art. Welcome.