Letters to The - #4

People say that you wrote a book to guide us but there are so many human fingerprints all over it. I haven’t known how to read it in a long time with the spirit that I read it as a child. Parts of it, though, Psalms, Proverbs, James, the Sermon on the Mount---they will always echo in my conscience.

Genesis is one of the best parts of the Bible for me. There is a garden where people eat trees--certain parts of them. It says fruits, but probably flowers, roots, stems, and leaves as well, I should think, and let’s suppose not just trees but also other types of plants. People eat, wander, garden, make love, speak new words, and name things, even themselves.

There is one tree you aren’t supposed to touch, and another that you are supposed to touch often. You are in both trees, but just as with lightning and the ocean floor, you keep some things to yourself. However, we homo sapiens insist on keys tied to kite strings and deep ocean submarines, and we touch the tree that you reserved for no one, for looking but not for touching.

We then suffer. We are electrocuted, we are crushed and drowned, and we learn sin. But we also learn ironworking, long-distance electronic communication, and space travel. Nothing is ever the same again. I wonder if we regret it. I am sure that I do. I’ve been trying to get back there for years, but it’s quite hard to find Eden in first world west coast America. I try, though. I stopped eating animals, and the food that animals make for their children. I stopped pledging allegiance to war. I don’t drink cola. I live among trees and eat fruit every day. None of this is enough, however. I am still not in Eden.

Origin stories can make or break a mythology. Christianity got it right. There is resplendent beauty, simplicity and innocence, a grave but forgivable error, and genuine, pure sensuality. Our divine tragedy, our separateness, is elegant in its construction. We are here, but we are not supposed to be. We are animal but we are spirit. We forgivable but we are flawed. In being both of everything dark and light, we can never be all one and all whole. In being too much, we feel that we are nothing. And in feeling that we are nothing, we need you to make us Something.

I find myself enchanted by Eden, adjusting my dreamy-eyed lens on the world to a paradise-tinted soft-focus. It’s much easier and more lovely to proceed in this way, but this computerized, post-post-modern purgatory of my present is also mine, and I can’t disown it without disowning too much of myself.