Life Sentences (40 page)

Let’s go back to the beginning.

God walks in the Garden to enjoy the cool of the evening. God makes clothes for Eve and Adam. God savors Noah’s sacrifice. The smoke of a good goat. He has to descend from heaven to check out the Tower of Babel that is rising toward Him and would reach Him if He’d just wait. He is His own investigative team looking into the alleged criminality of the citizens of Sodom; however—hey, what’s going on?—He has permitted the Snake to Inhabit Paradise. Moreover, He misrepresents the consequences to Adam and Eve of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He must be fearful that Adam and Eve will become gods like Himself. I think He envies their nobility. After all, isn’t He the Ancient of Days?

The sinful simply can’t take this stuff seriously. Nor should they, for sin is virtue in the face of such pranks played against reason and nature’s hungers. In the face of nonsense it is appropriate to giggle.
Decorum has its designs on everybody. It will chastise us, and charge us with flippancy. Perhaps we should take seriously ideas that have helped millions murder one another. Is it the numbers that should earn our respect?

God has one law, never mind how many the lawyers manage: obedience to the commands of God. That’s why the laws must be accounted equal. For the same reason that Zeus cuts the ripe round people in half, according to Aristophanes in Plato’s
Symposium—
though their roundness was perfection; and God scatters the language of Babylon hither and yon, destroying that unity along with its tower; God also punishes Adam and Eve for not doing what they were told. Hubris is at the root of it. Man may have been made in God’s image, but he is only a faint and distorted reflection. He dare not presume to rival his Father and get to know what is going on.

What sort of knowledge of good, and what sort of knowledge of evil, results from eating the forbidden fruit? Is it knowledge by acquaintance, so that suddenly Adam and Eve lust after each other and go to it in the bushes? Is it knowledge by description—equivalent to reading a self-help book on how things are done? Is the knowledge basically, as some think, of practical matters: the way God’s creation works, and how Adam and Eve can now command its laws; was it a skill acquired, like learning French, a gift for music and the lyre? Or is it more narrowly the inexperience of innocence destroyed by disobedience, and disobedience punished by shame, work, and death? The Garden was the good life. It sheltered the bliss of ignorance. Adam and Eve didn’t know that either, although their subsequent exile—their sojourn in an evil world—is a condition whose character they now know well.

It was the juice. They bit into the fruit, and, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “life and death entered their mouths.” They tasted culmination. They ate pulp, the flesh that surrounds seeds. The fruit hid inside its succulent skin—an apple, a pear, or a peach. Or for the sake of resemblance, a fig. They awoke within these sensations. Lust sang inside them like a bird. And they saw they were naked.

The serpent, or jinn of the tree, never struck me as any more than an ordinary local imp. The devil dwells in this story’s interpreters. Their motives, one and all, were malignant. It is the Saint Pauls of this world who give lust a bad name. Sexual feelings and their consequence recapitulate the fall and pass sin on, as miasmas were passed, as feuds were refueled, from generation to generation. The act of making more men and women makes the men and women genetically wicked. This doctrine creates a world of customers needing to be saved. Lust is thus the core feeling that inhabits all wrongdoing, because sex is its symbol.

Over time, people were encouraged to forget that disobedience was the original sin (Satan’s
non serviam
) and to believe that sex was after all the evil agent. Adam and Eve were as little children romping around the plastic pool until some mom or pop began to make them put on bras and panties. And the apple got blamed for inviting its bite. Not the pear. Not the peach. Not the grape. Not the fig that furnished its leaf. But there were those—there always are—who argued that the tree was a vine, and that the serpent offered Adam a glass of wine.

Well, it was the juice.

There is no need to dignify this malicious little tale with any further interpretation. It simply became a useful moment for those seeking power to reinforce their views. Encased in a sacred text, guarded by a pampered priesthood, its allegorized message became central to Christendom’s traducement of our sexual lives. Lust, which ought to be the feeling of life itself; erection and reception, which ought to be creative signs in whose physical exemplification pure delight is taken; the closeness passion insists on, whose loving intimacy of touch ought to yield the reassurance of one’s acceptance; the ecstasy of release and its resulting relaxation, which should yield a sense of security and peace and serene renewal: all these gifts of nature to us were—not only by organized religions, but through cultural policies both social and political, and by the pandering of profiteers and traders—made to blush, to seem evil, low, and nasty, at worst
like our fecal necessities—though obeyed, never displayed, praised, discussed.

“In their zeal,” Rilke writes of believers in “The Young Workman’s Letter,”

Not only do these liars promise to rescue our souls from the ground where our bodies rot, they tell us our human nature and all the signs of life in our species have put us there, into the dirt we deserve. So if we give up life here, we may later have it given back to us up there. How stupid we must be to believe in that promise; to accept the honors afforded chastity, for instance, that prolonged and perverse denial of our present existence; to reject this world for a nonexistent other.

Of course, when lust must go about in black clothes and seek other outlets for its energies, in power and privilege mostly, or ally itself with pain and pursue its infliction, or substitute shopping or golf for its goals, growing moist only at the mention of money, getting hard at the prospect of rape or war, then lust will be said to be “Lust,” one of the seven deadly sins, to be regarded with loathing and fear; then lust will be said to be selfish and interested in its own satisfactions; sexual organs will be places where favors are sold and money is made, not where joy is experienced; then lust will have to seek permission for its satisfaction by obtaining a license to drive from the state, permission from the Church to mate, and approval from family, friends, and credit card companies, but only to make babies and go into long-term debt.

Lust seeks another; lust is inherently social. Frustrated, arousals unanswered, the masturbator is sad and alone. Your own hand is not a fun date.

The lustful gaze—that great look that says, “I want it, it will please me, I shall please it in return, we shall merge more usefully than vehicles on the highway, we shall experience the interiors of one another, we shall burn like painless fires”—is thus not meant for men or women alone, and not perversely for vacuum cleaners or sheep, but for the sensuous appearance and shape of things, for the taste of fruit, the feel of silk and leather, for songs in another’s throat, for a horse in stride, and strong rich lines of verse.

Lust is present in any desire that has a strong sensuous component, because lust is provoked by form and color, and moves closer for odors to get in on the action, and then for taste and touch to fulfill it, for it’s not orgasm lust lusts for, but the juice of the orange squelching between the teeth, the touch of an inner thigh that transforms the palm, the smell of stew in a winter pot, snowflakes melting on glowing cheeks, wine rinsed meditatively in the mouth, the sound of “ah!” after a long indrawn breath.

To realize one is naked, rather than just one of the other girls and boys in the plastic pool, is what kind of knowledge? Is it knowledge of good and evil, or is it awareness of opinions fabricated by a society that has its reasons for lying and pretending and faking it? Adam and Eve saw they were naked; they saw they were naked because they saw, at the same time, that nakedness was wrong; they saw it was wrong because the tree of knowledge was planted and cultivated by a Santa Claus moonlighting for the Salvation Army.

Certain of our needs have a small range of satisfactory solutions: for thirst, water is the first and last solution; everything else we might drink—pop, juice, Scotch, soup—will be useful only because of the water it contains. For thirst, water is reality. No religion rules out water, only claims it for rituals. Hunger, on the other hand, can be satisfied in a thousand ways, so many of them can be safely forbidden.

Those who dominate the value choices in our societies, whether they represent business, military, state, or church, always try to regulate diet, clothing, off-duty activity, and sex. Eat veg; wear black;
pray while kneeling and making the right signs; take some days off; choose a chosen bride; don’t dance; don’t hum; don’t fuck from behind; don’t suck anything, handle yourself, or suck another self; don’t enjoy; don’t smear fluids; don’t shout or move about a lot.

Hide her behind veils, voluminous folds, body paint, high walls, patriarchal laws; cut her clit, or her hair; slit her nose; trade for cows—these are sins—not a nipple reaching its full height in another mouth. Not baby time down south. Burn her alive along with the furniture. Bury her in your tomb, you stiff. Slice her heart out with a sliver of stone. Sliding out and in is just plain nice when it’s done because it is just plain nice. Hey, at my wedding car, don’t throw the rice.

Old man Yeats knew what was true. If you have no anger at this world, anger at its willful stupidities, its grim indifference, its real sins: its murdering hordes, its smug myths, exploitive habits, its catastrophic wastes, the smile on its hyena hungry face, its jackal tastes, then you belong to it, and are one of its apes—though animals should not be so disgraced as to be put in any simile with man.

Old age ought to know. Death will soon enough come to its rescue. Till the knowing ends, all that was wasted and wronged in youth—through ignorance, haste, competition, bad belief—all that was bored by middle age into one long snooze, has borne its juiceless fruit, and is now known for what it is: nothing has been righted here. Yet if desire can be kept from contamination, if it can be aimed, as one’s fingertip, at the root’s place, if it is not harnessed to the horses of dismal domination, but is allowed to be itself and realize life, then the flutter of an eyelash on a cheek will assume its proper importance; Wall Street may crash and the gods of money be smelted back
into the sordid earths they came from; yet, unfazed, our heads will rest at least on one another, a fall sun will shine on the sheets, your nipple shall enter my ear like a bee seeking in a bloom a place to sleep; life shall run through us both renewed; we shall feel longing, lust for one another; we shall share rage for the world.

Let us begin with an example from Ford Madox Ford’s
The Fifth Queen
, always a good source of sentences of every kind. Upon the opening of the novel we meet Magister Nicholas Udall, a teacher, who is hungry, cold, and drenched.