Blake’s Elohim Creating Adam has one thing going for it. God looks – thanks to the Feldmanesque eyeballs and Braille-reader’s averted gaze – like He knows it’s all going to end in tears. Which of course He does. Did. Blakey managed to get something of it into his image; something, too, of his other preoccupation with opposites: ‘without contraries is no progression . . .’ Stubbornly flexible phrase, that. (Comes in handy at my rare moments of existential doubt.) Applied to the image of Elohim myopically touch-typing Adam into existence the contraries that spring to mind are God’s, His nasty habit of banging free will and determinism together in His head. Don’t eat that fruit you’re going to eat, okay? Don’t eat that fruit you’ve already eaten! What was Eden if not an exercise in Divine ambivalence? Another point in my favour, history agrees: at least I’m consistent . . .
When I see gurgling retarded children (that’s God’s doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he’s your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all – but I’m afraid he was rather an imbecile. He strolled around Eden wearing a beatific grin, content with an Everything so undeserved it amounted to Nothing, so filled with unreflective bliss that he might as well have been completely empty. He picked flowers. He paddled. He listened to birdsong. He rolled naked in the lush grass like a bare baby on a sheepskin rug. He slept nights with his limbs thrown wide and his head unrummaged by dreams. When the sun shone, he rejoiced. When the rain fell, he rejoiced. When neither sun shone nor rain fell, he rejoiced. He was a one-speed kind of guy, Adam, until Eve came along.
Now this is going to be hard for you, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to forget the story of Adam getting lonely and asking God for an help meet and God putting him to sleep and forming Eve out of one of his ribs. You’re going to have to forget it for one simple reason (cheer up girls!): it’s flan. The truth is that God had already created Eve – for all I know before He created Adam – and she’d been living quite self-sufficiently in another part of the garden as unknown to her future spouse as he was to her. You’ve got Eden in your heads as some in-need-of-a-trim public garden in Cheltenham. But Eden, not to put too fine a point on it, was fucking huge. Keeping one man and one woman apart wasn’t difficult, and that – ‘presume not the mind of’ etc – was the Old Man’s initial desire.
The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.) But I’m not just talking about the boobs and the bum, inspired though those innovations were, I’m sure we’re all agreed. She had something Adam didn’t. Curiosity. First step to growth – and if it wasn’t for Eve’s Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn’t bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she’d discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She’d decided she wasn’t overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she’d retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won’t be surprised to hear about her is that she’d already domesticated a cat and called it Misty.
There was a strange psychic timbre to Eve, sometimes, as if she sensed herself not entirely pleasing to her Maker. There were moments when, in some narrow tunnel of her being, she felt God’s presence as if she were looking at the back of His head, as if His attention was engaged emphatically and judgementally elsewhere. It made her feel curiously separate.
I – yea, even I, Lucifer – can’t quite explain this frond of selfhood that waved from time to time in the mistrals of Eve’s heart. It wasn’t that she didn’t love God; she did, for vast tracts of time as much as Adam did, constitutionally, reflexively, with all but no sense of being different from Him, penetrated (excuse me) and enfolded by Him almost to the point of dissolution. And yet. And yet, you see . . .? There was something in Eve I can only describe as the first cramped inkling of . . . well, of freedom.
Now how can I put this, economically? She was beautiful. (Adam was no back end of a bus either – the sloe eyes and sculpted cheekbones, the tight buns and chiselled pecs, the abdominals like a cluster of golden eggs – but without Eve’s sliver of personality it was all just a pretty picture.) Perhaps you’ve got some post-Darwinian model in mind, lowbrowed and beefy, with an Amazonian vadge and knuckle-hair; maybe you’ve got some Neanderthalette with an overbite and Brillo bumfuzz. Forget it. All that came later, after expulsion, in the sweat of thy brow with multiplied pains, etc. The Edenic Eve was . . . Well, think Platonic Form. The Beautiful Woman. Another bone I’ve picked with Buonarotti, incidentally. Oh yes, we got Mike downstairs. In fact maybe now’s as good a time as any to tell you: if you’re gay, you go to Hell. Doesn’t matter what else you spend your time doing – painting the Sistine Chapel, for instance – knob-jockey? Down you go. (Lezzers are borderline; room for manoeuvres if they’ve done social work.) The entire masterpiece fuelled by the stiffened brush softened in the wrong pot. Another superb irony lost on His Lordship. Not a titter. Just consigned Michelangelo to my torturous care. Awful shame, really. (Had you going, didn’t I? Don’t, for heaven’s sake, take everything so seriously all the time. Heaven’s bulging with queer souls. Honestly.)
But the bone I’ve had to pick with Mick (it . . . ah . . . hurts when I pick a bone with you, by the way) was over the Eve in his Original Sin. Personal tastes notwithstanding you’d think he’d have made a bit of an effort with the First Woman Ever Created. She makes Schwarzenegger look gym-shy. The actual Eve made today’s creatures (your Troys, your Monroes) crones by comparison. She was inevitable, tight as a Conrad novel, from the fortune of rippling hair to the calyx and corolla of the alert and sulky cunt, from the delta of the midriff to the sacrum’s golden slopes . . . I get carried away. The important thing about her wasn’t her body, it was her awakeness. (I’m sure when I started this passage I had some notion of the flesh functioning as metaphor for the soul’s irresistibility. Bit of a stretch. My apologies. Gunn’s penchant for oily lechery and oilier lyricism infecting me in equal measures. That fraud. How did women stand him?)
It wasn’t love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. ‘Glockenspiel,’ Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he’d found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.
They didn’t see each other again for quite some time. It was no skin off Eve’s nose – but Adam couldn’t get her out of his head. It wasn’t desire (micturition aside, the Edenic johnson was as useful as a burst balloon); it was anxiety. No other animal had ever (a) offered him elderberries (or anything else), or (b) looked so . . . so related to him. Not even the orangs, of whom he was especially fond. The memory of her tormented him in the weeks and months that followed – the dark eyes and long eyelashes, the swollen, berry-stained mouth, the incomprehensible arrangement between her legs; most of all the shocking fearlessness, the composure of the fruit-offering, as if he – he, Adam – was a beast to be propitiated or gulled. (Yes, girls, I know: good definition of a man.) He walked in the garden and called on God for reassurance, but God chose inscrutability. (He did that, from time to time, Adam had noticed. Until now he hadn’t questioned it.) His unease grew. He became obsessed with the idea that she’d already named the animals and that his own hard-thought-out monikers were redundant. Obsessed, too, with the notion that all those times God had withdrawn into silence He had in fact been with . . . with her, and this whole concept of his, Adam’s sovereignty was nothing but a . . . but surely that wasn’t possible? Surely he, Adam, was God’s first . . .