It is a rare thing to be hidden in a tree watching one’s mother making up to a golden cloud. Though not as strange as it would have been, I maintain — thinking of those stories of love between mortals and divinities which I have heard since I came among you — had I been hidden in the selfsame tree watching my mother presenting her hindquarters to a gander. I am speaking of degrees of strangeness only. Strangeness to me. It would be a poor return of your famous Shinarite hospitality, and a waste of all my wanderings, were I to entertain preferences for one god’s way of attending to his needs over another’s. Some deities are compunctious when it comes to employing their versatility to satisfy their lusts, and some are not; that is all there is to it. Yahweh happened to be one of those who didn’t hold with irresponsible metamorphosis. It’s as likely to be a question of stomach as morality. He — Yahweh — just felt more comfortable keeping His own shape.
And so He philandered with my mother through the medium of pure light. I employ no figure of speech when I say that He took a shine to her. Irradiated her. Lit her up from without and within, while He Himself throbbed above her in the sky like a flaming sunset, or flowed molten like a river ablaze with stars.
For my part I was not overly impressed. Display, when all is said and done, is only display. Coruscations of the heavens only management and timing. Who knows, He might have cut a more awesome figure after all, had He come down snorting and pawing the ground, with a brass ring through His nose and His pizzle bristling.
That, anyway, was how it struck me at the time. Reflection has since taught me that He knew to a nicety what He was about. He kept His distance and lit fireworks not only because that was what He was best at, or all that His fastidiousness would allow Him, but because it enabled Him to creep the long way round the back of carnality. Much of the harm that sex had done to His original scheme — conjoining what He had intended to be separate, fusing what He had meant to keep distinct — He now saw His opportunity to undo. He would reactivate the allure of the inaccessible. Restore hopeless yearning to the central position in human affairs He had always wanted for it.
To this end He painted the sky with colours that made my mother ache to set free her soul from its vegetable clothing. He played her heavenly music — divine melodies — which reminded her of where she had never been and woke her to anticipations of where she would never go. He whispered pastoral poetry in her ear, transforming her familiar mundane geography into enamell’d ground, watering her irriguous valley with fuming rills, protecting her complexion ’neath blissful bowers or in the shelter of umbrageous grots. He beguiled her into a pathetic fallacy, perpetuating the delusion in her that at His bidding the whole of nature would bend to her every feminine want, reverse the seasons rather than let her shiver, dapple her in sunlit gaiety before she should so much as think of letting go a sigh of sadness. ‘Where-e’er you walk,’ He sang, ‘cool gales shall fan the Glade. Trees where you sit,’ He promised, ‘shall crowd into a Shade.’ When had my father ever given her guarantees of that kind? Or last lisped the sweets of devotion as insubstantial as air –
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.
Everything that is mawkish in art, in other words, the All Trembling loosed upon the world in pursuance — in pursuance of the principle of the futility of pursuance — of my mother.
And she?
Well, naturally she had always been weak before the power of art. What woman is not? Which of them is proof against a little culture laced with compliment? A song, a dance, a pretty turn of wit, for which she might conceivably be credited with the inspiration?
It was my mother who had encouraged me, in the face of my father’s obdurate tonguelessness… dysphonia… muteness… recalcitrance… obmutescence… to coin words.
If I by chance stumbled on a rhyme in conversation — I am talking about my golden age now, my piping time, my fabled years before my Abel’d years — she showered praises on me, calling me her wonder boy, her prodigy, her little demi-god of language, all the while planting kisses on my head, as though to cool the forge that was my brain.
When I drew pictures in the soil she cried out in amazement at their lifelikeness, sometimes frightening my father who came running, fearing she’d been savaged by wild animals, and who was then asked to erect a fence around my work to keep those same wild animals from defacing it with their art-hating hoofs. As for my singing… there were times when I worried for her health, so direct a path did my trilling voice find into her heart, so violently did she roll her head to keep time with me.
Slim chance she had, then, against Someone who had put in more millennia daubing skies and harmonising spheres than her little demi-god had given minutes to scratching sandscapes with a pointed stick. Her capitulation, when it was demanded, was all but complete. She made mawkish art herself — made mawkish art of herself — sitting like a virgin with a baby at her breast and her eyes cast heavenwards, averted from the source of generation, modest, impregnable, fixed upon idea, not matter.
And yet there were moments, as I hung hidden in my tree, when I could have sworn those eyes drooped heavily again towards my muddy brother, and the old look of insentience in slime once more took possession of her features. I cannot say for certain there was a struggle going on. As a supporter of neither side I wasn’t on the look-out for signs of swerving loyalties. But it might have ended in a tussle had another god decided to try his luck in a more personable form. Who knows whether a snorting bull, making no bones about his intentions, may not after all have won the day, so many traces of the cow-in-heat did my mother still retain, so much steam still rose from her humid flanks, so full were her udders, even though Abel was fast approaching his first birthday, and divine melodies filled the air.
But there was no bull preparing to make a charge, and no notice served that any other god was willing to take up the challenge.
Unless you count my father, secretly perfecting his magic.
Leaving aside all the bodily disadvantages — cramps, stiffness, muscular spasms and seizures of the joints — it is not a good idea to spend as much time in a tree, spying on your family, as I did.
It is not a good idea emotionally.
You start to see your own absence, to notice how little your not being there is remarked on, how well others not only get by without you, but actually appear to thrive on your inexistence. To say that it is like observing your own death is altogether too grandiose. And too pleasing to yourself. You must suppose that you would in some measure be the hero of your own death, the reason why of whatever obsequies, and that at the very least you would be acknowledged sometimes as having been. What I saw, through leaves and fronds whose first function and principle of growth was to close around me, whose every breath seemed like a threat to mine, was more like my… cancellation. I was lodged in no memory because I had been expunged from the almanac. Eclipsed. Occulted. The consoling illusion that however blurred you become to yourself, you enjoy a clear outline in the minds and affections of those who love you — the child’s delirious supposition that at every waking moment a phantom of himself haunts the consciousness of his parents — came away in my aching fingers like stripped bark. I did not exist as an abstraction outside myself; I was not served and perpetuated by an army of impersonating spectres. If I had being anywhere, I had it in the tree; but, as my days in the tree were a sort of suspense of animation, I was as good as gone.