On Sunday morning — July 11, 2004 — I was listening to the Austin NPR station (KUT-FM) and got into "This American Life" (a Chicago Public Radio anthology) in the latter third of the hour-long show. Humor writer Jonathan Goldstein read his own version of the Garden of Eden. Goldstein is writing his version of the Bible. It won't pass muster with the inerrancy crowd in the Southern Baptist Convention. If this is (fair & balanced) errancy, so be it.
[x This American Life - NPR]
"Genesis"
By Jonathan Goldstein
In the Beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth, and yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point he tried to pinch his own eyes out, in order to examine them, and God had to step in.
Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you. But it's a stranger who you have created. And he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created. And you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years. And yet still, you have nothing to talk about. It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted. Before He created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now he was still lonely, and so was Adam.
Then came Eve. Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way. Eve: mayor. Adam: village idiot. And that is the way it was from the very beginning. Sometimes when Adam would start to speak, Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart, but he would only say stuff like, "Little things are really great, because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth."
Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there, or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. In her dreams, Eve danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies, and there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug. And then she would hear snoring. She would wake up, and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers, his dog-food breath blowing right up her nostrils. Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across her chest and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in Heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it.
Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them. Except for God, Eve had no one. She would complain to the Lord any chance she got. "Adam is a nimrod," she would say and the Lord would remain silent. God was the best and all that, and she loved the hell out of Him, but when it came to trash-talk, He was of no use.
Adam was constantly trying to impress her. "Look what I have made," he said one bright morning, his hands cupped together. Eve looked into his hands. She pulled away and shrieked. Adam was holding giraffe feces. "I've sculpted it!" said Adam. "It is for the Lord." He opened his hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck.
On some days, Adam galloped about, exploring. His hair was wiry and when it got sweaty, it hung down in his eyes. Adam was cute this way. On one such day, he saw a snake. Adam made the snake's acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back.
"Wow, that smarts!" said the snake through gritted teeth. Their eyes locked and in that very moment, the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was a lummox and as King of the Earth, his reign would very soon end. There was a new sheriff in town, and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake. He could tell all of this just by simply looking into his idiot eyes.
"I've seen you around with another one like you," he said to Adam. "But instead of the dead legless snake between the legs, she has chaos there."
"That's Eve!" said Adam, all animated. "I named her that myself. God made her from out of my rib." He showed the snake the scar on his side. The snake looked at Adam in silence. The idea of Adam, Adam the schlemiel, Adam the fool, being God's favorite was enough to give the snake a migraine.
"You aren't at all like I imagined," the snake said. "I thought you'd be closer to the ground. More pliant. Greener. I tried to explain to God that to make you balanced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don't know why I bother."
Adam sat and listened, wide-eyed. Eve hadn't the patience to sit and chat like this. So when the snake suggested that they get into the habit of meeting every once in a while to talk, Adam was very excited to do so. As they lazed on their backs, staring up at the sky, the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world and how he used to pal around with God in the dark, back before Creation. He said that in the darkness, it was a truer freer time, that in the darkness was the good ol' days. He told Adam that back in the very beginning, he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place -- but God was just too stubborn to listen to reason. "Make the earth out of sugar, I told Him. Instead of stingers, give bees lips they can kiss you with."
Adam didn't always agree with the snake. In fact, a lot of what the snake said went straight over his head. But there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood. He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself: "I sure could go for a good dose of snake."
You would think after all the time they spent together, the snake would finally find it within himself to like Adam, just a little bit. But instead, he only grew to hate him more. He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam's wife, Eve. From what he heard from Adam, she was hot and smart. Often he would imagine running into her, and the instant synergy they would have. "Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are," he would say, wrapping himself around her calf.
The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, bucktoothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp. Adam had the IQ of a coconut husk. But he was still human. The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed. "Sometimes, I'd think you were watching me," the snake imagined saying to Eve. "Because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me. Ribbons made of raw pork intestines. I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek at me from behind a tree, but all I would see were the hedgehogs who mocked me. Come, my dear. Let us eat from the Tree of Knowledge."
On Eve's very first day, Adam had explained to her the rules of the Garden, just the way God had explained them to him. He had lifted his head up and had made his back stiff. He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1940's would. Another kind of woman, someone softer than Eve, might have found this charming. He explained that except for the Tree of Knowledge, every tree in the Garden was theirs to eat from.
"I am a fan of the pear," Adam said. "It is not unlike an apple, whose head craves God."
"Tell me more about this Tree of Knowledge," said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it. The Tree of Knowledge. It sounded very poetic.
"There's not much to tell," said Adam. "If we eat from it, we will die."
From then on, Eve talked about the Tree of Knowledge all the time. It was Tree of Knowledge this and Tree of Knowledge that. It was like it wasn't a tree at all, but a moviestar. Sometimes she would just stand by the Tree and stare at it. It was on such an occasion that she met the snake.
When Eve first caught sight of him, she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day. A boobie that percolated her vomit just below her tonsils. A dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature's cruelty. And a deathwatch beetle that filled her with existential dread. But still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from 60 to 80 percent oilier than she would have ever imagined.
"Hi!" said the snake. "In the mood for some Fruit of Knowledge? It's fruity!"
"We were told not to eat from that tree, or else we would die," said Eve.
"Die? What an ignorant thing to say," said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass in the side of his mouth. "If there's an escape hatch from Paradise, then it isn't really paradise, is it?"
The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve. He could see that he was making an impression.
"All I'm saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake. I could talk about it all day and you still won't get it. You have a right to at least try it, right? I'm not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble. A nibble isn't really eating, is it?"
Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating. She looked at the Tree. The way the sun shined through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to: nibble the fruit. Then the snake said, "Think about it. Does God want companions who can think for themselves or does he want a bunch of lackeys and yes-men? Wouldn't God want a few surprises? It would seem to me that God telling you not to eat from the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God. The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely. At least give it a lick."
Eve looked at the fruit and then she looked at the snake. Then, slowly, she parted her lips and pushed out her tongue, all wet and warm and uncertain. She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit. The snake smiled. "Has anyone died?" he asked. "Now take a tiny little nibble. Just a speck, just to see."
The fruit was squishy and tart. She smooshed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes. It was a bit like trying on new glasses. It was a bit like an amal nitrate popper. It was a bit like a big wet kiss on the lips right at first when you weren't sure whether you wanted to be kissed or not. She felt a thousand little feet kicking at her uterus.
The idea of her own nudity, as well as Adam's, had always felt like a Nordic co-ed health spa thing. Now with the Fruit of Knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing. Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks. Her thighs, the way they swished against each other, were like scissors cutting through velour. With her lips still glistening in Tree of Knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam. The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass. And as she receded into the distance, he thought something along the lines of "Now that's what I'm talking about."
"Kiss me, Adam," said Eve. "Taste my lips."
Adam, like any lummox truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way, and thus he knew how to avoid it like the plague. But yet, there was also this. Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him. It felt like a very lucky thing. When he took her in his arms, he told her that he loved her with his whole entire heart. He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted. Then it started to rain and Eve began to cry.
During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the Garden more and more. A couple of times, he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn't try too hard anyway. He didn't want to bother God any more than he already had.
When Adam met someone that he really liked, he would say, "I so wish you could have been there." It didn't seem fair to him that he was the one who got to be in Eden. "This sunset isn't bad," he'd say, "but the sunsets in Eden, they burned your nosehairs. They made your ears bleed." He couldn't even explain it right. "When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God," he would say. "And God was delicious! When you wanted Him, you just grabbed Him." Now when he ate fruit, he could only taste what was not there. But it wasn't all bad. After Eden, Eve became much gentler with Adam. After getting them both cast out, she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love. She knew it was the very least she could do. She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place.
Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve had spent their earliest days in a beautiful garden, naked and frolicking, and the kids would say, "Ew!" The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam, lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time. They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled. "Where's Grandpa's bellybutton?" they all asked. He stared at the children. They were all his children. And as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid.
[Jonathan Goldstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he spent the first four years of his life before the family moved back to his mother's home town of Montreal. The family settled just outside of Montreal in the suburb of Lava where Goldstein grew up before attending McGill University and later completing a master's program in creative writing at Concordia University. After graduation, Goldstein supported himself by working in the telemarketing industry for ten years, all the while continuing to write and attend readings. In 2000, Goldstein's nascent career got a boost after he was selected to work on Ira Glass' popular public radio program "This American Life" and he relocated to Chicago to work as a producer on the show. In 2002, Goldstein moved back to Montreal and started work on several projects for CBC Radio One including his own show, "WireTap," which debuted in 2004.]
Copyright © 2004 Jonathan Goldstein
Monday, July 12, 2004
Jonathan Goldstein's Version Of Genesis
We Just Don't Get It
[x The New York Times]
Those Who Were Inspired to Hate the Modern World
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
The Western world is decadent. Its emphasis on individualism is corrupt. Its materialism is dangerous. Its vision of modernity reflects not progress but regress. The West will destroy itself. But if it doesn't, its destruction should be helped along. True salvation can be found only by returning to ancient disciplines and beliefs.
Such views may not seem totally unfamiliar. Similar doctrines are held by Islamist terror groups and by those finding common cause with them. Writers like Paul Berman have already shown a connection between Islamist ideas and 20th-century Western Fascism, with its own atavistic hatreds of modernity. Some of these ideas have emerged on the political left, as well, appearing in Marxist thought and inspiring the anti-globalization movement. Their impact on the political and religious landscape has been profound.
But how did such ideas develop? One surprising source turns out to be a little-known group of 20th-century European intellectuals. They passed these ideas on to small groups of ardent followers, but their books and pamphlets gradually shaped a worldwide subculture of belief and devotion. Their loose-limbed movement, which began in the 1920's, has been called traditionalism.
The pioneers of traditionalism are not well known, but are now the subject of a new book by Mark Sedgwick, a historian of Islam who teaches at the American University in Cairo. He began writing "Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the 20th Century" (Oxford), thinking that it would be a study of Islam in the West, since many traditionalist figures were converts to Islam.
But he found that these conversions — many done in secret — were associated with broader religious theories. As he searched Web sites, sought reluctant interviewees and probed an esoteric culture, he also came upon traditionalism's intersection with Fascism, the influence of traditionalism on American religious studies and the influence of traditionalism on Islamic thought. The careers of its original advocates also turned out to be elaborately eccentric: magic and sorcery mixed with Hinduism and Sufism; scholarship mixed with calls for revolution; devotion mixed with cult.
Mr. Sedgwick's history of traditionalism, the first scholarly effort by an outsider, also sheds light on contemporary passions.
While the book is flawed by awkward organization and the need for more systematic examination of traditionalist ideas, it also makes clear how important this neglected movement is. On his Web site (www.traditionalists.org), Mr. Sedgwick lists more than 200 traditionalist organizations and Web sites in 34 countries. Even the arts now reflect traditionalist influence. The British composer, Sir John Tavener, whose seven-hour work, "The Veil of the Temple," will receive its United States premiere on July 24 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, writes religious minimalist music and praises traditionalist writers, describing one, Firthjof Schuon (1907-98), as he "in whose mystical presence I live."
One of the central documents of traditionalism is a relatively brief book, first published in 1927, "The Crisis of the Modern World." Its author, René Guénon (1886-1951), born in Blois, France, to Catholic parents, had been a student of mathematics but soon turned to theosophy, Masonry, medieval Christianity, Hinduism and, finally, Islam. Guénon moved to Cairo and later seemed to retreat into solitude, fearing evil sorcery.
His philosophy was, as Mr. Sedgwick acknowledges, "not especially original." But he had a charismatic impact. In the 1920's, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the curator of the Department of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, wrote that "no living writer in modern Europe is more significant" than Guénon. In the 1940's, André Gide believed that if he had read Guénon earlier, his life would have been changed.
Guénon's argument was that the 20th-century West represented the final stage of a final age, the apotheosis of worldly decadence, in which materialism was emphasized over the spirit, individuality over community. The Renaissance, he proposes, was not a rebirth but a death; science, rationality and humanism were products of delusion. A cure — or at any rate, a refuge — could be found in the primordial truths that underlay all religions before modernity's distortions. Guénon scorned democracy; he believed in a hierarchical religious elite and saw himself as one of its elect.
He was right about one thing: there was something revolutionary about the notion of the individual that developed after the Renaissance. He was right, too, that religious and aesthetic compromises were required in a democratic culture with its beliefs in rights and liberties. But he could not imagine any way for a democratic culture of religion to develop: his religious truth left no room for reason or autonomy. The Reformation, for him, was a deformation. These views are what traditionalism shares with varieties of Islamic fundamentalism.
They are also what led it to flirt with various leadership cults and, ultimately, with Fascism, most obviously in the work of an Italian traditionalist, Julius Evola (1898-1974), who was inspired by Guénon. Evola wrote about the Holy Grail, about esoteric belief and magic, but in the 1920's and 30's he tried to influence both Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Mr. Sedgwick suggests that Evola even visited SS headquarters in Germany, urging the organization to supplement its vision with his.
Evola wanted Fascism to be "more radical" and Nazism to be less bourgeois. In his 1934 book, "Revolt Against the Modern World," Evola wrote: "What is really needed is a total catharsis and a radical `housecleaning.' " One method was to spur on "the most destructive processes of the modern era." It was a message hailed by right-wing Italian terrorist groups in the 1960's and, in different ways, by the left-wing terrorists who followed.
In a less blunt way, such tendencies were even evident in the early work of the Romanian scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, who was influenced by both Evola and Guénon in the 1920's and 30's. He later developed what Mr. Sedgwick calls a "soft traditionalism," devoting his career to studying archaic religions and their views, an interest that influenced the course of academic religious studies in the United States. But in his earlier traditionalist days, when he hailed "a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic," Eliade was lured by the attractions of Romanian Fascism and the Iron Guards, a past that came to light only after his death in 1986, leaving an indelible blot on his reputation.
This doesn't mean that all traditionalist belief is fascistic or that its restless quest for lost religious truth is inherently problematic; indeed, much of value has come out of traditionalist examinations of art and religion. But its anti-modern and anti-democratic polemics can have disturbing consequences. And Mr. Sedgwick shows that inscribed in its origins is the belief that truth could only be attained by overturning the modern world and its Western host; moral considerations and human consequences are treated as irrelevant.
Traditionalism declared a war in which modernity itself was the enemy. Only in the total destruction of democratic individualism and liberal humanism could the lost wisdom be restored. In some arenas, that is the battle still being fought.
Edward Rothstein is cultural critic at large for the New York Times.
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company