Skip to main content

Birth





She still lied restless on the ground days after she was created and sent forth to this unknown land. The land that seemed to her bristle with unnamed objects whose sharpness oftentimes rubbed her skin from pink to scarlet red. When it happened, some ineffable feeling scudded throughout her body like a little creature with spiky teeth that were liable to gnaw. And gnawed, and continuously gnawed until she wanted to rid the little creature of her body, insofar as she howled, a voice so ugly and thunderous that every other living thing bowed down and humbled in astonishment. She did feel prickings, both from within her body and outside it, after making such a shameless exhibition of her nature. Hunger was yet another “ineffable feeling,” but something less intolerant. There were periods when the feeling rendered her so euphoric that she guffawed. For days she fed on nothing but light and air.

The age of Unknowing and Savagery lasted only a few winks of sleeps. She proved to be, despite of all, the daughter of her Father, heir to all senses. All feelings were welcomed, as long as they entered her virginal body like birds piercing with their beaks berries that were yet ripened. She was still disdainful of giving them names. More precisely still, she disdained the need of communication or language. A snake attempted to allure her with serpentine incantations. Unmoved and baffled by the snake’s amorous overture, she riveted her attention on its speckled skin, which stripes of colours vibrate when the snake wormed its precarious way to her. So beautiful a sight it was that no sooner she was plagued by a feeling which disintegrated into myriads little ants traversing every part of her body until she shrieked and laughed. She hacked the snake off into half with the largest rock at her disposal. Her eyes sparkled with the menacing light one would have when one finally conquered beauty.

Sin was the first sign of her inchoate mortality. Sin simply enveloped her, blessed her with golden dusts. She scoured this yet barren earth- though some vegetation had started rearing their heads tentatively- with serpent’s eyes. But Evil was still miles away. In a more civilised and advanced age they would finally realise that Evil was not the seed of God’s bitter resentment, but, found its way in mostly when mortality was tainted with diverse Experiences, it was the result of numerous futile expeditions to search for an unnamed something that one so lusting after since one was created.

This unnamed something gnawed her heart without warning and incessantly like every other mortal feeling did when she was brought to the Earth. She now had the propensity of simulation, which accounted for her endeavour to blending herself into whatever she had beheld, so her Ugliness or Beauty could be pardoned and made less conspicuous. Biting off her often unmitigated urge to shriek, she hushed herself up and remained immobile like a forbidding rock. Therefore this unnamed something she as well swallowed it down into the pit of her stomach and let it rock and writhe about like a recalcitrant baby. Everything she sensed, she felt, was now in a topsy-turvy. The more she restrained those little invisible monsters from hammering the walls of her body, the lure of a wholesale annihilation hastened.


Symptoms like that knew no remedy, and no sooner got better of her sanity. She let out a long and, what they would allege years later, triumphant, call, and, sparing you details so graphic and gristly, gave herself single-handedly back to her Father. The last blow that struck her before she levitated struck awake what was long thought to be in everlasting hibernation- this was the moment they said Knowledge was born. The myth remained undisclosed of her knowledge of her last moments, or whether during the very brief respite between pain and unfeeling the unnamed something was finally endowed its title. Because for the God, His Grand Plan always had its great ends but the mortals were never its criterion.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are