I
was born and raised in an orchard known by the name of Eden, 16th orange
tree on the left, and all my future hopes had been Left there with the
Ultimate Orange.
From what I can tell now, in this position
of a painter detached from his painting, there was nothing that you have
not already seen or built yourself about the way the orchard was structured,
ruled or taken care of. It was just a world, though I recollect within
the Garden there was a center of energetic emanation, in the shape of
a circle of a small diameter, having the made-up features of a human Fun
Fair and which they called, given its conceptual schema, the Wheel of
Fortune. It had been designed long before I was born, and before most
of the people I know of or inherited something from were born as well.
Seen from the outside, the whole gizmo was looking like the clearing of
a forest or like a woman's heart, at once shiny and shadowy, open and
hidden behind her instinctual veils. Surrounded by a range of tall grown
apple-trees, the Park was the Big Attraction for each of us, Eden inhabitants.
By the time I learned how to walk, - so
you can guess my steps were being haltingly taken - my mind and my feet
always tended to go towards the apple trees, green and inviting as they
were, projecting their leafy silhouettes on the frowned face of the fall
sky. I say "frowned face" because the sky was crying a lot that specific
fall, and I could see its eyebrows of clouds turning purple or maybe violet,
and then dark blue. But who could tell exactly how an angry face changes
color, name the boundaries between serenity and gloom, since all you distinctly
perceive with your inner eye is the anger...?
The majestic apple-trees were unanimously
loved, much more loved than the nut-trees for instance, because people
didn't have the required patience to crack the nutshells open and taste
the fruit. Only the crows knew how to do that artistically with a dance
of their beaks, but what a pity, they were designed to be birds. Dark
birds. Therefore, the people of Eden always went for the apples with their
mysterious perfume and shiny skin, beautifully polished by the autumn
rain. Usually at sunset, while the sleepy birds were having their mystical
ritual of initiation in Phoenix's art of rebirth, the Garden's human inhabitants
-less artistic but more hungry than the dark crows themselves - were silently
heading for the circle of apple-trees, perfectly rendered on the canvas
of the twilight, their leafy crowns in the shape of an arch. Any resemblance
with a circus bolt could be significant.
The inhabitants of Eden, as highly ambitious
and responsible persons, were constantly looking for shadows, willing
to give it a shot in finding their shattered dreams abandoned somehow
in the games of the past and now supposed to dwell in the merry-go-round,
the Wheel of Fortune, the Circus. They were doing it, to quote them: "Just
for fun in our world's Fun Fair, like a bedtime loisir."
Beneath the dark and orange shadows - which
can be somehow reproduced by the color range of the fireworks you bathe
in today - the earth was utterly alive and breathing. The numerous families
of ants, - known as hardworking and also, in situations of necessity,
fellow-devouring creatures - were putting their young to sleep with a
prayer for grains and shiny days. Some wonder nowadays who on earth or
in the skies could listen to the minuscule prayers of an ant. I let them
wonder.
The life of the Garden in its small size
was not at all minimized for people with binocular vision. These endowed
people managed to understand that the same earth who had once breathed
us out through its lungs had also breathed ants through its pores. Thus
we got to count small hearts and big hearts, small hopes and big hopes
and people that were in between, insectlike molded - instinctual to paroxysm
in situations of necessity - therefore half human. The scientists of Eden
called them the-half-blind-half-awake-half-hearted-half-humans, a made-up
qualificative and pretty hard to memorize since no name has been invented
yet for things that were struggling in the middle of what we held as the
Being Humane Scale. Statisticians, in their turn, noted down in their
papers the unprecedented discovery of an astonishingly complete population
of the above-mentioned category.
Life went through its normal range of heart-perceived
phases in the Garden where I was born. The full meaning of the cycle light-darkness
was heard echoing even in the pulsations of the fungi attached to the
trunks of the trees. And yes, there were parasites, the concept of parasitism
(or there was symbiosis, if you wish) in the Garden of Eden. As for me,
I was always lonely, never found a friend because friends showed up when
I wasn't looking and disappeared quickly when I turned around. All by
myself night and day, I found these petty pleasures - which were my major
concerns and top 10 on my personal Being Humane Scale. Thus I loved to
watch the ritual of metamorphosing our reality into the reality of dreams
overnight, and having read some Freud, I was always wondering who fell
asleep first, the tree or the fungus, the host or the ghost. I loved to
watch the world change coordinates with the Silent Heaven of the Angels,
in the sense that nothing mean could be said while people's minds were
half-alive, that is deeply asleep to the eyes of this world.
Most of the women who inhabited the Garden
of Eden were getting pregnant in fall, because they were taught the earth
was gestating with fruits and their womb was like the earth. This way
the population increased rapidly and the hunger grew with the same speed.
The earthy hunger, that is, a disease much more dangerous and mind-attacking
than the learned doctors could even dare to predict. Yet the Garden was
ignorantly sleeping every night and the women's wombs, like the earth,
grew heavy with fruits, gestating full-season.
Beneath the branches rich with green unearthy
smell, in their yet earthy beds of grass from where the snakes of sin
were lurking, the young boys of the Eden's mothers were growing to become
Abel and Cain, or only Abel, or only Cain. A matter to be decided upon
at midnight, by Eve, the wanderer and the mistress of heart-dictated directions.
Eve was a beautiful young woman by then.
An all-loving mother of all the wombs and all their fruits. One time I
saw her in the distance, wandering in the Park. That's when she became
part of my painting. She looked so unprotectedly naked and so shiny beneath
the apple trees' arch, yet it could have been my eyes. A statue carved
in flesh - maybe Rodin's while thinking of Camille - her skin the color
of the sand, so young and shiny like the rays of the New Moon. I had been
told she was the Wife, the Given One. I tacitly embraced her much gossiped
idealism and dreamed of her blue eyes, the deep blue eyes of what they
called a Gift. Yet to her, from what I perceived, she was only the rib,
penetrating the flesh and longing for a duplication into Something Else.
Something Tasty. Eve had an insatiable heart; she was always hungry for
the unborn Adams with their unborn loves and poems hiding in the shadows
of the Park. Through her, the rib aimed high, so high that the final goal
could not be guessed by the mind, only perceived by the senses. Eve had
been born a lonely woman and stayed like that since the Adam in her bed
got so bored of loving himself. Life at home was like dying of hope suffocation,
keeping the claustrophobic indoors and telling him that you are out and
doing fine.
The Fun Fair was the place where something
was always happening, a bird would sing, an ant would die, a leaf would
fall young and very green. Good things and bad things. Plus the Fun Fair's
keeper was speaking in rhymes and the power of his words- a melody- kept
on resounding in Eve's ears:
Looking for the Ultimate Satisfaction?
We have Forbidden Mellow Apple Biting at
your discretion!
People presumed (and I see they still presume)
that that was why Eve had all those terrible bedtime worries she was continuously
complaining about. She called them heart-migraines and flesh insomnias.
Some thought she had gone crazy with no real husband at home, some thought
she was sane when she said that the apple-trees of beauty were having
nightmares too, and that their leafy crowns were giving her the whispered
messages from the Honey Moon. So people listened - for hours, for days,
for weeks - and no distinct sound could be heard coming from the apple-trees.
They tried harder, some of them got inspired and composed beautiful music,
and at the changing of the year they all felt older, much more older than
a year older and scared, much more scared than they had been of the things
they had used to know before as being terrible.
Eve felt lonely again, this time with no
refuge in the refugee camp. In an imagined dialogue with her, I would
have asked her: "Why don't you write what you feel? Why don't you write
about your spiritual wanderings?" "I don't master the punctuation marks
well," she would have said. "People say that in life they don't know what's
coming next. I don't know what is coming next either, but I know what
is NOT coming next in my life here, so my dots become exclamation points
and I say Beware Eve, as moles can't see but know how to dig, people can't
feel but know how to hurt."
Three years later, yet don't count on the
date since our calendar is relative, a tormented Eve, naked but not cold,
wrote these in a state of deep hunger. The Adam in her bed had gone hunting.
And, like a beauty sign on the face of the sky, the Honey Moon was singing,
"How does the poet feel in front of you, inhabitants of Eden? Naked, she
is completely naked in her irrepressible nakedness, she feels naaaked..."
*
What We Call Bedtime Worries
They
are some sort of feelings, thoughts or just figments of ideas
that some people cannot sleep on.
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