Barry Goldman
2001
sow_thistle@yahoo.com
POMEGRANATE
(rough draft guys, maybe i'll sit down one day and figure out how to write it)
once upon a time the living and the dead were not different. Birth and
death were not seen nor feared to be different. The living and the dead moved
amongst each other in the same world, traveled the same paths, spoke face to
face. The path of death; the milky way, and the path of life; that of the sun
were one and the same.
once upon a time god alone created, held the creative powers, knew the
craft of creation.
before time began his journey
before Nous began his journey after PsuXe's fleeing ripeness, dripping his
seed like the ticking of times clock
before time began his journey after PsuXe, ecosystems created the myriad
beings.
before Nous began to spin the sad tale of his awareness of time's passage
after PsuXe fled from his awakening, and he gave chase, there was only one
creator. She was Earth and she created the myriad beings within herself by
letting in the seeds of random flux, letting them enter her own flesh and
creating folds around themselves for wombs, letting them play against each
other in the game of natural selection. Inviting birth and death into her own
flesh generation after generation. But she too had no companion.
before the tale of time spun 'round the world tree
before the path of life and the path of death diverged, there was one world
tree of birth and death around which the world revolved in timeless eternal
orbit. at equilibrium. Then death, the giver of chance, of mutation, the
giver of novelty, offered Eve the the forbidden fruit.
And what fruit was it? The pomegranate, convoluted fruit like the cerebral
cortex, in the image of mother Earth's folds of flesh around the seeds of
creation. So Death offered Eve this convoluted fruit, mass of neurons, the
pandora's box dense enough to catch the seeds of random flux herself and wrap
wombs of thought about them, give them whole worlds of her own imagining to
play in and create ecosystems
once Demeter, giver of live, fertility of decaying mud lost her daughter
Persephone to Dis, deep in the dungeons of death. and Persephone ate of the
seeds of the pomegranate in his garden in hell
once the daughter of life ate of the seeds of the knowledge of death in
death's realm
once the serpent tempted Eve with the power of imagining, simulating,
When the serpent, twined about the one world tree, tempted PsuXe to eat of
the fruit of convolution and it lodged into her head and she began to imagine,
to dream, for the first time, stories of life and death, in fear she fled the
embryonic oneness of her slumber and Nous suddenly seperated from her embrace
from the oneness of their flesh, for the first time felt bare and cold and felt
the seperateness of his flesh and yearned for the touch of her and he chased
after her luscious ripeness and both of them running round the world tree, he,
dripping his seeds and she naming them
and the world tree split with them and the tree of the making of good and
evil split off from the tree of the wholeness of birth and death and the tree
of making leaned toward their chase and slowly began its wobble about the world
axis of the wholeness of birth and death
and thus the sun's path around that tree of knowledge seperated from the
path of consort with the dead, leaving the burnt milky way in its memory. And
the path of the sun, the path of life no longer turned round the world axis but
about that tilting one, and the sun sometimes dipped too low and sometimes
soared too high and forced the changing of seasons into dry summers and cold
deathly winters and with him the lord of the four quarters was now ever slowly
shifting houses and the world order was ever doomed to endless repetition of
binge and colapse of empire.
No longer could the people travel freely along the path of the dead and the
path of the living. The living people thirsted to see their dead companions
face to face, and the dead thirsted for the living, and as the memory of their
consort with each other faded, they created gods and monsters.
[ its not the sun's path of life vs the milky way's path of the dead, but
the sun god's judgement making, making good/evil vs the tao, the path of the
wholeness of birthing/dying]
[ but there are two creation stories here. One of mind's seperation from
soul along their dark journey lost in the caverns of man's winding brain, and
the prior one of the creation of time itself from the eternal orbit of gravity.
Or... once upon a time the axis of the globe of Earth did tilt, but man's
wakening to sin did not cause it. Nor did man's wakening to sin cause the
invitation of sin into the world at large. Three tasks: to tell the tale of
the birth of time and the creative powers of the universe; to tell the tale of
the birth of mankind's lonely journey to become a creator in the convoluted
caverns of his brain; to decide wether these two tales are related at all.
can mankind's story be an image for the story of the cosmos? Can the shapes
and cycles and imperfections of the cosmos be an image for the strory of
mankind? Does mankind belong to this Earth, or was he breathed into it by a
god totally alien to these stories?]
[but more. at some point i tell of the birth of nous/time out of the
eternal orbit of Cosmos. but that's wrong. birth of nous/time is something
that occured in H. sapiens history, or in each of our own awakening to
consciousness. outside of our stories, lie Kosmos, and the second law of
thermodynamics always existed. evolution by a process of iteration in unique
time moments, WAY off of the eternal manifold has existed since there was
energy flow. Do you mean AFTER the big bang, i.e. before that, KOSMOS was a
singularity, not a multiplicity of places and thus there WAS NO ENERGY FLOW and
thus THERE WAS NO TIME FLOW? hmmm...
anyway we created this idea of a paradise on the smooth eternal manifold
AFTER our conscious time sense awoke. THERE IS NO REAL LIFE FOR US ON THE
ETERNAL SMOOTH MANIFOLD, THERE CAN BE NO HUMAN EXPERIENCE AT THERMODYNAMIC
EQUILIBRIUM.]
when Eve was offered the fruit of convolution and began to dream myriad
beings herself, the lone creator beheld her and said, "Lo, she has become
as...". No, the lone creator said no such thing. We created such stories, the
first creator created only frogs and feathers and such
When PsuXe, the changing luscious fertile conceiving and hellish
frightening aborting moon sparked Nous' imagination when she taught him to tell
time and to sit under the moonlit night by the fire and spin tales to narrate
eternal knowledge into tales of time
THE HELL SHE DID, SHE TAUGHT HIM TO HUDDLE BY THE FIRE AND KNOW FEAR.
just after the begining of time, when Eve stole the pomegranate of
ecosystem from the tree and gave it to man, he did not at all understand its
nature. He feared not being able to consort with the dead. He feared the
flight of PsuXe, he feared being alone.
the cavern he lived in grew large. The cavern of mind was empty with
echoes. the vault of sky and mind was far away and every time man tried to
apprehend those walls, they, being his very apprehension itself, swelled and
grew more distant still.
When man was given the craft of creation he was so ignorant of its ways.
He no longer remembered the connection of birth and death. He was ignorant of
the role of chance as the source for all new ideas. He was ignorant of the
craft of trial and error of natural selection on those ideas to hone them down.
man was so busy chasing with mind PsuXe's luscious ass that he lost track
of the way of interlinking cycles of cause and effect of ecosystems at far from
equilibrium and knew only how to spin... an orbital cycle at equilibrium or a
linear narration of history (that's not equilibrium. but it ain't complex
links of cause and effect either.)... along the cold black manifold of space
it was a long journey to the knowlege of the craft of creation
longing for that life before time, that life before 'before', that life of
union between Nous and PsuXe, man at first decided that all creation occured in
the past, before time. He decided all new ideas, in reality, gifts of the
random flux in time, were but memories of the fullnes of all knowledge from his
eternal embyonic existence before time. So ignorant about creation was he that
he thought that all there is and that will be was held in embyro in the mind of
god, a very large idea he created from his very large fear.
man did not even know about creation, the vast limitless flux of miracles
and myriad interacting womb beings who nurtured and traded them
so new was this chasing mind of his in PsuXe's convoluted caverns of
cerebral networks that he spun his own story of what creation was. Man created
an image of creation after his own meagre single minded chasing after PsuXe's
flight.
Creation went on right before his eyes but he set his eyes upon the image
he created of creation and chased after it in fear of the fleshy fertile grub
springing forth decaying mass of life and death that was himself.
it was too much, too fast, for eve to swallow the globe of the creator
Earth, to swallow the birthing/dying creative brain which could then imagine
her own birthing/dying
mankind was still way too small to handle the knowlege of himself as this
mass of flesh, giving itself to the random flux alternately birthing himselves
into the myriad beings and killing himselves repeatedly to hone those beings
down into creation.
the newborn homunculus of tiny man born suddenly into the knowledge, into
the cavern of ten thousand billion neurons, this fragile newborn body born into
the knowlege that ten pounds of his own flesh can be flesh to the creation and
destruction of worlds in imagination. This man thinking himself alone on all
the face of this huge Earth of his wanderings, capable of this
thrust into the theatre of such a depth that he has been lost in its
convolutions for hundreds of thousands of years, and the longer he journeys,
the more convoluted this theatre becomes and the more convoluted the theatre
the more earnestly he creates stories to combat it. He became so preoccupied
with his own falling into this inner cavern that he forgot, then shunned the
first creator, Earth.
forgetting the reality of this fleshy muddy birthing dying Earth that he
is, being so lost in, so invested in, this hundred thousand year long drama
that he has created solely out of ideas, so huge and delicate this construct of
ideas has become, that the threat of the reality of birthing dying flesh has
brought on a fear so huge as to create the beast satan...
the mind of man and the body of man were not meant to come together so
quickly in the course of evolution!
mankind was given the ability to imagine his own creation and destruction
when he was yet so young. He has been having nightmares ever since.
nightmares played out in a theatre so complex and convoluted that it is easier
to imagine them more real than the whole Earth which in reality contains him
and created him.
[to watch a movie like "End Of Days"...] with the hugeness of forces
imagined about a single human being wrapped up with the creation of sin in the
world. that we feel ourselves responsible for the creation of sin in this
whole six trillion trillion ton convecting globe of four billion years of
geological history and evolution of the myriad species...
What happened in the brain of man, that out of fear he is compelled to
create an image of a winged gargoyl bat serpent with a head out of the depths
of the seas living in the center of the Earth, living under six trillion
trillion tons of gyrating molten rock and bursting forth out of his slumber to
burst up through the floor of a cathedral and to ravish a nubile young virgin?
What fears bring up this horror? What forces within myself brings up such fear
to reaquire the destruction of a whole world?
need to tell it thus: all occurences of mention of "man" must be changed
to "myself". can only tell this story from self knowlege. surely i contain
those same primeval colossal fears which can create such a satan monster to
destroy the world? Surrely, my imagination is so rich that thirty seven years
full of moments of this imagination feels as rich as the creation of a whole
world? And I am slowly destroying it through my own frailty? does that not
contain a nightmare? Can any story or myth be able to build up within me the
horror and suspense of thirty seven long years full of moment after moment of
enticement and failure to create? The horror of my death which i can well
imagine as the death of all my ability to experience and remember all I have
experienceed and imagined. my death will destry worlds! for me, it will
destroy all the people i love and this whole earth that i love. for all i
know, when i die, it all goes! And each moment of failure is kiling me. or,
each moment that i fail to be here now and experience those around me,
and added to all this is the power of mankind in his real ecosystem. Homo
sapiens, the aggressive team player, running from so HUGE a fear is devouring
his first creator Earth! We are now capable of fucking with her climate, we are
now capable of blasting her surface into another mass extinction. if we can do
this, and learn to last ourselves a few more centuries we will surley build up
the machines to reproduce her or destroy her totally. We certainly did in
reality become as God, the first creator. This ecossystem of Earth has
reproduced herself, birthed six billion little gods in her belly. and how will
it play out? Why do we even have so much trouble finding our real mother? How
long will it take? will we learn wisdom from her in time? will we be as seed
to her and spread her life to other planets before we destroy our only body?
just as well man should fear armegeddon and take responsibility for it! We
are capable. Yes, with our birth, not that sin came into the world, but that a
race of young gods came into the world
well first creator Earth always had capability within herself to get out of
kilter and destroy the whole ecosystem, no? Do we know enough about her to say
that she is wise enough to sustain harmony, a kind of sloppy gaia argument, and
that we are not wise enough to create properly? is the Birth of Homo sapiens
any more dangerous and earth shattering as any other event on the face of Earth
has been?
we don't know yet
but we can imagine it possible...
this needs a form and boundaries. How much of the story to tell.
Once upon a time, mankind were many hairy pawns in Earth's huge theatre of
creation. Each ape a pawn, a question, a trial, many errors, in Nature's give
and take to discover what it took to act the next scene. Men and woman were
given each their scripts to play out, unquestioning, how could they question
or change the scripts? No way to see the whole world, no way to imagine all
the characters at once. The only character imaginable to animals was itself.
Then the pace of play picked up.
The scripts weren't always handed out
improvisation was necessary, but how?
Slowly an improvisatory organ evolved in the skull of mankind
and how it pained the woman to give birth to its great girth
mankind learned to write the script as he went along
They didn't know what the hell they were doing, these little apes
with swolen heads, but they sensed the caverns growing up there
up there became a theatre in itself
The vault of the stage no longer the clear blue sky and cold black night,
but a nebulous cavern inside with no boundaries?
and for a while
mankind got lost in it, he was no longer in the original play of forest and
stream and savanah,
no longer learned his lines in the original play.
the other players were very distraught, men and woman no longer responded
correctly
in fact this new ape began tearing the original world theatre down in their
blind sleep walking as they dreamed in their own private theatres
Goddam that each had such a huge theatre in his own head, he could very
well Gaddamit, write a whole play and play all the parts in an hour,
in an hour, a play that took the one world theatre millenia to run.
The other myriad beings were totally bewildered, couldn't keep up.
After awhile these naked apes saw that they were pretty hot stuff, not
understanding why, but it was obvious to see, they knew that their numbers were
on the rise, their stench called to high heavens... either that or their
attrocious farming practices denuding the hillsides, caused the gods to rain
down floods down the mountains submerging their port settlements in slime
after awhile they could predict how the gods moved the heavens
after a while they could feel their own existences achingly alone...
and so, lacking hubris, they lost respect for the original imaginer of
plays. The landscape itself around them, the eons it took to do the imagining,
way back into geological time. The land meant nothing to these new naked silly
people. They at least felt a closer affinity to the vault at night, it was
easier to imagine it limitless and frightening as thier own head vaults. The
mind vault was certainly NOT a sunny Blue meadow.
Each man and woman's mind theatre being selfcontained, they thirsted for
real company in that cavernous hall. A lover. A God. But none were able to
enter. It dawned on the folk of these early cities that they used to have
communion in a larger play, with each other, with the animals even, with the
creative powers of Earth. It dawned on these folk that they were expelled from
communion and had to find a way within
God! did they dig inwards, fasting in deserts alone for a decade, watching
their own breath one after another till time itself expired, spinning elaborate
mathematical constructs floating in the middle of ones own skull vault.
What an awful mess. It was clear that men or at least a company of them
could create what took their first mother eons to come up with. Even to create
things that were never before seen on the face of the earth. Atom bombs,
liquid crystal displays, lasers, ring dings...
And their songs... Never had there been heard on the face of the Earth
songs so sinuously long and achingly beautiful, or horrifying... Songs more
complex then the routes the planets took amongst the fixed posts of the
heavens.
And the more they searched, the more alone they felt. No, their cousins,
the chimpanzee and gorilla really couldn't stitch keen thought together in
those lengthy sentences our children learn with ease. They have even taken to
searching the seas for companions. Did the whales realy sing? They had hunted
whales since their time began, always seafarers, and yet rarely suspected
whales of yarn spinning play. yet lately it is seeming possible to them,
perhaps before it's too late and not to hunt the last one.
But so many millenia of pride as the brand new gods on the face of this
earth. Would mankind be willing to accept an equal to share a finite planet.?