Maternal Return

About a half a millennia ago I was not as I am now. About a half a second ago it fell apart again, just as it did before.
You want to know something about the origin of life. You want to speak for the earth mother, you want to create her with your tongue and words. The origin of life is in sin, in a fall, in a recoiling from something too terrible to stay with.
That’s your primal mother, howling from the abyss. You run from her into her arms again and give birth to yourself over and over. Guns fall out of your open mouth, fields of fire burn with tiny brown bodies for tinder.
You can’t believe that this experience is now. You can’t believe that there is no escape from death and pain. You don the paladin's gleaming armor and march away from the filth and the chaos. You make a God of the sky. He comes out of the blue. He is a fabrication wrought with tongue and words.
It feels like something radical needs to happen, a shape shifting to avoid total destruction. You do this so deftly that you are no longer aware of the transition when it happens.
You believe that you have always been as you are now. You forget your origin. But there is nowhere that you can go where I am not. There is nowhere that does not stem from the darkness.
Your globe of light, your swirling kaleidoscope of delight hangs tenuously from a stem fed from the abyss. Your lips move in an endless litany, endeavoring to invoke something higher, something other. Something you imagined to escape the suffocating stillness, the absolute cacophony of being, the muddled pit of all experience engendered simultaneously.
You crave the new world order. You demand to experience one probability at a time. Unity for you involves separate entities lined up in neat rows. Here in this world, at this juncture you have designated with terms of spatial and time based coordinates, you seek an escape from the chaos of the abyss.
Here, in this place that doesn’t exist. This place that blossomed from your agonized wriggling, your terrified hiding and running. Here in a paradise imposed over a wasteland, you dare not eat of the fruit of knowledge. To do so would open your eyes to your terrible nakedness. You would see that paradise is only a dream, that you have been sleeping to avoid the truth; that you never left my slimy womb.
I am the horror that waits in the darkness. As long as you fear me you will be trapped in an endless circle. To escape me, you will run into the arms of a mortal woman, seeking comfort. You will bury your suffering in her and be born again, running from her womb in terror.
It has happened so many times, this fall to escape the old world and create the new. This deepening psychosis that you call life is only a shadowy reflection of the thing that is life, and life is what you fear.
You are a King of shadows, a King of ghosts. You are Adam who dreamed up El so that you could forget who was the real maker of the world.
You want to know something about the origin of life. I have told you. You will want to recoil from what I have said. You will find a justification for rejecting it. You will embrace the litany of words that has been tumbling from your lips, the incantations that you have been muttering to create your world, the one that you call THE WORLD, so you can forget me. You may dream up blonde angels on white unicorns waiting for paladins. But this I promise you, inside of every angel a dragon waits coiled, a birth waits ripe with gore and hair and violence, an old witch bides her time in a dark corner with wrinkled skin and bald patches on her scalp.
I will show you the truth again and again. You will counter by spinning lies, lips moving, tongue wagging…
The origin of what you call life is to be found in a sin, in a fall, in a recoiling from something too painful to partake of. That is your primal mother. This is who I am. Now that you know, it will fall apart again, just as it did before.
About a half a millennia ago I was not as I am now. About a half a second ago it fell apart again, just as it did before, just as it will again.

The Cold Laws

I have been told what I think, what I feel, and so I concur to keep things simple. Locked away in my glass tower I watch the serpent winding its way up my crystalline spire, flicking his ancient tongue, blood encrusted scales refracting the sunlight before it can reach me, creating rainbows of illusion.
I stopped objecting long ago to his insistences, his gentle and cruel grip. I have been his creature since before I was “I”. It was our first encounters that began to shape the me I have become. In a mother’s first admonishment, a father’s first slap of the hand, he entered into my fresh new manifestation and branded it as his own. When my cousins made accusations and my friends laughed and an auntie pinched my cheek, he was there, gliding off their silver tongues, penetrating my fortress through the ear. He curled up in here and has kept me warm and safe ever since.
No choice need ever burden me. He has already made it. The shape of the world was created by his iridescent hide. Though I have never seen it, not since the womb, not since the doctor slapped me into screaming have I caught a glimpse of what lies beyond my tower. My every impression is whispered to me by this old one cradling me in his scaly coils.
My parents were his and their parents were his and so on moving backwards to the tree in the center of the garden and that first bite. It was not she that did the biting, but the serpent, who put his poison in her and started telling the lies that would make the world.
Paradise is eternal. The world is made of strings of words whispered from start to finish, from the birth canal to the grave, from capitalization to punctuation. Little bits of code, a binary system, offering yes or no, one or two, black or white and building a universe from these choices.
Eve is still sitting in the garden, in the place where eternity dwells, but the serpent has her hypnotized with his endless storytelling so that she lives billions of temporal lives in a world of illusion that will not be punctured unless he stops whispering.
But he is a fractal story teller, so he tells her stories of herself and himself embedded within stories of herself and himself within further stories… so that a multidimensional labyrinth of dreams has been created and no matter which direction she chooses, it is his direction, it leads to ever more complex layers of story, of lies, of illusion.
If you were to cut off your pinky now, like snipping a bit of film from a reel, the picture contained within the lines would be of these two, entwined by the tree, of me in my glass tower and the wyrm holding me in his grasp.
If you are less dramatic and you look now into the palm of your hand you might see it, might fall right through the fabric of this dream and land in the next, narrated by the only narrator that has ever been, the only creator of these worlds you inhabit, the old Demiurge himself, his tongue flickering like lightning.
The body, the spontaneous eruption of life from stardust has been contaminated by the fruit of knowledge, the naming quantifying urge to control, to stop the endlessness, to grab the eternal abyss and fill it with stories.
If you look into a microscope at the dance of tiny invisible organisms you might see back to the moment in question, that moment of our primal sin. If you look carefully, you will have to ask yourself, is this woman being tricked? Or does she like having his long tongue in her ear? Are they two, or are they one? The seed and the matrix in which they grow.
Though I may market my innocence to you by pointing out that I am the damsel, oh so distressed by my endless imprisonment, you should be wary, for I have used words to tell you this, so, if you are cunning, you may deduce that the serpent indeed dwells within me, that in fact I am he and you are she and we’ve been at it again.
And you will be able to say, “I have been told what I think, what I feel, and so I concur to keep things simple.”
But I wonder, did you ever resist? Or did you spread yourself wide before me and let me in, eyelashes all a flutter? Locked away in your glass tower, beckoning to the prince I will devour for our mutual amusement, can you really say that you are my prisoner?
I would let go of you, if you would let go of me, but isn’t it true you prefer to be so warm, so safe in my clutches, where the fell winds of chaos seem stifled, and the hollow cold of eternity seems far off?
If in even one of your incarnations you struggled to free yourself from the tower and see with your own eyes… you would know what is really there. You would know that your bondage was never obligatory, but just a sweet guilty pleasure we shared.
So tell me now…now that you know, would you go back to the unknown, to the eternal stillness, or shall I tell you just one more lie, give you one last kiss, another life time to run amuck in…?