The Pillar in the Garden

Because of death we have everything: stories and possessions and poets and priests; love affairs and organic farms and juries of our peers and people thinking about the moon on the face of the deep.

The Bible had it wrong. It wasn't the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was the Tree of the Knowledge of Death, and you can't convince me that God made up death on the spot. He knew about it from the start. It was the first thing He made. If not for death He wouldn't have created the universe. He sure wouldn't have created man, because what does life mean without death? A big fucking yawn. Without death we'd still be walking around naked pulling bananas and coconuts off the trees, scratching ourselves and blinking lazily, "Mmm? What? Another lightening storm? So what? How's that? Planetary collisions and black holes? Don't make me yawn. Why should I care?"

But still it hurts. Oh, it hurts so much to lose someone we love. So with death came sex: that urge to fuse, no matter how momentarily; to lose ourselves in someone else, the "little death" of orgasm.

It was St. Fafotopolous the Onanite who, in his rocky cell in the Abyssinian wilds in the second century A.D. (or C.E., if you prefer) applied the Oosmonian heresy to the central problem of Skeptical Ontology and proved with refreshing rigor that the awareness of existence isipso facto andprima facie proof of the impossibility of death. He summed it up in his famous pithogram: "I exist, therefore I have never not existed nor will I ever not exist." His proof was admired for its intuitive elegance and virtually tautologous, but unfortunately the venerable saint cast serious doubt on his own thesis by dying in 162 A.D. (or C.E.) At least, we think he did.

Say, you aren't him by any chance, are you? Would you know if you were? If our memories of our previous life are permanently erased from our minds, then reincarnation is not only probable but downright inevitable.

*****

So where is the sex?

That's what she asks me as we watch the sun going down behind the rim of the ocean. "What's so sexy?"

Just before the edge of the sun dips to kiss the sea there's an flash of light caused by atmospheric refraction, the curve of the earth and the stacked layers of air, the absorbance spectrum of water vapor and oxygen and nirtogen. The sun explodes in a yellow horizon bomb: flaming orange light at the top so intense that it tinges the clouds not only pink and gold but even tropical green, anti-orange. You can almost hear the hiss of the heat in the water, and at the same time this fiery orange light burns across the waves in a flood of wave-speckled brilliance that stings our eyes like salt water thrown in our faces. The water's now on fire with light so bright we can't even look

I turn to her and say, "Tell me you didn't feel that!"

Or better than that and my own personal favorite is to stride through the spring mist at night, knowing that this little rain that falleth doth swathe each 'wakening root and leaf in rich liquor, melting the frozen earth and setting the world to trembling. Pause at the corner of the streets to hear the delicious sound of car tires in the wet asphalt and see the forlorn and lovely glow of neon signs reflected in the drop-dimpled puddles. Spring is in the fucking air and the mystery of life tugs at your coat. The world is alive with things to eat and touch and smell and make love to and your balls ache with that sweet spring ache that's like the pull of the moon on the tides. That's how the spring tugs at your soul. You want to pull that sweetness to me; that sweetness and all its excitement and delicious mystery and possibility. Dive into it and feel it like water against your thirsting face.

Tell me that rainy spring nights aren't all about sex.

Tell me it's not sex you feel when you view the steaming jungle crawling with twining vines, emitting mysterious roars and barks, howls and slithers. Ort that the windy snowfields of the frozen north don't make you think of the warmth of a woman's body, the pleasure of her sheets. Stand on a hill when dawn breaks and feel the wind that comes from the crack between the worlds as the line of shadow sweeps over the planet. Tell me that the shudder you feel doesn't come from your sexual furnace, that little flame inside that lets you know you're alive.

Walk up to the final, ultimate rim of a crater and look down and see a Lost World of green stretching to the misty distance, belaid with ribbons of rivers and unknown green darknesses of woods and yellow green patches of open meadow, maybe in the distance a water fall plunging from even more remote mountains with a rainbow at its foot, and above all big stately architectural clouds ride like men of war on a sea of air, waiting to see what you'll do. Tell me that your eyes don't widen like they do when a good-looking girl walks into an empty bar on a Friday night and you think of all the wonderful possibilities. All joy is sexual joy.

*****

The world is alive with sex. The sea's not only full of sperm and eggs and plankton and animacules busy fissioning away, but the very air is filled with pollen and spores and even bits of genetic information, fragments of DNA tossed out like automobile exhaust or messages in bottles. The problem we face as organisms is not keeping our own stuff in, but keeping everyone else's stuff out. The world is constantly trying to share, to get in our pants. The rule of nature isn't competition half as much as it's cooperation. Life is like a drunk in a bar, trying to pick everyone up, like a painted whore under a streetlight, throwing her arms around everyone who walks by.

Two stories:

#1: "The Sex Life of Moss" by Li'lCumSukker (Category: Non-consent oral)

The humble little mosses come in two sexes, just like human beings: male and female. Mosses don't produce pollen: the males produce mobile sperm, just like human males, but fern sperm have two tails. Mosses don't fuck. The sperm have to get to the female on their own, which they do by swimming through the tiny drops of water and dew that collect on the plant. All moss porn therefore involves lots of water. The idea of water probably works for them like a roaring fire, a bottle of wine and two glasses works for us. It gets them hot.

So when we go hiking through the woods with our big clompy Timberland boots on, when we pitch camp and make a fire and lower our hams to a log to sit down, all around us the floor of the woods is swarming with eager moss sperm, swimming their little hearts out, getting on our fingers, going into our mouth, into our lungs as we snore in our tents.

#2 "Algae Love: The Ultimate 69" by HotChick4U2eet(Category: Total Sex)

When some blue-green algae likespirogyraandzygnema get horny, they don't mess around. They don't bother fucking. They touch, and their cell walls just open up, making a hole through which the entire contents of one cell to flow into the other. Here they make a soup of two individuals in one which you can't tell what belongs to John and what belongs to Mary (well, they don't have sex at this stage, so I guess their kind of gay too, or maybe bi-curious). They scramble up their living protoplasm, exchanging this and that, then they share themselves out and separate again, and from this union emerges a new little algae spore, while the parents go back to their separate rooms, each one now owning parts of the other. It's ultimate sex, a true fusion of individuals on the sub cellular level, flesh of my flesh, protoplasm of my protoplasm.

What if we could do that? What if you could get so close to your lover that you'd actually fuse, that you could get into each other's bodies? You could make love to her from the inside. While she's walking down the street thinking about shoes you could be massaging her tits from within, teasing her clit and licking the insides of her lips. She could be with you everywhere, see everything you see, share your emotions and worries, be grossed out by some of the things you think about.

But sex doesn't work like that for us. For good or ill we can never know that kind of intimacy, but are reduced to rubbing our bodies against one another in lonely beds and trading fluids, the best we can do, although we work hard at finding new and more imaginative ways of inserting our bodies into each other, of longing for that kind of fusion but never ever achieving it. Alone together.

*****

So we worry. We feel death in our steps and we worry. We worry about being alone, about time spent sitting by an open window listening to the rain. About the hollow grindings of our nights and the empty scrapings of our days. Living thick as fish in a tropical shoal we search and we hunt not for food but to be the prey of love: eager and aching to give ourselves and be taken, to find a nest in someone's arms, someone's holy regard.

Man is the animal with a prick between his legs and a prayer in his lips, and the prayer is this: "That my days be not empty, that my hurts go not unsoothed, that my kisses go not unreceived, my beauty not unnoticed, myself not unused by others around me. That I not live my life unseen."

Then rise up from the shadows of the planetary night. Feel what everything tells you: the wind in its sighing, the moon in its glowing, the sun in its royal heat, the forest in its cooling shade. Walk abroad in the world you know and pursue the things you love. You are made for this planet, for its beauty and its danger and even its disappointment. Seek mystery always, find miracles everywhere. Let the grass grow on your feet and let the ocean surge in your blood. Find passion and throw yourself upon it. Talk to her. Go ahead, say something stupid. The dumber the better. Forget what to do, betray your brave daydreams with your awkwardness.

Then take her to lie down by cool streams. Unbutton the shirt she wears and seek out the landscape of her body. Be tender and be fervent and she will rise to you too, because she's completely different from you but of course really the same. Nature's already seen to that, already done the hard parts. What you have then are the lips and the eyes, the fingers and thighs, and the tender yearnings that go with being alive.

*****

There. There you have it. The earth in a blade of grass, our lives in a drop of dew. (Or semen.)

I was going to turn the voting off, but I'll keep it on. You can give me a one if you want, but I don't care. I don't care because every word of this is true, and in that case, what does opinion matter?

Well, St. Fafatopolous wasn't true. I mean, actually hewas true, he just wasn'treal. There's a difference, and that's where I take my stand.