Midrash for a plague year on the garden of Eden

They heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day; and the man and his wife hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. The Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” He replied, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” (Genesis 3:8-10, Jewish Study Bible).

As a writer, he had become accustomed to noticing carefully what he was seeing and hearing. 
In the cool afternoon air on this early June morning in the park, he listened to the sound of the wind in the trees.  God, this is lovely, he thought.  But he still not sure where he wanted to go with his writing today.  Maybe wander around a bit, why not, especially with Elle by his side.  The warm breeze was nice and it felt good just to be there.  Or at least up to now. 

The garden in this park was full of trees bearing fruit, and as she grabbed a juicy ripe one from some trees, she remarked that she felt at this moment so alive.  He concurred, saying, it seems so abundant here, like life as something that goes on and never ends, like a story that contains people and events but with no clear sense of where they are going, and so also where to get started.      

One tree stood out in a kind of chiaroscuro of light and dark, and for some reason it gave them both a sense of foreboding.  “This is the tree,” a voice in his mind seemed to say, a voice he wasn’t sure he could trust, anymore than this tree. “I’m curious about this tree and its strange fruit,” said Elle.  He sensed that he could go on piling metaphors and images in a series, but without really understanding anything important.  Could it be, he wondered, that the real key to writing that is not just “good” but interesting, not just enjoyable but somehow touching upon something like a crisis, which, though it might involve some suffering, nonetheless seemed compelling, if for no other reason than that one would find the words bringing some understanding of the life they would otherwise just go in with, not unhappily but only because one had not given it all that much thought.  Careful, his mind’s voice said; this sounds like it could be dangerous.  Elle was encouraging: come on, I think there’s something in this.  And then he had a realization and almost instantly he saw that she did too.  God cannot just be the index of happiness.  If you eat a piece of fruit from a tree that looks lovely in some ways and ugly in others, it could have a nasty taste or even kill you.  This concept, of dying, and dying as consequence of something or someone other than yourself, was new to his thinking, because while they had seen a few trees with over-ripe fruit start to rot and then look like they were darkening and lessening, withdrawing rather than emerging into a presence, moving from coming into being there to not being there.  Now what if what befalls things of nature around us will to us also, he wondered, because they were new to this story, and it was for both of them as if they were like disembodied angels who basically could enjoy reading, recounting stories of imagined people like but unlike them, whose fate they might not have to share (for if I prick you, he had noticed, I don’t bleed; it won’t even hurt; he shared this thought with her and she replied that she did not know what he was talking about or meant to say).  We’ll tire, then rot, then slowly begin to vanish; when this thought came to her, she immediately shared it, and they both shared a dark feeling of foreboding.  Though they still did not what this would mean.  After all, the story that he was writing about this experience had been given some form and was not just hapless chaos.  The thought of that had come to him earlier, and the slight feeling of dismay it brought him had momentarily given him pause.  For what would you do and how even understand where you were going if you had no sense of form, time, and, if not rhyme and meter, at least of metaphor and concept; and sentences, fragments of language that do not just name things and even perhaps states of feeling or mind, but name them in definite thoughts formed from a few such things connected in an intelligible way, such that one is actually not just naming what is or even describing it or saying that it is, but saying something about it.  That would mean committing yourself to some meaning.  If we could actually think about things, would we not find that we would be in a world that, being definite, such that one is committed to it in the fleshily real way they had seen in the animals, as he had started the other day to name them.  And then the definiteness of this would commit you to a particular way to be, think, feel, live, and you might even have to choose, including whether or not to eat this strange fruit, enticing in its beauty but also containing visibly hints of a darker fate that might mean decay and disappearance.  In fact, Jake and Elle both had earlier discussed a clear thought that had begun to dawn on both of them: that they too were in the world, not just looking at it, that the feelings they associated with the things, and that he had described in such moving imagery, these were stirrings in his own soul, and that as well as the fact that evidently the two of them could see each other, from the outside as it were, so that while one feels their feeling and thinks their thought, the other, looking at them, will not know that feeling unless she shares it, nor that thought unless he says it.  But the movement of things and the passions they seemed to evoke in him, both of them, unknown passions until now, it wasn’t just that the wind moves the leaves and then stops and they calm, nor that the tree that is visibly not just blooming but also diminishing—dying, he would say, later, when he had learned more about that concept so that he could really understand it, in all its bitterness to be sure—these passions and movements of the soul were “in” both of them, this man and woman, who were beginning to realize that that is what they are, different beings in certain key respects and regions.  The thought occurred that if they ate this fruit they would understand something.  Otherwise, what they saw and heard and felt and maybe knew was somehow not quite grasped, grasp of whatever we might think that passing things of sense and feeling portend or give us or say, something would be missing, and precisely because the world they were living in had for them no stain, and no great pain.  Not yet; that would come.  

This man had named things and these included himself and the girl, whom he just called the Girl before placing her existence in the enduring inscription as Elle.  (In his own club of ambitious storytellers, and, to be sure, audiences of them, names would come to be rather important).  But now the thought came to him, where am I?  Where are we, she and I?  Or rather, for this is how the voice was ‘heard’: Where are you?  Where are you hiding, Man?  I’m not hiding, he hastened to reply; I am right here.  Excuse me, the voice replied, where the f— is that?  I guess I’m in the garden in this park, he said, among all these trees.  The voice, who clearly seemed to be that of an other person, yet which did not seem connected to a body speaking it, nor itself to have any name; for a long time even after this, he would just think of it as the voice of one who asks puzzling questions like this.  Maybe his real name should be I or me, and you or he/him, to the others, whoever, where ever, whatever they were.  Eventually you have to commit yourself, he realized, to being in the world in a particular way, in some particular world.  Perhaps it is a question of something like recognition.  I see and hear what I suppose is there, he thought, and right now that is this particular verdant grand room—a room without walls, where space goes on without limit and time is not counted.  Then it would not matter really what you said or did, and indeed, it did kind of seem arbitrary that, not the first naming of things, or the first perception and even experience, but the first thing that one had to choose to do or do not or between this one and that.  He was such a lucky bastard in this place that he didn’t have to choose among companions of the type Elle seemed to be, and if there; he supposed that if there were others like her, they would all be the same, and so too if there were others like him.  At some point after she and he had been together, and had for some while seen, each of them, the other, outside of mastery or certitude and of what could be taken for granted as simply there and given, by the provident fecundity apparent in the plants and trees around them that appeared to grow and change and even become more in number, they saw each other as if like seeing them the way they are, as if naked, a new idea meaning that you appear as if like an actor on a stage who plays a role and dons a mask, but now one can see that there is a face beneath the mask, and wonder is this a mask too, in what would then have to be an endless series of masks, with each discovery or uncovering revealing another layer to be discovered.  Not so fast, he thought.  The truth is we are there for each other, she and I, and also for the Voice, let’s just call it that for now.  The Other who appears without a face, and certainly no evident mask which would only seem like one, but who seems to share their language, maybe even as master of it, in any case a speaking part in the play that seems to come from elsewhere, sounded from an offstage player no doubt.  And the Voice of this Other is of One who Knows.  And that’s frightening. 

And this is why: It’s to just that we don’t know where, or even what or who it is addressing us, and doing so suddenly as if we must answer, answer for ourselves, for what we are doing, what not only has happened but been done by us, and what not only can be said about it, but must be.  As if there were some strange necessity, and it not only touched him but called to him, asking for, even demanding, as if requiring, this too a new thought in this particular theater piece he was realizing that they were inhabiting.  At first he thought, well, the answer is obvious enough, this is easy: where I am is in this place.  Only, the nagging thought came, what does that mean?

We are naked, he thought, and must hide.  But there is a problem: you hide by going somewhere other than where you are.  Whoever was speaking this off-stage, hors-scène voice seemed to know what he was thinking already. 

Then it occurred to him, maybe the where that I am is where I am, where “I” am, where I say “I” as one who can and perhaps must, because another is calling him, using the name “you” which simply is what another speaking “I” calls the one he’s speaking to, if that is you, who are “I” now and here, “to” someone.  You are a self and a subject if another is calling you and it seems you must respond.  

If I speak, he thought to himself, of all the things and beings and happenings among what I see and hear and sometimes feel touching me, but “I” am not in it, wouldn’t it seem after a while perhaps nice enough to take pride in, but not really the vital piece I would like to write.  And why is that?  Many generations later, when Nature had become History, and there were conflicts and problems, that would give a Why.  Because unlike this perfect garden (at least until now), that would be a world very painfully imperfect, though interesting.  Descendants of descendants of Jake and Elle would find their task to be responding to difficult situations, far more so than this so paradigmatic if no longer quite so enigmatic one. 

You bring yourself to the task, and that is what would come to be called responsibility.  Many people live as if they are not really there.  Could you live a life of not being there, not being present, even while responding to the seeming needs and urgencies of the world around you?  Perhaps not, though the thought could drive you to want to engage in some “spiritual” practice like those who just sit there and observe what appears to pass before them on the movie screen of their awareness.  The good life perhaps is in some way a choice, and that may be in part because it matters how much of your you you will have brought to what you did and the people you were with, and so also to the “little worlds” you may have created or built.  Taking a risk each time because like God himself, you are stuck playing dice with the world in what you do.  That is to say, what happens with you and what you do are partly the result of what you did, or want, but also of what others did, and this is complex enough that unless you are not only God but the kind of God who knows everything, like some programmer looking into a monitor that has N dimensions and is more complicated than a physicist today correlating the paths of rocks and light and energy and movement in space, if you think that’s what the world we are part of and not just see but move in as part of, if you think that’s the best way to picture it.  But there may be no image of everything; perception seems to be a matter of perspective, as you see things from some angles or in some ways and not others.  People will make things, do things, think things, and come together in creative acts that are experiences of love, involving oneself and another, and all this is done without knowing enough to plan it out so that you get what you want, or expected.  In India some imaginative writers came up with a concept of people’s actions causing what will happen to them automatically, like a programmed machine or a boomerang that comes back to hit you, and in that case, maybe doing anything is really vain and pointless.  Why not just return to the heaven of writers who are just observing minds, the better not to get yourself dirty or risk a scratch that would hurt so much you might develop a passion needing to itch it, perhaps just for yourself, vainly, or in some imaginatively extended and multiplied way.  The lovers will see a fruit of their love that becomes a person, or several persons.  This is neither magic nor making with their techniques; it is where God himself or at least Nature plays dice such that the chance combinations of elements of what is, including persons, is undetermined until these elements fall back like the dice already rolled so that you can see and read them, and it has the particularity of the finite, and such that each new living being is unique, and persons among them unique also in how they think, how they are not just players played in the game but playing ones whose actions can change things, for worse or better.  Each time a chaos resolves itself into a definite thing that is in essence very good.  And because we do this, we bear in a way we use, the image of the one who first appeared as Voice, having, it seemed, Will or purpose, but no face, no body, no image.  Chaos is Being without Image, because it lacks the definite character of what is when it is articulated into aspects of some world.  What is will be found and given, but also come upon and partly created by us, as the Latin term invenire suggests.  The worlds we live in, and those that are images or pictures of them that we create to further our understanding (and enjoyment) of these worlds, they also are personal, because there are persons in them and we are subjected subjects of Being as persons, who in speaking, name and describe the things we encounter and their events and apparent fates or destinies, but who also do so as ones who are visible, tangible, and audible to other persons, in a world where these are plural.  If that Voice were of a single Being who in some mysterious way is composed of or composes and makes and directs the stage play of everything, of the everything, so to speak, or of any and every particular anything, of the anything whatever, since creation precedes in time and does not follow any set of things created that could be inventoried, — then that Being, as a creativity, would not just be a crystalline image composed of imaged and imaging parts, self-sufficient to himself; there would multiplicity and contingency.  The one who says “I” and can only say it to a “You” who seems to call and demand a response, maybe even command certain doings, limiting what is permitted and possible as separated from what is not, this One, subjected to time, would eventually lead us to being where we are today, in a very messy world, but one needing not just correctional procedures, some kind of clean-up operation, or a healing that would return things to a prior state, happier but simply.   We would find that we have things to do.  And while this is a poetic metaphor, it may make sense to suppose that we are as if called upon to do the right things and invent some part, doing our part, of what will come, in the world to come that will be what has become of this, our, world tomorrow. 

The one who feels naked has just discovered that he is being seen.  By another.  Shame is not wanting to be seen as you are, when you are.  Of course then it has its proper place, like everything.  Perhaps guilt only differs from shame in that it at first blush cowers before not being seen by another, but over-hearing itself and what is “said” by what he or she has done or made, and so then too in a deeper sense, who they are, who you are, who “I” am, a question that is not answered by observing properties.  The one who is and lives and acts and makes while being “in” the image of the absolute who calls, demands, and commands, is at that moment a “man without qualities.”  Now a subject and not just a set of objects, seen in a perspective, he is that perspective, that seeing, that calling into being of particular images of the world that we can contemplate as part of the work of perfecting that world.  The character who is a mask is played by an actor whose nakedness is concealed by all of the images and concepts that conceal what reveals, which is the unfindable origin of finding.  And since this metaphorical metaphysical notion is part of our ethical (and political) theology, which is of a piece with the idea that worlds are made out of chaos, and with definite elements of things, events, and names only forming in the contingency of a particular act of saying or making, there will always be some seemingly paradoxical sense in which what we think we are we are more than or even not.  We never quite mean what we say, because language and being are always in excess of themselves, and so we never quite say what we mean either.  No one told the man and woman in this story how to live, and no one could quite tell him how to write, how to make sense of his experience. 

Today some people think the world will soon come to an end, unless we do and do not do certain things.  That is possible, but we cannot know this any more than we can be sure of moral progress, or the institution of happiness, or that there will not be more catastrophes, that spokesmen of a civilization whose documents document also cruelty and needless pain and wrong, might even choose to make useful in their story or call sacrifice, exchanged for some other good, as if people could be exchanged, not being unique.  Though it is true that “I” and “You” are among everyone’s names.  The ultimate name of the unpresentable God may only be “the Name,” which names what has none in particular, which we may infer perhaps just from the fact that everything finite, that dies or disappears or ends, is exceeded and this excess is within a Being that in some sense we consider in essence good.  We want our children to only suffer useful pains, and not be destroyed by them, or at least not when young and not at the end of one’s story.  But that too is a chance.  A not very religious or by reputation perhaps even righteous writer about politics in the Italian renaissance thought that the good in social life and history is a consequence of the right people doing the right thing and something else, an unknown, which from our perspective looks like chance.  Action and creation, as well as revelation and the redemption of what seemed lost, depend on time, chance, and something like commitment.  That is more than faith, and involves more than hope.  Many are satisfied to know that the creative force in Being is a force of love.  But that is not an answer; it is only the beginning.  Our people have been around long enough to have a pretty good set of rules.  At a crucial moment, enough lessons had been learned from experience to make it possible for them to be given.  What we have been given would surely have been enough if that was all it could be, but as long as there is a tomorrow—and everyone with any sense and wisdom knows that the end of the line for them is not the end of the world, but only of their participation in it—there is work to do.  The thing itself that is commanded is always when realized in the performance enough in itself for that moment.  There is only lack when there can be more.   

I do sometimes hide from the world when I am discouraged.  Especially if I think I did something embarrassingly wrong, since then others might see the memory-image of my error, and I would count that a pain and a loss.  Now we have this plague where people can die from what used to be a metaphor of the soul itself: breathing, being breathed upon—or being unable to breathe, which, horribly when this happens by act and not mere chance— has noticeably happened to some people in this country.  I not only retreat like everyone else from deliberate action and thought at nighttime, when thoughts are dreams, which remain half-concealed even to the dreamer upon awakening.  I also find that in voluntary and involuntary retreat, I can use the time.  God knows where I am; I have a rough working sense of it.  Maybe as a writer, I will try to show some things people had not seen quite that way, and might prefer to keep concealed from their own conscience or even conceal themselves from association with it.  Falling short of that, as I might, I hope to learn some useful things myself in the process.  We need to know where we are as clearly as possible, and that includes who I am in terms of what kind of person I am today.  And then, from where we are, taking the risks of being visible to others, and so with some courage, to respond to the very conditions we find ourselves in.  To get as clear as possible about the where and there of this, the courage even to face it almost brutally, as if the right words were a mask imaged on the true face, indiscernibly.  And then to work with that, knowing and not shrinking back from the realization that what I can describe and understand and so criticize and want to change can only effectively be something I am wholly part of myself, for better and worse.  The moral of my story is a reminder to myself: Say I when you make your world, and make something of where and what you are when you find yourself called forth and must say, this time with great enthusiasm— dans cette place même, et même dans cette place: in this place itself, and even in this place, where there might be God’s own presence, and I did not know it  —“Here I am.”  Thus it is.  There you are.  To invent, and so create, is to come upon (in-venire) or find.  Could there be, as in much prayer, just one act, or word or phrase, for each situation?  The sculptor moves the chisel; it looks like mere technique, laborious as always, but actually this is a prayer.