Love Story

I’d like to tell you a story, although the story may not be mine to tell.

First came Adam and Eve, at least that’s the story we all seem happy to follow, then came all the beauty and bestiality that makes up this world. In fact, first came a lump of clay, but God’s love for pottery and the creative arts is less relevant to us than the love of a man for his own bodily parts.

With Adam’s rib miraculously metamorphosing into his matriarch and their allegorical allotment blossoming with all the flora and fauna of God’s imagination their future was rosy. And then came the doubt.

The doubt did not start with each other. Their love was beyond question for it was the love of Gods’ own will – a miracle of creation – the doubt started when the power of God was offered to Eve in the form of a fruit.

So we have two people, the only two people, in love with each other intimately and physically as befits the love of one thing cleaved from another. These two people go out into their own world and live bountifully only to succumb to the single thing which their patron has warned against: the desire for power in the form of knowledge.

Wind on two thousand years to a time when the garden has been torched; brought to ashes around the feet of warring nations, and in the centre of this desolate and destitute landscape stands tall a tree, the only living thing not taking life from others. Among the boughs of this tree lies a snake; a snake that has obeyed the rules of evolution rather than those of faith and so this snake does not speak and cannot be heard.

Not heard, at least, by those who battle in the shade of the tree, shedding sweat in order to shed blood, but articulate in the lexicon of love; vocal, in the hissing sentimentality of the serpent world for this snake was in love.

The snakes’ love was for the she-snake that shared the tree, the she-snake that had borne his offspring and reared his great grandchildren among the vital leaves and branches around which humanity chased, chastised and killed each other.

Their love had grown as the tree had grown; above and away from the dying earth, toward the light from which they came, toward their creator whose only mistake was to give a single serpentine forefather the power of human speech. This voice had cast man into his disastrous present, the destructive path that the snakes were sheltered from by one final irony: man feared the snake.

So from a single rib and an artistic flair on the grandest of scales we end with a scorched planet, a single blossoming tree and family of snakes. These snakes have true knowledge: of love and the folly of man. They also have, contrary to common opinion, a multitude of ribs.

thegooddoctor 2004