Eighth Lesson: Tree

There existed in the garden a tree. Its fruit had no particular qualities but in order to ensure that the man and the woman would not fall out of his gaze and cease to be, the God defined the boundaries of their safety, he defined the fruit of the tree as forbidden fruit. “You shall not eat of the fruit of this tree,” he declared, “for if you do so you shall surely die.” Man and woman knew that within the gaze, they were loved, they existed. However, the God did not seek a relationship coercion but mutual acceptance, choice and vulnerability. The God knew that in order for the man and the woman to love him freely, they must choose to love. And to choose to love, they must also be able to choose not to love. The tree existed in the garden in order that the man and woman might freely choose to love. The tree existed as a doorway also into a death. For outside the gaze there was no life. To choose to eat of the fruit of the tree freely, to step beyond the gaze willingly, to turn aside from the embrace, was to choose to suffocate themselves. He understood that to turn from the gaze was to seal oneself into self-reference, to turn one gaze only upon oneself, to cease to be seen and known. It was to commit oneself to a locked room, sealed of access to love and embrace, to slowly asphyxiate.

The man and the woman took the fruit and bit into its flesh. And their eyes were immediately open to their nakedness. They looked at each other now, outside the gaze; they looked at each other in unease; they looked at the folds and curves hiding within each other; they looked at the difference that spoke of the unknown, the unbidden, the strange. They looked, and felt fear, outside the gaze. Not held, not safe.

They must manage alone.

So they clothed themselves.

The clothes hid them. The clothes deflected gaze, concealed the person within. The clothes offered protection in vulnerable world. They substituted the protection of loving gaze for protection of fabric, deception of pattern, deflection of costume. They provoked the endless enactment of persona that was to follow, scene after scene. Down history, the enactment of self. Act after act, drama after drama, character after character, created and performed on the stage of history.

In what ways will we perform ourselves today? Will we sit in the tradition of Eve and Adam enacting ourselves as an mask of concealment? Or will we risk starting a new tradition? Theatre in the round, not theatre behind a curtain.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011