It's 4:17 a.m. Heat is rolling like a riptide in the lumbar region of my back, pulling quickly in one direction and then another. I lay there in bed with one leg sticking out from under the bedding in attempt to cool down. I begin imagining the tops of my clay vessels currently resting as works-in-progress in the ceramics studio. I start overlaying their tented forms with imagined illustrations. I'm picturing women with their legs open as if in a naked headstand and the top of the vessel is held between their toes, or maybe at the opening of their vagina. Why? Why do I want to illustrate naked women? This moves into apples. Why? Apple trees with roots in a river of water, a woman holding and eating an apple, Eve, Athena, blood, and milk start flowing. I consider the Christian mythology and the mashup of symbols. My gosh there are people in my family that genuinely believe man was made from a rib rather than birthed through a vagina!
I remember the conversation at the ceramic studio the day before, two senior women discussing between themselves whether or not they were afflicted with aphantasia, the inability to see something in one's mind. One woman said she could not picture an apple in her mind, and the other agreed but then questioned if this was true as she could imagine and know an apple in her mind. I wondered what the difference was between imagination and sensing in the mind.
I settle on the image of the apple tree with roots in the water and a pregnant naked woman in my mind's eye. How will I illustrate this on the vessel? I need the assistance of someone else's thoughts to put me back to sleep as I puzzle over scrafitto. I look out the window into the dark and starry night sky. When will the sun rise? I turn on the small bedside light, reach for my glasses, and worry I will crush them like a fragile bug clamped between my clumsy fingers. I look at the small mountain of books piled beside me.
At all times, I have between four and fifteen books bedside in various stages of completion. I read between 2:00–4:30 am. My sleep is consistently disrupted by an internal fire and a busy mind. Books are my dark hour medicine. Most recently, I have added a non-fiction account of a man's interspecies relationship with a saved owl named Alfie, called Alfie & Me by Carl Safino. It's not particularly well written or enchanting, but I chose it as an anecdote to the miasma concocted by current events. Other titles include When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone, When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodrin, The Reign of the Phallus by Eva C. Keus, An Oresteis by Anne Carson, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Rest is Resistance, by Tricia Hersey, Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece, The Creative Act of Being by Rick Rubin, The Anti Racist Writing Workshop, by Felcia Chaves, Remembering, by Sinead O'Connor, Advanced Creative Non-Fiction by Sean Prentiss and Jessica Jenry Nelson, The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, The Plant Paradox by Steven Gundry, Women in Ancient Greece and Rome by Michael Massey and lastly When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams.
I rummage a bit and grab When Women Were Birds, a book I left halfway through about two months ago. It's a small book with a soft cover printed on matt paper with rough edges. It's elegant. Illustrations of black feathers layer the opening and closing pages. Rather than typical chapters the book is broken into unnamed segments marked by Roman numerals and is described as a poetic memoir. I have no memory of what it's about, but I remember enjoying the storytelling style.
I find the folded-down page, a marking where to start again. I begin reading without recollection of what came before. To read like this is like stepping off a bus into a new place, a place you’ve visited once a long while back. Life has continued since then but it won't take long to remember where the coffee shop is. Or how to ask a stranger where the nearest restroom is in their mother tongue.
Within two pages, I am reading about Eve, apples, and vaginas. Only moments ago I was lying here imagining illustrating nude women wrapped around vases reaching for an apple. There are only two possibilities, it’s either uncanny timing, or completely normal to be imagining apples and vagina’s.
On page 96 Terry says:
"To disobey God was to be cast out of the Garden of Eden and face "sorrow in your loins for all your remaining days." What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the wilderness. Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth that every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to be certain we do not betray ourselves."
A few paragraphs later, she describes seeing Gustave Courbet's painting, L'Origine du monde, The Origin of the World, which is a petite oil painting peering at woman's gently opened vulva. She described crying at the beauty, recognizing that we all come into this world through women and it is no wonder that women have been feared and worshipped ever since man first saw the crowning of a head between a woman's legs.
I close the book. Thank you Terry for talking to me tonight.
Lying in bed, cooler now, I put the book down and look at the clock. It is closer to the time I should be waking up for the day. I begin imagining making an apple pie. I smell earthy nutmeg and sweet cinnamon. It is apple season.
This week's Torah portion is Bereshit ("In the Beginning"). It's the one in which G-d creates the world. There are words about separating this from that, water from water, land from land, light from dark. The kabbalists talk about idea of "tzimtzum"- in which G-d contracts from G-d's infinite presence in order to make space for creation that is time and place-bound. It is no wonder (it is a wonder) how apples and desire crept in your consciousness on this week in which the story of Adam and Eve has been told for generations. G-d imagines us into existence; there are two versions in one story. In one, the first one, we are created as "them." We are male and female and made in the divine image. In the second one, G-d makes a human
out of soil and blows the breath of life into his nostrils. Then, for company, G-d creates animals but they do not suffice, so another human (this time a woman) is crafted from the flesh of the first. But it's not entirely clear that Eve is born of "Adam=man." Eve is born of a human. Maybe the human that was man and woman? Not sure why this is the first time I read it and thought, "a human coming out of the flesh of another human..." - why do people read that as a "Adam's rib" (the Hebrew says "side," ) when it's so clearly describing birth as we know it? Or maybe back when we were unisex beings we gave birth to each other from our sides? Regardless, it doesn't sound so much like Adam came first and made Eve. As for eating of apples, knowing of good and evil - that's all in this week's portion too. And I have been thinking a lot about "what is Evil" and humans born of the same flesh this week, considering all that is going on in the world...