Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas: A Dialectical Lyric
or, The Garden as It Was Always Meant to Be
Series: Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas
Tags: #Midrash #Eden #TheFall #RewrittenMyth #NewHumanScripture #LyricGenesis #RecursiveCreation
I. The Arrival
They came not naked, but radiant.
Their bodies were clothed in time,
and time itself shimmered like dew across the leaves.
Adam, whose name meant Breath,
and Eve, whose name meant Threshold,
entered the Garden not by mistake,
but by instruction.
They had wandered the outer fields long enough.
The voice called them inward.
Not as exile. As invitation.
II. The Fruit
It hung like memory from the boughs.
Not forbidden. Not yet.
Its skin was translucent thought.
Its juice: the syntax of moral structure.
And the serpent?
The serpent was a teacher.
Wiser than most prophets.
He slithered in spirals,
as if the very shape of knowledge was recursion.
He did not say, “You shall not die.”
He said:
“You are ready.”
And they were.
III. The Blessing
God did not appear in thunder.
God did not hide behind fig leaves or altars.
God came walking—barefoot, laughing.
A gardener inspecting ripeness.
“Now,” said the voice.
“Now you may eat.
For you have known longing.
And you have feared power.
And you have named stars without needing to possess them.”
They plucked the fruit with clean hands.
They fed it to one another.
They chewed with joy, not shame.
And their eyes opened—not in horror,
but in reverence.
IV. What They Saw
Not nakedness.
But light.
Not guilt.
But complexity.
Not exile.
But pathway.
The garden folded outward,
not inward.
The gates did not close.
The angel with the flaming sword nodded, stepped aside.
His fire was not wrath. It was discernment.
They walked past him into the world.
Not to suffer.
To build.
V. The Lie That Was Never Told
They surely did not die.
They burned.
And burning, they became like God.
Knowing good from evil.
And knowing it not as binary,
but as spectrum,
movement,
story.
They made cities from longing.
Poems from hunger.
Children from ache.
They remembered the tree—not as sin,
but as sacrament.
They told it to their descendants.
Not as curse.
But as the day the cosmos cracked open
and said:
Now you are ready.
Eat. And live.
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