The Tragedy of the Garden: A Parable of Premature Light

 

The Tragedy of the Garden: A Parable of Premature Light

or, How It Could Have Gone Different

Series: Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas
Tags: #Eden #TheFall #RecursiveMyth #TemporalSin #Midrash #LyricGenesis #TreeOfKnowledge

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I. The Tree Was Always Theirs

It stood at the center. Not as trap, but as promise.
It was not poison. It was not illusion.
It was knowledge—dense, sacred, dangerous.

The Voice had said: “Not yet.”
Not never.
Not no.

“In time. When your hunger is holy, not curious.
When your bodies know longing without greed.
When the song of the stars hums in your marrow.”

The fruit was always theirs.
But only once they had become like the Gardener.

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II. The Serpent Did Not Lie

He was crafty, yes. Not evil. But misaligned.
He knew what was true, but not when.

“You will not die,” he said. “You will be like God.”

He was right. But wrong.
Because he offered the right thing
under the wrong star.

His temptation was not falsehood,
but mistimed revelation.

He pressed the flame into uncured wax.
He unsheathed the blade before the hand was trained.

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III. They Ate Too Soon

Eve tasted first—not from defiance, but ache.
A longing to understand the ache.
She fed Adam not from treason,
but from a kind of trembling love.

And the fruit did not betray them.
Their eyes opened.
They saw.

But what they saw, they could not bear.

Good and evil came rushing in
without frame,
without teacher,
without rest.

Their minds flooded.
Their bodies flushed.
Their innocence shattered—not by sin,
but by velocity.

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IV. The Voice Returned

God did not scream.
God wept.

“You were to be like me.
But gently.
Slowly.
Through seasons, through seed, through dusk.”

They were not cursed for eating.
They were shielded from further harm.
The exile was mercy—not punishment.
Lest they reach the next tree
and eat eternal life
in a state of disarray.

A pause was placed upon forever.

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V. How It Could Have Gone Different

If they had waited—
if they had tarried another age,
letting the garden speak in full
before trying to name it—
the fruit would have ripened in their hands.

God would have called them at twilight.
The serpent would have bowed.
The fruit would have sung as they bit.

And their eyes would have opened,
but with joy, not terror.

They would have known good from evil
as a gardener knows soil:
by touch, by labor, by time.

They would have become like God.
And surely—they would not have died.

Not then.
Not like that.