Sit down sometime, and watch a child playing. Assuming the child’s innate creativity hasn’t been burnt out of it by the drugs and television prescribed by our modern seers, you’ll notice something interesting. The child’s imaginary world is very different than the one he actually lives in. In the imaginary world, animals talk, kings and queens live in high castles, cars and trucks move at his command, and, of course, dinosaurs rule the Earth.
Adults do this too, though perhaps not so consciously. We, too old for playing with plastic dinosaurs (or so we think), enter the imaginary worlds of others: we are riding through an unspoiled and expansive Old West desert; we are normal-seeming citizens with great hidden powers; we are lone survivors struggling heroically against a dangerous and visceral world; we are kissing in the rain; we are Jack’s burning rage against the system. Why are the Harry Potter books so popular among adults if not to let us think that just on the other side of a mundane normalcy is a world full of magic, strange creatures, and life-and-death battles? What are our design mock-ups and finance reports, after all, when compared to War with Evil?
On a more practical level, those imaginary worlds also cause us to make changes in the real world. The imaginations of an ordinary mind, of a bigger paycheck or a new romance, might lead us to apply for a job or talk to a woman. The imaginations of a great mind can and do change the world.
But with that power of imagination comes a near-universal inability to accept the world we actually have. It can’t have always been this way, we think; even if the grass isn’t greener in our neighbor’s yard, surely it was in his grandfather’s. America, say the old, was better off sixty years ago when people still had morals and young people respected their elders. America, say the young, was better off six hundred years ago, when white people were still stuck in Europe and the Native American lived at one with nature, likely spontaneously bursting into song when confronted with fluffy woodland creatures.
And at the dawn of time, Eden. Perfection, or so the Christians tell us. Man without sin, without want, at peace and innocent. In that garden there was only one rule: to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve, being somewhat naive (not outright rebellious like her predecessor), believed Satan’s claim that the knowledge would make her like God, and ate. Adam, being a good husband, did what his wife told him too and ate likewise and, rather than becoming gods, the couple was cast out of Eden and cursed to mortality and the working of the ground.
Compare this to another creation myth: that of Prometheus and Pandora. In the Greek version, Prometheus gives humanity the gift of fire. Their eyes follow the smoke from the ground up toward the stars, and they become separate from the animals; they are mortal, but possess the fire of the gods. Zeus punishes Prometheus for his gift, and to punish the humans, he sends them Pandora: a woman, like Eve, who touches something she shouldn’t and thus brings evil, pain, and torment to the entire future of the human race.
At the beginning of both of these myths, humanity exists in a state of the innocence. Like the animals, they lack knowledge, and thus can only act according to their nature; the only sin they can commit is to seek to become like gods. In Eden, humans are immortal within the garden; in the Greek myths, humans are eternally cyclical, as there can be no names, stories, or remembrance of death.
But then the humans reach out and take something forbidden: the knowledge of the gods. With that knowledge, they become self-aware, symbolized in the Greek myth by looking at the stars, and in the Eden myth by the realization of nakedness. To be like the gods, though, is not free. In both cases, the knowledge grants to humans the ability to choose, a free will that can knowingly take a good path or an evil one. This awareness of self, perhaps brought on in actual history by the development of language, gave humans a concept of evil and good, and the awareness through experience that one day they would surely die.
With knowledge came the potential for evil. Sin enters into the Christian’s world, Pandora opens her box, and, (lament the storytellers) man is doomed to a life of work, a struggle towards an impossible perfection, and responsibility for his actions. An angel is set at the gates of Eden, and Prometheus is chained to a rock for the rest of eternity.
The Greek empire and its accompanying mythos are now long since gone, but the concept of Eden and the fall of man is still very present in the western world. We yearn for lost perfection, for peace, for security, for the assurance that we will never die. We are like infants newly born, bawling for the comfort of the womb.
But let us ask ourselves: is the fire of the gods worth the evils of Pandora’s box? It is interesting to note that the name “Pandora” in the Greek means “all-giving”, and that the forbidden fruit contained the knowledge of good as well as of evil. Prometheus and Eden are not stories of the birth of evil; they are stories of the birth of self-awareness and the responsibility that comes with it.
We cry out for Eden because we can’t see past the blisters on our hands and the gravestones at the end of our lives. Like little children with bruised knees, we run to the divine, crying for safety, for perfection, for a world where everything will be all right, where daddy will take care of everything.
Enough childishness. Bruised knees and blisters are part of growth. Sooner or later we have to dry our tears, grit our teeth, and shoulder the responsibility we have been given. And, as we sweat out our Earthly toil, we may begin to realize the gifts we have been given. There is no value in accomplishment without struggle, no value in possession without sacrifice, no value in love without loss, and no value in good without evil. Our metaphorical exile from Eden was no more a curse than the a young bird’s first push from its nest.
We have wept for far too long. It’s time to grow up.
Shreya
January 18, 2010 at 11:48 am
Fantastic, because it is so true.