Román Leão

Tag: genesis

  • 11–5 to 60: On The Garden

    5–21.07.26

    A lot has been made over the past 3,000 or so years about our sudden eviction from the Garden of Eden and all its verdant paradisaical splendor. Sure, you don’t miss your water until your well runs dry and all that, but it always struck me as strange that our concepts of such a state of arboreal grace must be derived from what we know, or have known, here on Earth. I think it would do humankind well to consider the possibility that we never actually left the garden. The sooner that we stop treating our planet like a divorced-dad apartment, the better.

    At the end of that unpleasantness with the Tree of Knowledge, Yahweh is said to have set cherubim with flaming swords in place to guard the way back so we wouldn’t mess with the Tree of Life. At the risk of being pedantic, and/or struck by lightning, according to Genesis, He/She/Them never said not to mess with that one, but it is probably too late to point that out.

    After the first big reset during Noah’s flood, it seems to me that the fences are all down, but unlike the Jurassic Park movie franchise wherein the dangerous raptors always find the weak spots (quite literally, the de-fence) in the defense of the garden, we are the apex predator and we have been on the rampage outside the gates since time immemorial.

    If we put aside the avaricious yearning for yet another paradise, we can likewise drop the handy scapegoating of the fairer sex—and, by extension, our primordial mother Earth—that has allowed for the rise and domination of a patriarchy that has yet to earn a spot in the playoffs, let alone an unbroken string of participation championships reaching back for millennia.

    After the second big reset, the coming of the Christ, his teachings, and most importantly, his sacrifice, we should have been satisfied with the biggest “Get Out of Jail Free” card that has ever been dealt out, instead—especially with the onset of the industrial age—we have subjugated the very garden we were tasked with nurturing, all in the name of progress. Our spiritual health has been separated from the physical, when they must be one and the same. Without the shadow of the Fall of humankind, would we have allowed the shadows that plague our planet to proliferate?

    I believe that we were given the Tree of Knowledge so that we might better tend the garden. If it was on me to write another narrative, I would have the Creator say, “All right, so now you have the manual, you two smartypants. I’ll be back to check your work. Don’t fuck it up, or I shall smite thee!”

  • 26–24 to 60: On Genesis, Pt. 1

    30.06–02.07.2026

    As I have been blessed with what could only be called a spotty memory (perhaps a learned coping mechanism, but I don’t really remember, so I guess it works). As I result, I can’t recall any of what my years of Sunday school and catechism actually taught. Over the years, this has led be to explore my own philosophical studies, which gradually wound their way back around to the books of the Bible.

    What struck me upon revisiting Genesis about 10 years ago, was how little of it has seeped into the general zeitgeist. I am pretty sure I would have been fascinated with the mention of a race of giants, the product of forbidden union between humans and angels. Hold on, could there have been allusions to Bigfoot in the Bible? I’ll make sure and circle back on that.

    When I wrote my second novel, Burn Your Starry Crown, I envisioned the creator as a distant CEO, the head of a Byzantine organization that hasn’t been seen around in years, but everyone fears could be back at any time. Whenever angels, members of the Upstairs Agency, referred to their chief, they used the term He/She/Them, a term I meant to indicate universal totality as well as poke a little fun at the pronoun culture wars that were raging at the time.

    The first thing that struck me upon rereading Genesis, was as God was first creating humankind in Genesis 1:26, it was written as, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” From the perspective of the second decade of the second millennium this seems to denote an inherent plurality in the creator, which to me makes perfect sense. He/She/Them surely embodied the original encompassing spirit, the OG, that Walt Whitman much later envisioned when he wrote in Leaves of Grass, “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

    However, as anyone can tell you, it is no fun at all to hang out with people exactly like yourself. (Do not get me started on the white supremacists.) There is nothing like a living mirror to point out the things in your own personality that drive you crazy. As the creator must, by definition, embody every conceivable notion or state, can fallibility be off the list? Of course not. It is rude to think so.

    Fortunately, He/She/They quickly sees the remedy to what could have ended up as humankind’s eternal insufferability, at least from a godhead’s perspective; split up the prototype, it would certainly be more entertaining. And so we are, for better or worse.