look at these tulips

Our friend Suzette gave us these tulip bulbs and Jami planted them.

Later I took these photos. In nature the composition makes itself. As an artist, I try to be like nature: I use my unwitting and random giving over of myself to create a presence that has the visual integrity of a raindrop covered window on a school bus moving down the country roads of 1960s rural Georgia.

Lately I read scripture as if no one's ever written anything about it. As if it were a patch of mesquite covered plains no one had paid much attention to. It begins with a couple of etiologies: How do we account for the natural world around us and the seeming patterns we adduce? Followed by: How do we describe the state of growing up human? We were "exposed" and were approached by an "expositor." 

We read things like The Fall and Creation ex nihlo into it. These are ideas promulgated in 1st Century BCE/CE Palestine. St Paul develops them and later Augustine will cement them such that whenever someone , even a non-believer, reads these opening chapters, she will assume that they describe humanity as lost in a sinful state and utterly alien to a saving knowledge of God - such that they don't even know that they need a saving knowledge - Otherwise God cannot communicate, much less look, at the humans She created. Instead, right after 'the fall', the first thing God does is look at the post-exposure pair. God counsels them and clothes them. This is hardly the act of a creating God whose sense of justice is mortally wounded and affronted.

Later there's a creation story that says that the earth was populated by aliens. A ship lands and people get off. The first thing they do is get hammered. Then they have irrational arguments. The question of nakedness arises, but there's no "expositor" to take the blame. To take the Fall. 

Above I worked out how that conversation might look: God talking to Adam and Eve (ever wonder why if Adam is so important to the salvation history thing, Jesus never says that his death is to atone for that primal sin? He's not thinking about it and the gospel writers aren't thinking about it.) questions them about what just happened. He doesn't question His Expositor. The enmity between Eve and the Expositor is roughly equivalent to the enmity anyone has with someone who points out information you or I might be uncomfortable with. The first couple learned that they needed to grow up - what dies here is childhood. They were unexposed, then exposed. Their next move is not to be unexposed again (you can't regress), but, now exposed, to build a life that bears scrutiny. Now the couple who had never questioned God or each other are free to scrutinize and be scrutinized. 

Cain's problem (the first use of the word Sin is here) is his fear of scrutiny. Not the expositor but God questions him, and instead of using the scrutiny, the exposure, he needs to wipe it out. His murder of his brother, Abel (a breath), is an attempt to regress - to regress to a time when it was just Cain and his parents.  Cain's sin springs from his narcissistic wound - he cannot be exposed as who he is; his brother's success calls into question his (Cain's) identity. To restore that identity there must be a regression to a happier time - and an erasure is attempted. 

I am approaching scripture this way to find its basic interpretation. Its basic use - or alternate uses. One means, that I get from Deleuze, is to forebear interpretation and instead experiment. My own writing here is an interpretation. I encourage readers to forego interpretation and experiment themselves on it. If you have a Judeo Christian background, throw out the overlaying words you bring to the text - discern what they are and ask what might be important or comical or tragic or inspiring about the passages. Commentaries might help (or not); word studies might help (or not). Above I used the pun for naked/crafty and wrote instead of "naked couple" and "crafty serpent" exposed couple and expositor. 

I wish translators of scripture would make an attempt at retaining the word play. As in Amos, where Amos sees a "basket of summer fruit" and God says he will destroy Israel, you might write that Amos sees a basket of berries and God responds "I will bury them."  Also in the Song of Songs a phrase like Deer of the Field is a wordplay that produces a Name of God - Lord Sabbaoth or something similar. How does God appear in the Songs, God appears as a pun.

I find it helpful to read the OT thinking about what puns and other word plays are moving underneath the surface of the text. What are the sources that have been borrowed and cobbled together. What do we say about prophetic indictments of the wealthy that could only be read by people who could afford an education - that is the wealthy? Who's writing what, and what are they trying to make us do? As my teacher*,  Brueggemann, wrote - Scripture is not univocal - but proffers a testimony and counter-testimony. Chronicles counters Kings, among other things; Ecclesiastes is a balance to Proverbs  -  a not necessarily so testimony of loss. When I read Psalm 119, the great paean to the Law - it is demur about any specific law: on close inspection it is a lament and complaint where the writer says that the doers of this perfect law are blessed and prosperous - and then asks, "why am I miserable?" Jonah counters any attempt at saying Our God hates Our Enemies. Jonah goes so far to imply that God loves our enemies. When Christ says Love your Enemies he might as well be God talking to the prophets (who universally hate Ninevah) - might the "sign of Jonah" be more than a whale, a large fish, but a fortiori, "God's love for enemies." To love one's enemies might be a greater miracle than rising from the dead.

*note my conspicuous name dropping here - as if my argument were something I were insecure about