These shells
move from one shore
to another
carrying along so many
memories.
Some good, some bad
some cheerful, some sad
So many love stories
so many mourns
echo inside
these hollow pods.
They flow
with the flow
filling the gap
satisfying hopes
building memoirs.
Eve and Nautilus -- Tony Hyden
Eve was the 1st woman, created at the beginning of the world. Among the creatures that existed at the time, the nautilus, often considered to be a "living fossil," has survived relatively unchanged for some 500 million years. It takes its name from the Latin form of "nautilos," the Greek word for "sailor" (although the Greeks used the word for octopi known as paper nautiluses due to the paper-thin eggcase that their females secrete, and called them sailors because they mistakenly thought 2 of their tentacles were used as sails). After the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, "men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them" (Genesis 6:1) and mysterious beings known as the "sons of God" took them "wives of all which they chose" (Genesis 6:2). Enoch was a 6th-generation descendant of Adam, and the great-grandfather of Noah, who "walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him" (Genesis 5:21-24); this phrase was interpreted to mean that he entered Heaven alive and was given access to esoteric knowledge and the ability to see the past and future. In the "Book of Enoch" he identified the "sons of God" as the Watchers; 200 of them took human wives and shared secret incantations and plant lore with them; Pinem'e taught mankind the secret of writing (and "on account of this matter, there are many who have erred ... human beings are not created .. to take up their beliefs with pen and ink") and Azaz'el taught men how to make metal weapons and women how to use make-up and jewelry to incite sexual sins. The Watchers and their wives generated a race of monstrous giants. These actions led God to destroy humankind except for Noah and his family. The watchers were buried until the final judgment, the giants were instigated to fight each other to the death (but spirits emerged from their dying bodies and continue to corrupt people), and the women who mated with the Watchers were doomed to "become sirens." The structuralist anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant used Homeros' description of the sirens to make the point that "Their cries, their flowering meadow (leimon, meadow, is one of the words used to designate female genitalia), their charm (thelxis) locates them in all their irresistibility unequivocally in the realm of sexual attraction or erotic appeal. at the same time, they are death, and death in its most brutally monstrous aspect: no funeral, no tomb, only the corpse's decomposition in the open air. Pure desire, pure death."
ReplyDeleteThe Chambered Nautilus
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.