Adam Lay Ybounden

Since this is the inaugural post of this tentative blog, one's mind turns to Genesis: not in the sense of the prog gods of the distant past, but in the sense of another Edenic fall, very nearly commensurate in gravity. Few conundra are as perpetually intriguing as that of the mystery of Adam's crime and the punishment that ensued.

There is a chicken-and-egg nature to Adam's sin, since the only thing that might reasonably have been expected to hold that young turk back from profligate enjoyment of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil was ... a knowledge of good and evil. If one thinks of The Fall as an actual historical occurrence, it is a shame that no lawyers were handy to argue to Adam's case, although even the combined resources of the Legal Aid system might have struggled to face down a tyrant whose pockets were literally bottomless: an attribute that (if you think about it) is not generally desirable in pockets but which would here confer a definite advantage.

If The Fall is an actual historical fact, mankind got saddled with Original Sin on the basis of a transgression that one would not need to be omniscient to anticipate. If one has established a habit of murdering one's wives, one does not keep their corpses in a room access to which is the one thing forbidden to one's seventh wife. If one has a box full of all the ills of the world, giving it to a curious young woman with the admonition not to open must be considered a serious breach even of the most relaxed principles of health and safety. Placing in one's garden a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is akin to bedding in a bit of Japanese Knotweed to brighten up one of its dingier corners. In fact, it was an error entirely commensurate in scale for a deity whose last action had been the creation of the universe.

But of course, Adam's fall, treated literally, was very far from unanticipated what with all the omniscience 'n' such. Adam's fall was a premeditated crime: not on Adam's part, or on Eve's, but on the part of God himself. Given that someone drinks, drives, speeds and kills, the actual killing (usually of a sweet child from a bygone age, probably playing with a dolly that will fall to the tarmac in slow motion, rather than some loathsome asbo of whom society would do well to rid itself) is not an intended consequence of the earlier stages of the crime. Nevertheless, we hold the driver responsible. Getting liquored up on the praise of angels, creating the universe and going and letting the one thing in Creation that you made in your image go and Fall is really a neglect of the fundamental responsibilities of universal creation. We do not build staircases without handrails and God should not build gardens of Eden that include a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Next time you are blaming the Planning Office for turning down your second bathroom, you might at the same times want to reproach them for also not having been set up a few thousand (or billion) years earlier. Picture the chagrin of the newly unomnipotent God when confronted with the news that this void had been Grade Two listed and that the letting-be of Light was a strict contravention of municipal bylaws.

And surely the prevention of this Folly would have been, broadly speaking, A Good Thing. Could even Kevin McCloud at his most fervent have readily approved this profoundly unergomatic domicile? When one's metaphorical turrets, gables and wetrooms are Babi Yar, Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz, it is tempting to wish that the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil had proven itself of a hardier stock. For, oddly enough, when it comes to Good and Evil, not knowing the difference seems to have become the ubiquitous and most unoriginal sin.