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Outsider
from a painting by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553)
I think of Dante, lost in a dark wood where he, like the plants and animals about him did not observe nature, but rather was in it and of it, indistinguishable from it, porous to it, one with it; that is until Beatrice and the mud and spittle.
No tree falls in the forest unless observed,
A shifting of molecules, an event occurred.
There was a stirring in the viscous soup
And man applied the girding hoop.
Hoops, metaphors, man needed these to distinguish one stirring from another within the jungle totality, the forest infinity.
With metaphors man created the world, cut out a space from the forest, burnt down a clearing for himself, and started to distinguish one facet of the forest from the other, the wood from the trees, the tree from the wood, the falling tree from the other trees.
Man was teased from nature with fire and metaphors, himself from other selves, a myself, Me.
From whence the tease, the intervention? Can Ouroboros be pulled from its own mouth?
You pushed the apple in,
You, who committed life’s first sin.
The bitten fruit was the broken pact—
Emissary to the Outsider, you made me act.
Lips forced apart, I choked and ate
And, violated… became aware of the gate.
I saw you,
I knew you,
We dressed before we left.
© John Dunn.
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