to be the battles of a never-ending war whose first cause no one could remember, at others revealing a kind of grotesque and invariably violent farce, a sort of on-going grand guignol, harsh, discordant and obsessive.
One of these images, the most enigmatic and fleeting of all, set before his eyes a vast expanse of water where one could see nothing as far as the horizon, not even an island or a sailing boat with its fishermen and their nets. Water, water everywhere, nothing but water covering the earth. Obviously, cain could not have been an eye-witness to all of these stories, and some, whether true or not, came to him via the well-known route of hearing a story from someone who had heard it from someone else who had, in turn, told someone else. One example was the scandalous case of lot and his daughters. When sodom and gomorrah were destroyed, lot was afraid to go on living in the nearby town of zoar and decided to seek shelter in a cave in the mountains.
One day, his eldest daughter said to his younger daughter, Our father is old, one day he will die, and there is no man on the earth to marry us, come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him so that he may give us descendants. And so it was, and lot did not notice when she lay down nor when she left his bed, and the same thing happened with his younger daughter on the following night, for he was so old and drunk that, again, he did not notice when she lay down nor when she left his bed. The two sisters duly became pregnant, but when this story was told to cain, that great expert on erections and
ejaculations, as
lilith, his first and so far only lover, would happily confirm, he said, Any man who was so drunk that he didn't even know what was going on wouldn't even be able to get it up, and if he couldn't get it up, then no penetration could take place and no engendering either. We should not be surprised by the fact that in the ancient societies he had created, the lord should accept incest as an everyday occurrence not deserving of punishment, for nature then lacked any moral code and was concerned only with the propagation of the species, whether driven by natural urges, mere lust or, as people will say later on, simply doing what comes naturally. The lord himself had said, Go forth and multiply, and he put no limits or restrictions on that injunction, nor on who one should or shouldn't go with. It's possible, although this is only a working hypothesis, that the lord's liberality in
the matter of making babies had to do
with the need to replace the
considerable losses suffered, in the way of dead and wounded, by his and other people's armies, as we have already seen and will doubtless continue to see. We need only recall what happened within sight of mount sinai and the column of smoke that was the lord, the erotic zeal with which, that same night, once the survivors had dried their tears, they hurriedly did their best to engender new combatants
who would one day wield the ownerless swords and slit the throats of the children of those who had just vanquished them. Look at what happened to the midianites. In the great lottery of war, it chanced that they defeated the israelites, who, in the past, it must be said, despite
all the propaganda to the contrary,
often faced defeat. This rankled
with the lord, like a stone in his shoe, and he said to moses, You should take vengeance for the israelites on the midianites and then, prepare yourself, for afterwards you will be gathered unto your people. Swallowing the unpleasant news about his own imminent demise, moses ordered each of the twelve tribes of israel to provide one thousand men for the war and thus raised an army of twelve thousand soldiers, who destroyed the midianites, not one of whom escaped with his life. Among the dead were the kings of midian, namely evi, rekem, zur, hur and reba, for kings then used to have strange names, rather than being called joao or afonso or manuel, sancho or pedro. As
One of these images, the most enigmatic and fleeting of all, set before his eyes a vast expanse of water where one could see nothing as far as the horizon, not even an island or a sailing boat with its fishermen and their nets. Water, water everywhere, nothing but water covering the earth. Obviously, cain could not have been an eye-witness to all of these stories, and some, whether true or not, came to him via the well-known route of hearing a story from someone who had heard it from someone else who had, in turn, told someone else. One example was the scandalous case of lot and his daughters. When sodom and gomorrah were destroyed, lot was afraid to go on living in the nearby town of zoar and decided to seek shelter in a cave in the mountains.
One day, his eldest daughter said to his younger daughter, Our father is old, one day he will die, and there is no man on the earth to marry us, come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him so that he may give us descendants. And so it was, and lot did not notice when she lay down nor when she left his bed, and the same thing happened with his younger daughter on the following night, for he was so old and drunk that, again, he did not notice when she lay down nor when she left his bed. The two sisters duly became pregnant, but when this story was told to cain, that great expert on erections and
ejaculations, as
lilith, his first and so far only lover, would happily confirm, he said, Any man who was so drunk that he didn't even know what was going on wouldn't even be able to get it up, and if he couldn't get it up, then no penetration could take place and no engendering either. We should not be surprised by the fact that in the ancient societies he had created, the lord should accept incest as an everyday occurrence not deserving of punishment, for nature then lacked any moral code and was concerned only with the propagation of the species, whether driven by natural urges, mere lust or, as people will say later on, simply doing what comes naturally. The lord himself had said, Go forth and multiply, and he put no limits or restrictions on that injunction, nor on who one should or shouldn't go with. It's possible, although this is only a working hypothesis, that the lord's liberality in
the matter of making babies had to do
with the need to replace the
considerable losses suffered, in the way of dead and wounded, by his and other people's armies, as we have already seen and will doubtless continue to see. We need only recall what happened within sight of mount sinai and the column of smoke that was the lord, the erotic zeal with which, that same night, once the survivors had dried their tears, they hurriedly did their best to engender new combatants
who would one day wield the ownerless swords and slit the throats of the children of those who had just vanquished them. Look at what happened to the midianites. In the great lottery of war, it chanced that they defeated the israelites, who, in the past, it must be said, despite
all the propaganda to the contrary,
often faced defeat. This rankled
with the lord, like a stone in his shoe, and he said to moses, You should take vengeance for the israelites on the midianites and then, prepare yourself, for afterwards you will be gathered unto your people. Swallowing the unpleasant news about his own imminent demise, moses ordered each of the twelve tribes of israel to provide one thousand men for the war and thus raised an army of twelve thousand soldiers, who destroyed the midianites, not one of whom escaped with his life. Among the dead were the kings of midian, namely evi, rekem, zur, hur and reba, for kings then used to have strange names, rather than being called joao or afonso or manuel, sancho or pedro. As
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