Dance This Mess Around - Music playlist of songs with 'dance' in the title

Music is primarily about dancing right? The rhythms get us swaying our hips, nodding our heads, throwing some shapes. So here's a playlist of songs devoted to the concept of dance.

1) Pere Ubu - "The Modern Dance"
David Behemoth Thomas is an odd cove isn't he? As judged by his introduction to the live version here in the video. Still P.U. made some highly danceable if vaguely unsettling music.



2) Toyah - "Danced"
Toyah Wilcox, actress, singer, or with the right contacts both simultaneously. She landed a deuteragonist role in a TV detective series, playing a singer in a band, so got to eprform two of her songs in the show as part of the plot, including this catchy number.



3) B52s - "Dance This Mess Around"
If there was ever a dance party band it was the B52s. But there were occasions such as on this song & "Give Me Back My Man" when Cindy Wilson's vocals hinted at a greater despair behind the fun.



4) Killing Joke - "Wardance"
This is a great song but there are no decent versions of them doing it live, which suggests how much of the song was enhanced by the studio production. None of the energy and menace were ever quite there live.



5) Mos Def - "Pretty Dancer"
Seems appropriate as Mos wrote this song as a tribute to Muhammad Ali.



6) David Bowie - "John I'm Only Dancing"
Another superstar who we've just lost recently. David Bowie RIP



7) Sly & The Family Stone - "Dance To The Music"
Is there any song that screams more for you to just get up & dance to the music? I'm not sure there is. You can't have any troubles when this comes on the loudspeakers.



8) Arctic Monkeys "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"
Weren't the Arctic Monkeys a thing a few years ago? I never believed the hype, but then I was more likely to heed the words of Public Enemy...



9) John Spencer Blues Explosion - "Lap Dance"
The clue's in the band name, a sort of messed up acid blues-rock, with bass on full distortion, love it!



10) Prince - "Sexy Dancer"
I'm going to have to stop doing these charts as one's musical heroes are popping their clogs at an alarming rate. I guess it's a reflection of my age, growing up and being exposed first to music in the 1970s, but Prince really did go far too early.



11) Abba - "Dancing Queen"
I was never an Abba fan, always seeing them as the immovable obstacle to more interesting bands getting to the top of the pop charts. But now in my dotage I hope I have become a bit more gracious and even though their music still brings me out in hives, I can at least acknowledge their significance by conferring them a place in one of my playlists. Just don't expect me to dance along to it that's all.



12) The Skids - "Scared To Dance"
The Skids were one of those bands whose individual parts amounted to more than the total. Fabulous guitarist, aesthetically pleasing lead singer and yet none of their songs were ever quite remarkable enough to my ear.



13) Ramones - "Blitzkrieg Bop"
Sad how classic pop/rock now gets recycled as music for adverts. This song now promotes a delivery system to rival UPS.



14) The Sweet - "Blitzkrieg Bop"
I have no idea how this song stuck in my psyche all these years for me to dredge up from my memory to end up in this chart. When I was pre-teen, this was the music that was around everywhere in daily life. Before ghetto blasters, walkmans and I-Pods, people used to listen to their transistor radios and so day and night this kind of stuff assaulted our earholes. Now you know just why punk rock had to emerge.



14) Martha And The Vandellas - "Dancing In the Street"
Phew, thank goodness for this. Restores one's faith in music, which is kind of Martha's point too



15) Genesis - "I Can't Dance"
Correct, you can't. When I was in the last years of my schooling, I travelled to school with a guy whose sister was being pursued by Phil Collins who was a total lech. See pop pickers, if you didn't make these people famous, they wouldn't get ideas above their true station.



16) Beenie Man - "Dancehall Queen"
Not to be confused with the similar sounding titled Abba song "Dancing Queen". definitely not to be confused musically... Horrible song, worse video



17) House Of Pain - "Jump Around"
Maybe not strictly a 'dance' song, but then it kind of is. Not Riverdance admittedly...



18) Leighton Buzzards - "Saturday Night Under The Plastic Palm Trees"
This was actually my tenderfoot experience on the dance floors of youth clubs

Criminal songs - 10 songs about crime

I've published a music chart of Murder Songs but here's one of other crimes.


1) Genesis - Robbery, Assault And Battery"
You'd probably never believe it given my music collection as it currently stands, dominated by New Wave, Hip-Hop, Reggae & Art Noise, but Genesis were one of the first bands I ever got into. Peter Gabriel Genesis rather than Phil Collins Genesis of course. But still, I find them impossible to listen to now. Weren't videos made in the 1970s really rubbish?



2) The Prodigy - "Firestarter"
The album this comes from "The Fat Of The Land" is almost excellent, but as with this track I just feel each song on it threatens a lot sonically and musically but somehow always manages to truncate it without nailing it. Maybe that's why Liam sacked the rest of the band.




3) New Order - "Thieves Like Us"
Um I loved this period New Order (that yielded the album "Power, Corruption and Lies". Not my normal type of music, but I guess there was a sentimental attachment from the Joy division days. I wonder if they lost any fans who felt the synth-heavy sound meant that they had sold out the Joy Division legacy? I certainly felt similar when one of my favourite noise bands The Swans went all quite singer-songwritery and recently when my favourite contemporary band Liars produced a second successive album that ditched their art-noise roots for plinky-computer game soundtrack music.




4) Renegade Soundwave - "Probably A Robbery"
I can't remember anything else about this band. One-hit wonders? Probably.




5) The Jam - "Thick As Thieves"
Supposedly a concept album because 3 of the songs were linked, of which this was one. But ignoring that, Paul Weller's gift for longing back to a childhood of being able to belong to something never bettered than in this song.




6) The Clash - "Bankrobber"
 I never pass up any excuse to play this song really! I always thought it was just another one of their reggae covers before I discovered that no, they'd penned it themselves. Very hard to do white reggae well, but this is definitely at the top of the white reggae charts.




7) Ministry - "The Land Of Rape & Honey"
This band are from Texas. They don't fit in very well down there...




8) MC 900Ft Jesus - "The City Sleeps"
Criminally (get it?) under-appreciated artist, really sorry they stopped after a couple of killer albums. This is waaay more menacing than anything the cartoon gangster rappers might pontificate upon.




9) Pulp - "Joyriders"
Never really a Pulp fan, a mix of professional Northerner with auto-didact intellectual, just didn't strike a chord with me. Sort of Morrisey without the racial prejudice.



10) Swans - "Blackmail"
This period Swans when female vocalist Jarboe joined the band saw their enormous power sound teeter on the point of fracturing as her voice cut against it. It was brilliant these two divergent muscularities.



11) Beastie Boys - "Car Thief"
Well you know I love all things Beastie Boys. I chose this song because of the title, but let's face it, the video for their song "Sabotage" which spoofs Starsky & Hutch's opening credits is one of the best music videos every made, so I'm linking to that! Makes me a bit of a cheat, but not a criminal!



12) 50 Cent - "P.I.M.P"
The Caribbean steel band vibe of this is genius, no matter how desultory the song would be without it. #guiltypleasure



13) Gary Clail - "Two Thieves And A Liar"
Another artist like The Prodigy who has the germ of brilliant songs but never quite manages to see them through (I find this also with Adrian Sherwood's Tackhead from which Clail spawned). But this song delivers all the way through.




14) Slits - "Shoplifting"
Another band who teetered on the brink of great tunesmithery but always managed to pull back. All the elements are there, but somehow the song sounds slightly weedy, which for dub is a bit odd. I did like their track "New Town" though.



15) Ice-T - "Grand Larceny"
The granddaddy of blustering gangster rap and where is he now? Oh yeah in a police drama series on TV. Oh the irony.

Exege(ne)sis - Friday Flash

In the beginning was the word and the word was God

In the beginning was the wor(l)d and the word/world was go(o)d

In the beginning was not the world, because God was supposed to have created it. Not in any procreative, progenerative way, since there was no conjoining of the sexes in reproduction, unless you buy into the male-female polarities of light/darkness, earth/sea, sky/ground.

The word or the world could not be good, since there was no other moral being yet extant to judge and pronounce upon it thus. If the Divinity is pronouncing his own work as good, it's a little unbecomingly arrogant of such a numinous Being to do so. Blowing his own trumpet as it were and we all know where trumpets and the number seven can lead don't we Jerichoans?

In similar vein there could not have been the word in the beginning, sine there was no one around to utter it (other than the Divinity uttering a 'shezam' or similar conjuration word). In certain Far Eastern theologies, there is a primordial sound, the moment of its first striking being the act of creation itself, from which all life and energies with their vibrations stem.

And God said, Let the earth bring the living soul after its kind; the beast and the thing moving itself and the wild animal of the earth after its kind; and it was so.

There is no capitalisation of 'earth' gainsaying the investing of gender in the manner of a Gaia and yet this is followed by an immediate polarity of the (higher) living soul and the (base) beast. 'After its kind' suggests the generations reproduced through sexual procreation and this is of course the (spare) bone of contention in The Garden Of Eden.

The word 'after' has been interpreted as 'according', that is within its delineated phylum, genus and species type. Genetic groupings are demarcated, yet allowing for theological prohibitions on 'pure' and 'unclean' animals that seem to cross several classificatory elements and forms the basis of the Jews' Kashrut dietary laws. They wouldn't eat animals that seemed to diverge from recognised groups in no matter how superficial a manner.

'The thing moving itself' undermines its own theological dialectic. One interpretation has this being worms and other legless creatures crawling along the ground (the snake of course was not thus shaped until God ripped its legs away in Eden). Modern science also suggests the primary existence of single cell creatures, clustering together into slightly larger aggregates. So something that superficially resembled an eye, though of course lacked for a developed retina and cortical and synaptic brain to function as oracular, clumped together with some cells that provided a degree of locomotion across the ground. Incrementally in time, the aggregation grew in sophistication and the eye was able to link up to specialist cells to facilitate it to 'see', the brain and central nervous system wired up the muscles so that the animal could walk and the rest is Natural History.

But what of language? That first word? In the beginning was the word and the word was Gravity. G-Force.

Of course the first enunciated word was nothing as complex and intricate as 'gravity'. Yet without gravity there would in all likelihood have been no first language, no opening gambit, no referential system at all. For as mankind evolved in among that confusing welter of sense experiences in his environment, there were a few things he noticed followed rigid patterns.

rain always fell down on their heads

mountains always pointed upwards

their spears and rocks would always eventually touch down on the ground

as would their urine (men only)

trees grew vertically

while their shed leaves tumbled back down to earth

birds flew higher than men's heads

scorpions crawled at men's feet

avalanches and waterfalls crashed deafeningly descendently

volcanoes belched their fire and smoke ascendantly

Ergo a brace of things man could stake his tongue with. Up was skywards and down was plunging towards their feet. From this they were able to extrapolate words such as here, there, right, left, near, far, under, over. Me and you as in a spatial configuration. Us an them. "My God good, your god no good". Heaven and the abyss. They didn't just admire mountains, now they scaled them through shared language enabling co-operation and teamwork and preparation of resources. Upwards ever upwards. Eventually they would tunnel and mine beneath the earth and quarry metals and powering fuels. And all thanks to gravity establishing a few regular ground rules.

In the beginning was the logos and the logos was G-d.

If the Greek word 'logos' means the unifying principle of the world, then it cannot truly be translated as 'Word'. For words partition, categorise and define. Words undermine the monistic, the belief in the one, for they introduce and encourage relativism.

In the beginning was the end of the world. And the world was begun (conceived) and ended (divided and dissevered) by the word.

30 Days Music Challenge

With thanks to my friend and literary fencing partner Dan Holloway, here is my 30 day music challenge to give you a little insight into me and my likes and dislikes. Each song has a link to a YouTube video.

Day 1 Favourite song - "I Wanna Be Adored" - Stone Roses. Undoubtedly a great song, managing to suggest both rampant egoism and yet a tentative self-doubt in his voice. I'll probably have a new favourite song next week. Pop's fickle like that.

Day 2 Least favourite song - "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Paul Jones or "She's Lost Control" by Grace Jones. Such abominations of the original Joy Division meisterwerks that I can't bring myself to link to them.

Day 3 Song that makes you happy - "Come Down Easy - Spacemen 3. I've never taken recreational drugs and have little tolerance for those who do. However, Spacemen 3 made some of the most sublime stoner music ever and this track so joyously surrenders itself to ecstatic bliss that I am suffused in it too. Maybe this should be a guilty pleasure song (see day 13)?

Day 4 Song that makes you sad - "Love In Vain" - The Ruts Lead singer Malcolm Owen pledges his determination never to return to the heroin needle in a voice that drips emotion. He died of a heroin overdose

Day 5 Song that reminds you of someone - Toss up between "Kerosene" by Big Black and "Cry Me A River" by Julie London, somewhat divergent styles of music I'm sure you'll agree. Both remind me of my first girlfriend who turned me on to both artists. She had pretty eclectic tastes and I will always honour her for that. Oh yes and for being the first of course...

Day 6 Song that reminds you of somewhere - "Fire Spirit" - Gun Club. I'd gone to see these guys on the recommendation of The Fall's Mark E Smith via John Peel's radio show. I'd never heard any of their songs and turned up at the venue to find it was a sit down place with waitress service, but boy did they blow the stage away that night. I'll always remember that venue though, sadly no longer with us, but hopefully to be immortalised in my WIP...

Day 7 Song that reminds you of an event - "Decades" - Joy Division. My second ever play was performed at the Edinburgh Festival and was about a Joy Division fan still trapped in denial 5 years after his hero has committed suicide {not autobiographical in the least there ;-)} This song was the inspiration behind the play. "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders". The play was about urban alienation and we were performing in a bus depot so periodically through the play there would be tannoy announcements about buses pulling out. Very apt.

Day 8 Song you know all the words to - "Bankrobber" - The Clash, but then there aren't all that many words in it! I do love singing along to it though much to my sons' chagrin. "My daddy was a bankrobber" - at such moments they probably wish I was and accordingly languishing behind bars...

Day 9 Song you can dance to - "Nothing Can Go Wrong" - South Central. I've never been big on dance music or rave, but this is quite catchy and besides I'm sure you're all bored with me posting 23 Skidoo's "IY" on every other music blog post I do...

Day 10 Song that helps you fall to sleep - I don't believe I possess any music that puts me to sleep. Music is supposed to reach out through the speakers, grab the top of your spine and make you want to MOOOOVE. I would imagine any Prog Rock group like Yes or Ozric Tentacles to put me to sleep, but I've never tried them. An oversight on my part perhaps, since I am actually an insomniac. Wonder if I can get hold of their CDs on an NHS prescription?

Day 11 Song from your favourite band - "Kalte Sterne" by Einsturzende Neubauten. God I loved this band. German is THE language for pop music.

Day 12 Song from a band you hate - Anything by Oasis. I'm not posting a link, I believe you can find some of their stuff on the internet somewhere... Why do I hate them? This isn't a Blur V Oasis thing, cos I was never a fan of Blur either. Actually it sort of is in an inverse way. Blur were seen as the London cool and Oasis the Northern lads' band (hence the rivalry), but even though I'm a Londoner, I acknowledge that Manchester has been the rock and roll capital of the UK for the last 35 years, yet Oasis a band from Manchester always wanted to sound like The Beatles, a band from Liverpool and that pop pickers, is tantamount to TREASON. Manchester and Liverpool hate each other more than either hates London. I think it had something to do with Liverpool charging Manchester rent to ship Manchester's manufactured textiles out to the world. Petty. Bit like my dislike of Oasis really...

Day 13 Song that is a guilty pleasure - "Jump Around" - House Of Pain, a really dumb song, from a band with a really crass Plastic Paddyness, yet that groove just gets me. Soz.

Day 14 Song that no one would expect you to love - "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" - St Etienne. I dunno, I normally like a bit of edge to my music, but Sarah Cracknell's voice on this wins me over. Mind you she's got more edge than Neil Young's reedy original.

Day 15 Song that describes you - "You've Got My Number, Why Don't You Use It" - The Undertones. Hey I'm a struggling writer, what more can I say?

Day 16 Song that you used to love but now hate - "The Knife" - Genesis. Peter Gabriel Genesis, Pink Floyd, Led Zep, I used to be into them during my formative musical years, but when punk came along I just couldn't listen to them any more because they just sounded SO SLOOOWWW. I mean this song even has a flautist on stage, what was I thinking? Seriously, I'm impressed there is actual footage of this up on YouTube. I wanted a decent live version of Pink Floyd's "Dogs" but there didn't seem to be one.

Day 17 Song that you hear often on the radio - "Can't Live Without My Radio" - World Domination Enterprises. Bit of a cheat this one as since DJ John Peel died, I don't listen to the radio for my tunes. World Dom do a marvellously OTT version of "Funkytown". Check it out.

Day 18 Song that you wish you heard on the radio - "Politicians And Paedophiles" - The Bug. The clue is in the title really, and you won't hear many more angry songs than this. Having said that, I bet there's some pirate radio station broadcasting out of a garret in a South London crack house that is playing this on the airwaves.

Day 19 Song from your favourite album - "Ghetto Of The City" - Misty In Roots. I don't really have a favourite album, but Misty In Roots "Live At The Counter Eurovision" is about as perfect an album as you can get with not one duff track on it. Thing is I no longer own it as some ex-housemate waltzed off with my vinyl copy many moons ago. Not that I would have a record player to play it on anyway.

Day 20 Song you listen to when you're angry - "To Hell With Poverty" - Gang Of Four

Day 21 Song you listen to when you're happy - "Groovy Situation" - Keith Rowe. Oh man that voice, that voice!

Day 22 Song you listen to when you're sad - "Let There Be Light" - Nas. Ugh, crushing.

Day 23 Song you want to play at your wedding - "Don't Touch Me There" - The Tubes. Hey I've had my wedding, so what's the problem? There was an outside chance, a real long shot, that The Beastie Boys could have been induced to play at my wedding as they were playing a set in Rough Trade Record Shop where I was working. But the inlaws nixed the idea... No Klezmer band either.

Day 24 Song you want played at your funeral - "Paper Planes" - MIA seems a fitting send off... "If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name". Let's hope so eh St Peter?

Day 25 Song that makes you laugh - "Art Bitch" - CSS Being funny in a second language, nuff respec'. Check out those lyrics in the box below the vid.

Day 26 Song you can play on an instrument - "Gdansk" - Test Department. I like doing guerilla art stunts. It started at college when we played a midnight concert on the croquet lawn outside the halls of residence, running the amp cables into the basement. I couldn't and can't actually play any instruments, so I hit a beer keg with a sledgehammer in tribute to Test Dept. The problem was the rest of the band were playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. Still it was all good fun until someone threatened to report us. Swot. I went on to hit an oil drum with the same sledgehammer in a play wot I wrote for the 1985 Edinburgh Festival, where we met some striking Kent miners who were performing a play about mining and de-industrialisation which Test Dept had backed. Funny that this vid has a cello piece so prominent, since I was supposed to learn the instrument at school, but I handed mine back in two pieces and the music department didn't ask me back again next term.

Day 27 Song you wish you could play - "Nice'N' Sleazy" - The Stranglers. I was always dreaming of being the bassist in a band, but couldn't even master 4 strings. There are so many low down and dirty bass riffs, but JJ.Burnel was maybe the king of them all. Did you know The Stranglers were reputed to have 3 men who were all draft dodgers in their respective countries?

Day 28 Song that makes you feel guilty - "Bombastic" - Shaggy. One isn't supposed to approve of Shaggy, or the sentiments on this song, but again, you find the right sound and I roll over and let you tickle my tummy.

Day 29 Song from your childhood - "Rhubarb And Custard" Theme Tune. Can't remember watching the show particularly, but the theme was simply awesome. Of course a bloody Rave DJ got hold of it and remixed it and it was horrible... Though I did like the version of the Rainbow theme tune by Crazed Mr Bungle.

Day 30 Your favourite song this time last year - "It Doesn't Make It Alright" - The Specials. I rediscovered the Specials last year and the plaint in Terry Hall's voice here makes me want to cry and rage all at the same time.

Creation Myth - A Serpent's Tale

“The serpent beguiled me and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). So claimed Eve in mitigation for disobeyiing god and consuming forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam blamed her and she in turn blamed the snake. Pretty poor show all round, with no one actually mettlesome enough to take responsibility for their actions. No chivalrous tale this. Still, that's free will for you. And at the bottom of the pile, who could the audacious snake hold to account? Overlooking the fanciful anthropomorphic notion of loquacious ophidia, it behooves one to uncover why the colubrid was chosen to be the er, well snake in the grass and not say the scorpion, or the spider, the chameleon or the komodo dragon. Which of its several traits prompted its selection as the genus most likely to, when the scribes came to set down their salutary tale ? And which species might have offered the model for the serpent, since many of these highly specialised traits are narrowly dispersed within the order. For example, only some seven hundred species are venomous and just a quarter of those pose a mortal threat to mankind. And let us agree, to have deceived Eve with words, to poison her mind with toxic thoughts, our suspect must have been mightily envenomed. “Tongues as sharp as a serpent’s bite” (Psalms 140:3).


*

When it went pear/apple shaped and god decided to suspend the (pioneer) Eden Project, he didn’t plump to purge it by fire. Nor tear it up and inter it through a convulsive earthquake. No, instead he pulled the plug by dousing it beneath the water of a mighty flood. To rehydrate the colloidal sediment of his creation and merely diffuse it amongst the tides. To wash it away as effluent. He was careful to preserve his intricate origami bestairy, but also opted to scoop up Noah and his family. To what purpose? Was god prefiguring the Masai, by burning off tired scrub in order to foster new germination? Nevertheless, genetically speaking, there was no new development on offer, since Noah’s kin were the tenth generation lineage direct from fallen Adam himself. Once the waters had receded, they were free to carry on reproducing as per his instruction to go forth and multiply. To swarm. To pullulate. Proceeding with their evolution, away from god’s blueprint of perfection. The Eden Project would therefore, to all intents and purposes, continue unabated.

God’s creative procedures invariably revolved around desiccation. Witness the earth coalescing from the misty and cloud-laden perch of the heavens. Then land being distilled from the roiling oceans. Next, once the sodden terrain had been wrung through the mangle, towering tree trunks and more modest flower stems, distended their exhuberant foliage towards the warm embrace of the sun. And incidentally, towards the life-enhancing rain waters, which they gleefully summoned down to perform them service. How they adsorbed the precipitation, enchaining it to transplant their sap, much like snakes swallow their prey whole and trust to their inner digestive chemistry to render them a sustaining broth. Which brings us to the next decoction, the (ex-marine) animals that humbly crawled across the humus, those that flew and those that stood firm on the ground. Each with its discrete corporeality. A delineated incarnation of solidity, which cut a swathe through space and bore down with mass. Then finally the monarch of all this brute matter, mankind himself, in the shape of Adam. The most sturdily upright and substantial of all god’s creations. And the most able. With his princess consort Eve. Yet perhaps she is not quite so condensed as he. With her milk and menstrual surges, subterranean streams and currents consigned to internal flows. Between the two therefore, already a fissure.

“For dust you are and to dust you will return”. Thus, like all god’s handiwork, Adam is hardened pith. Hung up to dry. Baked in the kiln. Adama itself means ‘red earth’ (did he extrude therefore from a parched desert soil?) Pressed and kneaded by the deft fingers of whom? Now, the habitually aloof god doesn’t strike as much of a potter, especially one without a wheel. Like his creation Adam, he would not undertake anything that threatened contamination with moist, besmirching clod. Anything that might deluge and overwhelm his staunch definition. Sully and fray his precious vinculum to life. No, this resounds more of the order of his mother Eve (or Sophia ‘wisdom’). Sat there in her field of clay, legs splayed out in the mud, joyously feeling the flow and the grain of the indeterminate pulp. Reiterating her own fluid origins, with no distinction between inner and outer, self and other. (The camouflage sported by most snakes, functions so as to break up their outline and thus make them hard for prey to distinguish against the background). Her sole extrinsic appendage, a stunted tree branch for rolling pin and pleasure stick. How she effortlessly moulds the empty vessel of Adam, in order to contain her moon blood. Then holding it to the breast and animating him with the syncopations of her heartbeat. (That wheezy hiss you can hear, is god bronchially attempting to breathe life up Adam’s nostrils). Ah, little Adam, indistinguishable from the clay cup from which he drinks, the bed in which he sleeps and the hoist as his mother shoulders him, when she goes for a dance to stretch her legs. Urtha. Udder. Mudder. Mother. (Adder ... Mamba ...?)




The human squab flexes his fledgeling legs and manages to plant himself erect in the soil. Now sufficiently leavened, some words come to his ear on the wind. God’s chittering, dangling him the opportunity to wreak his own beauty. “Mother, you have discharged your destiny and I thank you. Now there is much work to be done. Since we are to sow this field with trees and flowers and fashion their canopied bunting in order to exalt God’s divine majesty”. (And coincidentally thinks Eve, lacing and adulterating my pottery clay with their snaggly roots, while also covering the traces of little Adam when he could but crawl through the dust). “God? Have you forgotten that I am his Mother as your own?” (Further whispered prompting from off-stage). “Serpent ! Eve was carved from my rib. ‘Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’. I pledge the Father my troth.” “Did he bear your vessel as I did ? Did he fill your hollowness with life?” “No, I will be the one to fill your empty belly, give you being and purpose”. “Then Eve is pressed into Hell ! Would but the earth swirl and swallow me whole”. (That can be arranged muses God, scratching his scraggly beard). “No, it is Eve who is misconceived. You can no longer summon up any of your fecund magic, as I wield the sole power of nomination. For I am to become Father to a great family, that all other nations will seek to follow. You are to become my wife and to suckle and nurture our progeny.”

Though, as with all the cast of characters involved here, she bore no knowledge of molecular biology, Eve somehow intuited  that this might not be so. For if she had indeed been cloned from her husband, then their conjoining would be incestuous, with all the genetic consequences for their offspring. The degeneration would begin immediately. Eve smiled to herself, while she further hatched a plan to thwart her husband’s ambitions, even adopting some of the things he himself had the bare faced temerity to utter to her. Redeploying God’s devious distancing tactic of insinuation. If she could just conjure her enchantments for one final time and coil her gnarled branch. Utilise her skill with pigements and draw from Nature’s palette around her. And to convey the power of speech, she needed to fabricate a tongue. Now, what shape should it take on? She cast around her at her husband’s prototypical tools. “A hoe? Unsuitable. A trowel? Laying it on a bit thick perhaps. A rake? Hardly. But that twin-pronged fork fits the bill. Perfectly. Perfidiously. It reminds me of how my son stands so pincered upon the ground”.


*


The shall we say nebulous geographical co-ordinates of the Garden of Eden present our first and major obstacle to determining the possible genus of snake. References to the Tigris and Euphrates probably place it somewhere in South-East Mesopotamia, the future cradle of Ur civilisation, the kingdoms of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad. Yet Eden is a specially created garden, distinct from what, savannah? Bush? Scrub? Desert? The last two evoke notions of aridity, which is probably not the primary impression god was striving after with his canvas. It is of course quite possible that they were verdant areas in their own right, but through man’s colonisation and exploitation have since been rendered considerably less lush.



The first snake family under scrutiny (suspicion?) are the vipers (viperidae), since they possess sufficient variation to inhabit any of the above terrains and are widely found throughout the Saharan/ Middle Eastern loci. There are the Levant and Palestinian vipers, (vipera lebetina & vipera palaestinae) which are in the right neighbourhoods. Or else there’s the puff adder, (bitans arietans), a deadly snake that isn’t shy like most snakes and will hiss a warning. Then there is the desert horned viper (cerastes cornutus) a snake found in the Sahara, which has a sidewinding form of movement so that no part of its body is in contact with the blazing hot sand for too long. This snake burrows under the sand during the day and hunts at night, which might rule it out of the Eden scenario. Only, it has two horns on its head which might have prompted the diabolic imagery. That and the forked tongue, with which the snake neither speaks, nor even hisses (this is actually reverberating airflow through the respiratory tract). Rather the forked tongue is the snake’s means of scenting, as it projects out into the air.


Whichever of these, or any other genus, all vipers have long, hollow fangs which fold up into the roof of their mouths and are unleashed like stabbing daggers, or hypodermic needles by the attacking snake. The venom jetting out through the bottom of the tooth, whose length enables it to get deeply embedded within the target’s flesh. The venom of the most dangerous family members is a mixture of haemotoxic (attacks the blood) and neurotoxic (attacks the nerves).

There is perhaps a natural human female affinity with the snake. After all, the creature’s wavy movements may recall primordial flows within woman herself. Equally, when the Edenic serpent rubbed itself up against the forbidden tree, it wasn’t just debunking god’s idle threat that death would be the outcome of even merely touching its bark. For he was appealing on a deeper emotional level to Eve. Since does not the snake rub itself against solid objects, in order to slough its old skin and what greater appeal to woman than the promise of eternal rejuvenation, if not eternal life itself? Assailing the tree, that tree, could offer all this. And lastly, it is nettlesome to determine where any snake begins and ends, since its limbless corpus can be all of a piece. Venomous snakes however, are easier to determine frontpiece from tailpiece, since as with human heads making allowances for large brains, these serpents have to afford accomodation for their venom sacs. As with the triangulated head of the viper for example. Whichever species of snake was present in Eden, perhaps he spread his venomous patter, in an attempt to shed his bulbousness and shrink his features back to where he had no discernible beginning, middle or end. To return to a concealing amorphousness. A singular inscrutability. A state of unobtrsuiveness, with which the female human can empathise with her occult inclinations.

Of course, there is the possibility that the snake in question was not venomous, but a constrictor of some sort, such as the foreboding rock python (python sebae) which can grow uîp to six metres long. I have seen a rock python consume a crocodile. Slowly. Such a leviathan as this wouldn’t really need to whisper poisonous thoughts, its sheer girth would entail it had your ear. These snakes have small spurs on their body, for tickling in courtship, or jousting with rival male suitors. But the greater significance, is that these spurs are the vestigal remains of back legs which have adapted out over evolution. Could this match God’s assertion to have stripped the snake of ambulatory limbs in order to make it crawl on its belly for punishment? A secondary consideration is the nature of constriction itself. Once enfurled within the sepent’s coils, having the very life squeezed from it, the prey attempts to exhale, at which point the crafty snake presses home its advantage a little tighter, so that the animal finds it hard to inhale again. The benighted beast dies from suffocation.


Boomslang (dispholidus typus).
The boomslang, a resident of more Southerly climes, makes the line up simply by virtue of it being arboreal. Much religious iconography makes play of having the serpent spiralled around the tree of forbidden fruit during its seduction of Eve. Either draped around the trunk of the tree like some primeval barbed wire prohibition. Or intertwined with the forbidden fruit itself, up on the branches. The boomslang is an intense emerald green so that it blends in seamlessly with foliage and like all arboreal snakes is long, thin and agile so that it can slide across branches. It’s venom is haemotoxic, that is it prevents blood from clotting, causing blood pressure to drop and the heart rate to increase in an attempt to compensate. Eventually, internal haemorrhaging may occur and it has to be said, that by volume, the venom of the boomslang is the most concentrated of all venomous sub-Saharan snakes. However, the boomslang is quite a placid snake. It’s powers of smell inform it that humans are neither threat nor food, while instinctively it must be aware that we are too large for its rear fangs to penetrate us, since anything it takes for food must fit right into the back of its mouth for its fangs to repeatedly bite until fatally envenomed.

God admonishes the serpent even before he vents his spleen on A&E. “You’ll crawl on your belly” (all the better to pick up tell-tale ground-level vibrations through my lower jaw then big guy!) and eat dust (hey, I’m nothing if not a survivor. You just watch me evolve some alternative limbless strategies. I can see it now. Increased concentration of venom to immobilise the prey; swallowing it whole, utilising my whole corpus to push it down, in the place of feeding it through with paws. Anyway, dust’s a good thing right? It’s where we all came from. Keeps one grounded to our humility. Oh and the worms and centipedes and other soil creepers are well hacked off with you, as they thought you held them in higher esteem than that. Oh and while we’re on the subject, the dromedaries asked me to inform you that they’ve got the right hump with you, for giving them a left one as well). “And there will be an enmity between you and this woman and your offspring and hers”. (Hmm, why’s that then, why not between me and her husband as well while you’re at it?)

I’ll tell you why, because Eve has a special relationship with the serpent. And God is trying to drive a wedge between them. A wedge called Adam. Striding mightily through the landscape, janitor of all he surveyed. Hand flattened across his brow, shielding his eyes from the sun and what does he behold? Nothing. Whither Eve? He tracks lower, at ground level and sees her supine, or on her haunches like the beasts. Swaying on a rustling bed of dried, fallen leaves (leaf litter litter). He fails to under-stand. What on earth is she playing at? muses Adam. And he sees that she is not alone. Also present is her trusted sidekick stick. Her nimble fingers engaged with the stirrer, but they are not presently working away at any clay. Something from within makes Adam feel hot and bothered, he knows not what, but he does not enjoy the sensation. It threatens to overhwelm him, to melt and engulf him. To render him inchoate. In her reverie, from the corner of her eye, Eve espies his discomfort. She rises from the leaf mound, brushing herself free of them, (note to future self she muses, try the petals of flowers next time, since they might be softer and more soundless). She leads Adam by the hand down to the mound. And she ushers him into the knowledge of good and evil. The forbidden sapience. The erotic exotic. Yet again, Adam doesn’t under-stand what he feels within, there perched perilously, with just Eve’s body interceding between him and humus and loam. But he instinctively knows he likes it. He believes this to be the way forward. But when he rises up to brush himself down of his leafy investment, he notices the eye of his own retractable snake, glistening in the sunlight. And he is ashamed. Ashamed that it must not be on general view, reserved only for his wife lying back there, basking in the glow (what’s she doing now, seems to be searching for something?) Ashamed that it can display its propensity, its current vein of humour, seemingly independent of him Adam, merely by how long it stretches and unfurls. Perforce he had to conceal this rebellious member, this part of himself that would not come to heel. He veiled it off with a fig life snatched from a tree. And badgered a langorous Eve to do likewise, even though she lacked any overt outward sign of bodily sedition.

This is the Father-Son dyad trying to detach Eve from her pleasuring stick. This is the patriarchy coming between Eve and any alien cock that is not nestling under her husband’s fig veil. And also to perpetuate it down the generations, this is Papa sewing the seeds of Oedipal prohibition. Every Adam will have his own Eve, but Eve will not partake of any other seductive male member. Bellying snakes are to be put out of reach of upright (wo-)mankind. This represents the primal kiss off. When women last had any say in their own libidinous pleasure.

God’s final divide and rule imprecation, that (Her offspring) “will crush your head and yours will bite their heel”. (No, I think you're getting your metaphors all confused here oh omniscient one. My kind have no beef with humans. Accidents will happen, when we get stepped on and they get bitten, but normally we’ll just gracefully accede and yield them right of way as we go about our business in peace. If mankind goes genus-cidal on us, we’re not being singled out for special treatment. He’s inclined to do that to any species, cos that’s the way You’ve set him up. That’s the key you wound up in his back. And for what it’s worth, my cranky brethren the black mamba, can rise up and match the height of any man and bite them in the face. I think you’re muddying the mortal-divine boundaries, like with that Achilles chap, but that’s for another time. And as for our heads getting crushed, my learned oriental cousin the king cobra, (learned in the sense you don’t see too many of his magnificent kind swaying in wicker baskets, not without having first being defanged anyway), relates that where he comes from, it is customary for rivalrous males to bring their wrestling bouts to a victorious conclusion by butting the other on the head. Thus demonstrating in a simple Darwinian algorithim, that by cresting the loser, the victor must ergo be larger and therefore more powerful. No hard feelings and no serious injuries either. The loser slides off to look for another dowry, while the victor goes to advise on interior design (the king cobra is the only snake species to build a nest for its eggs). You modelled that whole breaking our heads in pieces and feeding it to the folks thing with Leviathan. You’re beginning to repeat yourself. The onset of a divine Alzheimer’s? Or more likely, a confusion in your original amanuenses.