The moment you think of paradise the words slip away. It’s as if they have no chance to dock at the shores of Eden, as if they are being incessantly rinsed and spun away into the distance. Could it be that it was not Adam and Eve that God banished from his Garden, but language? Was the fall from grace actually a fall from words, from speech?
There’s not much to say about paradise. Because speech prompts Eden to vanish like a piece of cake does from a plate.
But can such a tiny island-portion actually be paradise: a little sand, a few coconut palms, a stretch of unblemished sea? It’s not what exists at the place that makes it paradise, but that which doesn’t – which suggests that it’s the expulsion that brought paradise into existence in the first place. Hardly do we open our mouth and it’s there and gone at the same time. Our language brings it out and, at the same time, enables us be swallowed by it/disappear into it.
First Publication: 22-1-2012
Modifications: 22-6-2013