Genesis 3:6-7

’Ishah touched the Tree of Knowing Good and Not-Good with her eyes.

This look is not a mere glance but a call—a lusting after, a deep desire to sate a ravenous appetite. An ability to discern a difference between good and not-good awakens with as much force as a physical desire for survival, a need to eat. This feast for the eye cannot but be followed in an instinctual and reflexive grasping of the Tree’s fruit and ravenously cramming it in as fast as ever one can.

There is here no concern for moderation or a fear of choking. Focus is only on downloading this knowledge as quickly and completely as possible. Note the lack of discerning anything behind the data or a vehicle whereby it can be evaluated or applied. For now, there is only grasping.

This example of eating can be paired with the gasping for air one experiences from a breath held too long. It is as though we have waited from forever to receive this reviving inspiration. We know our emptiness, and there is no time to waste before sucking in new life.

Note that once we have received a good we can recognize our desire is to share it with all and even enforce it on all until it loses its goodness and becomes an outmoded trope alive in injunction and dead to a needed next bite or breath of a new good for a new occasion.

And so ’ishah passes a taste to ’ish. See, taste, know.

And so the generations pass on traditions that will need as much judgment as does nudity. This previously single-state can now be seen as good and also as not-good. And we still work at making boundary choices. When will we be nude and when naked? Such knowledge can never again be a once-for-all decision.

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Note: After language, sewing is our first technology, not fire nor wheel.

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