Let’s start with a prim-skinned rib-tickler. Answer me this: if disobedience isn’t genetically inherited and we don’t believe snakes can talk, then how can rationalisation play this trick? It might be a long-spooled drive created to break, if you believe the book (and theories of planned obsolescence) but isn’t it more like an excuse? To explain natural screaming and tears? To keep us lower? This skin, one micron thick, spreads to forms an impregnable dome. Now Hera, should we bite the Greek apples, sun-fat? You told us how he threw the race by throwing. This time, at least, there was a decency of gold. Seems we grew up and got value, still running, but might stop for a finger-worth as an excuse for being beaten. How can a goddess be so taken with the surface sweetness? This is how they get us. Shining pips, set in rings, finish our careers. Snow White, let’s not forget your kinder bite. She was old and feared you dreadfully, because that’s all the magic we are allowed. You already had so much sugar, had everything a beautiful girl gets. The direction was good but when you patch and wrinkle you’ll probably buy poison, consider the knife. The meaning is clearest in Kafka. This isn’t irony. How the father threw the seed-bearers so hard at his son, an action so psycho-analytically ripe it’s almost a shame to say we understand. This is the shock.This is how you rot and kill the skin of a beast already so low — see how he scuttles? The impulse we also recognise: he acted in fear, in ignorance of what he held. The poor creature couldn’t bear the change for long, of course. Even with all those extra legs, he buckled. Broke under the weight.
Annabel Banks