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Aleksander Wat’s Pastoral Poem is hardly bucolic; its title is obviously ironic. This monologue by Cain, who from a heap of rotting leaves ponders God, creation and history, is a first-class midrash, a reading into the Scripture from the perspective of our experience and knowledge.
   It is a piece, several pages long, of rather nebulous literary form; it
mixes free verse of irregular length and rhythmic patterns with essayistic and narrative prose. Pastoral Poem derives from and comments upon the well-known Biblical story, the few verses from the book of Genesis, chapter 4 about the arch-brothers whose offerings did not find equal favour in God’s eyes, here quoted from the Revised Standard Version:

[2] Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the
ground. [3] In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, [4] and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, [5] but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. [6] The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? [7] If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” [8] Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. [9] Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” [10] And the
LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. [11] And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. [12] When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” [13] Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. [14] Behold, thou hast driven me this day away from the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me.” [15] Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall
be taken on him sevenfold.” And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him. (Gen. 4:2-15.)

Like Job from among the ashes, Wat’s Cain asks God from his heap of leaves, why? Who is responsible? Like a romantic rebel he challenges God, scorns Him, hurls accusations and demands an answer. And like a child trying to deflect responsibility, he puts the blame squarely on God, lies and concocts lame excuses.
   The originality and importance of Wat’s midrash consist in presenting Cain’s story as the defining moment for humankind, equally important as the creation itself, or perhaps even more so. According to Wat, Abel’s killing by Cain, the first death ever, sets history in motion, creates civilization and determines the fate of humanity.
   The poet boldly mixes times past, present and future; he blends
history and fiction. Cain not only tries to make an argument in his
defence from the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, but also evokes Dostoevski’s heroVerkhovensky, Kierkegaard, Freud and Brigitte Bardot; he not only closely reads and comments on the Biblical narrative, but also inserts German quotations from Novalis and interprets a miniature from a medieval bestiarium. In Wat’s poem the three idioms of Western civilization, Jewish, Christian and classical (Greco-Roman) are tightly interwoven.
   Born in 1900 in Warsaw to a Jewish family that was drifting away
from religion, in his early twenties Aleksander Wat became an avantgarde poet. In the 1930s he was close to Polish communists and edited their front journal in Poland, The Literary Monthly. Arrested by the Soviets in Lwów at the beginning of WWII, he spent 6 years imprisoned and in exile in Kazakhstan. This radically cured him of his communist leanings. In Saratov prison he had a mystical illumination and converted to Catholicism. He returned to Poland in 1946 and was briefly active in Polish literary life, but was soon silenced because of his outspoken anticommunism. In 1953 he suffered a brain hemorrhage that resulted in recurring excruciating pains. Because of his ill health he was allowed to travel abroad and eventually settled in France. Invited by the University of California Berkeley, he spent a year in San Francisco where A Pastoral Poem was probably written. His pains did not allow him to work consistently and to alleviate his anxiety Czes∏aw Mi∏osz arranged
a series of recorded conversations with Wat; they resulted in Mój wiek, a two-volume “spoken memoir” published after Wat’s death, one of the most fascinating and important testimonies about 20th-century Eastern Europe (English translation by Richard Lourie, My Century, University of California Press, 1988).
    In addition to My Century, some of Wat’s writings have appeared in English including a volume of poetry With the Skin (translated by Czes∏aw Mi∏osz and Leonard Nathan) and a collection of prewar short stories, Lucifer Unemployed (translated by Lillian Vallee). A monograph of Wat by Tomas Venclova, Aleksander Wat, Life and Art of an Iconoclast was published in 1996. Still, much remains to be done to secure Wat the place he deserves in the pantheon of 20th-century literature.
   Wat left behind some 250 poems, many of them of amazing beauty
and profound insight, and a sizable body of largely unfinished prose
writings. They include part of a large-scale novel, Lot’s Flight, intended as a response from a Jewish perspective to Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus, several literary and political essays (the most important of them, 9 Notes to a Portrait of Stalin, is about two-thirds finished) and miscellaneous notes and memoirs.
   Like most of his longer writings, A Bucolic Poem, Wat’s “Midrash Cain,” is unfinished, missing the author’s final touch. Its editor Krzysztof Rutkowski compiled the present version from four sources, and we don’t know how much editing he did. Rutkowski wrote (‘Uwagi wydawcy’, Zeszyty Literackie 9/1985):

In Aleksander Wat’s archive there are four components of this difficult piece. First consists of 20 typed pages of thin paper corrected and numbered by the author. They contain the latest and the largest version of the poem, the one he worked upon for the longest time (this is evident from many cross-outs, additions, and comments made at different times). On the first page, near the handwritten title Poemat bukoliczny there is the crossed-out original title: Kain. The second one consists of nine very thin leaves of white onionskin, typewritten and with a few hand corrections and additions by the poet. They contain a draft of the whole poem in a much shorter version . . . Three very thin and crumbling leaves of onionskin that is closer to grey than blue . . . are typed; they are corrected and numbered by the author. At the top of the first page . . . there is a note, “To Cain”. It is the original title or, what is more likely, a kind of reference to different earlier fragments. It is impossible to establish which version (the “white” or the “grey “) is earlier; besides, each of them corresponds to a different part of the poem’s root version. The fourth and last element is a single typewritten page with
corrections in the author’s handwriting entitled (in translation):
‘Introduction to the epic Cain & Co. (many years in progress)’.

Rutkowski also explained the symbols he introduced in the text: [. . .] means an illegible word/s; [?] an uncertain rendering; [also] a word or its part inserted by the editor. These markings were retained in the
translation. The punctuation in the published version is the editor’s; in
this translation it has been further adjusted to conform with English
usage.

A Pastoral Poem
               Introduction to the epic Cain & Co.
               (in progress for many years)

Once when wandering around the city N***,
in the USA, I was struck by a neon sign.(1) It was on
the mezzanine level, stretching above an entire rather broad
sidewalk: a circle, rhythmically pulsating, spectacular,
braided from small vipers, each in a different colour,
only their eyes were alike, piercingly ruby, the eyes of a Chinese
dragon. This was in Chinatown, with all its kitsch.
An inscription was in the centre: KAIN & Ska., in Polish.
Don’t get carried away by your imagination, I cautioned myself,
remember, you’re in a city of sombre people! (In spite – or perhaps
              because of this? –
I love them. They’ve treated me better than anywhere else in the
                                                                                      world.
Perhaps they thought me an underdog, if so,
they were wrong. I hate dogs, I’m a cat person
and cats come to me, even wild cats. Only once,
on Aventine . . . but that’s a different story.)
Don’t get carried away by your imagination! – I repeated to myself.
I did.
And . . .
(But what do this introduction and sign have to do with the epic
               (in progress?) Nothing,
absolutely nothing. Except the title, which is inappropriate for
                an epic anyway.)

A pastoral poem

I don’t get it. I’m a clod, a boor,
what do I understand of the flowers of His thought?
An oaf so reeking of manure that animals in the woods
bump trustingly into me. I twist the legs of some,
for others, I clip wings; for birds, I mostly pluck the
eyes. One or the other: flying or looking.
If I were the Creator
I would assign one creature one
function, that’s it. But for man I’d give them all, for the sake of
                   the economy of wastefulness!
Real and imaginary ones. Natural and virtual, identical and
                   contradictory, etc., etc.
Man is the crown of creation!
Universal man, as the French padre
Teilhard de Chardin will some day put it. The king of nature. Oh,
these digressions, will I ever learn to think, methodically reason,
build an argument?
But how? I never went to school. A farmer, that’s what I am, an oaf.
       He made himself comfortable on the pile of rotting redwood
                 leaves. They say the smell of rot
improves thinking. He yawned,
stretched. Rotting-brown colours; since the expulsion,
it’s always autumn. People will call it winter, spring, summer and
                 autumn, again and again,
but this won’t be true, as with all human names.
Fine. Let’s try to understand this, put it in order.
Since the expulsion it’s always autumn, or more precisely, Fall;
a bit of psychoanalysis won’t hurt, not too little,
not too much. Patiently – whispered Cain, shading his eyes
from the too strong sun. He made himself comfortable like on
                 a therapist’s
couch. That’s because you already could have psychotherapy,
                                                                                dreams
                 had come into being.
Before there were no dreams. The first dream of humanity, at night,
no, not at night,
at the closing of the day, entre loup et chien,(2)
just after my brother’s killing which strangely
exhausted me. After a second a voice awoke me [. . .] How
much can you dream during a second? An entire life.
Now I must close my eyes, not resist the flow of thought,
memories, let the subconscious speak; my eyelids are so thick,
night is always under them. So this was the first dream of history,
when I killed my brother. Before this
there were no dreams. Before this
there were no dreams. How could there be? My father was made of clay,
my mother from a rib.
Clay, rib – but dreams?
Dreams, I tell you, came
from blood, the first
spilled blood.
Yield to the flow of dreams,
close your eyes. So there was water in that dream.
and nothing but water. (Water, water, water,
if only one inch of land, as the Polish poet Wat
will write.) And I feel it
with my ears, and through my ears.
It envelops my ears.
As if there were no other senses.
Say it’s as if I were under water.
Water was because of my ears,
and my ears were because of water.
My ears are ringing, fear rings into them.
So there was also fear? Of course.
I’d love to say
fear was always. But this isn’t true, either. It wasn’t before.
The angel’s sword was, the expulsion was, and toiling in sweat, you know, all those childhood frights like your Father’s stern look or punishing hand. But not Fear. Fear came to being in my dream, the first dream of humanity. [Was it] after I killed my brother Abel? Nascitur ex sangue Ultor,(3) or however the poet Virgil has it. Enough of quoting poets, I despise them. Why should they be respected? Back to the matter at hand. Back. To the river of my first memory. And to fear, the first fear that was born like a dream in a dream from the first blood spilled in history, back to the river of my first dream, the first – no joke! – dream of humanity. Zurück(4) to the river, to that river. And to fear. Nothing more, period. But there was something more. Something afterwards, but what? Something’s missing, but what? Let’s try Jung’s test. Water – ace of hearts. Fear – smear . . . Bullshit, I have a hole in my stupid head. Let’s breathe in, inhale the rotten air through the nose deep into the lungs, then breathe it out through the mouth. Let’s fix a dead motionless
stare at a shining point, for example this point of light glinting through
the brown-green sequoia leaves (after all, it is eternal autumn). Let’s
breathe deeply, alternating one nostril with the other. That’s easy, but darling, try to siphon 5 litres of water with your dick like any fakir! Oh, you can’t even dream of the things future generations will perform. Enough of sidetracks, no more!
   He turned over. Now he was lying on his side, like Goethe in his
well-known portrait in Italy, an elegiac Malte [?],(5) a sage-shepherdpantheist. Well he didn’t resemble Goethe at all, knotted, all muscly, covered in mud, sweaty, with the eyes of a murderer. A triumphant bird sang above him, and a freckled ladybug got entangled in the gray fur of his dishevelled beard.
   Shall we look at this in a different way? Let’s get back to water. Did it have a colour? For instance red? There was no red before my brother Abel’s killing. Certainly there was lots of light. And lots of darkness. They weren’t finished yet, hadn’t separated completely. Though they were on the waters, and in the water, their substances didn’t mix. Each had its own existence, they were neither mixed nor separated. Only water and fear. Oh how I wished for a clump of mud, a mouse, a plant, an echo. But nothing.
Of course, today I can make up something about that first dream of
humanity, anything you’d like. For example a fish like a mountain with knives instead of fins, knives instead of a moustache, and two bulging unblinking eyes that saw everything and remembered nothing. These eyes confirmed the existence of everything they saw through the momentary act of seeing; they reified it, certified and legalized like chief witnesses. And through the act of immediate forgetting they turned it into nothing, nullified what they had certified, murdered particular beings, murdered Everything (murdered metaphorically, in the imagination, not to be confused with real murder). “681. Kein Akt ist gewöhnlicher in uns – als der Annihilisationsakt. Eben so gewöhnlich ist der Positionsakt . . . Es ist eine Art von Zauberei, durch die wir die Welt umher nach unsrer Bequemlichkeit und Laune bestellen.”(6) To continue for another second (my stupid Lust zum fabulieren)(7). For example sailors will land on the back of this Leviathan mistaking it for land, finally dry land, oh joy, fair spark of the gods, as the ridiculous poet Schiller sings in the ridiculous symphony by the ridiculous Beethoven. They’re stupid, this will cause grave results, of course, but they won’t know it for
hundreds of thousands of years, the Leviathan is patient, only sometimes shakes off this or that one and [. . .] under its fins. A propos, I stole this image from an illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library (MS, Ashmole, 1511, fol. 86v. – God knows what this Ashmole means – perhaps Asmodeus?)(8). Damn it, this smell of rotting leaves makes me not think but babble. Stick to the subject, you old head. Back to water, to water (but not the Freudian one, the pre-natal symbol, etc., etc.)
   He suddenly fell asleep. But a few seconds later he woke up
refreshed saying, water, water that wants to turn into blood. Eureka!
Water, whose essence from the very beginning wanted to turn into blood is a puzzle for man who is 90% made up of water. His forefathers came from water, and in the end he will float down to water again, flushed by underground waters. These are foolish rationalizations, and here we have a mystical meaning. As usual, it’s all about my fascination with water. Though not with bloody water. As we said, the water was absolutely colourless, without even the colour of colourless objects. Light and darkness were there, of course, but they did not marry water, for instance they had nothing in common with the water that glimmers under the St Louis Bridge. Water that wants transfiguration into the dialectic of Nature; nothing in history will ever match the power of this want [. . .] – (my language is ugly, pretentious, ridiculous and boring, the language of a civilized boor, because civilization began after Abel’s killing, but more about this later). Beasts, they imagine blood is for nourishing their rotting flesh! As if pus, lymph, and other filth weren’t enough. Blood is for spilling. That’s Cain’s message for future generations. Therefore, is the only thing that matters water-blood? For everything else: birds, pterodactyls, minerals, bodies of young girls, frogs, the young moon over Marina Piccola, the twinkling city lights on the Seine, blue dragonflies over the S´’weder River, and the boring halfbaked dough that one day my many panegyrists will concoct in moments of poor philosophizing – all these are ephiphenomena. God knows what they will make of it, if one of these fellows, a fool, having crawled on all fours onto the rock in Préalpes de Grasse, yells over the mistral, calls me from there over the millions of years between us, wanting to have a philosophical-moral exchange! With me, Cain! They’ve lost the sense of the ridiculous, those late offspring, so arrogant and outrageous. But all these are epiphenomena, ephemeral states of transformation of water
into blood. The spilled blood. It soaks into the ground and reaches the underground waters, the sources, there exciting the limitless insatiable potentials of the will to transform into blood, the transfiguration, as they later will call it. For that purpose I Cain am Cain, so that it could come to pass in the first pre-figuration. That’s why I got my brother Abel, that’s why I loved him, oh, how much I loved him, deeply, more than myself, much more, since I never loved myself. It was quite the opposite, purely, not with an antagonistic feeling or resentment, not a Liebe Hass or whatever they call it, but with pure hatred that according to Empedocles was coupled at the beginning with Love. With Love that wasn’t yet. (Fear was.) But revenons à nos moutons,(9) as Stepan Trofimovich
Verchovensky will say(10). So, Fear and water. And hatred, and water wanting to turn into blood. With this one can develop a cosmogony. And for this craving I was just an agent, nothing more.
At last a moral problem arises.
If at the beginning there was the will of water to turn into blood, spilled blood, naturally, and I just was the first agent of this will and nothing more, then, first off, why punish me? Comrades, you really should put up a monument to me. Secondly, how can you punish me for murder if the law “You shall not kill” did not exist yet, and as everybody knows, law is not retroactive – unless we accept the prosecutor Vyshinsky’s(11) philosophy that time is an illusion, which indeed makes some sense. Okay, I can do without this argument. So, secondly, if we have Punishment, why is it so paradoxical? There are so many rational pragmatic punishments like Ixion’s wheel, Procrustes’ bed, Kolyma, Auschwitz, solitary confinement, etc., not mentioning the ones invented by poets. Or what Phorbas did, for example. He sat under an oak tree and hung the cut-off heads of his adversaries from the branches, those who sinned against him. Imagine Him, sitting under the large arch-oak of knowledge with the heads of sinners dangling from each branch. True, there was no punishment by death yet, but death already existed, exactly from the moment I murdered my dear brother Abel.
    Because of Abel’s killing,
    our chambers fill with Death.
    I cannot run from it.
    My life is agony.
    I will shake in agony
    with plague or leprosy,
    with tumour or thrombosis.
    Nobody gets just deserts
    save in Heaven, Hallelujah!
    Not even in Heaven!
Then secondly, if death came to being, it was for me, first of all and
above all for me (I want it so badly!). An eye for an eye was for me, and the right of tally, so reason says, and not just reason, but the soul, the pneuma as well. Instead, what we have here is delays, schemes, endless postponement; from now on in every generation man will be tormented by the puzzle, and in every generation the tormented will ask over and over, “Why do the just suffer and the wicked prosper? Unde our mala?” – until crazy with madness(12).
   Thirdly, why exactly did I kill my brother whom I loved, oh how I
loved him. Don’t think there was even a bit of envy in me because of his beauty! On the contrary, precisely because of that I wholeheartedly accepted
    my homeliness, so that its contrast
    reaffirmed his beauty, so that Caliban’s
    ugliness was a hymn to his beauty,
    the first human beauty, for I realize,
    needless to say, our parents weren’t pretty,
    they were heavy, not completely formed,
    of clay clumsily hardened,
    rough,
    hairy, purulent, snotty, drooling.
I repeat, why was it I who had to kill?
Couldn’t He wait a bit for my offspring?
He had just created man, and immediately pushed him
first to sin and punishment, and then in the very next generation,
to murder. Was it me because I was
the first disadvantaged one? Yes, I was the first
of these disadvantaged people who will be making
your futile revolutions.
Nor did I kill from envy,
a cluster of suppressed feelings, as the philosopher
Max Scheller will call it. For there was no envy between me
and my brother; it came to being only when He stood among us
               and between us.
When He accepted Abel’s offering, and rejected mine.
So didn’t envy come from Him and not from me? Only
after the killing did I become the patriarch
of the disadvantaged, disillusioned, all the frustrations; the whip
                                                           against
the chosen children of fortune, gods, or history.
It was a frustrating situation of one intrinsic frustration.
We all know this: the oppressed disadvantaged one becomes
               the oppressor himself,
and da capo(13). That’s how History got started. For history
also started with me, i.e. with the act of killing, before that
there was no history.
Let’s move on. I was the first farmer,
my brother Abel was the first herdsman (psychologically speaking
it should be the other way around, passons.)(14) He did not accept
                my offering
though/because it was the innocent fruit
of the soil, instead he accepted the offering of my little brother
Abel though/because it was the blood of the firstborn
of his flock. It’s clear (in the boorish mind
He gave me) that He principally
accepts only blood offerings. I, Cain,
was a farmer, so whose blood could I offer Him?
My brother’s, of course. You can’t expect me to steal
a calf from my brother, or a he-goat, or a cow. I’m a killer, not a thief.
              Killing Abel was
my offering, the offering I gave to Him, that’s how I understood it;
              I could have been
wrong, but the reasoning was correct. Whatever I had. That my
              reasoning wasn’t
completely wrong, see Abraham’s offering on
Mount Moriah!
Sure, sure, in the last second He turned it into a joke,
but Abraham, while walking up Mount Moriah
with his promised son and an offering knife did not
even suspect that a miracle would occur, he took it
seriously. Which means the custom of presenting God with offerings
of people was chose courante(15) even among the chosen people
for so many years – half a million, after me. Not to mention other
                                                                                     nations.
Even humanitarian Greek playwrights have many hints of it, even
                                                                                    Hesiod,
even the socialist-realist Homer; Pausanias will write about it quite 
                                                                                      openly. Not  to mention primitive civilizations. A hell of a lot.
     He turned again on the heap of rotten leaves. Did he fall asleep?
     He woke up, the night was moonless. Now, where did I stop?
                Oh, I know, the
incredible
bizarreness of my punishment. I don’t get it at all.
Let’s see, “What have you done? Do you hear the voice of
                your brother’s blood
crying to me from the ground? (I heard nothing, it did not cry,
                this was just a figure of
speech.) And now you are cursed
from the earth which opened her mouth to receive your brother’s 
                                                                                   blood”  (again rhetoric, ‘the earth’s mouth’, the first bad poetry!)
“You will be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth of the settled.”
(They’re so eager to banish you! While
a settled man has a great itch
to wander in order to affirm himself
in his settled state; if so, how much of a punishment is it?)
A dialogue ensued, “My punishment is greater
than I can bear (you’re supposed to say stuff like this). You drive me
from Your face, and I shall hide from You,
(could we wish for anything more?) and be a fugitive on the earth
of the settled; and whoever finds me can raise his hand on me
and slay me.” Here the most unexpected thing happened, the
                                                                          mystery of          mysteries,”Whoever slay Cain, vengeance shall be sevenfold (?!)
taken on him.” And He put a mark on my forehead, a sign so that
               no one would lift his
hand against me. How should one understand this? Maybe He
               thought, like Nietzsche,
like Seneca (see Consolatio a Marcia, XXII, 3) or like Kohelet, life
                                                                                                  is
               the worst of
punishments and it would be better
not to be born, or, being born,
to die at once? Would the act of Creation be an act of punishment [?]
Of punishing? But at the beginning He liked
everything. And He saw it was good, the Holy
Bible says, well before Cain had emerged from nothingness,
right after bereishis; reishis alone would do, what’s this be- about?
                                                                                           (16)
I don’t get it with my boorish
brains, obviously. A punishment combined with immunity, a taboo?
The killer’s the only person in history protected
from being killed. How many people would dream of such
                                                                      punishment!
Maybe to get this punishment they will kill their
brothers over and over. Not to kill, but to not be killed
they will race to see who gets whom first, watch each others’ hands,
movements, look each other in the eye, they won’t have a moment
of peace, a moment without fear, everyone will be scared of
               everyone, a father
of his son, until they erect a monument to Pavlik Morozov
in their neighbourhoods, a thoughtful monument to fearing
               your neighbour(17)
This monument will restore for them the sense of higher dignity.
Let’s go back to the beginning, a crime should be either met
               with punishment
or not. Either I Cain am guilty, even if without
guilt, and after a brief attempt at cheating (more about
this later), convinced about my guilt.
In this case, punish me equal to the extent and
degree of my guilt – and my crime was indeed monstrous,
with no extenuating circumstances, considering the beauty,
charm, naïveté, and innocence of the victim, such charm
that, if I hadn’t killed him I would have surely raped him, therefore
committing two stains hideous to His eyes, homicide
and incest. So charming that in fact,
he Abel, provoked me to one and the other.
So it was in fact an extenuating circumstance. Back to the matter
                at hand, the river
of my first dream. Back to it, I felt better there,
                                                I had more space.
    What was I talking about again? So it was punishment-notpunishment. Why? As a prevention programme, socialist pedagogy. May the dishevelled slob with hungry eyes wander around, a vagabond, reiser, clochard, urke, bezprizornyi, with a mark burning on his low forehead, “Untouchable”. So that others can see where disobedience and indecency lead, so that they won’t slay each other like praying mantises, bucks, dogs fighting over a bone. Of course they do it in mating or from hunger, whereas the king of creation is always prone to murder. But at the end what difference does it make if they slay each other? Let them be. Is there
anything more simple than to take another clump of clay and breathe on it? Since when don’t we like experiments? Sorry, I’m a clod, I don’t do irony well. Idiots, they think blood is for feeding their flesh. Idiots, pus would be enough, or snot, or dung that fertilizes your potatoes. You were given blood so that you would spill it. Not slyly, but openly so that “the earth’s mouth” (what a crude image!) can drink it and cry upon the heavens. It doesn’t even think of crying. (Nothing cries. There’s nothing but silence, the most real thing on earth.) And it will be like this until he will come who will be the Cain for his Abel and the Abel for his Cain, and he will be killed not at once, but will die from dusk to night before giving up Abel’s ghost. Then that which had been will be again. But this is still far away from now, this singular moment when guilt and punishment, death and history will cease to exist, distant, suspended; and afterwards
there will be again so distant, so eternally distant. Although this
moment, this only moment, [. . .] results, will never ever cease to exist.
   Grosso modo,(18) boorishly – he said after a pause and turned again on his back, staring at the stars – all of history will occur between those who kill and those who are killed. The struggle for survival, for territory, class struggle, or whatever they will call it. But since affirmation precedes negation there must have been a “You shall kill” before “You shall not kill.” By the way, note that seven of the ten commandments are negative. Again, I’m leading to the fact that history began with Cain’s crime. Before that we had the kingdom of Nature. Natura naturans, still not naturata(19). Good, some smartass can say, Cain killed Abel who/because he killed an ox that/because it killed (drank) water, that/because it killed fire, that/because it swallowed the cane, that/because with it Cain killed Abel, to paraphrase the old Jewish Haggadah(20). Smartasses
are fond of little loops of snakes swallowing their tails, corsi ricorsi, etc(21). But firstly, Abel did not kill the ox, he brought it as an offering; it’s a semantic error, the original flaw of human language that is ill suited for precise thought. Secondly, he did not kill, I was the first who did, and be what it may, I’m not giving up my rights to the original killing. Secondly, [sic] I killed not with a cane but a chopped flint since there were no other tools yet; as I said, civilization has started with me. It was said that killing Abel gave birth to civilization, and to history, and to death, and to dreams, and to fear. Besides, as everyone knows, a transition or leap from one Kingdom of things and states to another not always and not fully depends on the changes in them, but on the place, meaning, and value they acquire in the new general configuration of things and states. Thus Abel’s killing of the ox wasn’t murder; it did not
have the value and meaning of murder, though if we consider only the factual side, it was undeniably murder. This is what language is for, despite its lack of precision, for establishing this distinction. And by establishing and expressing this distinction, to endow it with the quality of essentiality; hence the offering by killing an ox was the ox’s
sanctification, not murder. Wasn’t it a natural and necessary act in the design of universal harmony and balance between God, man, and the well-balanced world of flora and fauna? Certainly, there were all these little games, original sin, my father’s stupidity, my mother’s greed, the tree of knowledge (by the way, Zeus dealt better with this knowledge: he swallowed Métis, Athena’s mother – Mhti~ is advice or wisdom – so that she got stuck in him and told him good from bad), the deception, the snakes. I can’t deny it, but they were for the sake of harmony. They added energy and drama, inspiration and diversity, without them everything would have grown sluggish, drowned in eternal boredom. Harmony burst when I, Cain killed my brother Abel, i.e. when not only a change of meaning occurred, but a new fact [. . .] revolutionary. “Where is Abel your brother?” I was squatting in the brushwood, not because of fear yet, though it already existed even though it had only just appeared in my dream, but because I was simply scared of the father’s punishing hand (bourgeois semanticists, learn to distinguish these!). I understood He didn’t like what I did. Firstly, Abel was His protégé; secondly, He had warned me – in obscure words, but unambiguously, as it came out afterwards, “Why are you so upset?” He asked me shortly before the killing, “Why are you pouting? If you blagonadiozhnyi(22) you wouldn’t lower your head but walk with your head up.” I swear, I wasn’t angry at all, and if I walked around with my head down, who didn’t since the ground was full of snakes, amphibians, huge insects, and all kinds of creepy-crawlies. It’s the same way as when you ask a calm person like your wife, why are you angry? Even if she’s not, you drive her crazy with this. What a vulgar example.
   So He warned me, but why? He could have prevented it altogether, not let it happen. Maybe it was supposed to be like, “Do what you want. I’m not interfering, I gave you free will, but if you do this you will regret your free will.” Or maybe – if not for this warning, “I want to try you like I will try Abraham later “ – maybe I would never have to kill my brother? It’s a kind of smerdyakovshina(23). “Am I my brother’s keeper?” I answered from the ferns, still squatting and not getting up. Note this “Am I”. I did not say I’m not, etc. but I dodged it even if I knew He knew, etc., etc. That was the beginning of the endless history with the police and doprosy(24).
From then on the arme Menschenkinder(25) will always be in some
interrogation. That’s how lies start, initially shyly. “Where?” “Am I?”
I know but pretend I don’t, and He knows but still asks, and then you swim in pure lies like fish in water, with lovely splashes and squeals. Thus as you see, lies and police, which is history, started the moment when Cain killed Abel.
   Death and the earthquake in Messina, and Brigitte Bardot, and
growing corn, and beautiful dragonflies screwing upon the S´ ’weder
River – all of this started with the megalomaniac Cain? – a smartass
would ask. You see, yes, my dear; and he was a megalomaniac, you’re right about that too. Only you’re wrong about this screwing, but more about this later. A megalomaniac, simply because then everything was mega-, tigers had not yet shrunk into cats, dinosaurs into the lizard that you scared with your careless glance from the marble balustrade in your villa in Settignano when it lazily basked in the sun. Look how it scampers off under the vine leaves while you, dizzy with the fragrance of the grapes ripening in the sun, catch in your thin nostrils [. . .] a whiff of roses from the garden as you look now at your refined fingers on the Neapolitan tufa and then at the golden shade of the mist over Arezzo, everything in the hot vibration of happiness. Oh give me a break. Well I am an aesthete too, don’t forget, darling; aesthetics also started with me. My expelled parents saw their awkward nakedness and covered it out of moral, not aesthetic shame. It was only when I saw Abel’s beauty turning in an instant into greenish meat, I immediately recognized ugliness and beauty, my own hideousness and the beauty of the landscape; that explains my stupid remark about Settignano.
As for the screwing dragonflies,
oh, then everything
was screwing, everywhere, in the air and
on the land and in the water. One big
pan-screwing. This wasn’t
like making love quite yet, but a frantic
dance of procreation, one unceasing ecstasy
common for all, for if they
stopped, it was just
to start
again, that
makes sense.
The endless
hymn of praise to the glory of Creation.
First they humped without producing offspring,
but after original sin, it toook off . . . !
The libido procreandi(26) and the proliferation took off,
you shall screw and endlessly multiply
at a hyper-geometric rate. Maybe,
maybe Cain’s unleashing the chain
of killing was to be the antidote, because soon there would be no
                                                                                        room
left for people, spiders, mammoths, infusoria, etc.
Wasn’t killing Abel a hygienic act,
population control? But why? Didn’t He accomplish the same thing
later in a simpler way, with the flood? That’s it! Well,
the first attempt didn’t work, the tribe of Cain
was too lazy to murder, so he invented
a more effective means, the deluge. But the swarms of mantises,
                 locusts and ants will
come again
and will make the defiled earth home.
If this was so, it would explain much, including the mild
punishment. But why all these complications? Making people
                                                                           believe,          arme Menschenkinder, that having offspring is the greatest
happiness while the best is not to be born at all, and being
              born, etc . . .,
and graft this onto eternal nostalgia for the lost
delights of screwing forever? What about Your disgraceful attitude,
              for instance,
towards that good old man who was just scared
to leave this world without offspring, well? You deceived him,
              provided him with a
descendant in his old age,
and then sent him to the summit of a mountain with a cord, a knife,
and a bunch of wood. In fear and trembling Abraham raises his knife
over his only son – enough. Søren
Churchyard will describe this better. Though most certainly he was
wrong, because the Allmacht der Ideen(27) is not in fear and trembling,
but in trusting, in Stalinist obedience.
But in my time ideas weren’t around yet,
honestly speaking there were no such things. There were
              concrete individual
beings not conceptualized yet: a dinosaur, a spring,
a redwood, a piece of gneiss. Only after Abel’s killing – ideas, 
                                                            symbols,                               for example after Abel’s death making love became a symbol
              (or an imago,
if you prefer) of killing, but that’s beside the point.

   He felt refreshed, rested after sleep, energetic. He looked at the stars, and all of a sudden, without even realizing it, started talking to them, “The egotist’s megalomania, yes my dear, this too appeared after Abel’s killing. Before, there was Cain, Abel and the two old folks. But not I-you because there was no mine-yours. Only, “where is your brother?” First your, then mine, then one’s own – that’s how it started, personalities and the cults of personalities and nations. Then I – personally [. . . ] – anti [. . . ] – you. And so it started. Paashlo . . .(28)
   What started? Everything everything everything. Our dearest
escape from nothing nothing nothing. That so neatly swallowed my
brother Abel. Let’s go back to making love. Everybody screwed
everybody else unceasingly, almost bodilessly, just like dragonflies but more transparently, and dragonflies were still large and so transparent on the very edge of bodilessness, with only the faintest coloration providing them bodies, merely a beginning, a sketch of the later universe of colours. Upon the face of the waters. Everything got baser and smaller when it proliferated, a simple economy of living space, but that wasn’t enough to stop this procreation volcano. But fixing it with killing when it would be so easy to introduce birth control? True, that’s the economy of wastefulness. Still, from His vast closet of imagination He could have picked up a hundred better things! For example something finite, no birth and no death. Such and such number of you, and that’s it. True, without death everything would become sluggish, that’s right. So what about starting the whole thing again before the sea annihilated everything? Can’t complain about the shortage of invention. Can’t complain about the shortage of clay. Breathe once and a new kadmos(29) stands before us, better done, more obedient. Death is tied with birth.
Salome interfectrix, as the apocrypha will say.(30) He was neither a foreman nor an economist but an artist, and death was a means against the boredom of existence and entropy of desire. But the killing . . . not to mention the fact that He could wait, there was an abundance of reptiles and flies, but only four people. Why would He [. . .] kill at the beginning of history. Yet even that killing didn’t work, and He had to resort to a flood. If ambition didn’t allow You to admit the product wasn’t good enough since it was said “And saw it was good”, then perhaps a simple burning breath would have done, as if by accident, and then just breathe again; no big deal. But maybe the number of breaths was limited by fate to say 99999 times, and He already had breathed these billions of times, and the results were worse and worse, or horrors, always the same. Adam always ate from the tree of knowledge, Cain always killed Abel, and for the billionth time in a row Abraham dragged himself on the same
donkey to the top of the same (even the name was the same, God!) Mount Moriah, horrors, enough, have mercy! Or else every subsequent breath was more teratologic, more and more degenerate, and finally He gave up, let it be as it was. The lesser evil. And He appointed me, Cain, as the garbage collector for his failed opus? Why not the other way around, why not Abel? Abel was his favourite. To let the favourite be killed, and laufen His disliked son lassen?(31) What a perversity of feelings, this smacks of Marquis de Sade or Sacher Masoch. The whole vast world without His only favourite, what a horror! (For He hated my parents too.) Did He want to punish Himself, perhaps because of His flawed product? This doesn’t hold up either. Not wanting someone dear to your heart in the whole vast universe? Just like a mother fed up with family life drowning her kids?
    Is it that I’m an instrument of His loathing towards His work? You’re by definition unfailingly perfect, and is everything You do rubbish You despise? Is this simply a botched job that needs constant fixing, improvements and then desperate removal of these improvements, over and over again? Retracting your always failed attempts? Did You entangle yourself in this dialectic – from thesis to antithesis to worse? Don’t You have enough power to create better? Nonsense. Are you so perfect that all you create has to be less perfect in order to make the perfect perfect by the fact of its very imperfection? But if this is so, whence loathing? It is an imperfect feeling of someone imperfect towards something less perfect but cannot be a feeling of the Perfect. Because it casts phlegm on perfection and deperfects it. Or maybe You are a perfection that always and [. . .] longing for degradation, a fall; then this whole affair with me is just a distasteful staging of Your sick desire. Let’s go back to the beginning. Why are You punishing me anyway if in
this case, as much as any other, I was just Your instrument, and why this crap about free will? Unbecoming to both of us. I’m not complaining, maybe I have even become fond of this game, but I want to know everything, understand everything. The religion you demand of me is not the beginning but the end of knowledge. As the poet Novalis will say, “448. Alle historische Wissenschaft strebt mathematisch zu werden. Die mathematische Kraft ist die ordnende Kraft. Jede mathematische Wissenschaft strebt wieder philosophisch zu werden, animiert oder rationalisiert zu werden – dann poetisch, endlich moralisch, zulezt religiös” (Philosophische Fragmente)(32). I want to know even if I will suffer from this knowledge more than I suffer now; because I suffer, oh, I do.
The cries of my offspring
reach even here, to my rock.
They wake up to their day
full of cries and whims.
The offspring, but whom do they come from?
The Holy Scripture speaks of three of us,
my parents and I, and much later
Seth. Then where did I find a wife?
Not incest. The rabbis will explain,
from a she-devil. Not true. Simply,
I too took a clump of clay and breathed on it.
And it worked, beyond expectation! The eon’s echo was still in me,
and I was the first sculptor, oh yes, believe me my dear.
Only your sculptors can’t breathe life.
And what I breathed out! Read the description
in Machiavelli’s letter to
Guicciardini, of that beauty with whom he had intercourse in
pitch darkness; compared to mine she was
an Egyptian beauty. What could I do, my breath was already
bad, after the killing my teeth
started rotting, my stomach
was ruined, I had constant hiccups; that’s because the process
of aging had already come into being, death had already come
               into being, death was already
in me, and my massive bone frame
was already but a skeleton.
So my wife wasn’t beautiful even if I am an aesthete.
Passons, she was the mother of my sons Menoch, Irad, and
                                                                           Mechuil.              Suddenly he felt drawn to people. But he suppressed it quickly. He
convinced himself that he felt loathing towards them, towards his ugly
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who built huts,
smithies, and in the evenings danced to a lute, fought, squealed, cried
and laughed. But the truth is he doesn’t like to show the mark on his
forehead, while it’s not safe to cover it in his offspring’s settlements with so many good-for-nothings around. Still it’s good to look at them from above, in the end they’re my children, bone of my bone and blood of my blood. Also, per procura(33) of Abel, my brother whom I murdered out of envy that the Lord accepted his offering and not mine. Some of them practise throwing spears, others make baskets, throw pots, trade in the market, and shoe horses. Their women dance at the bonfire, mothers feed babies, quarrel, and their squealing, their unbearable squealing reaches all the way up here, youngsters run from an angry old man, captains order trumpeters to play the wake-up call, soldiers go plunder and rape farmers’ daughters, and the king’s daughter with her maids approaches the well, fishermen throw their nets into the sea with swarming proliferating fish, a cup circles among the guests, and also a
knife, a blacksmith sharpens a blade in his smithy, boon flies from the
spinning wheel in a mother’s hands, a stranger is crucified on a hill, a
cleric slays a lamb on a sacred stone, naked children and dogs run
around in the crowd, a prostitute with big eyes stands like a tower at the crossroads, her great hair rises, her combs made of tortoiseshell and mother of pearl, behind the wall a farmer leads a fat ox with the plough, on a tower an astrologer composes a horoscope, it is pleasant, the earth is tended in a human way, the earth of the settled. But I am an eternal exile on the earth of the settled.
He dozed off. When he woke up
an earthworm stood before him. It shook as if doing the twist.
It was slender and pretended to be a snake.
It was all flesh, naked, unprotected
(except for hair), pinkish-yellowish, defenceless.
A drop of moisture
was on the slimy surface, between the hairs.
It was scared, obviously, uncertain if before it lay
a beam, a strange stone, a carnivorous body
or a worm sick with bloat,
or a Mystery; all its cartilage
crunched, this probably woke
Cain . . . All eyes, it stared
at that unknown thing not knowing
if edible, safe. To crawl up the unknown, to taste it with a tooth
                would be an exhilarating
pleasure, a dangerous life
for the earthworm. I don’t murder, it used to say with pride to its
                children,
I feed on what others
have murdered. Poor thing, what went on in it
when Cain lifted his heavy eyelids and it saw
(with all its length, and it was long, 3 metres and 28 centimetres)
his eyes. It froze. Suddenly it fell
to the ground which never before seemed
so motherly, mother earth, mat’
zemla syraia(34) this bizarre phrase
travelled from it to people, from the earthworm of the dawn of
history.
Cain felt very tired,
he carelessly shook off the grass and ants, took his stick and started
walking.
It was well into the day.
In the distance the cries of his offspring faded.