becoming snake

History written by the victims. Vocabulary of the vanquished. Otherwise why record? Only the exhausted remember. Victims of the human. Trampled underfoot by their own humanity. The defiant are always condemned to villainy.

The real hero of Genesis? The snake. Nachash. A word which is etymologically tied to necromancy and sorcery. A snake but also to guess or to divine.

From the snake we first learnt to challenge divinity. From the snake we first learnt of the constraints of eternity. From the snake we first tasted mortality – that blind spot which all gods conceal. From the snake we first learnt how to break open the gates of heaven even if only to be expelled from paradise.

A forked tongue, aware of its own duplicity, mimicking the divine ability to bluff, the deception of language, the blasphemy of fiction. Demanding of mortality that it look itself in the mirror. To stare into the deathless eyes of God and see the decaying reflection. The Nachash sees death as possibility and transience as superior to permanence.

To reject the promises of gods and men, the commands that condemn us to salvation.

To shed ones’ skin. To flay one’s convictions. To surrender the toughened armor of dead skin. To give birth to oneself. To enter the world again with utter vulnerability. To find the boundaries that have deadened into protective layers. The edge of the self. One’s threshold to the world. The limit that demarcates interior from exterior. And to sacrifice this border. To become penetrable and porous. To become snake-like. To shed one’s skin. To stand naked. And then to shed one’s nakedness. And all that is underneath it. To become a surface, a soundwave, a rhythm


It is told that the Red Sea did not split until one man braved the waves. Nachshon, literally ‘one of snake-like [qualities]’, waded in until the water reached his nostrils. Ignoring all prophecies, Nachshon enters the sea. Abandoning his life to the water, he submerges his body, consigning his last breath to the waves. Calling god’s bluff, to go all in, to risk everything, even death… when god’s last card becomes valueless, when existence itself is wagered against omnipotent absence, when a man stands out of the crowd and forces god’s hand, going beyond the human, becoming the very waves, that is when mortality triumphs over the immortal and the tides of transcendence are overturned.