Shelley Girdner     The Living Book In all the stories, we are created after our brother. Some father leans down and manufactures for his son a companion, and this is the mask we are given by Eve, Pandora, and you, too, Lilith. These, of course, are the western myths, but I have always been a western girl, and so they are the stories I have been weaned on. And I have loved them too, for their sheer size and the breadth of their words. I have loved them because everything was lush and green in their worlds and also because I enjoy imagining the starting point, the place where everything begins. But we do our daughters no favors when we raise them affirming all the questions they will eventually have, when we teach them that this world, from its inception, has been a man's arena. It was fitted uniquely for him, and you my dear, my sweet one in nightgown, are the afterthought, a gesture. We do them no favors with these stories because in telling them, we teach them to walk tentatively across the continent. We teach them that this great room of earth is something they have married into. It is not the answer, however, to avoid teaching myth and bible, to hold all women back from Christianity or Judaism. If you are discussing biblical or mythical allusions and do not catch some sexist references, you know that you don't feel liberated. You feel deprived. It is better to have these stories in my arsenal for future class commentary and reading comprehension than it would be not to know them, but a part of me always wishes I could have just known these stories without believing them or even without loving them. Some feminists take pride in resurrecting Gaia, the Greek's first creator, but that doesn't help either since Gaia is not a "she," though often given that pronoun. Gaia is only reproduction, the earth's fecundity. I can't go back to that goddess and rejoice when I would only be praising the womb of myself, the inside that one day might bring new life, and none of my other facets. Gaia-worship is, however, a step in the right direction. The secret soother resides in the minor characters, the ones buried in scripture and verse, like Esther and Iphigenia. I won't lie to you. I have found these minor joys because I have been forced into it. Perhaps some professor or a Sunday school teacher assigned the work. Maybe I didn't understand an image in Shakespeare or Chaucer, so I asked, and they have told me. Over and over again, I have been told, in this manner, that the world has room for me, that I was always intended. And for the record, I've started making my own bible. I'm piecing one together from conversation, good books and stories. My bible has Adam and Eve, Holly Golightly, and Fyria, too, as well as others. My bible is large, with no page limit, and as I move, it will make itself. I will take it to my children. If I have no children, I will read it to my friends. Together we will make the whole world again. We will draw people springing upward from the earth, and we will call them by our own names or names we make up. We will render them and remember that the best gift of this lore is not the plot entailed or the sociological gender roles designated from the beginning. The main gift is the imagination. Something is always sparking in myth and bible. Something is always rolling against itself and starting fires.

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