Alright, we just received a new volume in our Tree of Life library. 

This time it is leather bound volume. A skin colored, leather bound volume of average size, to be precise. The leather is worn and rough - it must be the oldest book in our library so far? As I take it off the shelf I realize that my stroll through the library brought me to the shelf of Netzach. The hebrew name of the fourth Sephira is engraved in deep dark letters on a copper shield at the top... I open the book and it releases a strange, sweet smell. As I flip through the pages I see the chapters flying by. I stop at the first page; it's a novel released only a couple of years ago. Under the title "The Gargoyle" I read the first line: "Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love." I wonder how the leather can be so worn even though the book isn't really older than three years? Maybe it was bound in leather that was already old and used - but who would make the effort? Or maybe it's from an animal with thin skins...? I turn the page and look at the inner binding. At the bottom left corner I see a single black flame printed on the vellum. Beside it in small capital letters it reads: "Skin donated by   Andrew Davidson ." 

::

The Gargoyle is a book about a porn-star who loses most of his body skin in a car accident. He awakens in a hospital and realizes he lost his entire life. His past, his present and future. He is bound to a bed, drugged up to the eyeballs with morphia in order to survive the pain rushing through what little is left of his body - peeled from its skin, its body hair, its lips, its genitals and nipples and ears. A rose-colored, broken human shell - unable to grab on to or let go of life... Slowly a clinical routine of painful treatments emerges from the ashes of his phoenix bed which chains him to an empty nothingness, an agony in slow motion, one day at a time.

Only that one day he awakens and finds a woman next to his bed. She smiles and says she has waited for him all her life. He cannot smile back but only show his lip-less teeth and silently condemn the maniac that must have stolen away from the psychiatric unit next door...

What emerges between the two of them, chapter by chapter, is one of the most moving stories about love and life I have read in a long time. It's a journey as far into the distant past as it is into what little is left of a future. It's also a rediscovery of the roots of life - the ones that go deep and survive the fire storms. The ones that go unnoticed by the the wind and flames, the ones that stay quietly connected to the dark waters in the ground. The roots that still drink from wells underground while all leaves and buds, all bark and branches have fallen for the flames. What you find in this little book is a story about the forces of Netzach in their purest form, about the victory of life while two persons, hand in hand, walk down the spiraling stairs of death.

Hate it or like. Throw it into the flames or have it bound in leather. Here is to all the fires that teach us dying - here is to all the wells sustain us unnoticed. Here is to faith in the forces of life and to the secrets that Netzach that teach us. Here is to all the little stories, the unnoticed events, the forgotten encounters. Their sleeping powers captured in seeds, deep underground. 

::

I close the book and put it back... - Boy, this shelf will need some shallow entertainment next. Maybe I should consider putting up some porn? Forces of life, Venus and fertility after all? We can still get it leather bound.