boredom kills beauty

I saw: “Adam and Eve (Still)”.
A movie out of Mexico.
The premise:
After having tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (Eve was framed, by the way) Adam and Eve are doomed to live eternally in the world outside the Garden of Eden…
Present day Mexico City. Adam–sporting an amazing Breughel tattoo–and Eve wander the city, barely speaking or registering anything. “Boredom kills beauty,” they say. Adam hits the disco and participates in sordid sex triangles to pass the time; Eve has become a prostitute. They are so uninterested with life that they allow others to mete out punishments on their bodies.

This brought up self-flagellation for me. And self-mutilation. What is it that makes religious zealots and teenage girls–otherwise at opposite spectrums–both cut/hurt/bruise/scar themselves?

It’s rapture, I believe. The want for rapture. But it doesn’t come spiritually, no. It’s chemical. What chemical in the brain can it be that’s triggered for the ascetics and the angsty? Endorphins, perhaps. Adrenaline? I know very little about body chemistry but it seems to make sense to me that the brain–with its ability to shock to numbness the pain of a tortured man, and give a woman the might to pull an automobile off her husband– could easily create the transcendent state of rapture.

Moments I’ve felt rapture in my life:
1. after laughing so hard I got light-headed,
2. while rolling on ecstasy in college,
3. sex?
Not often enough, I see. So maybe the preachers and the pubescents are on to something. I just asked Mark what he thinks. He says, “Either we’re underestimating teenage girls, or we’re overestimating religious zealots.”

So I arrive at a personal kick-starter, a seedling of thought, an idea cultivator to break up the white page: Write about two opposing characters that act out of the same motivation.