The Beginning of the World

by Scott Cairns

In the midst of His long and silent observation of eternal presence, during which He, now and again, would find His own attention spiraling in that abysmal soup, God draws up what He will call His voice from that unfathomable slumber where it lay in that great, sepulchral Throat and out from Him, in what would thereafter be witnessed as a gesture of pouring, falls the Word, as a bright, translucent gem among primal turbulence, still spinning. Think this is evening? Well, that was night. And born into that turmoil so bright or so dark as to render all points moot, God’s pronouncement and first measure.

But before even that original issue, first utterance of our Great Solitary, His self-demarcation of Himself, before even that first birth I suspect an inclination. In God’s center, something of a murmur, pre-verbal, pre-phenomenal, perhaps nothing more disturbing to the moment than a silent clearing of the hollowed throat, an approach merely, but it was a willingness for something standing out apart from Him, if nonetheless His own.

Still, by the time anything so weakly theatrical as that has occurred, already so many invisible preparations: God’s general availability, His brooding peckishness, an appetite and predilection–even before invention–to invent, to give vent, an all but unsuspected longing for desire followed by the eventual arrival of desire’s deep hum, its thrumming escalation and upward flight into the dome’s aperture, already open and voluble and without warning giving voice.

But how long, and without benefit of Time’s secretarial skills, had that Visage lain facing in our direction? What hunger must have built before the last repast? And, we might ask, to what end, if any? And if any end, why begin? (The imagination’s tedious mimesis of the sea.) In the incommensurate cathedral of Himself, what stillness?

What extreme expression could prevail against that self-same weight? And would such, then, be approximate to trinity?  An organization, say, like this: The Enormity, Its Aspirations, Its Voice. Forever God and the mind of God in wordless discourse until that first polarity divests a shout against the void. Perhaps it is that first resounding measure which lays foundation for every flowing utterance to come. It would appear to us, I suppose, as a chaos of waters–and everything since proceeding from the merest drop of it.

So long as we have come this far, we may as well continue onto God’s initial venture, His first concession at that locus out of time when He invited the absence of Himself, which first retraction avails for all the cosmos and for us. In the very midst of His unending wholeness He withdraws, and a portion of what He was He abdicates. We may suppose our entire aberration to proceed from that dislocated Hand, and may suppose the terror we suspect–which lingers if only to discourage too long an entertainment–to be trace and resonance of that self-inflicted wound.

So why the vertiginous kiss of waters?  Why the pouring chaos at our beginning, which charges all that scene with…would you call it rapture? Perhaps the dawning impulse of our creation, meager as it may have been, pronounced–in terms we never heard–God’s return.

Read at St. Lydia’s on August 15