Tales of creation vary according to time and place in any given universe, and
yet, when you hear those dusty tales it is the similarities between them that strike you
the most, and from these similarities we assume that there must at least be a grain of
truth shared amongst our stories of beginning. For example, most such tales share an
idea or thought of conception that is usually expressed as an action of some form of
anthropomorphic being. The lists of creators are legion.
In the Bakuba account the Earth was originally nothing but water and
darkness, ruled by the giant Mbombo. This giant, after feeling an intense pain in his
stomach one day, vomited up the sun, moon, and stars. For the Maasai of Kenya
humanity was fashioned by the creator from a single tree or leg which split into three
pieces. Beyond the rising Maasai sun the Ainu people of Hokkaidō tell of six heavens
and six hells where gods, demons, and animals lived. In the highest of these heavens
lived Kamui, the creator god, and his servants. In the bloody annals of Aztec
narratives creation proceeds with an Earth mother, Coatlique, the Lady of the Skirt of
Snakes.
Not all tales of creation begin with the action or thought of some vaguely
familiar being. Although some philosophers of origin may hear such abstracts as
nothing more than a little local dissent or muddled thinking, nonetheless these
different tales can be just as powerful. In earlier Vedic pondering on origin, the
universe emanated from a cosmic egg, while some Daoists interpreted creation as a
series of philosophical steps; The Way gave birth to Unity, Unity gave birth to
Duality, Duality gave birth to Trinity, and Trinity gave birth to the myriad creatures.
Buddhism, however, largely ignores the question. The Buddha is quoted as
saying something like, “Conjecture about the world is an unconjecturable that is not to
be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation to anyone who
conjectured about it.”
Allowing for the unknowable and the agnostic, tolerating the conflict between
the absolute void and the essential necessity of beginning, and forgetting for a
moment the clamour of insistent insanity that underpins all of our attempts to
understand anything beyond the obvious demarcation lines of our own fragile and
brief existence, the tale that follows may also turn out to be as much a truth about
creation as any other...
It is a commonly held belief that where there is light there must be darkness,
that forces of life are matched by those of death and that in all things there is a
balanced equation of equals and opposites. It stands to basic human reasoning given
that we as conscious beings experience everything through a beginning and an end. A
human child is born, erupts through puberty, mellows in maturity, fades with age, and
eventually returns to the dust of death. A washing machine rises bright and shining
from its packaging, suffers a decade of high-speed revolutions and hot water
calcification, and finally returns back to its constituent elements through recycling or
decomposition deep beneath the gull strewn summits of landfill.
This limitation to life is, of course, entirely human-centric and bears no real
scrutiny when we consider the true faith inherent in origin. What was out there before
Big Bang? The question is answerable only by an apparently endless circling of the
square root of our own experience or by accepting that there is an absolute version of
an almost impossible conceptual device; nothing.
The deity in question in this story was and is a small God. He, She or It has by
simply existing removed the possibility of nothing, but equally none of the
fundamental questions about beginning are answered by this God’s existence. We
have to face the simple fact that there was, all along, something.
In this particular beginning there was darkness, an almost void, an incomplete
essence, and, for the sake of simplicity, Smith, our quietly drifting creator, really
rather liked the darkness. Smith was the way and the meaning of nothing. Smith was
thought without action, the procrastination at the very start of things. Smith liked to
drift in the great expanse of un-place, whiling away the immeasurable aeons of non-
time by contemplating the vagueness at the heart of all things. Smith thought about
nothing.
Smith was not by nature solitary, rather it was simply the case that He had
always been alone. Smith had what we might recognise as thoughts, but He had no
shapes upon which to hang them. Smith was unable to fashion physical angels and
demons as companions because Smith had never imagined imagination. In effect
Smith could draw like an eighteen month old infant. He had no control over the
heavenly pencil. All that Smith was aware of was the equivalent of a cosmic itch, and
he endured the madness of the itch because he was impotence personified, that
impotence inherent in not quite understanding the concept of the scratch, Smith
unwittingly agreed with the future earthly Buddha in that He found the unformulated
conjecture of eternal peace to be vexatious and maddening.
There is a moment in every natural state, a moment before the reaction, when
forces are marshalled, reach a critical point and then tip towards change. Across the
far flung boundaries of the void Smith finally determined that the endlessly irritating
sensation that underlay the void was deserving of a name. Smith thought through the
very fabric of time and finally, in a moment of naturally divine inspiration, He
invented the word. Smith called the itch Silence.
Silence was the first form, the first shape upon which Smith could hang an
idea, and He marvelled at the universe that crept into view with the naming of this
first idea. Silence was a perfection of void and nothing. Smith, using a modern
colloquial term, loved silence but with love comes an inevitable discontent. Even in
the vast emptiness of Smith-time the itch eventually returned, and Smith was forced to
concede a fundamental philosophical point.
In order that Smith might truly enjoy the silence, in the same way that a man
might enjoy the silence of a house in the early morning before the space in the world
is filled with voices, He had to accept the fact that He, She or It was conceptually
awake. To love silence, Smith realised, meant that as the creator He had become
aware of self and place and time, and of the difference between places and times and
selves, none of which could ever have existed in a true void.
Smith thought, and in thinking proved Descartes right, and therein lay a
problem. He was alone. He saw darkness. He experienced silence. He felt need. Smith
wanted something, but had no means to express such things in any sense other than
silence and darkness, and so Smith thought un-shapes out of the fraying circular
chords of absolute tranquillity.
Beyond the confines of earth-time, way out beyond the fringes of the universe
where dark matter falls forever, Smith thought about nothing, taking slow but gigantic
steps towards origin, and in thinking, even on a universal scale, Smith began to
acquire the very first trappings of personality. Universal silence had a shape and the
simple fact that Smith could hang thoughts from this shape inevitably lead Him to
choose particular ways of thinking. Smith preferred those thought-shapes that pleased,
that scratched the cosmic itch most effectively, and so He expressed thought in a set
of patterned, reactive ways. Smith started to become predictable.
Predictability was, thought Smith in a broad and universal manner, a good
thing. Smith preferred to consider a thought from a familiar set of view points, rolling
it across the heavens like thunder, looking at all those aspects of silence and darkness
that reinforced the heavens as imagined by a responsible God. No matter how hard He
tried to order creation, however, he continually discovered unwelcome shades of
black within the unlimited spaces of the void, and in so doing He revealed even more
of a personality. Smith liked some shades of nothing more than others. Smith put
away the shades that displeased, and so came the formation of ideas that later we
would call Good and Bad.
Unlike our earthly translators of the divine, unlike our latter day messengers of
God, who know the way and speak the truth in our narrowly confined little world,
Smith continually refashioned His likes and dislikes. With every turn of thought, as
the shades of dark void rippled in the non-light, Smith found that His tastes changed.
What had once been a Good shade now became a Bad tone and vice versa. Smith
discovered choice.
Silence has a shape and upon that shape hang thoughts, and thoughts ripple,
and Smith’s universal mind grappled with the meanings of things without words or
explanation. Faced with an endlessly moving target of certainty it is probably little
wonder that across the gulf of time and space Smith became a little indecisive. With
such unlimited options within His darkness how could a simple, artisan, pubescent
God make a choice?
We, the readers of books and tales, find it difficult enough to answer questions
even when our reading is wide and our thinking deep. For Smith, without access to
heaven’s as yet empty libraries, the darkness was beauty beyond description, solitude
was a cruel mistress who only ever tasked without instruction, and silence was the
wonder, the brilliance, the radiance of an eternal symphony half remembered. Smith
could never quite be sure of anything. Silence was bliss, was the summation of every
force and vitality known to the universal mind, but the inevitably subtle tonal
difference within the quietude, as with the spectral shades of the void, caused Smith to
vacillate.
In human terms, Smith listened to silence like we listen to Mozart on a
Tuesday. We love Mozart the best. Then we listen to Beethoven on a Thursday and
love Beethoven the best. Smith loved the Universal Light Programme that fizzed
across the unseen radiation waves of His thought, but He loved each and every aspect
of silence as if, for a fleeting moment, it was the only silence He had ever heard.
Smith took the melody and the rhythm of the void into the soul of creation, swinging
in allegiance from every note to every other note in a crescendo of perfect solitude,
until it began to dawn on Smith that there was simply no way to settle on a universal
truth in un-sound. Basically, Smith could no more organise a cosmic booze-up in an
entire star field of breweries than could an ant recite the works of Rabbie Burns across
the vast glens of Whisky sodden Scotland.
And so it came to pass – always a sign of an author who can’t quite grasp the
deepest philosophical foundations, let alone be bothered to write it all down – that
Smith, in the madness of endless conjecture, decided to stick a virtual pin into the
dark hide of the universal donkey. Smith drew a metaphorical line in the cosmic sand
and, breaking with every one of the unbidden traditions that had as yet underpinned
the universe, thought-spoke to the void.
“LET THERE BE LIGHT”.
Smith allowed the melody of sudden voice to flood through the vacuum of the
void, combining it with the driving base line of fundamental creation that beat at His
breast, and in so doing the stars shone suddenly like notes upon a black stave. Smith
squinted in the bursting light, rubbed the black holes at the heart of his consciousness
and grinned. The music of the heavens filled Smith with delight and He swooned with
every rising phrase, letting the maelstrom notes burn through the universe. Had the
universe contained any concept as simple as song, you would have heard Smith sing
with a booming voice.
“LET THERE BE GALAXIES…LET THERE BE GASES…LET THERE BE
COLLISIONS BETWEEN HEAVENLY BODIES…LET THERE BE STRANGE
AND SQUIGGLY CHEMICAL CHAIN REACTIONS…”
This is how the heavens broke forth into starlight, how the suns began to burn
and how the cosmic gas and dust coalesced to form the planets. This is how a
primordial soup was brewed, how tectonic shifts came to be and how the rocks and
the heaving skies settled down to their endless game of birth and erosion. Smith
looked out across these symphonic landscapes and grinned ever wider, and it was
good.
Except, of course, for the unbending equation, for the balancing highs and
lows in the song of Smith’s stars. For things to be good, for Smith to feel the warmth
of a billion, billion nuclear suns, there also had to be things that were bad. There had
to be the absolute cold that allowed Smith to feel the warmth, and the inevitable
balancing factor in the equation was Smith. In the primordial soup of creation a
chemical chain might have a lifetime of a second, or it might exist in an unbroken
sequence that lasted for millennia, but for Smith that moment of absolute happiness in
the melody of life was nothing but a blink of an eye. Smith looked down upon one
small star and upon one totally insignificant rocky ball at the outer edge of a tiny
spiral galaxy of stars, and there He heard the very first bum note.
If, along with suns, molten planet cores and gas nebulae, Smith had invented
teeth then he would have understood the problem instinctively. This single second of
discord in act three of the universal symphony effectively scratched a single fingernail
of blackboard agony across Smith’s infant mind, and He knew in that instant of molar
grinding pain that the equation must have balance. Good requires Bad.
Smith looked down upon the third rock out from a brightly burning star at the
edge of an insignificant spiral galaxy and beheld friction. The elemental soup eroded
the rock. Skies billowed and poured acid rain into fissures in those rocks, fissures that
cracked and split ever wider, and spellbound by the fascination that makes a B-movie
actress in a horror film go forth to see what it is that makes such an unusual noise,
Smith made His first fundamental mistake.
Gods, even small ones, should never delegate, but if you read the stories in any
one of a thousand books you will find that pretty well every single one of these
creative types has taken the odd short cut or two. Smith thought about the Bad,
considered the symphonic disagreement at the edge of the universe and, after a
millennium or two of orbital time Smith arrived at a conclusion. The solution was
simple and elegant; take a galactic eraser, rub out the errant note, and write down a
simple harmonic improvement.
However, feeling the pull of a billion, billion stars, feeling the weight of mass
and time upon His shoulders, succumbing to the myriad energies of relative balance
flexing across the void, Smith put away the cosmic HB pencil with the little pink tip,
washed his hands in the ethereal mists of space and willed the skies to peace. Smith
brushed the primordial broth with a thought, dismissing this disappointing, barren
little rock with a shrug, and left the madly sparking chemical squiggles to their own
peculiar frenzy of oxygenated radicalism.
Almost as an afterthought Smith allocated a small portion of his dream time as
the equivalent of a galactic closed circuit television system. That part of his ethereal
mind that bore the as yet unnamed form of Conscience added just a hint of chiding
harmonic resonance to the song of the universe, and thus was born the conduit
between God and the third rock out from an insignificant little star. Smith turned his
gaze away from the chemical and physical experiment at the edge of what we now
call the Milky Way, but he left the monitors on and the tapes running just in case he
ever needed to put a face to a crime.
In doing this, in leaving the cameras on constant surveillance, Smith also
effected a process of change and evolution. As Smith dreamed and experimented and
changed the fabric of time and space, as He formulated infinite varieties of life and
death across the vast expanse of the void, small packages of His thought leaked out
from beyond the horizon of Smith’s dreaming and drifted through the aeons and along
the canals and wires that connect the universal whole. Some of these rogue thoughts
leaked into the here and now, drifting all the way out to Smith’s now forgotten song
of the Earth.
In dreaming of a peacock sky on some far distant world, Smith allowed a
feather to fall upon the barren rocks of our world. Cells coalesced as notes in the song
combined, water formed as notes tumbled over cosmic cliff edges, and proverbial
butterfly wings fluttered in their thousands over the future-distant space of Beijing.
Amphibians croaked a tenor’s song of night. The Unicorn fluttered into the world for
an instant before the nightmare broke its back upon the anvil of impossibility. Clouds
billowed. Rain fell. Mountains rose and rivers cut deep scars into the surface of the
planet. Ferns uncurled their leaves, morphosing into a billion species of tree and bush
and flower. A flood of marine shapes colonised the roaring seas, monsters roamed the
earth, shaking the foundations of the world to rubble, and finally, in the heart of
blackness that was a shallow echo of Smith’s loneliness, there was a dream of
companionship. The mammals came and one of them, born of just a single
microscopic moment in the great dream, stood up and walked out from the crowd.
Through the long ages of Smith’s indifference the madly spinning Earth
flourished, blooming on the edge of the void like a tiny fungal spore at the heart of a
vast, immeasurable forest, and in that paradisiacal garden the ape walked, simply and
silently, embodying the dream of Smith, becoming the ultimate, if yet unknown,
companion.
Birdsong joined with the universal melody. Volcanoes added deep resonance
to the bass lines underpinning the twinkling of the stars. Whales sang in the deeps of
the ocean. Life itself upon, within and underneath the good, damp soil blew a fanfare
to the heavens far beyond the measure of any single organism. The song was Good
and Smith, even though he heard none of the individual songs sung by the flora and
fauna of this long forgotten refrain at the edge of all things, found contentment in the
straightforward knowledge that the song continued, a fulfilment sufficient for Him to
think the work of creation a noble thing. But as always with the rhythm of the
universe a discordant note took its inevitable place in the skirl of creation.
Smith batted the discord away like a fly on a hot summer day, but no matter
how swift or firm Smith’s vast and unimaginable hand, the fly continually evaded the
swatter and buzzed back and forth at the edge of His perception. Eventually Smith
turned towards the high pitched whine of gossamer winged song and, looking behind
the metaphorical net curtain that hid the outer reaches of the old melodies from His
hearing, Smith focussed his universal ear upon the sound of this disharmony.
Out at the edge of an insignificantly flat spiral galaxy, by a minute speck of
light that shone almost below the visible spectrum, Smith heard a plaintive howling.
He looked down upon the bright and savage earth for the first time in countless
measures of eternity and there Smith saw something quite unexpected; the utterly
familiar shape of loneliness embodied in the outlandish shell of the hairless ape who
dared to contemplate creation, baying at the stars, calling out in utter desperation for
the companionship that comes with that first sparkling moment of harmony within the
song of songs.