and Void

Deep in the silken nothingness, something stirred. The void voided itself, and for a moment, once again, all was void. Then out of the void there appeared an abyss, inside of which was another abyss, inside of which was yet another void. Out of this void then came the world, with the sun, moon, planets, and various galaxies trailing behind it, fanning out ever so slightly like the tail of a young peafowl that may or may not turn out to be a cock, too early to say. But no sooner had the last shred of galaxy emerged than the world abruptly swerved, made a U-turn, and steered itself back into the void, its cosmic retinue still trailing behind it. Then all was null and void, and even the abysses blinked out of being or nonbeing, and what was left was an absolute vacuum, with not even a single wrinkle to disrupt its stubborn “surface” (in quotes because in fact it was utterly without surface and likewise lacking in depth). Nothing curved or varied within it, it was so totally featureless it might as well have been milk, but it wasn’t: it wasn’t white, it wasn’t black, it wasn’t grey, it wasn’t infrared or ultraviolet, it was really and truly void, a good-for-nothing hollow, albeit not really, since “hollow” is just a metaphor, and not an especially good one, I now realize, for in reality (“in reality”) whatever was was nothing at all like an empty urn, an urn being the sort of hollow that still suggests a particular shape (it may hold water or house keys but not, for example, a corgi), whereas this was the sort of hollow that has no surrounding substance to define or delimit it, no underlying substrate to support it, such that we could say without exaggeration that it did not exist, and nor did it not exist, what with “not existing” still implying a possibility of existence which in this case, needless to say, was wholly absent. And even if one were to argue that the urn is not equivalent to the hollow inside of it, that in fact the two are wholly separate, still it would be essential to disavow or at least qualify the previous metaphorical descriptive statement, for the remaining “void” or “nothingness” absolutely did not “exist” in relation to anything else that could be said to qualify or impose parameters upon its own state of “being.” In short, what “remained,” for an indeterminate stretch of something resembling time (time obviously did not exist at that juncture, nor did space) was ______, only without the line under it: a total blank, an inconceivable nullity, from which there abruptly issued God.

The rest of the story is well-known and bears no repeating here.