exemplum

1. And God decided to write the world. He wrote the words round vast empty dark. They made a line He liked. He wrote the word vast in triplicate because He wanted the world to be very, very vast. He wrote the word empty twice because he wanted the world to be mostly empty, so that one might turn tens of thousands of its pages and find them all blank and black. The word dark he doubled for the same reason. There was no point in writing the word round more than once, because whatever was round (and surely round was round) could not become any rounder, even by rolling. God appointed one vast to accompany the darkness like a friend, and another to confront emptiness like an enemy, for what is it to be vast if your vastness is for rent?

2. round vast empty dark
vast dark empty vast

was the way it went. Then He wrote revolve so there might be a place for time, but nothing did, for there was nothing but a vast emptiness, as He had decreed; moreover, had that vast dark emptiness turned, no one would have noticed. God had thought He could write down whatever He wished. But the Creator was corrected by His creation. God had thought He was omnipotent until He began to write. He thought about adding erase, but what was the point of erasing Nothing to get nothing? Vexed, God decided to let those vast black pages curl from exposure and disuse. He didn’t write another word for what would have been a long long time.

3. And then, still miffed, He wrote the word revolver. The chambers did, but the chambers were empty.

4. And then, still more miffed, he thought about mixing meaningless in, or pointless, or aimless, but why should the Future know? Let it remain ignorant as the cows that would come to be.

5. God remembered, being omniscient, how Plato’s Demiurge would one day do it. When the Demiurge (who had fashioned the world’s soul and set the planets moving in perfect circles, and who, using the harmonic mean as a recipe, had readied the rational light that was to be set in man’s head) was confronted by the problem of creating the lower parts of the human soul, he realized that he had better outsource that aspect of the job (as we say now), because the lower parts of the soul called for imperfection, and imperfection was exactly what was beyond the Demiurge’s abilities.

So he turned the task over to the planets, inadvertently giving astrologers a big boost, for these lesser gods, striving to do their best, would still be unable to surpass or even equal their own natures, and thus, though aiming high, create just the lowness necessary. Man’s whole soul in a sense would have three authors: (1) Plato, who created the Demiurge, (2) the Demiurge, who created the planets and their rational paths, as well as, out of the leftovers, man’s mind, and (3) the planets, who would supply the soul with its darker dimensions.

God then remembered that it would get worse. Among men, some would be poets. There’d be Hesiod, for one. And he would invent gods by the dozens and give them hierarchy, home, and history. Valleys would be haunted, woods, too, cliffs and caves. There’d be Olympians, Titans, Fates, and Furies, Nymphs and Naiads, Sprites and Lemurs, bugbears aplenty.

6. Instructed by the future, then, God wrote host of angelic scriveners in His very long hand. Let them do the writing, which is damnably hard, God silently, inside Himself, said; I’ll just publish. These were God’s last words, even to Himself, since He wished to remain Omnipotent.

round vast empty dark
vast dark empty vast
host of angelic scriveners

God’s last thought, however, was a bit of rearrangement.

round vast empty dark
host of angelic scriveners
vast dark empty vast

He wanted his writers to be in the thick of things.