The Poetry of Creation

What does the eternal do? He writes. He is a poet. He is the author of the poetry of life. A coliseum of Epic verse of such epic proportions that, when fully experienced, it insites only weeping.

First, there was nothing. Nothing and God. The nothing was nothing, but God pleased God. He wasn't in a state of need, but in a state of pure potential. He was potential.

He spoke. And all that is and will be was spoken. We are words, all of us, a verse in God's epic. Of style and layer and prowess it is inconceivable to contemplate. We are God's poem. A structured universe of unstructured chaos that came from his open lips.

Why? Why would God write a poem? Why would anyone? Creation was creativity. We are potential made real. That is all.

The story begins. Where does one start a story? A setting of course. A where, and a when. He spoke of the earth. The where. At first he spoke nothing of it's form, and so there was no form. He spoke nothing of it's bounties, and so there were no bounties. It was formless. It was empty. He spoke of the heavens that bend above the earth. He spoke of light, and there was some. But it was placeless. He spoke, and gave it a place. The night and the day. A setting.

What next does an heavenly author do? Details. A setting is only as good as it's details. He spoke of the earth, and he spoke of the waters in the earth, and he spoke of the waters under the earth and the waters above it. He spoke their names. A sky. A sea. Some land. He spoke of the bounties of the land, bountiful bounties of a beauty and complexity one cannot comprehend. He spoke of the bounties of the sea of a depth and terror one would seldom want to comprehend. The details.

Ambience comes next. A sun, a moon, a star or two. The sound of the cricket at night and the woosh of wind in the day. This too he spoke, all in verse. All in beautiful singsong verse.

Many a book has been written about his work. All the books. All according to diffent levels of detail. Some may choose a single subject, the waterlilly, the Daisy, the movement of the stars. As yet, a few focuse on the chronology, and with that comes grave miscommunication. How does one meter the chronology of a poem so vast. So deep and frightening, so wonderfully enchanting, so imposing of the curiosity, yet so far from cognition. There is but one way. For the sake of sanity leave the details out. You either ignore the details, or be consumed by them.

I have no concerns of this type or the other. The details are neither of import nor detriment. I have chosen to implement only as much detail as my will and mind allow and leave it at that. The chronology also tends to the tricky. This whole epic could, feasibly, have taken millennia in human years. It may just as well have been the work of but a week. It is a sound assumption still to make, that this all took but an instant. For the sake of both our sanity, I shall simply avoid it.

Of the ambience, God spoke in great detail. Each moonbeam and cloud to correspond with the use and property of later creations. It was all a perfect and immaculate plan. The afternoon sun would give exactly an aura of endless weightless future, and the sound of the night would be both soft and calming, and harsh and threatening. Each star would be suspended, suspended close enough to see and also exactly too far to count. The sea would equal parts beckon, and crush. The wind would whip and still often waft. Not a single detail was missed. Not a single detail spared. And yet, all the detail was so far obscured within another as to be non-existent. A painting within a painting within a painting within a line of verse.

The detail all coalesced into the day, the night and the in-between. Into a clockwork of universal proportions that serves as an exquisite timepeice. A day. A month. A year. Each perfectly predictable. Each utterly and mesmerizingly balanced. Each a detail in a line of verse so impeccable as to make a brave man weep, and a million writers empty their thoughts and ink. The universal clock was uttered.

The next piece was motion. Life. A system was spoken of that worked absolutely. A cog. A million. And they all moved in harmony. But still there was need for the randomness of life. The tree needed a caterpillar, who made a daily march up and down it's trunk for food. It needed a bird to nest in it's perfectly unique branches. The bird needed a caterpillar on which to feed, and the caterpillar strangely needed a bird to keep it on it's 100 toes. A layer of perfect randomness. Structured chaos. This too was spoken.

Each line of verse was only exactly as breathtakingly beautiful as the last, and yet each was especially asphyxiating. A deadly aromatic. Speaking of which, yes. He spoke of this too. Smells so absurdly diverse, that the senses could never hope to cope. And then a million more. More smells. More stimulus. More even than there were senses. Senseless sensations floating in the wind awaiting senses with which to be perceived and underappreciated.

Life was expanding because that is how he spoke it. It filled every crevice. Now, there was no more clockwork. By design. It was now all fluid. Full, not of mesmerizing, measured, precise motions, but of mesmerizing, unpredictable, chaotic motions. This was how it was spoken.

And it was perfect. A more perfect world had never been dreamed, and never again will be. A more detailed world has never been uttered, and never again will be. A more dynamic world has never been imagined, and never again will be. It was all perfect. Felt perfect. The perfect setting. The perfect where.

The world was made. It was full of sound. It was full of fury. It was full to the point of exploding with anticipation. There was a setting, but a setting for what?

It was time for the story to start.

The poetry starts with a protagonist. And, like it too often is, the protagonist was, of course, made in the author's image. A perfect creation, for whom the sound and the fury was but a backdrop. A simple story, that develops into such complexity as is painful to even imagine

Man was made. Spoken into existence. And the rest, what's next, is history.

Any poet knows that it is inevitable to fall in love with the characters in ones play. You love them... Love them all. You can't help but love them. You love everyone, heroes and villains alike. And the better crafted they are the harder you love them. They become people. They become real. Real people. Real people you know everything about. And love is nothing if not familiarity.

God loved his characters. He loved them all. He loved them so much that he gave them the ability to love. He gave them the ability to love him. He gave them the ability to love each other. He gave them the ability to love their world. He gave them the ability to love. And they did. They loved him. They loved each other. They loved their world. They loved. And it was good.

God crafted the perfect beings. Beings capable of love. Beings capable of choice. Beings crafted after himself. Each with a story, each with such a depth that it's impossible to tell all the stories. Each with a soul, eternal and undying. It became impossible not to love them. Not to love their rebelliousness and their repentance, the ecstasy of their joy and the immensity of their sorrow. It was inevitable. He loved them.

There was a problem, however. The story, the epic poem had built into it poetic justice. And, left to their own devices, this poetic justice would destroy them. He had to intervene. but more on that later.

Now for a late, late preface. This story is sound, yes. As sound as any good there you'll find. More so... I reckon. But it's not complete. Some of the details are fuzzy. It's been a long time. Consider it a long lost manuscript, it's author long dead, but by sheer strength of quality the work remains. The manuscript has been made into scene after scene, play after play, always applauded, always acclaimed. So much so, that a significant many have chosen to make it a life's work to reproduce it. This one epic, this one torn and forgotten epic drifting through endless time, has been the most retold story in all of eternity. Nobody likes to forget the story of their birth, not even time.

There is, however, a large misunderstanding of the manuscript upon which this story is based. As I said, it has been a long time. Just as most people like to believe that Romeo and Juliet is a work of romance, people tend to believe that this manuscript is a step by step telling, when, I for example, I have many questions, many of which I will personally answer by means of conjecture. But it would do neither the reader, nor the work justice if I wrote such things down. And so, for the remainder of this telling, I urge you to accept my sincerest apologies when I tell you that I do not know what happened here or there, and to understand that firstly this work is researched rather poorly, for the mere and soundest reason that it was not meant to be a reading of the Epic, but a guide to the existence and impact of the Epic. And secondly, regardless of being incomplete, I feel it's still worth a read. If it weren't I'd say so, but It's not very long.

One such question, would perhaps be, are there any characters in creation capable of choice besides the ones perfectly and deliberately crafted for it? To this, of course, the answer is I haven't the foggiest. The manuscript states that there was a being more crafty than the others, but says nothing else besides. Whether crafty means capable of free will, I don't, and perhaps will never know.

Onwards. The world was perfect. And quiet. Drama was yet to enter the scene. Since, although the characters introduced were capable of conflict, there was still no call for it. The conflict was to be choice, and a choice is not a choice without choices.

So here is the main plot, as butchered by me, a pathetic devil, satirizing a masterwork of grade as yet unheard of. The conflict was simple. Obedience, or death. Extremely dramatic. And probably, as butchered here, by me, perhaps a bit tasteless. But the plot is not the story, and the story is where this Epic shines.

The story in a nutshell goes as follows. Character is created. Character lives in harmony with all it's surroundings. Character is given a choice. Character chooses badly. Character is then faced with the consequences of his choice.

"Now, I've heard that one before," you must be saying. Well, yes. Artists, consciously or otherwise, have no choice but to acknowledge the merits of THE work of art. Borrowing, in this case, is not only an involuntary form of flattery, but also basically a necessity, since any work of art necessarily does fall under the domain of this one.

I've gone this far, very admirably I might add, with but a mere few digressions, but here... Here, you must forgive me for I must now digress something feirce. The stories in this epic, they are the stories of every man or mouse and every tree or drop of rain. With the whole world, the whole universe mind you!, acting as a backdrop to the myriad happenings within. My challenge is not a small one. It is to find a way to summarize the breadth and depth of the lives and deaths of quite literally everyone. This, is the part I was dreading.

The issue remains that, I have many a limitation that this epic poem does not. Your attention, for one, which I admit I may be squandering a bit with this lengthy, but quite necessary digression. My mortality and the fact that, there is, quite frankly only a small amount of my time on this plain I'm willing to dedicate to this endeavor. And lastly, my complete and utter ignorance as to the occurrences that took place between the day the universe was created and the year 1999. Even after the year 1999, I am quite ill informed about the details of the things that happened until my 13th birthday, since I was quite young at the time and did not have the journalistic skillset to engage in constant inquiry and dilegent note taking. In fact, I am also woefully ill informed about things that occured anywhere outside a radius of about 3 miles from where I lived.

So, you see, though the story is a beautiful one, it has been happening for quite a while now. And I'm sad to say that I have missed a great deal of it. Thankfully, however, if these details are of interest to you, you can visit a local library and dust off a history book or two. I, however, will attempt to give you the cliff notes on the poem, the poet and the characters in a brisk and hurried fashion.

This is all to say that, I apologize for the lack of detail in the following chapters. I will be relying on the accounts of others, and on the accounts of the manuscript, which, as I've said, is incomplete. I will also be relying on conjecture, which is not the ideal way to go about things, but alas...

The character we spoke of earlier, let's, for the sake of brevity, call him Adam, made a deliberate and calculated action to disobay the authors will. Not a casual blunder, not a singular mistake, but a transgression that can almost be described in the terms of a personal attack. I feel I have to interject here and say that, at this point within the poem fourth wall breaks were quite normal and the author played a quite direct role in the action. Anyway, rules were broken, choices made, and poetic justice would end up ruling the day. Adam's actions were, decidedly benign. But of course it wasn't the action, but the intention. It showed a greed and malice in the man, and, as in any story, such a man should be condemned to a life filled with difficulties. It is only right. And indeed he would, first in a physical, then later in a spiritual dimension he would be punished.

The problem with this sentence however, was that it carried with it, not only a punishment upon Adam, but also by extension, all of the people that he would eventually sire. "Now", you may say, "that can't be right! What did his children do to deserve this punishment?" I thought that too, until the day I realized that, were I offered a fruit that made me God's equal, how quickly I would seize the opportunity to become like the almighty.

In fact, the more one observes us, the more reasons one finds for each one of us to be even more severely punished. The greed and malice of our ancestor is not gone or deminished. And, like I said, the wrongdoing had rather a lot less to do with the action than the intention.

But again, the failure and punishment must not be what we linger on here. The story was meant to be aristotelian. Tragic sure, but dramatic. And, he might get scuffed or bruised but the central character always recovers the moral high ground in the end.

This epic predates Aristotle by really quite a long margin of time, which is why we shouldn't be surprised to understand that this was, of course, not what happened. Life spread, as life does, and the character became characters, and his sin became sins and his debauchery multiplied until all was villains in the world.* Genesis 6:5 KJV [5] And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.*

And since that never was the idea, the author wiped the whole thing in a fit of poetic justice. Burned the manuscript, flushed the pages and chose to start from scratch. Well... Almost. From the epic the author took the whole of the setting. The setting was never the problem, of course, and it was all so beautifully crafted, it seemed a shame to waste. But that was not all. From the epic he also plucked one character, one man around whom a narrative CAN be structured. One man, who found grace in the eyes of the author. One chosen man. We have a new main character.

This one, Noah, was given more or less the same choice as the first one. Obedience or death. Not a difficult choice by any means, but actually you'd be hard pressed to find someone who chooses the former, by the looks of it. Noah, however, was such a man. * Genesis 6:22 KJV [22] Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he. *

In fact, Noah made all the right choices. To such an extent that the author made the decision that this would be the definitive final edition of the epic. No more rewites, no more burning and flushing and flooding. It would be this one. This one character, Noah, refreshed the author's faith in his creation.

Now at this point I suspect you're feeling that, either the metaphor is wearing rather thin or the story is getting a little too incoherently meta. There is, of course, such a thing as one too many 4th wall breaks. But I assure you that the metaphor is still quite sound, and that this story is just simply a strange one. If you need some reassurance on the continuity of the metaphore, however, please look to the next chapter.