A Story; a Myth; a Fable
The children boxed their grandmother in, shouting and whooping, pleading for one last story. “A story from before we can remember!” they yipped, and gathered around her as she sat by the fire, and closed her eyes, and spoke to them:
“Little ones, I have told you so many stories. Now there is only one more story to tell. Yet if it is the last, it is also the oldest, and I am the only person who remembers it. Just as my own grandmother told me, and just as hers did. Just as I imagine it was always told, ever since the first person shared it with their own little ones, by a fire like this…
“Once, when the world was not the world, there was nothing. Then all at once there was something. A Spirit, stealing into the universe. First, there was only heat and cold, and everything was still, and ages passed by without a sound. Yet slowly the Spirit worked, forming huge rocks and balls of gas. Patiently growing enormous structures, which grew and collapsed in on themselves, until eventually some remained. Then the Spirit would turn to growing more. The Spirit was always trying to make something, you see. It wanted desperately to be alive in everything. And it was a very patient growing Spirit. Patient enough to wait billions of years, as its forms fell spinning through the darkness.
“The Spirit was patient because above all the Spirit wished to be a gardener. The Spirit had spent so long being Nothing, now it only wished to make things grow. Yet it knew this much: there are few things more harsh or unforgiving than Nothingness. Billions of years passed as the Spirit worked, forming its infinite spheres, placing them in fragile conjunction with each other. Sometimes a hole would rip in space, or the hottest of the spheres would combust and explode, and the Spirit would have to try again. Always pushing, stretching against the Nothingness which waited to claim every one of its forms.
“Finally the Spirit found balance, a settlement in the heat and the light. Traveling from rock to rock, sometimes it would linger, looking for the right place for its garden. And at last it found a good place, and it came to rest. For hundreds of millions of years it worked, laying the ground for its garden there. Yet even hundreds of millions of years were as nothing to the Spirit, so lost was it in its shaping and growing, in its most intimate attention to the smallest atom. From the tiniest particle, it formed its exquisite sphere of rock, setting the rock at the perfect distance from its star. Then it began to make the World.
“From deep within the rock, the Spirit let out gasses, making a barrier around the world to keep out the Nothingness. Between the rock and this barrier, the Spirit trapped many vapors, which condensed into oceans. Long millennia passed until at last, the Spirit came and crouched down there, at the boundary of the ocean and the heat from beneath the rock, watching life grow in the waves. There, at the shoreline of becoming, the patient Spirit with its wet feet rushed to bind blind heat into moving matter. And often the Nothingness would claim the forms that grew there, and sometimes the patient grower found it must start over, and then start over again. Yet then one day something finally took hold and went and leapt into the water.
“Soon the whole world was full of self-driving energies, swarming in the tide-pools, living, birthing, dividing. Trillions of living things, which teemed and died and fed in the water. And the Spirit loved every one of them, lavishing its infinite force on the motion of every tiniest one. So the first small gods soon began to appear in the seas, and some even made their way to the land, laying their eggs on the shore. Algae blooming on the ocean began to take root in wet soil, and the Spirit rejoiced to see its garden spreading green over the entire Earth. Nowhere in all the universe had the Spirit ever created and sustained so many living things. Now the Spirit turned to making new kinds, and before long it grew larger gods of the Earth, gods which would roam and kill and conquer the land. Great cold-blooded Titans, the largest beings yet to live.
“And the Spirit watched and waited, hoping that these great Titans might be the first to wake and see what the Spirit itself had done. Because more than anything the Spirit now longed for creatures to share its beauty with. But soon it saw that the Titans would never accomplish this. They were too perfect and too strong: some were so perfect, they might go tens of million years without ever needing to change. The Spirit saw they would never wake up or notice the world around them, only go blindly on in a perfect cycle of endless death, feeding on each other forever. And all the beauty which the Spirit had grown, patiently, lovingly, would only ever amount to a world of pain and horror, gyring in the face of the Nothingness.
“So the Spirit cleaved off a piece of itself, and blew some of its own heat into it. And from this piece came a new Creature—a Creature of the ether, which loved the Spirit as a parent. ‘Look here,’ said the Spirit to the Creature. ‘Look at the beauty I have made. I have made this rock into a garden. Yet in making life, I have made death, too, and from beauty has come pain. I have made these Titans too well. They kill and they feel nothing. But I feel every death. Each being, as it starves or bleeds, I feel. I must, since I have made them. Now you, Creature of my own self, must help me. There must be newer things, and we must make them. So I will teach you the painstaking art of growing life. And we will witness their growing, together.’
“But this Creature was very clever. It had no patience for growing things, and in its heart it refused to listen to the Spirit. Now when it was going to and fro across the universe, studying the planets and the suns, the Creature came upon the primal Nothingness. It looked into it and saw that for all there was of matter in this universe, there was always more of the infinite Nothing. The Creature saw that the Nothingness was so strong, even the Spirit would not always hold it back. So the Creature, having begun to wish for a power as great as its parent’s, thought the Nothingness might give it such a power, if it could only learn the secret of the Nothingness. Then the Creature hid from the Spirit and went away to the end of the Universe, to study the abyss.
“But the Spirit saw it all, and it knew what the creature had done. The Spirit had seen that this would happen. Now when the Spirit came upon the Creature, the Creature fled. Taking up its own form, it came down, flaming, as a burning meteor, and landed on the Earth. And as the Creature struck the Earth, it kicked up ashes and dust which covered the skies. It caused huge tidal waves of water to roll over the land, and enormous fires which burned every living thing they touched. So the Creature avenged its growing hatred on the living things of the Earth, sweeping its path of destruction over the ancient Titans. And the Titans roared, dying by the millions, their bones slowly crushed and buried underground. Then the Creature declared itself the true king of the Earth, and looked up and surveyed its new material kingdom.
“Yet the Spirit had tricked the Creature, since the Spirit had foreseen this, too. It knew the Creature would fall to the Earth, and that the Titans would die, making way for new beings. So all this time, below the surface of the Earth, in little tunnels, at the roots of trees, the Spirit had been growing new forms of life. These were small, hairy, hot-blooded creatures. And though ugly compared to the Titans, with soft flesh much weaker than the Titan’s scales and horns, yet they could do things no other living thing could. They did not divide as cells, or lay their eggs in the sea, or on the land, or defile the corpses of other beings. Instead they carried their young inside themselves and after birthing, nursed them. And the Spirit rejoiced when it saw that it had at last made things more like itself. Since with these beings had finally come love and kinship, and all the qualities of the patient gardener. Yet most importantly, these beings were imperfect, and because they were imperfect, the Spirit knew they might be able to change. And the Spirit rejoiced when it realized these creatures might be the witnesses it had wished for.
“But the Creature, looking out at its new kingdom, saw these beings, too. And it realized it had been tricked. Then the Creature grew crueler and more hateful, and vowed to kill these beings. So it set out from the lip of its crater. But as it did, it suddenly thrashed and ebbed in the material air, sinking into the earth, down into the muck and ooze, under the ground where the remains of the Titans bubbled. And it lay there, sapped of all its strength, king of nothing but the slime and the sediment beneath it.
“Meanwhile these new beings grew, multiplying across the face of the Earth. Slowly, over eons, some learned to use their hands and their tails. Some even learned to speak to one another, and to walk upright. They roamed the entire planet—there was no place they could not learn to live. All around the Earth they pitched their tents, and sang songs, and painted their signs into cave walls. The Spirit celebrated them and moved among them, though they did not always know it. It came down in the lightning, which gave them fire, and soon they killed and cooked and ate other animals, picking up the rest of their food off the ground. Sometimes they killed each other, or stole from each other, and the Spirit would weep at this. Yet the people saw what killing and stealing were, and they were the first living things to see it. They made rules amongst themselves, saying that sometimes it would be right to kill, but that to kill at the wrong time forfeit one’s own life in turn.
“Now the Creature, which had become a truly pitiful thing, slinking in the caverns of the Earth, living off the Titans’ ooze, awoke. And it saw these beings wandering on the plain. And it hated them, ridiculing them in its heart, yet delighted by their growing knowledge of the Nothingness. So the Creature rose and took form, and it came to the people on the plain. It saw that the people were of two kinds: one with a womb, the other without. And taking one small fruit in its hand, the Creature took it first to the men and showed it to them. It took seeds and planted them, and told the men that if they waited, a new plant would soon grow there. But the men were strong and stubborn, and far too proud of their skill at hunting. They would not listen to the Creature.
“So the Creature turned to the women next and showed them the fruit, and said it was pure. The Creature took the seeds and planted them, and told the women that if they waited, a new plant would soon grow there. Now the women, strong and full of love, dreamed of building permanent homes for their little ones. For many long years, they had dreamed of the day they might finally settle and end this wandering around the Earth. So they took and ate and planted the fruit, and soon it bore new stems from the ground, just as the Creature had promised. And as the women planted more, they gathered back the men, and showed them, and together all of them began to plant.
“But the Spirit saw them doing this and it came down to them. It wept and cried for them. And when they asked it why it wept, it replied: ‘My poor little ones, my sons and daughters, I knew this would happen. But now it cannot be undone. Now you must be bound to the growth of the Earth. And the seasons will rule you, and your lives will change forever. Yes, you will discover extraordinary things, calendars and cities, plows and buildings. You will begin to write, to irrigate, to tame animals. And the full glory of your kind will shine across the world. But for this you will pay a terrible price, which this Creature has incurred on you. Since now there will be diseases and wars beyond anything you can imagine. And you will suffer under slavery. Under kings and warlords you will be chained to the plow, and crushed by the wheel. This world which might have been a paradise for you, will now be a greater hell. My garden is yours now and I weep for all the horrors you will visit on it.’
“Then the Spirit turned to the Creature and cursed it, crushing it underneath its foot. But as it did, the Creature wriggled into the air, and the last words it was heard to say were these: ‘Now this world is mine. And I will sleep until they find me again, until they have dug deep into the Earth. And my last gift to them will be this: the remains of the Titans, the black mulch of their dead, crushed bones. Then they will take it and burn it. And through it, they will wield powers to rival even you, Spirit. I will give them the power to live longer, to create new powers of their own. I will even give them the power to harness the heart of the atom you created. And they will murder and starve each other in countless millions, as they choke and cook the world with blood and fire. Just as I did, when I first fell down upon it.’
“So the Creature vanished, leaving them there. Then the Spirit wept again and lingered with its children, mourning the coming destruction of its garden. The people asked the Spirit if everything the Creature had told them would come to pass. And the Spirit told them that their fate was now to find this out. So they begged the Spirit for its help. ‘Give us new rules to govern ourselves,’ they asked. ‘And we will follow them, and by your instruction we will never come to this horrible fate.’ But the Spirit said to them, ‘My children, you cannot ask me for that. I will never give you that. Do you see that I cannot, because I love you? You would only break my laws. You would only lie to me. Do you see that I cannot bind my own children?’
“But they begged the Spirit again, saying, ‘Give us one law at least. One law only. Tell us not to kill, or not to eat certain animals. Tell us not to plant certain seeds, or to never live in certain places. Give us a guide to show us how to live.’ Yet the Spirit spoke to them, saying, ‘My poor children, I cannot give you even one law. Because I did not create you to obey me. I cannot even command you to love me, since such a thing would be intolerable. It would be hell for a Spirit that exists to grow the things it loves. One day you may discover for yourselves how long it took me to find this place, how long it took to grow the world, how many lives flared out before you ever came here. And yet even when you do, I fear you will not understand it.
“‘Now you are at the mercy of the Creature, the servant of Nothingness, who is the king of this Earth. But you must remember it was not the Creature that made and held the smallest atom, or gave the leviathan of the oceans its breath. The Spirit which made these made the Creature, too. With its patience, with its love, it has held the rocks together, and it holds the universe together, still. Remember that you came out of the rock, and out of the Spirit. And that I loved you when I first saw you, because I knew that you alone might see what you are. You alone might see, and you alone might know, what it is to want to grow things.
“‘You see, the Creature believed it could learn the secret of Nothingness, and wield its power against my power. But the Creature misunderstood. There is no power: I have renounced all power. I only am. Not even the Nothingness has power, not truly. It is only a background, without which there would never be anything to love. So do not fear it, but give thanks for the abyss you come from, and for the darkness you return to. Remember also that pain is not a curse. It is only the knowledge which comes from division. Remember also that pain is necessary for beauty. For beauty is only the knowledge that all things are different. All I ever grew, I grew because I wanted there to be so many things. It was not enough for the universe to be one. It had to blossom and be many. This is the only true secret of love—to blossom and be many. One day you will see this, and on that day, you will at last be gardeners.’”
Now as she reached the end of the story, the grandmother looked up to find that the children had dozed off on the ground, by the fire. Every last little one had fallen asleep there, somewhere in the midst of her story. Who knew what they had heard, or what they understood? Perhaps by morning they would have forgotten it all. Still, the grandmother laughed a little to herself, and hummed as she tended to the fire. There would be time to tell the story again. There would be many long nights by the fire, where the children could sit and hear that they were meant to be gardeners. One day the children might even understand. But for now, it was right for them to sleep. And it was right for their grandmother to tend the fire. So she sat and hummed and watched over them. And the children slept and dreamed of Creatures and Titans, and perhaps some of them even wished they might get a glimpse of the Spirit when they woke the next day, in the morning.