First entry: a rather weird little short story that I did for a Religious Writing class in college where the prof. asked us to "write a story about a religious mystery in Christianity." I thought at the time that the biggest mystery of all was what God, being immortal, did before the creation of the universe. The resulting story was pretty rough and only got me a B, but I like it.
Afflatus
By
Manta Obscura
On the morning of April 53, -2,000,000,000, a lonely yet amiable young/old God was strolling about . . .
I think I must clarify. When I say He was strolling about, He wasn’t literally strolling. There wasn’t anywhere to stroll in, really, because of the mere fact that Creation hadn’t been created yet. Or perhaps it had been created and just hadn’t been given physical form. Or maybe it still has yet to be formed and we are all merely thoughts of Creation in the God’s mind. Most likely, though, everything hadn’t been created.
All of that aside, the God was strolling about in an as yet undetermined way. He had been strolling/not-really-strolling for what would be, if time had been created at this point, centuries.
It just so happened that He was walking by His favorite part in the multiverse of non-Creation that day. From there He had a rather lovely view of the waves of Nothingness cresting across the Sea of Emptiness, and finally crashing against the shores of Desolation. The God saw all of it (or none of it, for that matter), but by what system of otherworldly sight He saw it amidst the non-black blackness even He wasn’t sure. He tried not to muse over it much, though. Even if He did, Nothing usually happened.
He was incredibly bored that day. Not that there was any day to speak of, really. There hadn’t ever even been the epiphany of the concept of day. In fact, there hadn’t ever even been the epiphany of the concept of epiphany, let alone the epiphany of such an epiphany as a concept like day. But if there had been, the day would have been considered, by and large, boring.
For a bit of fun He turned Himself into what one day might have been called a mongoose. The trudging boredom fled for about three anti-seconds.
If there had been air at this time the God would have sighed. It would have been a big sigh. If stars had been created, it would have had the equivalent effect of one of them going supernova.
Because He didn’t have much choice, He did what He always did (or perhaps never did at all): He began to just not stand there for a time that wasn’t an eon.
This was, needless to say, quite a dull and pointless preoccupation for a deity of all-powerful proportions. But still, He didn’t have many other options, so he continued to not do it anyway.
* * *
It has already been commented that the being in question was a God and was all-powerful. However, these two statements are a bit inaccurate; in fact, they’re completely false.
For one thing, a God is a being who loves all of Creation and wields an infinite compassion for what He’s created. It has already been pointed out in minor detail that Nothing had been created yet, so one could conclude that the aforementioned deity loved nothing. Actually, he probably didn’t even like Nothing, really, because it was a lot like Something that was bad, except sans the something-ness and the bad-ness. In any case, nothing to love = no Godship. QED.
As for the bit about Him being all-powerful, that too is false. He isn’t almighty, just massively, enormously powerful, which doesn’t really mean anything because there’s no scale at this point with which to compare Him. If, hypothetically speaking, Creation existed at this point and if, hypothetically speaking, one would have compared Him to It, the resulting simile is too drastically skewed to imagine. If, perchance, a lesser being had existed such as, let’s say, a human, and if this lesser being had attempted to challenge His power and authority, it would be to the same effect as if ants and black holes existed, and if the ant had tried to plug up the black hole with its face. It would be a lot like that only much bigger, more impressive looking, and a lot weirder of a story to tell your grandchildren.
The thing that didn’t make Him all-powerful, disregarding the fact that no base of perspective had yet been established with which to measure His power in the first place, was the fact that He a) couldn’t really destroy Himself, because there was nothing powerful enough to destroy Himself with, and b) He was unable to be rebellious against anything because of the simple fact that there was no structure greater than Him with which to be rebellious against.
All of this is really niggling and beside the point, though. I just thought you might like to know.
* * *
For countless periods of non-time He continued to not stand there. Even with the massiveness of His form which, of course, would only seem massive when compared to such nonexistent entities like a universe, He still seemed a small thing compared to Nothing.
It was sort of like comparing a toothpick to the cosmos, only entirely different.
Amidst the endless non-blackness He stood there, a single yet unmistakable pinpoint of Creation on the backdrop of backdroplessness.
(Chronicler’s note: It should be clarified at this point that when the God in question is referred to as “He” or “Him,” there is no actual evidence to say that the God was a male at all. This is largely true because of the fact that the mere concept that there could even be genders hadn’t been thought up yet. However, I’m an immoral, sexist pig, so I’ll continue to chronicle the God in question as being male.)
Despite the amazing and exhaustive list of possibilities that this Nothingness presented, after a time something, very stubbornly, began to happen. If crap had been created, it would have been scared out of the God at this point, assuming He had all the necessary organs to do so. The reason that this figurative reaction occurred was not because the something that happened was necessarily surprising; it was the fact that something was happening at all.
In all His existence in non-existence, He had never seen anything happen. Ever. There had been nothing there to happen, really. It was a lot like a Nascar race, only a little more exciting. This new experience, however, blew His celestial mind to smithereens with the thought of the possibilities it presented.
In fact, that’s just what it was: an epiphany of possible possibilities. Never had the God had an epiphany before; it was never there to have had. So in effect, having this one let Him have the first thing that He had had.
It’s not to say that epiphanies are in any way miraculous. Far from it, in fact. Given the statistical probability of finite possibility weighed against infinite eternity, it’s inevitable that every possible epiphany must occur at some point or another. No, there was nothing miraculous about it aside from the fact that it was the first anything that the God didn’t not experience. Before now, the non-universe just hadn’t been the non-universe, and that’s the way things weren’t.
But this time was different. With the first-ever epiphany of the concept of possible epiphanies, the God was primed for the epiphany of the possible concepts yet to come. Swimming there in His brain, much like porpoises at Sea World, many amazing things overwhelmed Him.
Reflecting back later, the God would recall the memory fondly: “Yeah, it was pretty weird, y’know? I mean, there I am, right, just not minding my own business, when out of nowhere there’s a somewhere. That crap will mess with your head.”
And so, with a mind full of existence, fit to burst like a frog on a hotplate, the God set out on the first endeavor He’d ever endeavored: He made. Dredging up His first-ever words from the depths of His first-ever body, He uttered the first-ever incantation that created the first-ever makeshift universe.
When He did it, it was done with a firm pronouncement. It was done with a loving, caring tone. It was done with a vague inkling on the God’s part that He’d regret it in the morning. With a thunderous roar like the splitting of an atom, the God’s voice boomed across the Nothingness. The Nothingness was pissed. As often happens, a whole cosmos sprang from just two words.
He liked them so much, He repeated them again.
“What if?”
* * *
It was said a moment ago that the whole cosmos sprang from two words. The cosmos didn’t actually spring, though. It’s hard to describe what it did, really. The closest word to describe what it did would be to say that it “qualallumed.” This word is an ancient, obsolete verb from the language of the angels that means, roughly translated, “to spring into existence as if from two words from the Divine God.” This doesn’t come much closer to doing the job.
* * *
Imagine an explosion . . .
No, bigger than that.
Still bigger.
Come on, stretch your brain; I’m talking REALLY big here . . .
Okay, now you’ve got it. Now imagine that this isn’t an explosion of fire, but an explosion of light. Picture, if you will, the sight of endless waves of brightness streaming through the universe to the darkest recesses of the cosmos. Try and envision the sound of Nothingness, vast and bleary, being torn apart by a raging torrent of photogenic chaos. Imagine that, from the tatters of this Nothingness, colossal balls of furiously burning gas are being hurled into the universe, in turn spewing from their titanic depths mighty orbs of gas and rock that tear across the heavens. Imagine the nebulae, the star clusters, the black holes, the novas, the moons and meteors, all of Creation exploding upon the now-black canvas of space as if Pollock himself had splattered them there . . .
This is exactly what the Creation of the universe was not like.
When it happened there was, in fact, no spewing, or hurling, or exploding, or any of that other unnecessary riffraff. What actually happened was beyond words. It was ineffable, indescribable; there is no poetry colorful enough in all the world to illustrate the Divine Artwork that was the beginning of everything.
This is what it looked like:
The black non-blackness that had once been the non-color of Nothingness began to drain away in silent ripples. Where once there had been mere Nothingness there was now a brilliant, somber shade of black. The black was strange, though. Though it was unquestionably, unarguably dark, there was also a quality of light to it. The pitch black radiated a sort of dusky glow that interwove onto and within itself, creating a darkness that was darker than black but infinitely brighter than Nothing at all.
When the ripples of blackness ceased and the dark settled into a comfortable sitting position, there came another change. Rolling over the horizon of Space came, at last, Creation. It was like a wave of dancing color that twirled tidally over the endless firmament, reminiscent in a way of what a kaleidoscope would look like when peered through with the eyes of an acid junkie or Andy Worhol. Where it touched the Space it left vast sprinklings of fuzzy color and glowing light that intermingled with the dark/light of the firmament, and the two miracle glows made awkward love across the vast expanse of Eternity.
Where the wave left splotches of color, there was movement. The tiny speckles of vibrant hues began to slowly spread their way into fuzzy orbs that were not unlike Furbies, only larger and more planet shaped. With unspeakably slow patience the colors wound outward, much like tree roots through soft soil or ink across a clean handkerchief.
When the wave of light and color had spread to an expanse that seemed a little ridiculous even to the God, it stopped. As a final touch to His masterpiece the God breathed, for the first time, on the still-drying canvas of the cosmos. His breath meandered across the expanse of the new light and color, and all that it touched solidified into reality. The once-fuzzy forms of the color planets grew hard lines, and the planets themselves began showing off their new physiques to their lesser moon-friends.
As for the light, well, when the breath touched it the light became, in a sense, more illuminated. This wasn’t the old-fashioned light of your grandfather’s age. This light was the funky, new, “see everything that I touch” kind of light. It was sassy.
And for days the breath continued its inexorable flow across it all and, to the delight of the God, it really was a period of days this time. He fell in love with watching it bring Creation into reality, flowing like silk on river water. But to Him it seemed to gush and trickle, rolling like the brightest watercolor down the edge of a perfect palette.
* * *
A very talented artist once told a reporter, “Art is life. It is the language of God.” Unfortunately, the artist was also reported as having said, “Urk!” when he died from drug overdose. Because of this, no one really seems to have taken his first statement seriously, which is quite a shame.
He was a clever chap, despite his perusal of recreational pharmaceuticals.
