Creatio ex nihilo, literally “creation from nothing,” is familiar to most of us in the Western world with the first of two creation stories in Genesis, the one that has God simply speaking man and woman into existence, as he does the rest of creation, rather than making the man from earth and the woman from the man’s rib. The first story--the one that in English translations repeats the phrase “and God said, let there be”-- has much more recent origins than the one in Genesis 2. It’s also similar to creation-from-chaos myths in some places (“the earth was without form, and void”). It’s hard to find purity of form in human categories.
A lot of books have been written on the topic of creation myths. One, Charles H. Long’s Alpha: The Myths of Creation was first published in 1963 and is still in print.
We have a curiosity, maybe out of psychological need, to know where things come from. It helps us carve out an understanding of our place in the universe. We do this now mostly with the tools of science--astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology. And modern cosmology speculates about whether the universe even had a beginning.
Along with our curiosity about where we came from, we ponder the origins of our own creations--ideas, works of art, inventions. I have a friend, an artist who lives in Santa Fe, who is considering a series of works on creation ex nihilo--from nothing. When she told me this, I became curious myself about the wide range of this notion that something can come from what we think of as “nothing.”
People can be relentlessly inquisitive about where ideas come from, and delighted with stories about flashes of insight. In science, Mendeleev is said to have arranged the elements of the periodic table along the lines of the way playing cards are organized in solitaire. Michael Faraday’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene involved a kind of waking dream in which he saw the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros--the image of a snake swallowing its own tail.
Certainly it’s reassuring to hear of the ability of people to solve complex problems through the power of an informed intuition. Or to write a story that seems to be without an external source. P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, tells of an interviewer who visited her once, insistent upon ferreting out the source of this preposterous character who slides up bannisters. Travers recounts part of the conversation in the Spring 1988 issue of Parabola, a magazine she contributed to for many years as an editor and writer:
“So tell me,” he said eagerly . . . “Where did you get the idea?”
“Where does anyone get an idea?”
“But it must--it can’t help it--come from somewhere.”
“Why not from nowhere?” I suggested.
“The Interviewer” (the title of the article) is looking for an Answer, one definitive locus for the source of a tale, an Answer with none of the nebulous, contingent character of so much human experience. He wants to banish uncertainty.
Near the article’s end, Travers sums up:
But let us admit it. With that word “creative,” when applied to any human endeavor, we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light--by grace one feels, rather than deserving--for it always comes as something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for explanations.
Still, we want explanations. We don’t want to have to rely on any mysterious source. We’d rather have a formula or a recipe or an algorithm. So equipped, we could summon at will our power to bring something new to the world. Having to wait for some mysterious entity to bestow “a sudden shaft of light” is anathema to busy creatures like ourselves who don’t like to wait for things.
For Travers, a story coming “from nowhere” seems to mean coming from an unknown source or sources. What’s needed is a receptive mind, which may imply a kind of meditative emptiness, a mind that’s at least relatively free of the usual mundane clutter and concern. Such a mind has, at least for a moment, set aside its role as the center of the universe. It says it can’t know where it can get anything it wants, but it knows valuable things sometimes come unbidden. And such a mind likes play.
An insight or idea from nowhere may have sources. My guess is that it’s almost certain there’s not one source, but an interplay of images, abstractions, experiences, and expressions that coalesce long enough to become something surprisingly new, and coherent enough to make sense to others. With science, such an intuition might stand up to empirical scrutiny. With art, it would resonate in the inner lives of others who see it, hear it, or read it, and say yes, I recognize that, I’ve felt its presence somehow before and couldn’t describe it.
The nothing from which something can be created is, perhaps, more an absence of the thing created, a kind of void where an almost infinite array of potentials exists, and the force of human intuition and action assembles elements in a new form. We all do this in some way as we make meaning in life. Some of us, not content with copies of constructs or received wisdom, make meaning more consciously than others.
On the other hand, some, like Travers’ interlocutor, cannot seem to accept that a physics-defying character could simply appear in the mind of a writer’s playful imagination, in spite of the rich heritage of stories in human history from Homer to Garcia-Marquez whose magical narratives not only appear, but manage to convey something deeply moving about what it’s like to be human.
Writing is a form of thinking, and I write personal essays in part to find out more about what I think about one topic or another. I still don’t have a firm position to argue for one way or another on creating from nothing. What I do find is that it’s interesting to put the notion into play, bounce it around a bit, and see if it opens any new perspectives. For the time being I’m comfortable with my agnosticism, my lack of knowledge about the sources of inspiration, and content to keep my varying thoughts in play with each other.
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