Shuzanghu’s question to his wife, “How long must we live without a place to rest our feet?” was posed when “at first there was neither Earth nor Sky.” But once Earth and Sky have separated from each other—once creation has begun, as it always already has—the answer to Shuzanghu’s question is evident: there will be somewhere to rest your feet if only you will look in the right place—in the first place. As Aristotle assures us that “time will not fail,”57 so Shuzanghu can be certain that place will not lack.
2
Mastering the Matrix
The Enuma Elish and Plato’s Timaeus
That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?
—Ecclesiastes 7:24
[Marduk] crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above Apsu, that Apsu built by Nudimmud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
—Enuma Elish
Before that, all these kinds were without proportion or measure. . . . Such being their nature at the time when the ordering of the universe was taken in hand, the god then began by giving them a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers.
—Plato, Timaeus 53b
Everyone says that place is something; but [Plato] alone attempted to say what it was.
—Aristotle, Physics Book 4
I
Once we admit that the panic-producing idea of the void is always (in advance) a matter of place—and is thus not reducible to the daunting nothingness, the strict no-place, that occasions the panic—we must face a second major issue. This is the propensity not merely to fill the void as a way of allaying anxiety but, more especially, to master the void. To master is not to bring into being in the first place but to control and shape that which has already been brought into existence. It is still a matter of creation, at least in that sense of creation inherent in the Hebrew word bará used in I Genesis: a word whose cognate meanings include “to carve” (e.g., the tip of an arrow) or “to cut up” (e.g., a carcass).1 What is now at stake is not creation ex nihilo—an action we have discovered to be as rare as it is problematical—but creation ex datis, “out of the given.” Yet how is creation carried forward once we are willing to acknowledge that the void has content, that something is already given in and with (and even as) the void itself?
What is pregiven is usually considered to be material, a matter of matter. But in ancient and traditional cosmogonies, “matter” does not signify anything hard and fast—anything rigorously physical in the manner of determinate and resistant “material objects.” On the contrary: matter connotes matrix, one of its cognates and certainly something material (even if not something completely definite in its constitution). In its literal sense of “uterus” or “womb,” the matrix is the generatrix of created things: their mater or material precondition. As such, it is the formative phase of things—things that will become more fully determinate in the course of creation. Vis-à-vis the generative matrix, the task of creation becomes that of crafting and shaping, ultimately of controlling, what is unformed or preformed in the matrix itself. Creation becomes a matter of mastering matter.
Just as chaos has proved to be a place, so a cosmogonic matrix is a place as well. Beyond its strictly anatomical sense, matrix means “a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed,” “a place or point of origin and growth.” In the matter of the matrix, place remains primary. As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the definitions just cited are traceable to at least the middle of the sixteenth century A.D. But they are seen to possess a still more ancient lineage if we reflect that a text such as Genesis opens with the description of a state of affairs that is neither chaos nor void but a matrix: “Darkness was upon the face of the Deep.” As the initial moment of cosmogenesis, the dark Deep is a material, or more precisely an elemental, matrix. The world starts with an “embedding or enclosing mass” (in yet another OED definition of “matrix”) that is aqueous in character; it starts with “the waters” as the generative matrix of things-to-be, things-to-come.
We may trace things even farther back. Tehom, the Hebrew word for “deep [waters],” itself stems from Tiamat, the Mesopotamian proper name for that primordial oceanic force figuring at the very beginning of the Enuma Elish, a tale of creation that predates the reign of Hammurabi (ca. 1900 B.C.). Tiamat is in place as an elemental matrix from time immemorial, and therefore creation must begin with her antecedent and massive presence.
When there was no heaven,
no earth, no height, no depth, no name,
when Apsu was alone,
the sweet water, the first begetter; and Tiamat
the bitter water, and that
return to the womb, her Mummu,
When there were no gods—
When sweet and bitter
mingled together, no reed was plaited, no rushes
muddied the water,
the gods were nameless, natureless, futureless, then
from Apsu and Tiamat
in the waters gods were created, in the waters
silt precipitated.2
Unlike Genesis, the Babylonian text does not mention earth, not even an earth “without form and void.” Nor do we find any gods—certainly not “God,” or Yahweh—much less any words by which a god could summon up creation. In this nameless scene, no one says “Let there be light.”
On the other hand (and here in contrast with Hesiod’s Theogony),3 in the Enuma Elish there is no chaos to start with, nor is there any primal separation between heaven and earth. All that is present is water: two kinds of water, salt and fresh, “Tiamat” and “Apsu.” Even Mummu, the originary mist, is aqueous. All begins with/in water. The gods themselves are created from it: creation occurs without creators. Instead of arising from a decisive act of scission, creation takes place with the imperceptible mixing of waters; everything begins with the merging of two regions of water in an elemental commixture. For Apsu and Tiamat are less the names of gods than of primeval places; they are cosmogonic place-names. “Bitter water” is one kind of place and “sweet water” another kind of place. When they merge, they create a common place—a matrix—for more particular places, including the places of particular gods.
The silty mass precipitated in the intermixed waters is the first definite place to emerge from the Apsu-Tiamat matrix, and it brings with it the naming of the first four gods. Place and name are here coeval.
Lahmu and Lahamu,
were named; they were not yet old,
not yet grown tall
When Anshar and Kishar overtook them both,
the lines of sky and earth
stretched where horizons meet to separate
cloud from silt.4
From the place of silt, “primeval sediment,”5 comes the separation of earth and sky. Lahmu and Lahamu, barely distinguishable from each other as names (except insofar as the former is male, the latter female), are overtaken by the more distinctly differentiated figures of Anshar and Kishar, gods of the horizons of sky and earth, respectively. The comparatively belated distinction of earth from sky constitutes separation between heaven and earth that we have observed elsewhere—most notably in Genesis, where God “separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.” Unlike the Old Testament account, however, the Enuma Elish explicitly builds the feature of horizon lines into the proper names Anshar and Kishar, remarking oxymoronically that