Neither/nor, both/and: not only can we not decide in any definitive manner between these two options as ways of expressing the relationship between creation and place, but, still more significantly, we must affirm each option. The either/or of a forced choice between such alternatives, either one or the other, yields to the inclusive “or” of affirming both together. It follows that creation is at once of place and from place. From creation, place proceeds; but it, creation itself, takes place only in place.93
VII
If the immediately preceding reflections seem to rely too readily on the undecidable, I would suggest that they in fact only carry forward into reflective discourse what is already present, at least implicitly, in various texts examined in this and the previous chapter. Even in quite fragmentary utterances, such as the text of Heraclitos with which I began the last section, we find a stance of “having it both ways.” There, too, place (the WorldMother’s body) was both presupposed and produced (i.e., as earth and sky, land and sea, and more particular places). And we see the same dual cosmologic at work even in the following suggestive lines from the Orphic Argonautica.
everything was born
everything pulled apart
from one another.94
If everything has been born, this must apply to place as well as to things-in-places. Place itself would have to be a created product. But if everything is born as “pulled apart from one another,” then equally everything is born in some place (for there can be no pulling apart except from or into a place). Everything is born placed: to be born at all is to be born as a separated being with its own place. The process of birth itself is no exception to this rule, since there is parturition only from within place. This is not only to presume place at the origin of things, along with other pregivennesses; still more audaciously, it is to posit it as this origin.
It is evident that the frequent invocation of water or waters as there from the beginning—most conspicuously in Genesis and in the Enuma Elish, but also in many other ancient accounts of creation (“in the beginning there was nothing but water, water, water”)95—is an invocation as much of a place or a region as of a generative source. It is an invocation of place-as-source. The same is true of such other nonaqueous elements as the “sunless desert” in Heraclitos’s “Homeric Allegory” or the earth on which there was not “even a wild bush” in the older Hebrew cosmogony of the Yahwist tradition.96 In both of these latter cases, a precosmic Place is posited as/at the very source of the creation that will take place on it. Such a place is indispensable to the taking-place of creation itself. In and from this place will come myriad items of creation that will at once populate the created world and occupy singular topoi within it. In this manner places will be added to Place; or, better, the latter will be seen as harboring the former.
Could it be that this is what Plato had in mind when he in effect deconstructed the idea of obdurate physical body—the focus of earlier physiocratic speculation—as a candidate for the elementary unit of the Receptacle? Could it be that the most primordial items are not elements, much less atoms, but choric regions? Is this not what Aristophanes meant when he placed the “deep Dark” before “air earth or sky”? Could it be that Place (e.g., chōra as Space and Region)97 provides, perhaps ultimately is, deep Dark’s own “bottomless wombs”—matrices, however unillumined, that are place-bearers?
If the answers to such questions are in the affirmative, Archytas would be vindicated again, and even twice over. For place indeed would be (as Archytas put it pithily) “the first of all things.”98 It would be this not only for the formal reason that every physical thing must occupy some particular place but also for the substantive reason that the generation of the world itself must take place in, from, and as place. If so, place is cosmically and even precosmically privileged.
To affirm this privilege is to reinforce the quite basic idea, which emerged in the first chapter, that the notion of no-place, and in particular the conception of a sheer void preceding the creation of the world, is highly problematic. The facility of the rhetorical gesture by which such a void—whether termed “Gap” or “abyss” or “interval”—is assumed to constitute the aboriginal state of things should not obscure the fact that on close examination few, if any, accounts of world-creation consistently maintain a strict nowhereness at the origin of things. Consider these famous lines of Milton’s in Paradise Lost:
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.99
At first glance these lines seem to offer a straightforward ex nihilo version of the state of the universe before Creation. To be “without bound” and “without dimension” is to be without depth—and thus to be, as I have just argued, without place. And yet Milton’s explicit allusions to Chaos and Night100 as well as to the “hoary deep” and to “a dark illimitable ocean”—to what the Romans called immensi tremor oceani—point us unmistakably to primal regions that precede any act of creation. It is also revealing that the poet says that “time and place are lost”: he does not say that they do not exist in this precreationist moment. To be lost is still to exist, however amorphously or covertly. In the Miltonic account, place is still very much around—as much as it is in Hebraic or Platonic cosmogonies. In no instance is the comparative shapelessness of place—its lack of “length, breadth, and highth”—a reason for doubting its preexisting and persisting being.101
I single out Milton because the account he presents in the above passage illustrates the continuing power of anxiety before the void. In the opening pages of this part I referred to the extreme measures we take to avoid confronting the possibility of there being no place at all in our lives—or even, as we may now add, in our speculation about the origin of the world. Milton’s elegant poetic-mythic synthesis is itself one such extreme measure, filling up the looming void with the “confusion” of Chaos and Night. Other extremes include those accounts of creation that posit places as existing from the beginning. In the latter case, the very intolerability of no-place influences the account itself, an account that, circuitously or directly, indicates that we never need fear reaching actual placelessness, not even at the very start of the known universe. For if creation is itself an ur-scene, it is ineluctably a Place of considerable cosmogonic significance.
Is this not the lesson of the Pelasgian myth that (as we saw in chapter 1) states, “In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves"? Does not any such primal creation-and-division of place express an effort to escape, at all costs, from a situation of being altogether without place? Deeper than what Friedrich Nietzsche calls a “will to nothingness”—“man would rather will nothingness than not will”102—may be an effort to will place itself in place of the void. Such a will, I suspect, is the Ariadne’s thread connecting all the disparate views of creation we have considered: disparate in historical and geographic location, in conscious intention, and in explicit textuality.
This