Kiho dwelt in his heaven in the Many-proportioned-realm-of-night.
These places were situated within the Night-sphere.51
This night-sphere of creation is a scene of becoming-place; it is a “many-proportioned” arena of possible places-to-come. The cosmogonic void, far from being place-indifferent or simply place-bereft, proves to be place-productive, proliferating into place after place.
The Tuamotuan text illustrates a principle that can be designated “topo-reversal.” Void is posited as no-place, only to be succeeded by the immediate positing of place. Or more exactly: no-place is succeeded by something that, precisely as something, brings places with it. Nowhere is this reversal so dramatically evident as in a Jicarilla Apache creation tale.
In the beginning nothing was here where the world now stands; there was no ground, no earth—nothing but Darkness, Water, and Cyclone. There were no people living. Only the Hactcin [personifications of the powers of objects and natural forces] existed. It was a lonely place.52
Here the reversal is marked by the sudden transition from “nothing” to “nothing but.” While the first stage represents a radically empty state, the second populates it with at least three natural things and several personified forces. The volte-face occurs even within one and the same sentence, and is expanded in subsequent sentences. Saturation is by no means reached—the place in question is still quite “lonely”—but the changeover from nothing at all to just barely something is cosmogonically progressive. Nonplacement gives way to implacement: cyclones, darkness, and water come clinging to their cosmic locations.
The topo-reversal can move in the opposite direction as well: from something to nothing. In the Han dynasty text Huai-nan Tzu, the Great Beginning gives way to emptiness. Or else something and nothing may be considered as coexisting. Thus Chuang Tzu writes, “There is being. There is nonbeing.”53 An ancient Mayan text proclaims that in the beginning “there was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed.”54 Nothing stands—and yet water and sea are already standing there. The chiasmatic turn whereby even a minimal nothing-but or an “only” (i.e., a bare something) is denied existence, yet is nevertheless given existence, also receives expression in one of the Upanishads: “In the beginning this world was merely non-being. It was existent.”55 To exist as nonbeing: a self-complicating assertion of convoluted cosmologic.
Despite such reversals and twists, indeed through them, we witness the persistence of place in the face of the nothing—a nothing that one might have assumed to be the very death of place. Whether as the sheer something of a “Black-gleamless-realm” or as the still sheerer nonbeing that nevertheless exists (and thus literally “stands-out”), place abides. In the context of cosmogony—that is to say, in an account of the becoming of the world—there is no place for no-place. Dearth of place, even literal nonplace, we may acknowledge: such is the “lonely place” of the Apache creation myth. But this is not tantamount to the death of place, no-place-at-all: rather than dealing with its demise, cosmogony has to do with the birth of place itself.
Even the utter void, then, retains the dynamic property of being a scene of emergence, a proscenium on which things can arise as taking place and as having their own place. Much as we have found that chaos is not entirely empty of form, so we now discover the empty no-place of the void to have more shape and force than we might have imagined. Indeed, if chaos can be regarded as predeterminate place, the void is best construed as the scene of emergent place. Cosmogonically considered, the void is on its way to becoming ever more place-definite. It is the scene of world-creation and thus the basis of an increasingly coherent and densely textured place-world.
VII
The foregoing construal of the void does not retrieve it for place. Indeed, it deprives void of place—particular place—and place of void. But it makes room for the possibility of place in the void by maintaining that the void may itself become devoid of its own initially unimplaced and unimplacing character. By speaking of “possibility” and of “become,” I am keeping the void within a cosmogonic context. It is important to retain this context in the face of the temptation to offer a transcendental deduction of place as that which has to be presupposed if experience or knowledge of certain kinds is to be possible. This temptation must be resisted. The only thing that can be deduced from a transcendental argument—of a Kantian sort—is the presupposition of empty space. Such space, especially when located in (or, more exactly, as) a form of intuition, is not only mental in status; more seriously still, it is a merely objective posit, a present-at-hand entity. As such—as categorial, or vorhanden in Heidegger’s nomenclature—it fails to capture what is specific to place, namely, the capacity to hold and situate things, to give them a local habitation. Such holding action proffers something ready-to-hand (zuhanden), something concretely palpable, to which attachment can be made. This palpability belongs properly to place and not to space.56
A deductive, relentless cosmologic is driven to presuppose an empty and boundless no-place—not yet named “space” in many mythic accounts—that is as abstract and barren of holding-locating properties as is space on the modern conception. To parry this cosmologism (whereby an entity is posited as cosmically necessary yet is unable to play any constructive role), the void is quickly filled with various places. Navajo cosmogony lays down places of emergence, “underworlds” that are both located (under the visible upperworld) and locating (of all that is on and in the upperworld). These sub-worlds are concrete holding environments that do what the void, taken by itself alone, cannot do: they offer palpable implacement to things. The advantage in this literally topocosmic move is that the role of place is made central and explicit from the beginning. It need not be inferred as something surreptitiously supposed. The transcendental deduction of space stands instructed by a cosmogonic espousal of place.
By interpreting the void as a scene of emergent implacement, we pursue a middle path, one that is neither covertly transcendental nor expressly mythical. This middle way regards the void as the scene of the becoming of place. To take up this view is neither to transform the strict void into infinite isotropic space nor to populate it in advance with determinate mythical places. Neither the indeterminate nor the determinate but the predeterminate is what is cosmogonically formative. The strict void is avoided by recognizing the void as already on the way to place. Such a void is not presupposed, much less deduced as cosmologically or epistemologically necessary. It is posited in the first place—not as the first place but as the first becoming of place itself. Just as the space posited in a transcendental deduction shows itself capable of providing particular places, the void of cosmogonic accounts is on its way to the determination of particular places. The void makes provision for places. It is place in its provisionally.
In pursuing this last line of thought, am I not papering over the abyss of the cosmogonic void by my own discursive considerations? If so, I shall not have been the first philosopher to have averted place-panic by proposing the massive preplacement of the world-in-the-making. In the next chapter, we shall witness Plato doing something similar. In the face of the void, and in the absence of the deducibility of space, recourse to place becomes tempting indeed.
Yet, even apart from concerted (and quite possibly defensive) steps to assure the abiding prepresence of place, in the end we may take a certain comfort in the very void itself. We have seen that even in the face of the utter void, of no-thingness itself, place is already prefigured. Place configures and situates the face of the dark Deep. Even a cosmogonically rigorous account that sets down no-place as a necessary beginning point—or one that discovers chaos at the origin—is never without the resources of place. At no place is such an account altogether destitute of these resources. Even the void yields place: if it is now bereft of body and place (i.e., is no-place for no-body), it promises to give way to both body and place then, after the work of creation has been done.
In fact, as we reflect on all the cosmogenetic moments in which place is of import (moments, however, not arranged in any strict chronological sequence), we begin to savor a different prospect. This is a prospect of an aboriginal preplacement, and an ongoing implacement,