Final Fridays (6 page)

Bereshith
—in Hebrew, the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible—says it more aptly than does the usual English translation, “In the beginning.” Both expressions are adverbial, and their sense is inarguably the same:
Bereshith
means, indeed, “in the beginning,”
³
its first syllable corresponding to the English preposition. But if, as John's subsequent gospel affirms (1:1),
“In the beginning was the word,” then any form-conscious writer of a creation-story will prefer that beginning word to be the word
Beginning
. The text of Genesis (called, in Hebrew,
Bereshith
), especially its opening chapters, is virtually proto-Postmodernist in its deployment of what art critics call “significant form”—the form a metaphor for the content, or form and content reciprocally emblematical—and the original Hebrew begins the story best:
beginningly.
⁴

In the “Near Eastern” stacks of my university's library, once the distinguished haunt of William Foxwell Albright's Oriental Seminary, there is half an alcove of scholarly commentary, in a babel of languages, on the text of Genesis; enough to frighten any self-respecting fictionist back to his/her trade. Of all this (except for Sacks's excellent treatise aforenoted) I remain programmatically innocent. No professional storyteller, however, especially of the Postmodernist or Romantic-Formalist persuasion, can fail on rereading this seminal narrative to be struck by two circumstances, no doubt commonplaces among Bible scholars: 1) that the structure of Genesis, particularly of its opening chapter, is self-reflexive, self-similar, even self-demonstrative; and 2) that its narrative procedure echoes, prefigures, or metaphorizes some aspects of current cosmogonical theory.

In the astrophysical beginning, in short, were the seeds of several beginnings-within-beginnings: the beginning of spacetime, the beginning of matter, of radiant energy, and of galaxy formation, down (or up) to the beginnings of life, of human consciousness, of rational inquiry, of scientific reasoning and experiment, and of contemporary cosmological speculation capable even of some empirical verification of these several beginnings.

Analogously, Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth”
⁶
—in one sense says it all. And then the next four verses (i.e., Day One: the creation of light, its division from darkness, their naming as Day and Night, and, coincidentally, the initiation of time) sort of say it all again; and then the remaining 26 verses of Chapter One (the ensuing five days of creation, echoing on a larger scale and with more particulars the first five verses, themselves an expansion of 1:1) sort of say it all
again
. Whereafter, Chapter Two (following God's three-verse rest on Day Seven) proceeds to say it all yet again—“This is the generations of the sky and the earth in their creation on the day in which God made the earth and the sky,” et cetera—replaying the same creation-riffs in so different a key that some scholars take it to be another tune altogether (Sacks, pp. 18 ff.).
In either case, what's undeniable is that each successive expansion
is
an expansion, both in textual space, like the universe's expansion of physical space (not, strictly speaking,
in
physical space, since at any moment its expanding space is all the space there is), and also in particularity, differentiation, multiplicity. From mere sky and earth in 1:1, we have evolved by 2:23 a cosmos replete with heavenly bodies in motion, speciated life on Earth, and sexually differentiated human beings endowed with language and intelligence, though not yet with upper-case Knowledge and its attendant hazards.

The rest, as they say, is history:
⁷
the rest of Genesis (creation + fall, flood, and bondage); the rest of the Pentateuch (Genesis + Exodus through Deuteronomy); the rest of the Hebrew bible (Pentateuch + prophets and “writings”); the rest of the canonical Christian Bible (Hebrew Bible + New Testament)—all implicit in the beginning,
bereshith
. Indeed, one might call the opening verse of Genesis the macrobang from which evolve not only the Jewish and Christian sacred texts but the centuries of commentary thereupon: an evolution no more “finished” than that of the physical universe, as biblical scholarship and archaeology expand our knowledge and understanding of the texts. Witness, for example, the recent scholarly catfights over publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the expectable deluge of associated books and papers now that the text is readily available.

As a creator myself, of word-worlds, I'm admiringly envious—not so much of the universe's genesis, which is beyond my agnostic ken, as of Genesis's genesis; less of divine Creation than of this artfully created creation-story.

 

DID I EVER actually
believe
any of it? The six-day cosmogony, Adam and Eve and the serpent, and for that matter the text as God's
word and the a priori existence of its divine author? In the sluggishly Christian but essentially secular household of my small-town boyhood, one dutifully attended the neighborhood Methodist Sunday school as a child and then, as an adolescent, the Friday-evening Junior Christian Endeavor, as well as “joining church” round about puberty-time. I did all that in the same mainly unprotesting spirit in which I attended Cambridge (Maryland) public schools: It was what one did. But the air of our house, while not openly skeptical, was in no way suffused with religious belief: God, the afterlife, the authority of biblical texts—such matters never entered our table talk. The first time I heard the Genesis story questioned on scientific grounds (God knows where, in that venue), whatever notional assent I'd given it as a literal account slipped lightly away forever, as did by high-school days any notion of its divine authorship. Later, in university years and the beginnings of my own authorhood, I would come to appreciate metaphor and to respect the power and profundity of great myths, the biblical creation-myth included—but that's another story.

As for the one told in the book of Genesis: Bravo! What a splendid beginning!

For believing Christians, Act Two of the creation-drama is mankind's vicarious redemption by the Messiah from man's original sin and fall from grace in Act One.
⁸
I shall now audaciously rush in where no angel would presume to tread and draw another analogy with contemporary theoretical physics, as I understand that vertiginous discipline.

Werner Heisenberg's celebrated Uncertainty Principle and Erwin Schrödinger's quantum-mechanical wave-function equations, taken together, declare in effect that the position of an electron, say, is
“merely” a field of probabilities until we observe it, whereupon its “wave function collapses” and it may be said to
have
a position. Extrapolating from these axioms of quantum physics, some later theoreticians have maintained that in a sense, at least, such observation may be said to be not only uninnocent (i.e., not non-disturbing) but downright causative: We didn't observe Electron X to be at Point A because that happens to be where it was; that's where it was
because we made the observation
, prior to which its position was no one particular point but a probability-field. On the microlevels of particle physics and the macrolevels of astrophysics, such counterintuitive
bi-zarries
are in rigorous conformity with empirical observation; quantum physics has been an extraordinarily successful scientific theory, with formidable predictive power. The Anthropic Principle, which comes in several flavors,
⁹
carries these extrapolations to startling lengths: Had our universe not happened to develop precisely within a number of very critical parameters (as could just as possibly and much more probably have been the case), there would have been no evolution of planetary systems, of life, and of intelligences capable of measuring (never “innocently”) and theorizing upon those critical parameters. Depending on whether you take your Anthropic Principle in its diluted or its industrial-strength versions, the universe may thus be said to have evolved precisely such that astrophysicists can exist to understand its evolution, or it may be said to exist as we observe it to exist at least in part because we make those (never non-disturbing) observations. As John Wheeler succinctly puts it, “The observer is as essential to the creation of the universe as the universe is to the creation of the observer.”

Without rigorous amplification, at least, this smacks of teleology, not to say tautology, as even some proponents of the principle agree
(Wheeler declares that he wholeheartedly believes in his Participatory Anthropic Principle “every February 29th”). It also echoes, in my ears anyhow, the “Christian-dramatic” view that the universe was created as the theater of mankind's fall and messianic redemption. On this view, while the Old Testament implies and validates the New, the New reciprocally completes and validates the Old (more to come on this reciprocity). Every playwright and novel-plotter knows that while the events of Act Two will appear to the audience/reader to have been necessitated by the events of Act One, it is reciprocally true that the events of Act One may be said to have been necessitated by the requirements of Act Two. To Chekhov's aforenoted injunction I would add that many a scriptwriter has been obliged to go back and hang a pistol on the wall in the story's beginning because it turns out to be needed for firing at or near the story's end.
¹⁰
Do physicists observe the universe to be such-and-so because its evolution has narrowly permitted the existence of physicists, or vice-versa? Was the Messiah's coming necessary because of Original Sin, or was Original Sin (in Catholic tradition,
felix culpa
, Man's “happy fault”) necessary for the Messiah's coming?

Either way, it all begins in the beginning, dramaturgically speaking, prefigured in Adam and Eve's tasting the forbidden fruit of knowledge—including self-knowledge, the original causative, uninnocent observation:

And they likewise stitched together, in their subsequent/consequent generations, everything from scripture and scriptural commentary to quantum physics and the Anthropic Principle—all implicit, though not predictable,
bereshith
.

 

NOT PREDICTABLE? SO says chaos theory about the exfoliation of any complex system, such as the weather or the evolution of life on earth, “sensitively dependent on initial conditions”—small differences among which (Eve eats the apple; Eve doesn't eat the apple; Eve eats, but Adam doesn't; they both do) rather quickly generate large differences in outcome.
¹¹
But such paradoxes of postlapsarian self-consciousness as the Anthropic Principle permit us to muse on some other modes of “reciprocal validation,” which I'll approach via a brief detour from scriptural into secular literary classics.

Virgil's
Aenead
is more aware of itself as a monumental epic poem than are its great predecessors and models, Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. Just as the poem's story-line traces the triumphant Roman empire back to wandering refugees from fallen Troy (and thus settles historical scores with Homer's Greeks), so the Roman poet programmatically combines in Aeneas's adventures an Odyssey and an Iliad, respectfully going one-on-one with the master, so to speak, in episode after episode, as if to say “Anything you Greeks did, we Romans can imitate, equal, and perhaps exceed.” Politically and militarily there are winners and losers in such competitions; in art, one does better to speak not of victors and vanquished but of inspiration and reciprocal enrichment. Readers who know both Homer and Virgil find their enjoyment of each enhanced by its prefiguration or reorchestration of the other. Whether or not, as Jorge Luis Borges declares, “Every great writer creates his own precursors” (a sort of literary Anthropic
Principle), great artists unquestionably enrich and revalidate their precursors, as well as conversely.
¹²