Twelve Scenarios for
the Creation of the Universe
1.
God was a small girl, about ten years old. God was
black. She was dressed in black. She was walking along
the dark shore of the sea, the sea of which you have
heard, the many-sounding sea. She passed great rocks,
great heights, and things above the heights which were
greater still.
She picked up a grain of sand and said, "Let there be
light." The sand grain began to sparkle in the gloom.
God looked at it closely; she breathed on it; she brushed
it with her lips. "There," she said, 'that's good." And
she cast it upward, into the heavens. And so she was
walking along that beach.
2.
God was trying to untie his shoe. He struggled with the
knot, but it had been tied for a long time and it was a
pretty big knot. But he really wanted to untie it. Finally
- by picking at it tediously with his fingernails - he
got the knot apart, and pulled his shoe off. The universe
fell out of his shoe.
"Oh,' said God, "so that's what it was."
3.
God was in labor, it was a difficult labor, for a child like
this had never been born before. Her face glistened with
sweat. She thrashed and twisted, she cried out, she
wept. She ground her teeth, she bled.
After a long struggle an electron was born.
God cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. She jumped
up and began to lick the electron. It howled.
4.
There was no God. There was no universe. There was
nothing, nothing, nothing. It was so sad, out of pity the
universe brought itself into being.
5.
Before the universe, there was something completely
indescribable. After the universe, there was something
else, also completely indescribable. Between the two
indescribable things, was the universe. You came along
and picked it, this very world.
6.
Actually, Coyote created the universe. Before that
everything was cool, it was okay. Coyote showed up
and said, "Hey, let's create a universe! Let's make ants
and smoke and high finance and love and dreams and
stuff," he said. 'Let's make stuff that smells, and weird
things, and mirrors, and time, and lies, and last Tuesday
morning! Wow!" Well, there was no one around to stop
him, so he went ahead and did it.
7.
It all started with this moment. I looked into your eyes
and said, Let there be a world which leads to this
moment. And it was so, eleven billion years of it. And
eleven billion years yet to come, just to give us a little
room.
8.
There was a man that sat in a chair reflecting on how
things come into being. At the opposite end of space
and time, the primordial thing also reflected. It reflected
itself and it reflected the man; they reflected each other.
That time flows either this way, or that, is an illusion.
9.
In the beginning, of course, there was sex. Hard, heavy,
hot sex. Dirty sex. Like those loft parties you used to
hear about. It went on and on and on. It just got wilder
and more incredible and heavier all the time.
Naturally, beings came along and wanted to get in on it.
They got in.
10.
It was an accident, but there's no use crying over spilt
milk.
11.
There was a fantastic crystal, oh, it was impossible, it
blazed from billions of facets, it coruscated from within,
impossibly beautiful, gold, amethyst, onyx, bronze, opal,
sapphire, viridian, umber. It was impossible and its
impossibility shattered it, the air filled with innumerable
falling particles that clashed and shrieked as they fell.
We came after.
12.
There was a tone, single and strong. There was a pipe
that played this tone, dusky bronze in the shadows, and
a wind howling in the pipe raising the sound. There
was a chamber from which that sound came and a man
to press the key of the instrument which sounded.
He held the key down and listened to the sound; he
began to hear other sounds within the sound. He
moved his fingers over the keys, following the sounds
within as he heard them. The sounds gathered and
cascaded, sounds within sounds, winding and
unwinding.
Outside the wind was a dark plain. As the man played
the sounds, the arms of the nebula, terrible to behold,
slowly rose over the plain.