Genesis 1 - The Illegible Stone

(Rothko)

Am I going to be a man of faith or a man of science? I would rather be a hedonist and that is the truth. Of course this is one of those "background radiation" questions that emanate from this text, and the truth that the question points to un-nerves me to the very core of my modernity. This isn't your grandma's universe, nor your great-grandma's universe for that matter. The cosmology of the text is wild -- not the measured rationality of glasses and after-dinner drinking -- but a primordial screech from a lost antediluvian throat. Here there are no galaxies, no stars, no solar systems, no planets, no moons, no earth (and the modern reader can't help but imagine them there). Instead man stands on earth and breaths in the sky, with the water chaos below and beside and above, and beyond the water chaos -- God. What did Eliot write?

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We start with an illegible stone and an epitaph to a dead Man. Every text is an text in time, and this is a text weathered by time and almost lost to the beating of the modern wind of mind, almost completely worn down, almost. But look carefully. I just thought of that poem by Thomas Merton:

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

Can this text be opened for us like the breaking of the sealed scroll? I think the only thing less open, more "other" than the silence of stones is the reptilian eye. Just remember the first shot in Malick's Thin Red Line, a crocodile swimming through the chaos waters of the chaos jungle, an image of nature at war with itself, the nature that is a destroying power bent on bringing humanity into its own chaos. It is this animal that brings Adam and Eve into itself, into it's own questions. Is the chaos of serpents and water the chaos of questions, as in the romantic sea-foam? Am I asking the questions of serpents even now? Scroll down, scroll down.

I am yet drawn to this story be cause it speaks truth. Surely only a sacrament of the true cosmos, far more good and beautiful than even the freshly cut runes of man can devise (because words are only the sacraments on man's imagination, and the cosmos the sacrament of God's Imagination). But it answers. It says: this is what you believe, ancient man, and I am going to tell you why. The Why and the "what it is really," beyond the stuff. This is the problem for modern man, and the joy of the ancient. I am of course referencing the Cosmic Temple reading but I am trying to get to something deeper. I feel a problem in my own exegesis where two-thousand years into church history and I think I am deciphering the stone. I feel that the text is getting between me and the world, and is it supposed to?

Our universe began in light, pure light, theirs begins in darkness, pure darkness. I feel as if the word should bring be into deeper communion with creation, and not be a wall between me and the truth. I fear that modern exegesis can fall into the same trap as the young-earth modernists, of treating the word as the "thing itself" and not as sacrament.

(I didn't write an apologetic for the use of this ANE cosmology even though there is a perfectly good one to be had by anyone, because I didn't feel like stealing the good ideas of others to that extent today, i.e. John Walton, Rick Watts etc. (that was a very lazy etcetera indeed))