way to the imposed and regular configurations, the “limit-shapes,” of the builder and the surveyor.38 This is not to say that on this paradigm measuring is merely posterior to creation: it is itself an act of creation. To measure is to create. This bold equation will be repeated in other texts concerning creation, as we shall observe in one particular case in the next chapter.
For the moment, I want only to draw attention to the fact that in the inaugural creation text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, place is both ubiquitous and multifarious—and that its unfolding is even presented in a quasi-progressive (but not simply successive) manner. The void is evaded, and in its stead we find a proliferation of cosmogonically significant places, each of which is essential to the progress of the narrative of creation. Does this narrativized proliferation of places betray an effort to paper over the abyss of the void? If it does, it only repeats a gesture found elsewhere—beginning with the way we handle our own place-panic. For who can face the void? An absolute void cannot be faced (in either sense of this term). God Himself, as Genesis avers, can move only over a Deep that already possesses a face. He faces the Deep only insofar as its own face is already traced out upon its dark surface.
IV
It gives as great a shock to the mind to think of pure nothing in any one place, as it does to think of it in all; and it is self-evident that there can be nothing in one place as well as in another, and so if there can be in one, there can be in all.
—Jonathan Edwards, “Of Being”
Is this to say that cosmogonic accounts never begin expressly with a void? The citation from a Hopi creation myth that stands as an epigraph to this chapter shows that such a beginning indeed can be made. For the Hopi, “the first world,” that is, the first state of the world, is precisely that of Tokpela, “endless space.” Tokpela is conceived as an “immeasurable void” that has no beginning or end; no time, shape, or life. Once given the prospect of endless space, however, no time is wasted in the attempt to change that space into something less appallingly empty. The awesome void is just what creation must transmute—which is precisely what Taiowa, the Hopi creator-god, proceeds to do.
Then he, the infinite, conceived the finite. First he created Sotuknang to make it manifest, saying to him, “I have created you, the first power and instrument as a person, to carry out my plan for life in endless space. I am your Uncle. You are my Nephew. Go now and lay out these universes in proper order so they may work harmoniously with one another according to my plan.”
Sotuknang did as he was commanded. From endless space he gathered that which was to be manifest as solid substance, molded it into forms.39
The task is so immense that Taiowa creates a younger and stronger person to undertake it: his nephew Sotuknang. To “lay out these universes in proper order” Sotuknang engages in an action of gathering. Just as in Genesis the waters are “gathered together in one place” (Gen. 1:9), so in the Hopi creation story solid substances or parts of the earth are gathered together and given form. In both cases, the giving of form entails the bestowal of place: where else are formed things to be? The cosmogonic gathering is in effect a formation of place. Thus, even if the beginning is characterized as a situation of noplace, the ineluctable nisus is toward place—and toward an ever-increasing specificity of place, its laying out in the right (and ultimately a measurable) order. If the void is not itself a place, it must become one.
Despite their considerable diversity, all the accounts of creation examined so far agree on one basic cosmo-axiom: only from place can created things come. The known universe, albeit originating in a void, evolved from place to place. It follows that creation is a process of progressive implacement.
V
We have observed, then, a set of quite diverse cosmogonic models. Place figures in each of these, though with important nuances of difference. Genesis begins from a diffusely regionalized place made ever more determinate by the several stages of creation. In the chaos model of Hesiod’s Theogony, no preexisting regions are presumed—only the cosmomonstrosity of a primal Gap, whose action of scission brings about places of many sorts. Whereas scission in Genesis is subsequent to the initial state of things—acting to divide what is already there—separation itself is the first state in Hesiod’s story: or, more exactly, the first state proves to be no state at all but an action of dissociation that is place-creative by its very nature. Much the same is true of the Navajo creation myth, which imputes to the fateful horizon between the disks of Sky and Earth a special cosmogonic significance. In the case of the Hopi legend, creation opens with a situation of endless space in which neither regions nor actions are possible. (Elsewhere, cosmic emptiness is recognized as a second state of the universe situated between the first beginning and the plenitude of creation proper.)40 But the radical no-place of this inaugural moment in the Hopi myth is immediately succeeded by an act of deputized filling, a filling that recalls the gap-plugging presence of Eros, Kronos, and Zeus in the Theogony. Even apart from this remedial action, the cosmogonic void is not wholly devoid of place-properties in its aboriginal state. However empty it may be, it is still a place of, and for, creation. In it, from out of it, creation occurs—and first of all, in most cases, the creation of heaven (or sky) as a domain distinct from earth or sea.
There is no creation without place. This is so whether place is considered to preexist (as does the dark Deep in Genesis or the underworlds from which the primal mists arise in Navajo belief);41 or is brought forth out of Chaos as one of “ten thousand creations” (as the Taoists would put it); or is an emptiness that, precisely as emptiness, is necessary to world-creation (as we see dramatically enacted in kenotic models of the self-emptying of a creator god); or is the very place of creation and, more particularly, of the creator (as in the case of the ancient Babylonian account).42 Whether it is presumed or produced, given as simultaneous with creation or subsequent to it, place figures throughout. It is the continuing subtext of narratives of creation, the figured bass of their commingled melody.
VI
In being said—or not said—the void is voided.
—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Resemblances
But the void, the strict void, does not vanish easily, not even under the most unrelenting efforts to eliminate it. It keeps returning, in creation myths as in personal life. The Maori people speak of “the limitless space-filling void,”43 while the Zuñi point to “void desolation everywhere”44 as the original state of things. Anaximander’s notion of to apeiron, “the Boundless,” is tantamount to “the Placeless”—given that places, even cosmically vast places, require boundaries of some sort. The notion of the Boundless anticipates modern ideas of infinite space that expressly exclude places from their ambit (or if including them, then only as indifferent areas). From the perspective of place, to be without bounds of any kind, to be limitlessly empty, is to enter into dire straits indeed: “straits” despite the fact that there are no effective enclosures in these troubling unlimited waters.45 In cosmogonies that posit the utter void, water itself may not yet exist—not even in the form of the Deep, primal mists, or the “chaos-fluid” posited in the Egyptian Book of the Dead:
I am (bowl lord all fluid owl) ATUM completing-rising
of all
the only one
in Nun/chaos-fluid/46
Without an aqueous life-inducing element, and especially without its separation from earth or from sky, we reach that extremity of emptiness that seems to be sine qua non for those aporetic cosmogonies in which creation must come “from nothing.” About this extremity, this zero point, we must ask, do we here finally encounter a void so radical that it cannot offer place
