Sparse Plots

Sparse Plots

       By Lord Douglas (Salgoud) Rawleigh

                        i prayed to the father

                        and to the holy ghost

            `           i prayed to the spirit

                        but I prayed to god the most

Years ago when God was void, air and land and sea mixed in a swirling mog. Chaos ruled and no structure anywhere had a place in His grand dominion. God thought to Himself, I must change this. I am tired of it. I will do something to relieve the monotony of swirl and fold. And He did.

       He brooded on the deep. Now “brooded,” as you know, has that Saxon root of “broo,” spelled “brew” in our day. He drank a couple of beers that He rustled up from within Himself and thought with intense intensity about the problem. This would have to be a great thing, somehow, to replace the insane display that Chaos had cornered for itself. Cornered, or created, God was never quite sure. In fact, till this moment of boredom, He had never really contemplated much at all. He could and did do. That is true. But when You are a Flow and a Downward Rush, a Resistance and a Flight, You do with a kind of immediacy that requires no thought. Oh, thought could have been involved, but with the same characteristics that all other movement and action in Chaos demonstrated. Till now, then, Chaos contented itself had with such spontaneity. So, when the Divine brooded, he took to His Circulian mouth a formed bottle and drank from it the liquid it contained. He brooded for the first time in a long while. He had never brooded before. Correct. All Knowledge had never before felt like brooding and so hadn’t been that, though now that He wanted to He did. And doing so He came up with a response to Chaos that surprised Him not the least.

       It dawned on Him that brooding was work. Stopping and thinking, halting and reflecting, breaking from action and brooding, were a hell of a lot of work. Now, having thus labored long and hard, He realized that He did not really care for work. No, that is not quite correct. He discovered in Himself a resistance to labor, an inertia. Inert to movement of an unaccustomed sort, He decided, was the nature of Chaos. That would be the first thing that newness would have to contain within itself; there would be no allowances for the rule of inertia. Whatever came next would have to deflect boredom by refusing to sit still within its own flows, which were its will. Whatever came next would have to will and then live without that active flow that was will in the doing that came till the doing was done, which was not a doing. Yes.

       That was a tricky thought, but having sipped long enough till the brew had made that thought clear to Him, He knew that the most difficult part of the relief of boredom had been accomplished and He said to Himself that it was good. Having determined that work was a beast, that work was a doing of the non doing, the activity that was not activity, God said, “Now, what next?” He decided on something entirely foreign to Himself at that moment, too. I am, He thought. I am! And it is good! Lordy, how long do we have to wait? Which Road am I going to take? I’ve been in the lowlands too long. All these expressions of bluegrass delight infused Him, filled Him with the joy of knowing something exceptional. I am a thinking Thing. Thought is. Thinking, I Am.

       And then he rested. But, not for long. There was work to be done. “I am still bored,” He said. “If I stop here with the work of thinking (which is not a doing and a flowing that I will but a willless continuation of inward reflection, than I have done nothing. ‘I Am’ needs ‘I See That You Are!’ ‘I Am’ needs ‘I Seed You.’” And so, by circuitous means unfamiliar to Him, God arrived at an impasse. What to do to relieve the need to have a witness for His great discoveries about Himself?

       Well, now, this is where we come in. We were conceived at that moment. It was a long moment, and I am not going to bore you with the hourly reportage of it. The conclusion of this self-searching bore us. God thought us then. He reached into Chaos for the first available substance, like toast in the Thames, and formed it into earth. He divided the earth from the sky. He pronounced that good. And the next good too, which was the making of sea, fishes, and other things. He had already filled the sky with objects and great floating things. Now, next, still a bit anxious inside His own skin, God thought till He thought us and made us out of the earth of a favored sky object. Adam was made. There, I have duplicated Myself. That was a lot of work, but there I Am mirroring Myself.

       He said as much to Adam, who replied respectfully that he was bored. “Couldn’t I have something around here that I could see and put my faith in, as well as other things?”

       God then made Eve in the way we have come to know it. To relieve Adam’s boredom He made her. To even the score. She would see to it that Adam kept the garden neat and tidy. He would have little time for willing from that moment on. She would keep his life unboring. And she did. Things happened fast there, and before long they were out of the garden hunting and destroying snakes that attempted at the same time to outwit them and bite their ankles. Babies were born, and that kept them from willing. Children gave them hellish worries when they grew, and that kept them willless.

Animals needed to be husbanded (well, that may not be the best word choice, since Adam, on one or more occasion when Eve was in her way, or otherwise indisposed, did things unthinkable, mistaken as he was in his knowledge of words, but we will overlook that labor of his for the moment). Food had to be gathered. Eventually, governments had to be formed and kept track of and so on. Work, work, work, work. That was their legacy. That was the way of the world now. No time for flows. No time for willing. Only time for swilling and work.

Ah, well, where has the time gone?