Before the beginning is the tricky part, I guess. But when you’re writing the beginning, how do you differentiate it from what came before? How do you start anything? How could anyone end anything?

With nothing. That’s the entire continuum; the words and the nothing between. That wasn’t obvious to me, of course, for years. How many thousands of notebook pages can you fill before the beginning and end are ultimately almost meaningless? I am not a musician or a mystic, so this stuff has to turn up arranged just the right way on a page, or I’ll never get it. Well I got it; like a fucking bullet:

A blank page is never empty. “Nothing” is given an outline by reference. That outline is a veil, beyond which we can neither go nor gaze. How do you talk about what can be neither said nor seen? A Gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi library, sometimes called On the Origin of the World, attempts this.

Seeing that everybody, gods of the world and mankind, says that nothing existed prior to chaos, I, in distinction to them, shall demonstrate that they are all mistaken, because they are not acquainted with the origin of chaos, nor with its root. Here is the demonstration.

How well it suits all men, on the subject of chaos, to say that it is a kind of darkness! But in fact it comes from a shadow, which has been called by the name ‘darkness’. And the shadow comes from a product that has existed since the beginning. It is, moreover, clear that it existed before chaos came into being, and that the latter is posterior to the first product. Let us therefore concern ourselves with the facts of the matter; and furthermore, with the first product, from which chaos was projected. And in this way the truth will be clearly demonstrated.

After the natural structure of the immortal beings had completely developed out of the infinite, a likeness then emanated from Pistis (Faith); it is called Sophia (Wisdom). It exercised volition and became a product resembling the primeval light. And immediately her will manifested itself as a likeness of heaven, having an unimaginable magnitude; it was between the immortal beings and those things that came into being after them, like […]: she (Sophia) functioned as a veil dividing mankind from the things above.

Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name ‘darkness’. From it, there appeared a force, presiding over the darkness. And the forces that came into being subsequent to them called the shadow ‘the limitless chaos’. From it, every kind of divinity sprouted up […] together with the entire place, so that also, shadow is posterior to the first product. It was the abyss that it (shadow) appeared, deriving from the aforementioned Pistis.

As you approach the genesis or terminus of reality, meaning falls apart. Suddenly words are reduced to a prehistoric grunt, then a primordial squelch, a soft hum, perfect silence. For someone like a god, this is not much of a problem; they don’t subsist on our projections, nor do they need to be written into existence. For those of us who play by their rules, it is quite a puzzle. We have to create hierarchies, structures populated by infinitely general personifications of concepts, forces so incomprehensible to us that they seem undefinable and unquantifiable. We have to pretend they’re us, and build monuments to climb in the hope of glimpsing them. Or of being seen.

The Gnostic story of Pistis Sophia does this, and still spends a lot of time repeating that there are things above and beneath and beyond our concepts of the void or the absolute, which remain a mystery, even to the Light. It is this chasm between the titular Sophia and the unknowable absolute, the story says, which caused the trouble that got us all into the mess of existing. Jesus tells his disciples his account of the original event:

She saw the light of the veil of the Treasury of the Light, and she longed to reach to that region, and she could not reach to that region. But she ceased to perform the mystery of the thirteenth æon, and sang praises to the light of the height, which she had seen in the light of the veil of the Treasury of the Light.

This primeval being-before-all saw, longed for, sang to what she could not have. What does that sound like?

After being tricked into leaving her realm, the thirteenth æon, by the powers and beings in the æons below her, Sophia is terribly oppressed and weakened by the lesser forces, which had come to hate her for her ambition to reach the Light. She offers thirteen repentances to the Light, praising it while also begging that it visit hell-everlasting upon her enemies. This not only gets the attention of Jesus beyond the veil of the Treasury of the Light, but he comes to her aid even before being commanded to do so, leading her up out of the depths of chaos into which she had been dragged.

In her twelfth repentance, Sophia pleads:

O Light, forget not my praise-singing.

In her thirteenth and final repentance, her prayer to be returned to the thirteenth æon from which she had been lured:

Moreover I have transgressed, that thy commandment may be accomplished.

If that isn’t codependency and manipulation, nothing is. Does it work?

Ancient religions all seem to have at their foundation a representation of the initial state from which emerged the spark of existence. Each originating from, dwelling within, and personifying the primeval sea. The Sumerians named it Namma. Despite her absolute necessity and importance within the cosmogony, nearly nothing about Namma has survived or been remembered long enough to be transcribed by modern scholars. Precious little evidence has been found suggesting that there were temples or any cults devoted to her, and what has been found is ambiguous.

Babylonians called her Tiamat, the deification of the primeval salt sea. The mingling of her waters with those of Abzu, the primeval sweet sea, creates the gods, who then create other gods. This post-creation reality rapidly grows troublesome and beyond their control until the gods kill Abzu, so as to claim his throne. In grief and fury, Tiamat wages a war of vengeance against those who murdered her other half. For her army, she creates fierce monsters, dragons with venom in their veins. But she, too, is brutally slain and her dismembered corpse is used to create the world.

In Egypt, they referred to the Ogdoad, a body of eight deifications of the void, in four male-female pairs. Nun and Naunet are the primordial waters from which all else springs.

At the geographic heart of the Abrahamic faiths is the Well of Souls, a small cave beneath the Dome of the Rock. Some claim that from beneath the floor of this cave can be heard the whisper of souls, and the waters of the cosmic ocean.

In Hindu cosmology there are seven cosmic oceans. The fifth, the Ocean of Milk, was churned by the gods to create Amrita, the immortal force of life.

In modern English, a great deal of weight – if not emphasis – is placed on only a few words, like “primeval” and “primordial”, and even on terms which wield a bit more creativity, like “cosmic ocean.” We spend very little vernacular, or time, on the things which we know but can’t talk about. Sooner or later though, someone has to write them down.

In the library method, before you ask how, you will need to ask why. It’s a question you will only need to ask once.

So why does it begin? Because it must. Only after, does it get complicated. Not because it must, but because conflict requires an opponent, a victory necessitates a defeat, a destination demands a journey, and every last rule needs breaking – a story must be told.

If you love something, letting go is never an option. Fortunately, the gates to hell and heaven’s exits are never guarded. But you shouldn’t leave there until you remember the way home.