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 in any sense whatsoever?
In this aporia—this literal im-passe—Aristotle makes a most puzzling claim: “The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place; one could [even] define void as place bereft of body.”47 If Aristotle is right, the void itself is not without place, and may be itself a kind of place. Difficult as it may be to conceive, anxiety provoking as it certainly is to experience, even the strictest void is not unrelated to place. At the very least, the void may possess certain residual place-properties: for example, “bereft of body.” To be devoid of body is nevertheless to be capable of containing a body—even if the body in question does not yet exist, or no longer exists. Aristotle here qualifies Archytas: to be (a body) is to be in place, but there can also be a (void) place without (any) body. Although void and place usually are construed as antonymic, they may not be antinomic: they may share in some common nomos, or law, some shared structure.
What void and place share is the common property of being the arena for the appearance of bodies (and thus for the events of which bodies form part). But while a place is the immediate arena for such appearance—a body appears precisely in a particular place—the void is the scene for this kind of place. As a precreationist entity, the void is empty of place primarily and of bodies secondarily. It is empty of the place that is empty of bodies. Thus we need to emend Aristotle’s dictum: not merely is void “place bereft of body” but “void is bereft of place that is bereft of body.” The void is doubly bereft. As a scene, it is an empty stage that is not yet specified as to places or bodies. (“Scene” in its origins meant an empty tent or booth before it came to signify a theatrical stage.)
Regarded as a scene of places and things to come, the void may thus play a positive and not a merely nugatory role in cosmogony. It figures precisely as the scene named “Tokpela” (endless space) by the Hopi, or as “Taaora,” literally “immensity” or “void,” by the ancient inhabitants of Hawaii, the Tuamotuans.48 Neither of these void-scenes is an inert pregiven entity. According to Hopi tradition, Taiowa the Creator immediately occupies Tokpela; indeed, far from inertly preexisting, the endless immensity of Tokpela is said to exist already in Taiowa’s mind and thus to be part of an active agency from the start. Tokpela is “an immeasurable void that had its beginning and end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.”49 Conversely, for the Tuamotuan people the creator-god exists in the void, thereby assuring its dynamism from within: “It is said that Kiho dwelt in the Void. It [is] said that Kiho dwelt beneath the foundations of Havaiki [i.e., in a particular place] which was called the Black-gleamless-realm-of-Havaiki.”50 To dwell in the void in this immanent manner is to dwell in the active scene of creation, the scene of what-is-to-come. It is to dwell in the void as place-giving; to be placed in the void. The lines that follow in the Tuamotuan epic spell out this curious topology.
That place wherein Kiho dwelt was said to be the Non-existence-of-the-land; the name of that place was the Black-gleamless-realm-of-Havaiki.
It was there that Kiho dwelt; indeed, in that place he created all things whatsoever.
Hereafter [I give] the names of his dwelling places.
Kiho dwelt in his heaven at the nadir of the Night-realm.