00.33 — Cosmogonies, the Cosmic Egg and Continuous Creation

00.33 — COSMOGONIES, THE COSMIC EGG AND CONTINUOUS CREATION

Uncertain date · Purple notebook

Every culture invented a beginning. It would be strange if any had endured not having one.

My father used to say that a cosmogony reveals less about the origin of the world than about the people who need to explain it.

The Mexica placed duality above everything.

Ometecuhtli.

Omecíhuatl.

Lord and lady.

Masculine and feminine before those words meant exactly what they mean now. Below, thirteen heavens. Beneath us, nine regions the dead had to cross.

—Then the universe began by being ambiguous —I said.

—Not ambiguous. Double.

He did not think it was the same thing.

Among the Maya, on the other hand, he liked to say that the truly extraordinary event had been the dawn. Before it there had been a world, gods, attempts, mistakes.

Then the light appeared.

—That is more like it.

—Like what?

—Like everything.

My father shrugged.

In Egypt he preferred Nu.

A primordial ocean.

Nothing solid.

Then a tiny rise above the waters, a first place where one could stand.

Every city ended up insisting that the first mound lay precisely beneath its own temple.

That made me laugh.

—What a coincidence.

—Centers are always invented afterward.

Heliopolis had Atum. Memphis had Ptah. Thebes had Amun. One god spat, another spoke, another emerged from the waters. Human beings appeared from tears.

Never in only one way.

For thousands of years, what we call Egyptian religion was an argument between cities over which had been the first to remember correctly something none had seen.

Then Aten arrived.

A form of light without a body.

My father said some people were fascinated by him because he seemed to anticipate monotheism. Something else interested him: that even when a god lost his face, we still needed to imagine where the light came from.

In Genesis everything begins through separation.

Light from darkness.

Waters from waters.

Sea from land.

One thing from another.

I remembered Rodolfo.

Perhaps the Word did not invent objects.

It invented differences.

The Chinese, my father said, distrusted the beginning much more. The Tao did not need an inaugural instant. There was movement. Alternation. Yin within yang, yang within yin. Growing. Diminishing. Returning.

A universe that did not need to be born to be alive.

—Then the East won —I said.

—What competition?

—The one about not obsessing over finding the first minute.

—Wait until you meet the physicists.

Geologists found fish in mountains.

Folded strata.

Coasts that rose.

Rivers that abandoned their beds.

The Earth began to stop looking like a stage and started to have a biography.

Then the sky did the same.

Galaxies moving apart.

Stretched light.

A universe that was not standing still.

If things were moving apart now, it was tempting to run the film backward.

Closer.

More.

More.

Until distances cease to be useful.

For years people spoke of the primeval atom.

Then of the cosmic egg.

My father liked that name because it sounded scientific and mythological at the same time.

—The egg again.

—We humans love eggs.

—Because things come out of them.

—Precisely.

The problem was imagining it as a bomb placed in the middle of empty space.

There was no empty space around it.

Space was included in the event.

Time too.

That was what I found hardest.

—Then what was there before?

—The question may not make sense.

—That is what they say when they do not know.

—That too.

Saint Augustine had reached a similar intuition by another route: God does not create in time. He creates time too.

My father, a materialist when it suited him, found that irritatingly elegant.

—It does not mean Augustine discovered cosmology.

—But he asked the right question.

—That is worse.

The physical beginning was not a single instant that was easy to recount either.

There was a phase of extraordinarily rapid expansion.

Inflation.

Then cooling.

Particles.

Light nuclei.

Much later, electrons able to stay with them and a universe that, as it became transparent, let a light escape that we can still detect.

The first possible photograph.

It shows no stars.

There are none yet.

It shows minute differences.

Wrinkles.

Seeds.

That interests me much more than the egg.

The almost uniform already containing what will prevent everything from remaining uniform.

Then gravity works.

It accumulates.

It compresses.

It lights stars.

Inside them, elements the young universe could not produce begin to be made.

Carbon.

Oxygen.

Iron.

When certain stars die, they distribute what they made.

That is how a table eventually appears.

A bullet.

A drop of blood.

A Dell computer.

Not because the universe intended to produce them.

Precisely for that reason.

There was another possibility.

Continuous creation.

A universe that could expand and yet remain essentially the same because new matter kept appearing to fill what the expansion left empty.

My father liked it more than he admitted.

—It is more elegant.

—Does creating matter out of nothing not seem religious enough to you?

—It depends on who writes the equation.

For a time both ideas could face each other.

A universe with a beginning.

Another without one.

Then evidence appeared that tipped the balance.

The background radiation was one piece of it.

A minimal temperature spread everywhere.

A remnant.

Not the sound of the explosion.

Something better.

The fossil light of a universe that had once been too hot to let light pass through.

My father could spend a long time thinking about that.

A glow that takes almost the entire history of the cosmos to reach a device built by animals that had only just learned to count.

—And how does it end?

That was always my question.

My father hated endings.

It could go on expanding.

It could cool.

The galaxies could move apart until they disappeared from one another.

There had also been models in which gravity eventually won: ever slower expansion, a halt, a collapse inward.

A pulsating universe.

Birth.

Expansion.

Contraction.

Again.

I liked it immediately.

—A loop.

—Not necessarily.

—But it could.

—It could.

That was enough.

I thought of the Tao.

Of the Maya suns appearing and disappearing.

Of the Mexica heavens.

Of Atum rising above Nu.

Of God separating light and darkness.

Of a Roman priest imagining that God undresses himself of nothingness and covers himself with time.

Different stories.

Not proofs.

Not equivalences.

I did not want to do what Tony detested: find two similar things and declare that they knew each other.

But there was a recurrence I could not ignore.

We always ended up doing the same thing.

We looked at the world.

The world did not answer.

Then we invented a form so it could begin.

My father called that science when there were equations.

Myth when there were gods.

I was no longer so sure that the important difference lay there.

Perhaps it lay somewhere else.

In knowing when an explanation should stop.

And let the universe go on expanding without us.