The Fate of Place - Edward Casey

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progress from this initial state of no-thing-cum-no-place to the state of created existence—to ens creatum—calls not only for cosmically creative acts but also for a sequential temporality within which the transition from void to plenum can occur. The story of that transition is the narrative of cosmic creation, of cosmogony, itself. Not only does this narrative supervene upon, and express in words, the movement from placelessness to a place-filled existence; it is itself part of the cosmically creative process and inseparable from it: “In the beginning was the Word.” This claim is by no means limited to the Old Testament. The Dogon of Mali also attribute cosmogonic powers to the Word. They conceive of creation as a process of word weaving:

      The Word is in the sound of the block and the shuttle. The name of the block means “creaking of the word.” Everybody understands what is meant by “the word” in that connection. It is interwoven with threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric. It belongs to the eight ancestors; the first seven possess it: the seventh is the master of it; it is itself the eighth.11

      Wherever cosmogenesis is taken seriously—that is, wherever it is not presumed that things simply are as they always were—we are likely to find a narrative of creation.

      A cosmogonic narrative is not only a recounting of events in time. Of course, it does relate the act or acts of creation and thus presupposes a cosmic temporality whose minimal structure is that of Before/After: prior to creation/posterior to creation. But such a narrative also tells of things in place, how things occupy or come to acquire places. It tells, too, of events in place. Events, those prototypical temporal occurrents, call for cosmic implacement: no event can happen unplaced, suspended in a placeless aithēr. This includes the event of creation itself. It, too, must have its place. Integral to cosmic creation is the creation not just of places for created things as such but of a place for creation (and thus for the creator). Inseparable from topogenesis is cosmogenesis itself.

      To create “in the first place” is to create a first place. Perhaps it is true that in the beginning was the Word. But is it not equally likely that in the beginning was a Place—the place of creation itself? Should we assume that the Word precedes Place and brings it into being? Or does not the Word itself presuppose Place? Whichever direction we may prefer to take, it is evident that narrative accounts of creation must bear on place even as they rely on time and language. It behooves us to consider these accounts with an eye to place—and to no-place, that from which places themselves, along with all other things, are so often thought to arise. But how then does the placelessness of nonbeing give way to the placedness of beings? How do these beings gain their existence as well as their place from a primal act of creation that is itself self-placing in character?

      II

      So things evolved, and out of blind confusion each found its place, bound in eternal order.

      —Ovid, Metamorphoses

      Might everything have come from chaos? This idea has perennial appeal. Contemporary “chaos theorists” carry on a chain of speculation that stretches backward to some of the earliest extant accounts of creation. The Pelasgian narrative of creation, dating from at least 3500 B.C., runs like this:

      In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves.12

      

      The insubstantiality of Chaos, its elemental confusion and gaping character,13 is what gives rise to the terror with which it is characteristically experienced—a terror closely affiliated with the place-panic occasioned by no-place. But is the “nothing substantial” of Pelasgian Chaos the same thing as nothing whatsoever? Is it equivalent to the sheer void? The proper name “Eurynome,” the creator Goddess of All Things, hints that we must answer both questions in the negative. For Eurynome, taken literally, means “the wide wandering.” A wanderer, even a cosmogonic primal wanderer, cannot wander amid nothing: to wander is to roam between places of some kind. Indeed, that Eurynome “rose naked from Chaos” indicates that Chaos has at least enough substantiality to be something from which to arise in the first place. If this substantiality is not sufficient for surefootedness, it can be made more determinate—as Eurynome proceeds to do when she “therefore divided the sea from the sky,” so as to dance “lonely upon its waves.” The “therefore” is revealing; it possesses the special cosmogonic force of something having to be the case if other things are to obtain.

      Suddenly we recall that in 1 Genesis the separation of the heavens from the earth—and all that ensues from this separation—requires the primordial scission of “the waters from the waters,” that is, the creation of the firmament in an otherwise undifferentiated Deep. We shall return to Genesis presently, but for now let us only note that in the Old Testament and the Pelasgian account alike for creation to proceed differentiation must occur. Moreover, this differentiation is of one place from another. Could “chaos” be another name for this obligatory action of primeval differentiation of places? The opening lines of Hesiod’s Theogony, a text whose composition occurred between the Pelasgian narrative and the writing of Genesis, intimate that this is indeed so:

      Verily first of all did Chaos come into being, and then broad-bosomed Gaia [earth], a firm seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartaros in a recess of broad-wayed earth, and Eros, who is fairest among immortal gods, looser of limbs, and subdues in their breasts the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men. Out of Chaos, Erebos and black Night came into being; and from Night, again, came Aither and Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling in love with Erebos. And Earth first of all brought forth starry Ouranos [sky], equal to herself, to cover her completely round about, to be a firm seat for the blessed gods for ever. Then she brought forth tall Mountains, lovely haunts of the divine Nymphs who dwell in the woody mountains. She also gave birth to the unharvested sea, seething with its swell, Pontos, without delightful love; and then having lain with Ouranos she bore deep-eddying Okeanos.14

      The surprising affinity between this text of the seventh century B.C. and Genesis, in regard to the deferred separation of earth from sky, has been remarked on by several commentators.15 Most striking, however, is the suggestion in Hesiod’s account that Chaos came into being first—not as a settled state, that is, as something that (as one interpreter puts it) “coexisted with the undifferentiated state of the universe from eternity,”16 but as itself both differentiated and differentiating.

      The ancient notion of chaos as a primal abyss or gap points in this same direction: a gap is both an opening between two already existing things (e.g., earth and sky) and an opening between them (i.e., that which brings about the differentiation of these two things in the first place). A gap has boundaries and thus a form, however primitive; it is not an indefinite, much less an empty and endless, space. As John Burnet remarks, Chaos for Hesiod “is not a formless mixture, but rather, as its etymology indicates, the yawning gulf or gap where nothing is as yet.”17 Nothing may yet be in Chaos, but Chaos itself is not nothing. As a gap, Chaos is a primordial place within which things can happen. Aristotle, who cites the first several lines of the Theogony with approval, comments that “things need to have space first, because [Hesiod] thought, with most people, that everything is somewhere and in place.”18

      Chaos, then, is not a scene of disorder—of what moderns shortsightedly call “the chaotic.”19 It is a scene of emerging order. Such a scene cannot be an utter void, a merely vacant space. It is a scene of spacing, not just gaping but “gapping” in a cosmogonically active sense. To be chaotic in this sense is not to destroy order but to create it. Indeed, on the Hesiodic account Chaos is the very first stage of creating; it is what makes the rest of created order possible in the first place. Indeed, it is the first place of creation. As G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield put it, Chaos is “not the eternal precondition of a differentiated world, but a modification of that precondition.”20 As an action and not a permanent state, Chaos is not eternal. It occurs. But it occurs as a place—a place for things to be.

      What kind of a place is this? As the Pelasgian cosmogony, Genesis, and the Theogony all insist, it is a place of separation. Occurring not as an empty place but as a scene

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