The Fate of Place - Edward Casey

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genet (in transliterated Greek) is to “imply that the gap between earth and sky came into being; that is, that the first stage of cosmogony was the separation of earth and sky.”21 After this inaugural separation has taken place, other more delimited separations—“local differentiations”22—can occur: Night from Day, Mountains from Earth, Sea from Ocean. A sequence of increasingly specific differences arises from the primordial Difference, that is to say, from what Aristophanes (in a playful parody of Hesiod) calls the “first gap”:

      first Gap Night deep Dark abyss Tartaros

      no air earth or sky

      then in deep Dark’s bottomless wombs

      Night on black wings laid the wind egg.23

      

      Even though Chaos qua Gap is neither disorder nor void (some early Greeks held that the primal gap contained air), as cosmic separation it remained threatening enough to call for filling. Aristophanes thus deposits a primordial wind-borne egg in it. Hesiod himself tries to fill the gap first with Eros—who acts to reunite earth and sky, his dissociated parents—and then with Kronos and Zeus, to whose glorification the Theogony is devoted.24 In these various ingenious moves to plug up the Gap, we already witness the phenomenon of horror vacui, that is, the intolerability of no-place-at-all.

      That the cosmogonic Gap is most often conceived as the gulf between heaven and earth is not accidental. We may speculate that the separation between these latter regions is the first separation for a quite concrete phenomenological reason. If you look around in almost any outdoor situation, you discover the stark difference between land and sky (or at sea, between water and sky). These are the separate protoregions of ordinary perception; they divide up the perceptual landscape from the beginning. This beginning confirms the cosmogonic beginning—and may well provide the model for the latter, especially if we include the fact that dawn, the allegorical origin for many creation stories, arises literally in the opening between earth and sky. If our ordinary perceptual lives are as “gapped” as they are because they are filled with “obtrusions” (in Husserl’s word for objects as they are given at the primary level of perception),25 can it be surprising that ancient cosmogonies single out the very gap that is the most obtrusive of all?

      Such singling out is not limited to early Mediterranean cosmogonies. A southern Chinese creation myth has it that the creator god P’an Ku “went to work at once, mightily, to put the world in order. He chiseled the land and sky apart.”26 P’an Ku himself was born from a cosmic egg that contained Chaos—as if to show that Chaos is not boundless.27 Quite different traditions place the scission between Heaven and Earth at the beginning of things. These traditions include those of the Celts, the ancient Japanese, and the contemporary Navajo.

      The Navajo world or universe consists of a shallow, flat disk in the form of a dish, topped by a similar form which covers it like a lid. The lower part is the Earth, while the upper part (the lid, so to speak) is the Sky. . . . [B]oth are represented as human or anthropomorphic forms, lying down in an arching stretched manner, one on top of the other. . . . The things were placed on the Earth and in the Sky in the Holy Way.28

      For the Navajo, Earth and Sky are the two great regions in which any particular thing must be “placed” if it is to become created. As in ancient Mediterranean and Far Eastern accounts, an initial period of Chaos, imagined by the Navajo as a time of primal mists, gives way to (or, more radically, occurs as) the primeval separation of Earth from Heaven.29 As if to underline the importance of this separation, the Navajo believe that around the edges of the double-dished structure of Earth and Sky is an opening: “The Sky does not really touch the Earth at any place, not even at the horizon.”30 If Sky and Earth were ever to touch, it would mean the destruction of the world—as if to say that the original act of separation must be continued as horizon if the created world is to retain its identity as a coherent cosmos.

      What is the horizon but that factor in everyday perception that embodies the cosmogonic separation of Earth from Sky? The strange power of the horizon to distinguish these two regions from each other in the course of daily existence—a power to which we rarely attend as such—is the dynamic basis of the gap between Heaven and Earth. As painters know, it is anything but a mere “horizon line,” the spatial equivalent of the time line; the experienced horizon is a central creative force in the field of visual perception, especially when beheld at the beginning or the ending of the day.31 Without its differentiating action—which the Navajo symbolize by variegated coloration—we would be lost indeed in a primal mist of indifferentiation, a perceptual morass, a “slush” of indetermination such as the Ainu people of Japan posit as the first state of things: “In the beginning the world was slush, for the waters and the mud were all stirred in together. All was silence; there was no sound. It was cold. There were no birds in the air. There was no living thing.”32 A world without a horizon would be a most inhospitable environment—if it could still be considered environing. It would be a world without a distinction between Heaven and Earth, and thus no world, no “cosmos,” at all. No wonder a creator must be invoked to bring such slush, such chaos, into the minimal order that being a world (and being-in-the-world) requires. On the way from Chaos to Cosmos the horizonal differentiation between Earth and Sky is of crucial importance.

      We need not live in the American Southwest (or any other particular place) to grasp the world-creating character of the horizon, its unique capacity to bring earth and sky into active contiguity with one another while respecting their differences as distinct cosmic regions. Just by looking at photographs of the earth taken from the moon, we see the globe of the earth horizoned against an all-encompassing sky. In these remarkable images—at once disturbing and inspiring—we observe the earth itself as a place of places, as a “basis body” for more particular bodies.33 In fact, we observe the primal separation of Earth from Heaven, the differentiation of an ordered Cosmos out of Chaos. Before our eyes is something like an icon of Creation.

      III

      The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them. Thou didst set a bound which they should not pass.

      —Psalm 104

      

      Contrary to popular belief, 1 Genesis, the first Book of Moses, does not tell a story of creation ex nihilo. That it is believed to be such a story is a tribute not so much to misinterpretation as to the power of a certain cosmologic, which dictates that nothing should or must precede the act of creation. But the celebrated opening lines of Genesis suggest otherwise:

      In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.34

      Not only does “the deep”—tehom, a term to which we shall have occasion to return—preexist creation, but it already has a “face.” The face itself is not superficial: it is the face “of the waters,” that is, of something quite elemental, and it is determinate enough to be moved over. In the beginning, then, was an elemental mass having sufficient density and shape to be counterposed to the movement of the spirit (or, alternately, the “wind”) of God. If the Deep is nothing, it is, like Chaos, the “nothing substantial,” a strangely substantial nothing!

      It is true that the earth is said to be “without form and void.” Is this a reference to the absolute void that cosmological reasoning relentlessly posits? I think not. The void at stake here is the relative void of shapelessness—of something devoid of form. This becomes evident when the text adds, several lines later,

      And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1:9–10)

      This passage makes it clear that the first allusion to “earth” is to an indeterminate entity that gains its full identity only when it has become separated from the oceans and other waters. When it has become “dry land,” it deserves the designation

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