Made In Its Image

"Genesis Revised"
by Reed Whittemore, from Fifty Poems Fifty (1970) & The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New (1990)

In my opinion this concept of the interval, detached as it is from the selection of any special body to occupy it, is the starting point of the whole concept of space.
~ Albert Einstein

Think of an "and" alone,
Nothing before, nothing after,
Nothing and nothing.
The "and" proposes a structure, and by the proposing
Is. And makes.
For nothing is nothing, but nothing and nothing
Are spatial, temporal; the structure does it,
A nothing there and here, a nothing then and now,
To and fro in the space-time.

But in grammar we cannot think of this. The
"and" comes second.
We need something, then "and."
Or if we are willing to grant, without understanding,
a precedent "and,"
We still ask to know where it came from.
Grammar, logic, math work in the matrix
Of the space-time. "And" is the space-time. We
in its matrix
Know what we do in it, where we are in it,
But not it.

This that we don't know we call soul, spirit.
More of it every day is found in the physics lab,
By omission.
It is what we tend to describe by what it is not.
It is not logical, it is not metrical; it is not
(as I now propose) grammatical.

Yet it is with us. Our minds seem made in its image,
Each a space-time kit for making a world up.
We cannot conceive of that spirit (the "and")
a father,
Yet we cannot conceive of it otherwise. In
Eddington's words,
The breach of causality keeps breaking the chain of
inference. Sense leads to nonsense.

In the beginning, then, was nonsense? So every
beginning. So far.
We cannot conceive of a nothing that makes something.
The "and" we say must be physical. Or electrical.
Something.
Yet the something is nothing. Nonsense.
We have no grammar for nonsense; we cannot posit
A nothing-something moving between nothings.
Yet I repeat:
Think of an "and" alone,
Nothing before, nothing after,
Nothing and nothing, thereby making

The first day.

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Made In Its Image