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By Root 2288 0

was chaos, and chaos gave birth to the earth, the sky, the underworld, love and darkness, and the earth lay in love with the sky and gave birth to the sea. In the beginning was the earth, resting on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. And what was the turtle standing on? Another turtle. And what was that turtle standing on? You’re very clever, young man—says the primitive father—but it’s no use, it’s turtles all the way down. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. In the beginning the entire universe was condensed into a single point of infinite mass, which suddenly blew up and made everything. And this was the beginning of time. The beginning of beginnings, the beginning of Beginning. In the beginning was word. A word, or the word? Just word, my son, this was a time long before definite articles. In the beginning, somebody said let there be light. And there was. How did he/she/it know the word for light? How could the word light preexist the thing light? How was the universe brought into existence by the utterance of a word?

You see (I said to Clever) it is natural that we should think language somehow created matter itself, since language creates thought in our minds, creates the very question itself. That the world was birthed on the tongue, in the mouth, in the lungs, in the blood, in the brain, in electricity, in light. That it was the word itself that formed the world. That we were birthed not by a great otherness who sculpted us from dust, packed the clay on our bones, and inflated our lungs with the kiss of life, nor even by an unaccountable explosion ringing out in an unimaginable void—but by our very capacity for conscious thought. A word begets time and consciousness, and consciousness begets the curiosity as to what begat time before we were conscious, and this begets the question: What happened in the beginning? But maybe a wiser question to ask is, What is beginning? If we had begun with that question, then maybe we wouldn’t get so twisted up in wondering what happened before the big bang, who uttered the cosmic word that brought us into existence, and what the turtle is standing on. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

At some point my monologue had become a dream, because I had fallen asleep in the field. Clever went back to the house to get Lydia. Clever took her by the hand and led her to the place in the field where I had fallen into drunken sleep beneath the stars. Lydia scooped me up in her arms and I half-consciously held on to her neck, which I kissed continually as she carried me to bed.

XXVII

Last night I found something in my memory that may be of interest to our readers, Gwen. It is one last relevant bit of dangling narrative in need of narrating from my time at the ranch, and once I have narrated it, then we may spin those hands of that clock into that time-blur that I have promised.

I could not sleep last night. Sometimes I have these bouts of insomnia. Nothing terrible—nothing at all like what Lydia used to have—but every so often I spend a restless night in bed, I thrash around in my sheets, with my mind turning over and over like the engine of a car stuck in neutral gear. I still haven’t yet slept today, despite the fact that the unencumbered leisure of my daily schedule would not prevent me from filching a few hours’ worth of a nap.

So, as I lay in bed last night, flipping my pillow over again and again to cool my sleepless cheeks, watching the rectangle of moonlight on my bedroom floor slowly slant into a rhombus, for entertainment I began rummaging through the toy box of my brain to see if I could find any old half-forgotten memories to play with. And what I found buried toward the bottom, dusted off and examined with curiosity and a sudden gush of remembrance was this interesting hippocampal artifact. In my sleeplessness, I remembered an incident that happened at the ranch—I can’t exactly remember when it was, but I know that it was near the end of our stay there. I’m pretty sure that