On The First Day

On the first day, in many accounts, it is said that God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void. It is occasionally like that on the first day of the school — there is a framework from which things depend suspended in a sweet and slightly metallic treacle of time and space, and yet all things are formless, void, filled with more questions than answers.

A grand occasion, the grand gesture, some sort of grand piano (which in itself is some sort of oxymoron, unless you mean a great silence) — these things come together. They leave you wondering if gold is bronze or bronze is pyrite. They leave you wondering what would appear if you peeled back the fabric of the universe-that-presents-itself, to look at the universe-that-is.

For each day brings what it brings best, and that is the unique denouément of the day itself. Each day can have a long morning, a hasty passing of the noonday gun, a crossing of the bar when one sets out to sea; sunset and evening star, silver apples of the moon and golden apples of the sun; the afternoon and dusk and the sweeping away of the rose veil of the day and the arrival of the cloak of Ratri. All these things can be found in a day, but not always in the same day.

God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light. And there was a morning, and an evening, a first day. And the second was completely different, as it always is, world without end.