Creation or Evolution?

Compromise (a poem)

By Michael Vázquez, when he was 11

[Contributed by his mother, Sharon Stoner, who reports that at age 11 Michael “wrote and illustrated a book of his poems, including some limericks. Using cardboard and stick-and-peel vinyl, he made a book to put them in. I still think he missed his calling to be a writer.”]

There’s an argument in the nation,
about evolution and creation.
    Tho I don’t know what it is,
   I hope they settle the whole biz.
Maybe compromise, and call it Evolation!

Copyright © 2019 by Sharon Stoner

Goines On: All us creatures

Click image for more vignettes

Goines could still remember a dream he had the year he was twenty-two, while taking a nap on a delightful, rainy Spring afternoon in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Some possibilities of metaphor

From recent correspondence

Edited by Morris Dean

The photo shown in the NY Times article “Creations That Capture Our Imaginations” of the 1000-year old Chand Baori stepwell in Rajastan, India could be used to exemplify the well of knowledge in a text.

Thor’s Day: The creation of the world

Based on a Yoruba myth

By Bob Boldt

Some years in the future, Obatala and his sidekick Oduduwa were reminiscing about how they created the world. Obatala, in his retirement, had resumed his drinking. The palm wine was flowing. As night fell, all gathered to hear about the first creation of the world and how the tribes of man were created. The fire grew stronger as the blue light of evening fell and a chill night blew all around.

"God"

It struck me forcefully this morning that whenever we use the word "God," we really ought to put it in quotation marks, for who has the slightest, vaguest idea what he or she is talking about? Who has any idea at all, really, whoever or whatever "God" might signify?

Of course, those who have a handy "holy book" that for them spells it all out will say that they know very well who "God" is. He's the Being, for example, who created the world in six days and on the seventh day rested, etc.

Well, I formulated my views on that yesterday, in response to Maliha's excellent observation that "We all have our own narratives that help us make sense of the world and help us figure out our own place in the universe." I replied that I guess mine, at the moment, is that man created [the concept of] "God" and concocted a fabulous marketing campaign to convince the masses that it was the other way around. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has developed a stern regimen of "papal infallibility" to keep the troops in line. I guess it wasn't so much a "marketing campaign" as a political power play.

Maliha also observed that a person's background affects the way he or she perceives the world. I suspected, in my case, that my distrust of authority must be among the most salient factors influencing me. Papal infallibility, of course, works really well into my anti-authoritarian strain.

Ironically (or maybe just naturally) it was the authoritarian weight of the Bush administration's pandering to the American religious right that seems to have provoked my current reexamination of religion and my relationship to it....

Whether or not Howard Nemerov was right that

The world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being prayed^*

I myself do seem mad enough for something...yet to be determined.
_______________
* That's Nemerov's poem "Myth of Creation on a Moebius Band" in its entirety.

The fascination of "Déjà Vu"

Hey, I don't even like science fiction, but I loved the movie "Deja Vu," directed by Tony Scott, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and starring Denzel Washington, with Paula Patton. "Deja Vu" won't let me go.

Without giving the show away, I'll say that the plot involves time travel. Right, how much more science fictiony can you get? Thing is, the technology and the characters are told so convincingly that it was no problem at all to suspend not only my disbelief but also my usual aversion to science fiction. I mean, Denzel Washington! And the best performance I've seen by Val Kilmer, who was perhaps responding to Washington and to Scott's direction? And James Caviezel (who starred in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"), eerily perfect as the terrorist.

What I think resonated with me most of all is the film's fitting in uncannily well with my recent reflections on the "seminal paradox in the heart of creation." You know, an accepted contradiction that "makes all things possible." For "Déjà Vu" asks you to accept (and effectively forces you, on an emotional level, to accept) that impossible contradictions in replayed versions of the past are...possible. Dramatically possible at any rate, and that, of course, is the art of cinema.

While watching the plot unfold (and for some minutes after watching "Déjà Vu"), I had that most glorious of all movie experiences, a sort of "sacred awe" (to quote Nikos Kazantsakis's character Zorba the Greek) at the beauty of this cinematic creation. Zorba spoke of sacred awe at life, at God's creation, but our awe at a brilliant cinematic creation (or creation in any art) can reflect and echo that grander awe. M. Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Traveled, drew the same parallel between sexual orgasm and religious ecstasy....

My cinematic awe rested on my initial, mind-boggling thought that the plot is just too ingenious and intricate for anyone to have created it. I've had identical reactions to books—to most of the later novels of John Le Carré, for example, often uttering in disbelief, "How could anyone have written a book this good!" We can, when suitably disposed, be similarly in awe of the grandeur of Nature and the Cosmos, of the fact that there's something rather than nothing.

But a second, relieving thought about "Déjà Vu" was that, well, if you started with two or three simple ideas, it couldn't have been that difficult to work out the plot. I suppose that would be like our everyday attitude toward what we see around us. Just another day, nothing to be in awe of. We ordinarily just aren't disposed to "smell the roses." We have to stop to do it.

The first reaction gives life and movies their thrill, their "sacred awe." The second makes it possible for us to incorporate them into our ordinary, practical existence and get on with it.

Ramifications of paradox

The freedom paradox from which springs all things possible (and all beliefs possible) bears a family resemblance to Howard Nemerov's "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

This world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being Prayed

and to Martin Heideggar's metaphysical question:

Why is there something rather than nothing?
["There isn't nothing." ≡ "There's something."]

on which David Lodge embroidered in his tragicomic novel How Far Can You Go? [Souls and Bodies in the U.S.]:

Our friends had started life with too many beliefs—the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. To work their way back to the fundamental ones—what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about?—they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece....[p. 143]

And all such paradoxes are akin to miracles, whose paradox is to seem to shatter science by contravening natural law.

These paradoxes are family, but is one of them the Grandaddy? Or, as the paradox has been put colloquially for generations:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?