Author’s Note: This piece first featured on Medium. I’m republishing it as-is, mostly without change or comment, except to note here that the religious tone at the beginning can be misleading if you skim too fast. Ultimately this is a piece about writing that starts from something of a historic mystery—the firmament—and moves from there into a discussion of the interior lives of writers. And, ultimately, I suppose it is also about the ocean, which has always captivated me.
I.
In the creation myth, in the book of Genesis, the first of God’s creations was water. This surprises most people I know; as a culture we are far more familiar with the part of the Abrahamic creation narrative where God creates light: And God said ‘let there be light,’ and there was light. And it was good.
The first verse of the Bible adds even more confusion. Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” From this, many assume that God’s first step was to create an approximation of what we experience today—a planet, fully formed.
The problem is that Genesis 1:1 lacks context. You have to read the verses that follow to understand the writer’s vision of what that first instance of the world looked like — the primal stuff that everything else was created from. What did the writer see in his mind, as he tried to describe the first moments of creation?
The author’s answer lies in the verses that follow. It is a striking image — the spirit of God descends upon the waters, hovering over a massive, undifferentiated ocean of chaos, beneath a canopy knit from shadows. That was the canvas of creation; the darkness and the ocean. The beginning.
II.
Is it strange that I am thinking of these things as I ride a ferry through the Caribbean? As we drift away from the pier I find myself contemplating the horizon. My view is studded with lonely boats and the silhouettes of paragliders suspended in the air against a bright, steel-blue day.
I am on the middle deck of the ferry, sitting in the back row. I am not sure what the emotional tenor of a ferry ride to Cozumel is supposed to be. Perhaps it’s what you choose to make it. I choose to rifle through my bag in search of my notebook and pen. My mind is on writing.
The people around me are distracted. A few seats to my left a senorita in a lime shirt is sharing a gentle laugh with her cell phone screen. Her ponytail is draped over the rail — her nonchalance suggests that she takes this ferry often, perhaps to work on the far shore.
A few rows ahead, a father wearing budget sunglasses and a doofy tourist hat is comforting his squalling daughter. His wife is digging frantically through her bag for formula.
It’s sweet and profoundly normal. It still amazes me, after months of traveling, how thoughtlessly I topple back into believing that these vacation moments should feel like the commercials. As if there was supposed to be more excitement to a ferry ride, rather than just pleasant affectations pasted on top of a bunch of sweet normal.
At the front of the deck, a gringo in a floral print shirt taps gently at a microphone on a small podium. I can’t make out what he says, but as we pull away from the dock a friend joins him and the two pull out guitars and begin to serenade the passengers. The soundtrack for my twenty-minute ferry ride has been decided.
Guantanamera. La Bamba. There’s the affectation. I have an answer to my question, now; this is what the emotional tenor of a ferry ride to Cozumel is supposed to be. My eyes drift back toward the horizon.
I have loved the ocean since I was a child. I don’t know why. Beauty is an elemental thing; it offers no explanation for its appeal except itself, and does not require more. I think, though, that as I have grown into my identity as a writer, the ocean has acquired new shades of meaning for me. Symbolically, both the ocean and the sky represent something special to writers and storytellers, as a backdrop for their craft.
The ocean that I am looking at now is the same ocean that captivated Hemingway from his home in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. It is the ocean that served as the setting for his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, and that he patrolled through the 1940s in quest of tuna, marlin, and German U-boats. It was special to him.
It is the same ocean that Jorge Luis Borges, another masterful writer, once compared to the work of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life, he said.
Borges, always obsessed with the unfathomable, was trying to articulate a quality he felt in Dostoevsky’s writing. Elsewhere he compared Dostoevsky’s work to stepping into a new world, unlike his own. That, in brief, is what linked the three concepts in Borges’ mind. Love, Sea, and Dostoevsky — to Borges, and like any encounter with the profound, these were the stuff of new worlds. Of creation.
III.
In the creation myth, the first victories of God over the primal chaos — those first hammerings of the roiling world of shadow and water into the world we experience today — were acts of separation.
On the first day, God created the light and then separated the light and shadows into night and day. We know that story already. The second day, though, is one of the Torah’s great mysteries.
Few know about it. God created a structure called the firmament — a division that exists in space, not time — and separated the ocean of the newborn world into the water that existed above the firmament and the water that existed below it. Only afterward did God create land, by gathering the waters below the firmament together in one place and allowing the shores and the mountains and the plains to emerge.
For centuries the Church tried to turn the biblical account into a scientific description of creation. This led to a long debate over what, exactly, the firmament is. The Hebrew word, raqiya, refers to something solid that has been hammered out into a flat, thin sheet. Medieval scholars imagined it as a dividing layer with the planets and stars embedded in it, separating Earth from a literal second ocean that existed above.
These attempts to imagine the firmament as a physical structure have warped our understanding of it. But there is a way to see it, again, unmoored from all of the scholastic pomp and religious debate.
It clicks into place nicely if you accept that Genesis is not a scientific treatise, but a myth. We treat ancient myths with contempt, but really, mythmaking is a natural impulse. Myths are attempts to fill in the blanks of what we know, fashioning stories to teach our children about who they are and what world we have brought them into.
The best way to understand a myth, then, is to picture it in the context it was created, serving the purpose it was intended. Imagine a father explaining the world to his son, or a mother to her daughter, each telling their child who they are, why they exist, and why they live the way they do.
For understanding the creation myth, that means reimagining the opening verses of Genesis as a dialogue between a shepherd father and his curious son, thousands of years ago. Imagine a pastoral people for whom life was spent inland — the type of people who, perhaps, would see the ocean only once or twice in their life.
Suddenly several aspects of the Genesis narrative make sense. One is the idea that, to create the dry land, God gathered all of the water on Earth together into one place. Ancient nomads would have known little about the true scope of the ocean; for the ancient shepherd and his son the “one place” would have been a place that they knew, and could visit, in order to see from the shore what the world was like at the beginning.
So they would go there, and the father would explain to his son that they were going to see the waters that God made the world from, and that the dry land that they were walking across was only formed after God himself had broken the infinite sea and created a space for them, which they now marked with their footsteps.
The son, for his part, would nod at the story, not comprehending what his father was trying to say. Because how can you possibly anticipate the ocean, if you have never seen it?
And then they would arrive at the shore, and would have seen something like this:
That is the firmament. A single, bright, solid line, raqiya, hammered out flat like a narrow sheet, dividing the waters above from the waters below. Not a physical line, but perceptual; a perfect split in the endless blue.
For the son, this might well be his very first experience of wonder. This is the sea that Borges called upon, that he compared to love, as he tried to explain art that tore the veil of his comfortable world and showed him there were other worlds hiding behind it.
For the father and the son, this would be a powerful shared moment — one where they looked out at the endless sea, el ocean sin fin, and enjoyed the view that God had, at the dawn of all things.
IV.
My view of the ocean in Cozumel isn’t endless. Playa del Carmen is visible across the channel, and my view of the water is blocked by shops, hotels, and the looming thuggery of a Disney cruise ship, docked at the southern pier.
Out on the ocean, it is still possible to feel traces of the old maritime sense of mystery that Hemingway must have felt, and so many other writers before him; Melville, Swift and Verne, Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Louis Stevenson.
But for many people now, the ocean is now just this; shops, sand, ships, and questions we no longer ask. A place for cruises.
The sea means less to us now because we have mastered it. However, for much of history, the ocean was the mystery at the land’s end, stretching into infinity. It was the place where the earth stopped, and for those standing on the shore, it would have offered only questions and the occasional storm, with peals of distant thunder.
It was, along with the sky, the void of Genesis. I wonder if the scribe knew, when he split the world into the waters above and the waters below, that he was defining the two great canvases that storytellers would use as the backdrop for exploring, defining, and recreating the human soul, for thousands of years to come?
A true void is more than just a blank space on the horizon; it is an unanswered question, a blank space in our mind. When we look at it, we cannot know what lies within it. We can only imagine. The power of the primal voids is that they ask us to play God and fill them.
And we do. When faced with a void we not only fill it, we fill it with stories — our wildest visions of ourselves and the world. Voids like the sea and the stars are the blank pages of human meaning. We use them as raw narrative material to help us articulate and answer deep questions about ourselves.
For example, there are many ancient myths about lost sailors. Like the most famous of the genre, The Oddysey, they tend to be episodic. Each island in the story is a narrative device, offering the writer a chance to explore a new vision of what humankind might be. The lost sailors are also a narrative device, offering the writer a chance to explore how normal people might respond to these unfamiliar visions.
Why is it that, when faced with a true void — an unknowable mystery — our thoughts turn inward, in contemplation, to the possibilities dormant within ourselves?
I don’t think that it is a coincidence that the great void of the Hebrew God’s creation, split into the ocean and sky, would become the two great voids that inspire our own creativity.
I’m not sure that there’s a supernatural connection. I think it’s likely, though, that the writer of the opening lines of Genesis was just that — a writer, like us. His soul was our soul. He understood the power that the sky and the sea have over human creativity — that they were the raw stuff that human stories are made from. The formless void, waiting for separation, and land, and people, and animals, and a purpose.
Why do we stop this inward speculation as the void is conquered? One of the charms of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was that he resurrected the mystery of the ocean and harnessed its power to force contemplation of the inner life of one man, Santiago, the fisherman. But Hemingway’s novel was powerful in part because it was a resurrection of a genre thought dead for decades.
And now? Only the sky is left, and we have learned that there was never really water there. All that is left to us is the darkness of space. And so we have moved our stories and our soul-searching there. After all, what is all of science fiction, from Gene Roddenbury’s Star Trek to Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem, except a bold exploration of the many ways human society might arrange itself? Star Trek, with its planet-by-planet, episodic exploration of human potential, is the new Odyssey.
Will we ever lose the mystery of space, the way that we lost the mystery of the sea? Will a person like me, some hundreds of years from now, cross the gulf between stars and land on a planet, and see only shops, sand, starships, and questions we no longer ask?
If that happens, will there be any new void at all? Or will the universe have been so endlessly cleaved and named and known that there is no longer any shore, any expanse of darkness or water that we can go to that makes us pause, and look inward, and try to recreate ourselves?
In Cozumel, after several hours of exploration, I settle into a comfortable seat in a coffee shop on the waterfront. I rifle through my bag one more time, for a pen and paper, and arrange them on the stone countertop in front of me. The paper is a thin, flat sheet, empty and inviting. My pen writes a vibrant, navy blue. I sip my coffee and get to work.
I pray that we never lose our wonder completely. I hope that there is always an expanse out there that remains vast and undefined, enough to make our knees quake and our souls humble and full of awe — a void from which God’s voice trembles like a distant storm, asking us who we are, and impelling us to answer.
I can see the ocean from my place here at the counter. There are boats in the distance, and people on the shore. From here, each of them looks like a story being told by the endless blue. El ocean sin fin. And they are.
“I have loved the ocean since I was a child. I don’t know why.”
It’s because the ocean/sky is so AWE-some!
We lose the capacity to feel that sense of awe as we grow “up” (though I find I’m recapturing that sensibility as I grow “old”).