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2 Mastering the Matrix The Enuma Elish and Plato's Timaeus That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out? -Ecclesiastes 7:24 [Marduk] crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance ; he stationed himself above Apsu, that Apsu built by Nudimmud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in. -Enuma Elish Before that, all these kinds were without proportion or measure.... Such being their nature at the time when the ordering of the universe was taken in hand, the god then began by giving them a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers. -Plato, Timaeus 53b Everyone says that place is something; but [Plato] alone attempted to say what it was. -Aristotle, Physics Book 4 Once we admit that the panic-producing idea of the void is always (in advance ) a matter of place-and is thus not reducible to the daunting nothingness , the strict no-place, that occasions the panic-we must face a second major issue. This is the propensity not merely to fill the void as a way of allaying anxiety but, more especially, to master the void. To master is not to bring into being in the first place but to control and shape that which has 23 24 From Void to Vessel already been brought into existence. It is still a matter of creation, at least in that sense of creation inherent in the Hebrew word bara used in I Genesis: a word whose cognate meanings include "to carve" (e.g., the tip of an arrow) or "to cut up" (e.g., a carcass).1 What is now at stake is not creation ex nihilo-an action we have discovered to be as rare as it is problematical-but creation ex datis, "out of the given." Yet how is creation carried forward once we are willing to acknowledge that the void has content, that something is already given in and with (and even as) the void itself? What is pregiven is usually considered to be material, a matter of matter. But in ancient and traditional cosmogonies, "matter" does not signify anything hard and fast-anything rigorously physical in the manner of determinate and resistant "material objects." On the contrary: matter connotes matrix, one of its cognates and certainly something material (even if not something completely definite in its constitution). In its literal sense of "uterus" or "womb," the matrix is the generatrix of created things: their mater or material precondition . As such, it is the formative phase of· things-things that will become more fully determinate in the course of creation. Vis-a-vis the generative matrix , the task of creation becomes that of crafting and shaping, ultimately of controlling, what is unformed or preformed in the matrix itself. Creation becomes a matter of mastering matter. Just as chaos has proved to be a place, so a cosmogonic matrix is a place as well. Beyond its strictly anatomical sense, matrix means "a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed," "a place or point of origin and growth." In the matter of the matrix, place remains primary. As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the definitions just cited are traceable to at least the middle of the sixteenth century A.D. But they are seen to possess a still more ancient lineage if we reflect that a text such as Genesis opens with the description of a state of affairs that is neither chaos nor void but a matrix: "Darkness was upon the face of the Deep." As the initial moment of cosmogenesis, the dark Deep is a material, or more precisely an elemental, matrix. The world starts with an "embedding or enclosing mass" (in yet another OED definition of "matrix") that is aqueous in character; it starts with "the waters" as the generative matrix of things-to-be, things-to-come. We may trace things even farther back. Tehom, the Hebrew word for "deep [waters]," itself stems from Tiamat, the Mesopotamian proper name for that primordial oceanic force figuring at the very beginning of the Enuma Elish, a tale of creation that predates the reign of Hammurabi (ca. I goo B.C.). Tiamat is in place as an elemental matrix from time immemorial, and therefore creation must begin with her antecedent and massive presence. When there was no heaven, no earth, no height, no depth, no name, when APSll was alone, The Enuma Elish and Plato's Timaeus the sweet...

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