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Twelve Scenarios for the Creation of the Universe

1.

God was a small girl, about ten years old. God was black. She was dressed in black. She was walking along the dark shore of the sea, the sea of which you have heard, the many-sounding sea. She passed great rocks, great heights, and things above the heights which were greater still.

She picked up a grain of sand and said, ‘Let there be light.’ The sand grain began to sparkle in the gloom. God looked at it closely; she breathed on it; she brushed it with her lips. ‘There,’ she said, 'that's good.‘ And she cast it upward, into the heavens. And so she was walking along that beach.

2.

God was trying to untie his shoe. He struggled with the knot, but it had been tied for a long time and it was a pretty big knot. But he really wanted to untie it. Finally - by picking at it tediously with his fingernails - he got the knot apart, and pulled his shoe off. The universe fell out of his shoe.

’Oh,' said God, ‘so that's what it was.’

3.

God was in labor, it was a difficult labor, for a child like this had never been born before. Her face glistened with sweat. She thrashed and twisted, she cried out, she wept. She ground her teeth, she bled.

After a long struggle an electron was born.

God cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. She jumped up and began to lick the electron. It howled.

4.

There was no God. There was no universe. There was nothing, nothing, nothing. It was so sad, out of pity the universe brought itself into being.

5.

Before the universe, there was something completely indescribable. After the universe, there was something else, also completely indescribable. Between the two indescribable things, was the universe. You came along and picked it, this very world.

6.

Actually, Coyote created the universe. Before that everything was cool, it was okay. Coyote showed up and said, ‘Hey, let's create a universe! Let's make ants and smoke and high finance and love and dreams and stuff,’ he said. 'Let's make stuff that smells, and weird things, and mirrors, and time, and lies, and last Tuesday morning! Wow!‘ Well, there was no one around to stop him, so he went ahead and did it.

7.

It all started with this moment. I looked into your eyes and said, Let there be a world which leads to this moment. And it was so, eleven billion years of it. And eleven billion years yet to come, just to give us a little room.

8.

There was a man that sat in a chair reflecting on how things come into being. At the opposite end of space and time, the primordial thing also reflected. It reflected itself and it reflected the man; they reflected each other. That time flows either this way, or that, is an illusion.

9.

In the beginning, of course, there was sex. Hard, heavy, hot sex. Dirty sex. Like those loft parties you used to hear about. It went on and on and on. It just got wilder and more incredible and heavier all the time.

Naturally, beings came along and wanted to get in on it.

They got in.

10.

It was an accident, but there's no use crying over spilt milk.

11.

There was a fantastic crystal, oh, it was impossible, it blazed from billions of facets, it coruscated from within, impossibly beautiful, gold, amethyst, onyx, bronze, opal, sapphire, viridian, umber. It was impossible and its impossibility shattered it, the air filled with innumerable falling particles that clashed and shrieked as they fell.

We came after.

12.

There was a tone, single and strong. There was a pipe that played this tone, dusky bronze in the shadows, and a wind howling in the pipe raising the sound. There was a chamber from which that sound came and a man to press the key of the instrument which sounded.

He held the key down and listened to the sound; he began to hear other sounds within the sound. He moved his fingers over the keys, following the sounds within as he heard them. The sounds gathered and cascaded, sounds within sounds, winding and unwinding.

Outside the wind was a dark plain. As the man played the sounds, the arms of the nebula, terrible to behold, slowly rose over the plain.