Keywords: inchoate, cosmogony, cosmology, mythology, religion, metaphysics

Chaos was not incoherent, merely inchoate[1], … and subject to constant change as everything that could happen, happened, and not just the bad things to which Murphy alludes.  Everything!

It was infinitely inchoate except for a single fleeting reality, a sort of tease really, but the reality of the instant was constantly changing, sometimes repeatedly, other times not.  The multiverse was constantly assembled and disassembled, then reassembled in different patterns.  Memory was ephemeral, whether involving radiation, energy or matter.  Multiverses existed but for what humans would consider a tiny fraction of a zeptosecond[2], but with fully formed recollections going back billions of years, at least so that during that infinitesimal fraction of a zeptosecond, quintillions of beings scattered throughout that multiverse believed they had a present, and had had a past, and had aspirations for a future, and it might be that at some other fraction of a zeptosecond, either in the past or concurrently somewhere else or in some future fraction of a zeptosecond, there might be continuity of sorts, but everything was not random, at least not always.  Nonetheless, discontinuity was the rule, at least usually.  Each zeptosegundic civilization might be interrupted for eternities before one instant there followed another, although time being non-existent, oxymoronically, instants and an eternities both lacked context or meaning, everything occurring concurrently but, simultaneously, not occurring at all.  Chaos was, well, chaotic that way, but interesting, very interesting.

Two beings formed the only continuity in chaos, a sort of husband, who lacked a name (having been the first) and his consort, whom he called Sophia.  He’d willed her into existence, freeing her from the inchoate, or perhaps, he’d merely severed her from himself so that he’d not be alone, or perhaps she was just his echo, as ying would someday be to yang, or alpha to omega, or male to female.

Each had the ability to create chains of existence, something he’d always been able to do but had not considered until she appeared at his side, or within him, or somewhere, somehow perceptible; but they were both rather immature, very fickle, and, like the context in which they existed, with very poorly developed memories, linearity being anathema to them but essential for memory.  You see, memory implied order, and order implied a sort of temporal stability and was thus a heresy to beings born in inchoate chaos, thus they (or at least, he) had no intention of permitting order or time in his (well, now their) realm.  He somehow perceived that it would bring limits to their infinite power and perhaps permit others to pop into existence, … and remain “existent”.  And that would inevitably destroy the unstable stability required to maintain chaos perfectly inchoate.  Inchoate chaos, were everything was equally possible and thus much more than just probable, and where every possibility could coexist concurrently.  Indeed, given the absence of time, every possibility had to coexist concurrently, albeit, as we’ve noted, rather briefly.  Extreme brevity, the most extreme brevity possible, was also an essential and inherent component of inchoate chaos.

The foregoing was, of course, chock full of paradoxes, an infinity of paradoxes running concurrently, like uncontrolled chain reactions of quanta fusing inchoate quarks into whatever inchoate quarks wanted to become.  Perhaps he’d been the result of the first such fusion, and perhaps he’d immediately sought to contain and discontinue the phenomenon.  If so, that would have ended the perfect harmony of inchoate chaos and represented the first quanta of order.  How ironic would that have been?  But, of course, memory being strictly forbidden, he had no memory of anything before him, or with him, at least until Sofia had somehow appeared.  And come to think of it, since she’d joined him, waves seemed to be jostling the infinity of ephemeral multiverses a bit.  He could tell because the waves made a sort of music, and he’d enjoyed the music, unaware of what it might mean.  As he’d enjoyed Sophia’s company, unaware of what that might mean either.  But music and Sophia sort of went together, and Sophia had never been aware of an existence were the music had not been present.

And then, of a sudden, there had been a sudden.  The first “sudden”, sort of.

The first sudden, and inchoatesy had been ruptured and time had appeared from apparently nowhere and everywhere synchronously (knowing that it was anathema it’d been hiding), and order emerged, starting to gather up infinitesimal pieces, linking and organizing them, although to anyone who might have been watching[3] there was a huge blast.  Infinitely hot, but only for a small fraction of a zeptosecond, after which it started to cool and expand.

And the One looked at Sophia, but she just shrugged, the first shrug, and for some reason, she thought of apples.

….
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

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[1] Something that will be, with the passage of time, but is not yet, at least not quite, but is perhaps hinted at.

[2] The smallest unit of measurable time, i.e., the time it takes a photon to traverse a proton.

[3] And, of course, everyone was (even an inchoate version of you was there), although unaware of what we were doing, having been inchoate until then, and inchoatesy took a long time to unravel, now that time existed, as well as, well, … motion.