New Beagle Publishing - Sample Poenza

A Creation Story (from SIXTY2)

Few things are as sublime as the universe’s big bang and quantum gravity’s grip birthed of the foam of space-time; evolving to the ultimate Genesis epic, and transforming a single dot from potency to being.

Cosmic evolution, abundantly dark, with mysterious voids of light and matter, enfolded and curled in the heat, then turned to cold in the empty gasp of inflation, reaching out and escaping the vacuum, rushing to transform the atoms of the universe, into totally new luminescent and radiant states.

The sculpted renaissance of asteroids and comets, proliferative meteoric showers, and violent cataclysmic symphonies of colliding galaxies, amongst the traps of black hole horizons and the debris of creations’ billions of hydrogen fires, visit destruction and extermination in the inanimate world on a scale that defies the best of special effects visualization.

But amidst all this, this fury and fire, in the pools of subterranean recesses, in the far depths of oceanic canyons, stretched along the faults of molten crevasses of a solidifying earth, the organic chemistry of molecular worlds begins to experiment with structures, and reactions, that will begin the perilous journey through simple chance to complexity.

It is in this gaseous polluted inferno, a virulent cauldron of lava-incited stews, and the imagination’s inhospitable environment; on a lonely tiny planet, in the most insignificant corner of a very ordinary galaxy, that this autocatalytic process begins the long climb to complex physical systems; to self-replicating, self-intentioned, diversified living organisms.

Creation myths abound with pre-natural forces, supreme law givers, the omnipotent being, the chain of hierarchy; all explicitly immune to nature’s Zen, the blind path of intention, and the illumination derived of adaptation and selection. The mulch forces of life’s soup are thus cast away.

The old chronology reflects the dream and the curse of our human predisposition, to assume the clock’s clockmaker, and, implicitly, the impossibility of intelligent design, absent a designer. The toolmaker makes the tools, Newton’s universe demands ex cathedra intent to admire creation. Replication and survival are only indirectly causal.

Old sages commune with the dreamways that tunnel to the dawn mists of creation, pillaging its gardens, seeking signposts of the songlines, amidst the debris of the migratory jungle. Meditations and visions erupt with precursors, of life’s savageness, gifts, and destruction, and tales abound of descent from more serene kingdoms.

Our wisdom seems paralyzed and hypnotized, by lost sacredness, and anguish for access to magical remedies; the desire for shimmering purpose, driven by forgotten value. Progress is deemed hopeless, or pointless at best; since the mere niches of occupancy and preservation, are driven by contingency and chaos to accident, and selection is aided solely by the mistakes of transcription.

But against this gloom of the romantic and theologian, we time and time again, see nature reveal her secret, as her algorithm continues to produce of form and color, in shape of majesty and grandeur, scenes of such texture and fabric that we are reassured of chance’s magnificence upon the canvas of possibility, and the order that grows out of entropy.

We luxuriate in uncertainty’s whim, and complexities scaffolding; and we cannot but marvel that ancient astronomical structures, in a cold empty void, give birth to combustible worlds that cool and evolve into verdant and luxurious gardens, beyond Eden’s wildest depictions, providing the seeds and fitness landscapes for life.

And that from these primitive processes, through the the eons of geological time have evolved, an abundant array of species, in hierarchies of consciousness, to include a relatively smallish primate, with the gifts of tool-making, art, speech, and social organization; with the power to shape its environment; contingent of course, on constraining its own arrogance---- its spiritual immaturity, and its myths of perfection.