(Re)Telling the Cosmic Story.

In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss, But then Gaia, the Earth, came into being, Her broad bosom the ever-firm foundation of all, And Tartaros, dim in the underground depths, And Eros, loveliest of all the Immortals, who Makes their bodies (and men’s bodies) go limp, Mastering their minds and subduing their wills. –Hesiod, "Theogony," Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation,                     edited and translated by Stephen M. Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet, 2nd Ed. (Indianapolis:                     Hackett, 2016), ln. 116-122.

And they say back then our universe Was an endless land, until our ancestors Woke up and before they went back to sleep They carved it up into the world we know –                     Björk, "Cosmogony," on Biophilia, released 2011, streaming audio, Spotify.

January 23, 2025. I stand on the porch next to my bedroom. The temperature inside the room is about 18º F, 0º on the other side of the exterior wall. I breathe against the already clouded window, but there's no visual evidence. I wipe away the previously untouched condensation. Where I have cut into the opacity, I breathe again. Wipe it away. Breathe again. Layers build up: hand-swipe erasures, water-recorded breaths, one on top of the other. The air outside my house and the air from my lungs and mouth meet in the glass. I return to my bedroom and lock the door. I'm still shivering as I warm up under the covers.

Interactions between environment and body, like air from two sources meeting on a piece of glass, are not exceptional events. They constant and always recorded, if not always obvious to our human eyes. We always make the world as the world makes us.

Mina Loy, Moons I, mixed media on board, 1932, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

As both a scholar of mythology and theologian and an artist, I think about "Creation" a lot. And I tend to return to two key points. The first is that 1) nothing is created from nothing. I don’t think there was ever a time before matter or the universe. There was and is and always will be “stuff.” Creation has no beginning or end. It is a process, and this brings me to the second point: 2) the universe moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. Things move apart and things come close: things appear more, and things appear fewer. Possibilities become restrictions, and repressions give way to freedoms–in the social sphere, authoritarianism to wildness. We are always caught between binding and unraveling.

Creation stories narrativize these cycles in tragedies/falls or as a comedies/triumphs depending on the canon. For some worldviews, the "original" creation was a taming of chaos and for others, creation was a blip in what was otherwise a divine harmony. Creation, in these, was a mistake, an accidental novelty. In most traditions, both narratives are at play, although one of these stories usually dominates. In the cosmogony of Hesiod's Theogony, existence begins with ordering chaos but it doesn’t end with order. After the epic describes the titans and gods, the rank and file of the heavens, we come to Pandora’s Box: a new chaos which will require a new order. The cycle continues.

In Genesis 1, God creates the world not of a nothingness but from water and darkness. He systematizes the elements and planetary beings, the days, the species, the genders, and their functions. The narrative immediately yields, then, to a retelling. In Genesis 2, creation starts anew: God plants a garden. God shapes an earth creature, Adam, out of the dust, and it is imperfect. This human creature needs company besides the creator. So God creates the animals. Adam is lonely with the other animals. So God creates Eve from Adam, dividing an androgynous earth creature into a man and a woman, although at this point in the Bible, there is no description of a physiological difference between the man and the woman. Dimorphism comes in Genesis 3 as a result of disorder, of a fall, of humans harkening to a snake with a kink for knowledge. In Genesis 4, disorder grows: Cain grows jealous of Abel, brother kills brother, an act of violence forever alters Cain's face and the world he's cursed eternally to wander. The garden has turned wilderness. Eden become Earth. A third son must be born, Seth, who reestablish the family line all the way down to Noah and his Ark. The Bible is an endless series of attempts to establish divine, social, political, biological, and physical order amidst constant disordering.

William Blake, "The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve," ink, tempera and gold on mahogany, c. 1826, Tate.

These processes constitute our lives. However, to use William Blake's term, if I had to artificially choose one camp, then I am much more "of the Devil’s party." Blake's Devil, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the emissary of Hell, the domain of Energy, Body, Rebellion, Imagination, Resistance in counterbalance to God's Reason, Repression, Authority, Order: Heaven. The poem flips good and evil as traditionally understood and locates the human Soul in both poles, with individuals (and whole peoples/cultures) inclined more to one or the other. In a season of empire, slavery, industrialization, and and the vying between restrictive scientisms and Protestantisms--that is to say, a timeline bent toward the authoritarian, Blake's Devil blazes through as an heroic rebel.

The problem with “order” is when it becomes synonymous with "good." Often, there is too much order or desire for order, which I find most dangerous in orders manifests as “mono-:” monotheism, monoculture, monopoly, monarchy, monism. How can a sole god, a sole human, a sole gender system, a sole material world, and a sole spiritual world account for a constantly shifting planet? A particularly prominent "myth of order" is what we call a demiurgic myth. In this story type, a lone creator ignores and despies whatever came before him, assumes authority, authors the world (and us) in His image, and labels everything "evil" that deviates from its authoritarian creed. Sometimes he builds the world out of nothing; other times, he vanquishes whatever came before him through violence, often of a sexual nature. When the myth is told by a storyteller who believes in the Demiurge, her audience is meant to trust the Creation account as is. When the mythographer blows holes into Demiurge's narrative, in what we can call a gnostic myth, the reader or listener is invited to join in her suspicion of authority.

I am concerned about cosmogonies that paint chaos as something that has been slain, because chaos is always going to be a part of our lives. It is incredibly difficult to face change, miraculous or disastrous, if we fundamentally do not believe in alterity. Furthermore, cosmogonies that admit to chaos but claim it as equivalent to moral evil, some that needs to be destroyed, can only lead to a life of constant defense overwhelmed by a violent paranoia. Because the enemy--if the enemy is chaos, energy, life--will never go away. To wardens of ultimate order, multiplicity, novelty, and variance are something to be fixed. But that truth order can and often is overstepped is right there in the word “fixed” with its double meaning correct and it can mean to hold rigidly in place. A mythos obsessed with fixing the world at the expense of relishing its possibilities and movement is an authoritarian mythos. Order is useful when yields life when it harmonizes divergencies but becomes lethal when it homogenizes, maligns, hierarchizes, and eradicates them.

On Monday, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term POTUS. Immediately, through a slew of reckless pardons and executive orders, so many government departments, factions of society, and millions of individual lives were thrown into chaos. I do not put chaos on a pedistal such that ignore its own cruelties. But, I also contest the kind of chaos that Trump manufactures is an intentional step toward in a particular movement toward a very malignant order. Tyrants create chaos to plant fear so that they become, for enough people, the only hope for a return to a new, more restrictive, conservative order. Plunge us into Hell and you can become the King of Heaven. I admit that chaos alone is not a given good; the overturning of lives we are seeing in real time will be deadly. But chaos becomes most egregious, when each element, idea, faction, and person deludes itself as the demiurgic, as apart from chaos, as the one whose divine right is to force what he sees before him into the order he wants, often one that he has inherited from -an even greater authority/authoritarian. Chaos is at its worst when we each thinks ourself a a monarch and every "other" a threat to our rule. I am a subject who orders, you the object to be ordered. Fascists do empower some of us to feel like subjects and can to reclaim "our values," "our birthright," and "our country" in the most in systemic and interpersonally violent ways. Then the rest of us are meant to feel like objects, unable or underserving to act or desire: our very persons determined a threat to order and, eventually, in need of elimination.

M. C. Escher, "Metamorphosis I," woodcut, 1937, M.C. Escher Collection.

If humans are storytellers, and we are, then in the days ahead of us, on this road of authoritarian rule, let's offer each other stories of multiplicity: challenges to the politically, epistemologically, and theologically totalitarian. Myths, which are our most sacred stories, grab a hold of our cultures, bodies, dreams, our histories and our futures, and their greatest gift is their excessive, abundance of meaning. Myths put symbols into conversation, overflow with referents, fundamentally shaking any firm picture of our cosmos and who we are in it. 

When it comes to art, let us lean into work that is ekphrastic, dialogical, alluding, collaged, multi-vocal, projects that make explicit our multiplicities, our many sources and destinations. Let us defy the authorities who shout that there is only one way to be, attempting and failing to drown out our polyphony.

Let me state that I have never made an artwork alone. Everything I make is made with what has come before and after, with those around me and within me. To claim otherwise would make me an artist-demiurge. It is so tempting within our culture of "acadmies" and "geniuses" for artist to uphold ourselves as that arrogant, self-designated world-maker. It can be tempting to ignore the powers and possibilities that preceded me and will receive me. But I do not want to follow the mythic archetype of the demiurge, Blake's lonely Urizen, when there are gods and daemons of chaos, freedom, and sensuality modeling another way. I aspire to be the daemon, the hybrid, the human/god, beast/plant, man/woman, harmonious assemblage of ever changing elements that I, beneath every story of a pure, unified self, ultimately am.

Betye Saar, "The Divine Face and Hand," acrylic, gouache, and ink on paper, 1971, MoMA.

Order, in moderation, is thus an essential part of me. I'm a director, an author, a curator, a cosmos maker but never a creator-from nothing. Every organizer is a reorganizer. We inherit practices, strategies, communities, philosophies, embodiments, languages, materials, forms if we are to do anything. As an angel, I bring into cooperation my disparate parts. As a demon–the trickster, the alchemist–I provoke instability in any part that would become a jealous god.

People will always make art. Art is the seed of transformation, the root of our material liberity. Art is transubstantiation. Our movements will always need art.

Where morality comes into play, then, is not in the ordering or the disordering themselves, but when we pay attention to what influences us and why, how we transform and into what, and how we transubstantiate and for what purpose. Ethical art requires a conscious appreciation of our own location within a cosmos and community, how we are shaped and how we shape in relation to all other emerging forms.

In my writing and performances, I explore the bindings of sexual and gendered systems, empire, Christendom: ideologies that deaden the world and nature's complexity. I am fascinated by our various claim that any human is expendable who is not X enough (white enough, male enough, woman enough, Christian enough, Jewish enough, straight enough, gay enough, pure enough, liberal enough, leftist enough, conservative enough, rich enough, smart enough, reasonable enough, scientific enough, religious enough). I create, in part, to expose the messy, hybrid, impure incongruities that we, in our most authoritarian presumptions of angelhood, deny.

What myths does your art tell? What myths does your art provoke, disrupt, advocate, and relish? When do you tell a story of united, of oneness? When do you break the monument into its glistening pieces?

Keith Haring, "Three Lithographs (Plate 1)," lithograph on BFK Rives paper, 1985

We need art, to excavate and reimagine the mythic, symbolic, ritualistic determinants of our cultures. Myth is the well we tap for the fundamental bindings of world, community, and self. Art is the bucket. Every composition, dance, embroidery, song, poem, painting is an invitation to reshape the myths that materially shape our world. There has never been a fascist movement without its own mythographers. So too, can there be no revolution without us using myth. Sacred stories are among our greatest prisons and most powerful rebellions.