In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…
These words have haunted me since before memory begins. My father is a fervent atheist, but growing up in the rural south I desperately wanted to believe what my friends believed. I mostly failed. But I could be overcome, completely undone, by the cadences of Genesis. To this day, their beauty and flow define yearning for me.
A while back I began to write into those cadences, but what emerged was a focus on undoing, on destruction, on the eerie and the haunted, rather than a linear map of creation: in the beginning the sound of holes, and the weight of treason and light paper streamers. and a hundredfold, and below; and the girls with thickening braids, brought round at last to see the slick animal caught in the rain. and the deluge; and the dark; and the story past the window…
And yet for me the pull– the yearning– feels the same.
Often my
writing begins with an image, a narrative fragment, or a partial memory. In genesis,
it began with rhythm. By focusing on that pull, I could let image and narrative
wash over me.
Writing genesis
felt a lot like trying to ride– or just survive– a river in full flood. I wrote
genesis before I wrote psalmbook, my most recent full-length
book, which also responds to the King James Version of the Bible. In genesis,
the impetus was rhythm; in psalmbook, it’s voice. In both, though, the
yearning I felt as a child is still in full force.
