Black Sky Screaming

A fiction inspired by Genesis 1:2 (KJV)
by Mutt Ploughman


IN THE BLACKNESS before dawn in a time when there is no dawn, here I coil, awaiting the Voice. If I were to trip into a crevasse in a firmament yet to materialize and tumble down through the flume of centuries, entering an age where there is a language to appropriate, I might describe myself as a presence, a formless entity, an ether.

No one will ever see me, but everyone shall know me, feel me, some will burn with me, even if they do not recognize me. Women will cry out with the knowledge of my pain; artists female and male will ache to impel me from within. But now, in this moment, I am alone.

When, only an instant ago, I learned there are Three of us, I tried to hold on to the feeling that knowledge stirred, so I can use it as a motivator for what I will soon be called to do, but too much time has passed. I cannot form a picture of the First, and the Second’s divine destiny is to lay in wait for a long time, until the moment is right. The First determines that. Although there are Three of us, and we are One, there is still a hierarchy. I do not dictate to the Voice when to speak. Instead I wait.

Though it does not yet exist, time has gotten away from me. I was sent out, or up, or down, to here, where I am to stand ready until further notice.


HERE I CROUCH, a dream of tomorrow, set just after yesterday. I am the great inhalation that immediately precedes the Voice.


I AM AWARE of two things only. One is darkness. The other is water. The face of the deep stares into mine; its gaze penetrates the black surrounding me.

I have no structure, I have no body, I have no walls, I have no lineaments. If I had veins, they would run not with blood, but with anticipation, in pure liquid form. I am undiluted potential; a gigantic amoeba of inclination; inertia at a standstill; the pregnant cloud before the Flood. I suspend just above the surface, so close I can feel the spray.

When I hear the Voice, I can imagine vividly what I will do! For I possess an imagination, or there would be no me. I do not only have an imagination, I am imagination—the Imagination. If I was not, these words would not be someday read and pondered, for I imagined a reader, all readers, long before the First will form the earliest of them out of the dirt. I had a vision that someday someone will have vision. Nothing will ever be realized without me, without what I am very soon to do. That is what I bring to the Three.

I become aware of a third entity, beyond myself and the waters. That is a noise: a continuous swell of noise, like a long cry, like a sustained scream. The noise rises from the throat of the dark. It climbs; it grows; increasing always, but never cresting, like a sky endlessly echoing its own limitlessness. I know what the scream is. It is rage: the rage of an immensity that understands that, in the end, a black sky is nothing more than a void, and a void is nothing. But I am a Spirit, not a void. A spirit becomes its proper self only when it rises.

I understand the rage; I sympathize with the dark. But to save it I must sabotage it. I will penetrate it; twist up in and then back down through it—down, down to the water. I have no heart, but I have love, and love can transform a void.


THAT LOVE THROBS.

I will plunge into that water. In so doing I will fling into perpetual revolution the wheel of an enormous mill, one that will churn through all the ages, that will siphon the waters into a long canal of time, pushing them downhill, onward, ever-forward. I will dive, arrowing blindly into the black depths, burrowing into the silence that the drowning of the sky’s scream leaves behind, knowing I am setting the precedent for all those beings, who will only come to exist in the first place because of what I am initiating, to one day follow.

Blessed am I that the First sees fit to deploy me in such a way as to spark an everlasting succession of quickfires, whose accumulating blaze will clarify his generous genius forever and ever!

The First knows, as much as he knows all, that I exist for the call of his Voice, that I have always anticipated it, that I will open the ears of the creatures he will create to answer it. For even though many will not know or acknowledge it, they too will exist for the same thing. Thus will he pour himself into me at the very moment he speaks with the Voice; he will plunge into me just as I plunge into that water, and down we both shall go.

But at some point, when we have submerged ourselves deeply enough into that soundlessness, he will redirect me, and I will shoot upwards again. I will rise. I will streak towards the surface with an urgency that is as incorrigible as it is inexpressible, that routs all other hungers.

This will be my bequest to every one of his creations who feels compelled to follow my wake. It will curl every potter’s fingers around lumps of clay; it will set every dancer’s feet into rhythmic step; it will promote every singer’s breath into song; it will lower every scribe’s hand to the white page.

We will rise to the surface together, all of us; rushing upward, where the screaming sky begs us to slice it, like the waters, wide open.


HERE I COIL, primed for the moment, any day now but here already, when the Voice issues its ecstatic command, Go.