Metaphysics: The Gray Doldrums

The Gray Doldrums

Before the world was made, there was only the gray doldrums: an endless waste of nothingness where forms and formless jumbled together in meaningless array. This was the junkyard leftover from a previous world or something very like it: lifeless, without vitality, possessing the characteristics of a world but not its truth.

It's an interesting question whether this counted as "something."

One argument is that absolute nothingness would look to us like the doldrums; that we cannot help, as people, but to project the echoes of thingness (but without the thing) and lifeness (but without the life) onto the emptiness that came before. Another belief is that the doldrums were a substance, a thing, an actuality, whose meaning was either "dead" or "primordial"—like a field that is fallow in winter or after extensive soil depletion, but retaining the potentiality to nourish something new.

What is known is that attempts to assign a live meaning to the gray doldrums, to act based on the idea that it was thus, or such, or to excavate from it an active life or thing that predates the transformative experience, is not productive. There is no fairy who has achieved victory or gained utility by relying on more about the gray doldrums than that they were there and that we may think about them. A graduate student might make waves with a paper speculating on some detail of the doldrums, but a practical scientist cannot extract from them a useful form—if there is anything in the doldrums that in any fashion matters it was catalyzed to matter in the transformative experience that created the world.