Metaphysics: Fairies (in re: the origin of things)

The movement that turned this primal thing into a world was the quickening of fairies.

These were as the fairies that are born from humans now, save that they rose from lifeless things. They rose from the jumble of numinous superficiality and doldrums substance, and they were moved to make a world.

There were some among them who were chaotic and unboundaried; these fell into an undifferentiated mass and became the great sea of experience and the mother world. Some were brilliant and radiant with energy; these fell into an underlying lattice of mathematical structure and became the support system for the principles of being. The great spark rose into the sky and became the Sun. And the movements of the nicknobs became the seasons, and the joy of the world coalesced from the primal summerkin; and thus, and thus, and thus, from each of them.

And one day the things looked at themselves and they were no longer things, but a world of living creatures, and they spoke to one another, and they interacted with one another, and they danced and ate and killed and loved and grew.

And it was Good.

Metaphysics: the Transformative Experience

The Transformative Experience

And then at some point the numinous superficialities took root on the surface of the doldrums, like dandelion puff raining down from some unknown welkin. They are understood as anything from bright chaff that happened to catalyze existence to active spiritual angels—in fact, it's generally assumed that they're both. That at some point something in the doldrums drew the attention of a great host of shining . . . things . . .

That fell onto its surface and began to transform it.

Then the doldrums quaked, then they rippled and shook and hungered—more than anything else, hungered—for something more.

Certain of the superficialities were swallowed beneath its surface, taken in and made embedded seeds of brightness; others were cast away to serve as distant nexuses of light. Yet this did not suffice. The world remained an inanimate and unfinished thing. It had traces of something, but inchoate, and with large chunks of its suchness missing.

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.