A VERY OLD TALE

“In the beginning,” intoned the Master, “there was nothing. It was written in the First Book that there was nothing. The page, the opening page, the sacred opening page, was blank, like the mind of a child. It was wonderful. Not a sin had been committed to plague the Universe…”

“What Universe?” asked the Scholar, a blond boy loved by everyone who knew him, including the Master.

“The basic Universe, my son,” replied the benevolent Master, and he rubbed the boy’s tousled hair, making it even more tousled. “It is wordlessly written that our Creator looked upon that nothing, and loved it so much that he moulded it with his sacred fingers into the shape of a woman. And that woman was beautiful. The first Mother. The Earth Mother. If you have any conception of beauty, any idea, my Son, what beauty can achieve by just being, then that is what he moulded with his bare hands out of nothing.”

“My mistress was beautiful,” sighed the scholar, remembering his mother and the way she had loved him, and a tear trickled silently from one of his eyes, ran slowly, hesitantly down his cheek, and splashed onto his gown.

“Your Mistress,” sighed the Master, “was a goddess. I knew her once, in all innocence, of course, for I am a Master and devoid of the frailties of ordinary men.

“Tell me more about the First Book,” suggested the Scholar, wiping both eyes.

“Ah, you are keen,” smiled the Master, tousling his hair again, “there was a void. Everything that is was lost in that void, was formless, which means it had no shape or substance. Even the birds of the trees and the fish of the sea! Every precious thing, lost and swirling and shapeless in the void. And scents, fragrances, were nothing, light and shade unheard of, everything was blank.”

“”The dove that sings in the morning?” asked the boy, “not there? It’s song the roar of silence?”

“So it says in the First Book,” smiled the Master, “and even the poop from that dove, and the maggots that thrive in the poop, and the sickness that oozes from those maggots. All was in that nothing recorded faithfully in the First Book, written on its second page in indelible ink.”

“And who wrote it?” asked the Scholar, “who braved the endless dark of nothing to record its beauty?”

“The gods themselves,” sighed the Master.

The Scholar smiled. He had seen a flaw in the lesson and his education had urged him to explore such things, to rattle the cage of truth until it swore.

“From nothing, Master?” he asked, “Is that the case? For if there was nothing as the First Book tells us, where were the gods and how did they create words in the dark of nothing?”

The Master’s smile melted away like the snow melts on a sunny January morning after a bleak nght.

“Easy, my lad,” he warned, “your words are getting mighty close to those that might be said to doubt the words on the First Book, and that is sacrilege!”

“But, Master, you taught me…”

“To question, yes, to doubt, never!”

And the scholar had to retreat into silence because he couldn’t for the life of him distinguish between doubting and questioning.

“You see,” murmured the Master calmly, understanding the young man’s confusion, “there are truths in the First Book, on that first unwritten page, that must never change. Wisdom greater than that of any man, and it is folly if you or I or any man or woman try to alter it by as much as a comma or a full stop.”

The Scholar felt suddenly brave. He was, after all, not a stupid scholar. He was where he was on account of his own intellect, recognised by a team of Masters after his entrance examination.

“So the blank page never changes?” he asked, “it is always the same, a tabula rasa with no meaning and no content?”

The Master had heard enough. He took one step closer to the Scholar, and as he was already almost standing on his toes became uncomfortably close. “Scholars have been flogged for saying less than that!” he barked. “I have rods enough to cut your skin, young man… and I would use them bur for the fact that I asked the same questions when I was no older than you are now! Of course there is meaning and content! It’s just that in our humility we are too blind to see and too deaf to hear it. Now go, and pray for forgiveness before I change myn mind and beat you like an ancient Master once beat me!”

The Scholar turned and quietly, with humiliation, walked away.

So that’s the truth, he thought, a silence that must go down as many generations as there will be, and never questioned…

And watching him go the Master shook his head. If the lad wasn’t so blond and beautiful I’d have him beaten and weeping on the floor at my feet, bleeding…

© Peter Rogerson, 04.09.22

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