Welter & Waste

". . . the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters . . ."

Survivors of the gigantic undersea earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia to Africa - which officials now describe as one of the worst natural disasters in recent history - recovered bodies today, hurriedly arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart. The reported deaths from the disaster climbed today to more than 50,000, with some reports placing the number near 60,000. A third of the dead are said to be children. With hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the open without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other waterborne diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.

There are some interesting blogs about the disaster written by survivors here, here and here. They also provide information on relief organizations. It's kind of hard for me to add anything to what they have to say, so I won't try.

I met my friend K. for coffee this moring at Starbucks, then went to the office to answer a few emails (I know I'm on vacation, but clients are still important). The rest of the day was spent finishing the yard work I started yesterday - I took down a tree, blew the leaves off the roof, and raked/swept/blew the leaves from the back patio all the way around to the street.

I trail Witch Doctor Jim by three games in the pool now, along with my Mom and my brother. For the next four games (tonight and tomorrow), our picks are the same, so I can't make up any ground on the Witch Doctor until North Carolina beats BC (by more than three points) on Thursday. The BiL and my sister trail the Witch Doctor by 1 and 2 games, respectively. A Miami (Ohio) win over Iowa State (by >3) would get me one game closer to them, and an Oregon State win over Notre Fucking Dame (by 3 1/2) would tie me with the BiL. So if everything goes my way tonight, my Mom and I will be in a three-way tie for second place with the BiL, and my poor brother will be left all alone in last place with only two wins to his name.

Recent Web Searches

Christmas Day, soyu matsuoka, from AOL on the East Coast

Christmas Day, Chattanooga zazen, from Comcast on the East Coast

December 26, Arden's Garden, from Dogpile on the East Coast

December 27, paper that dissolves in water, on MSN in the Central Time Zone

December 28, michael creighton + State Of Fear, a Google search from the East Coast (fourth reference on page)

December 28, shokai, another Google on the East Coast (seventh reference, Otsuka Corporation of Japan's home page was the first reference).

In the Beginning, God Did Not Create the Heavens and the Earth.

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES
A Translation With Commentary.
By Robert Alter. 1,064 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

Reviewed by Edward Rothstein
The New York Times: December 29, 2004

The King James Bible puts it too neatly: "In the beginning" could mean that the creation was God's first act, or that the creation was itself the beginning, but wasn't something there before? The sentence also reads like a topic sentence, bluntly introducing that account that follows.

Things are actually far more mysterious and inchoate, as Robert Alter keeps reminding us in his astonishing translation of the original Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible. There are so many accretions of meaning and assumption layered over the Biblical text, so many commentaries, so many doctrines; even the English language has been influenced by the glories (and errors) of the 17th-century King James translation.

Return, then, to the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch - the Torah - where pronouns are often ambiguous, words are compacted with multiple meanings and clauses can begin to make sense not in the ordinary sequence of reading but only in the course of doubling back and rereading. Here is how Mr. Alter renders that first sentence of Genesis:

"When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, 'Let there be light.' "

That sentence unsettles. The creation is not a completed act, but part of a process. The act of speaking is the focus of attention, coming after an almost breathless catalog of elements in a world "without form and void" (as the King James version puts it), in which "welter and waste and darkness over the deep" and "God's breath" are components of a primordial earth.

It isn't likely that this rendering will soon replace the old. It doesn't easily scan. But it is so weirdly convincing, and so evocative of matters beyond conventional understanding, that it anticipates not just the story of Creation but the epic enterprise of translation and commentary into which Mr. Alter leads us.