Prima Materia: A Prose Poem

A swirling void with dreams of form

Before everything — there was Chaos. Formless. Breathless. Timeless. Creativity in potentia. Neither male nor female, yet holding the imprint of both — gestating womb of existence and phallic wand of spermatozoic alchemy. Stirring the cauldron of a swirling void with dreams of form. Of the world wanting to be. Yearning particles, breaking apart with the force of opposing desires. The first dichotomy — some yearning for substance, succumbing to gravity. Some rising upwards — becoming ether. Between — the silent scream, memory of the primordial schism, the gaping abyss.

Listen to the old myths — hear tell of how Chaos birthed both Night and Darkness. Nyx and Erebus. Night has always been older than day. In the beginning was not the word. Terror and the unknown were its necessary predecessors. Creativity is a force that begins in darkness. Is that why I want the night to write? I am Chaos in the clasp of creative imperative. Circumventing the conscious self, leaping into the limbic brain.

Down into that abyss —

A microcosm of the memory of that first yawning void — where a million eyes stare back at me — elliptical eyes like tiny whirling galaxies — or cosmic fried eggs — ideas, born but barely nascent. Oh I contain multitudes …but I need the thread of language to haul them up into the light. The power to name things — a civilizing urge. The pen — a tool of modern times. But my ink running through it must be arcane and untamed — like the memory of chaos in my blood. The blood of my ego, pouring out of the slit of its jugular — on the altar of sacrifice to archaic Muses that demand darker offerings. Descendants of Nyx and Erebus — keepers of secrets and hidden things. Mouths eternally agape — roaring at the day to stay away.

I crack open my head like an egg, letting the prima materia of my unconscious chaos spill out onto the page, images gleaming and viscous like albumen, metaphors swimming in the womb of that golden, spreading, melting sun. Ideas sticky with possibility — to beget my own magnum opus.

Slipping into the surreal, I dive like Dali into the yolk of my creative metamorphosis — the split splatter of an egg like the spilt matter of the unconscious — symbol of penultimate chaos — fried emblem of the surrealists — they would wear it on their coats if they could — they knew a fried egg was never just breakfast.

I am Chaos — first impulse of creativity. The persistent attempt to transcend my mortality. Elemental force of disorder trying to grasp a pen in its hands — unaware it has an opposing thumb.

I am Chaos, remembering its origins to manifest what the page needs, but forgetting itself to encase the slippery-wild aliveness of newborn beings into words.

I am Chaos — constantly birthing itself, destroying itself and everything the coddled imagination ever held dear. Chaos, laughing, conjuring up its dark cloak of annihilation — and returning again to the void.

I am Chaos —get out of my way.

© Melissa Coffey January 2022

Prima Materia is written primarily in response to the Tracks of Writing prompt with a little of the Dear Chaos prompt by J.D. Harms. I couldn’t make the phrase “Dear Chaos” work, but I finished one sentence with the word “dear” and started the next with “Chaos”.

The phrase that became the title sprung out of my pen to capture the idea that the creative writer often has everything they need in their head — the initial ideas, even if research is needed. My research revealed the fascinating alchemical concept of prima materia as linked to the concept of primoridal Chaos, containing all things and understood by the ancient Greeks (and echoed in numerous other religons) to be what the world sprung from.

Images of eggs seemed to symbolically link everything I was exploring — and there’s a little of Paroma Sen’s recent prose poem — and our conversation in the inspiration.

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