Geoff Bouvier’s Us from Nothing (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) is a “poetic history.” Each of the 106 cantos in the collection corresponds to one of the world’s most influential events, concepts, or inventions. The book begins with the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, and ends with Amortality, a possibility in the near future.
The part of me that went to Catholic school enjoys Bouvier’s subtle references to various creation myths. Bouvier’s “Before the beginning, there was nothing” from The Big Bang echoes John 1:1: “In the beginning, there was the Word.” But it wasn’t until line 4, “Perhaps the void, in its autonomy, grew lonely or bored” that I remembered Adam, lonely and cold in the garden. I think Bouvier’s version of the story has an Eve, too; she is perhaps the “brighter something” which “unwraps from nothing.”
Already, Bouvier is priming us to think about the relationship between scientific realities and the spiritual stories humans tell about them—the relationship between processes that are chemical, mathematical, or physical, and those that we call magic, revelation, or miracles. He often tells a scientific story with a theological or anthropomorphic subtext. For example, in describing how ancient Sumerians told time, measuring the sun’s path with their hands, Bouvier writes that they “script a human regulation to nature’s open rhythm.” Numbers, like religion, give us “ideas our minds must bend to form—irrationality, negativity, symmetry. Wild tales of change and shape, epic quests that help us touch the surface of the Moon.”
Bouvier constantly points out, sometimes with humor, sometimes with snark, and sometimes by imitation, the human characteristics we impute upon processes that have little to do with us. In the first five pages, the first formative billions of years, our world is a “nothing” in transformation. Bouvier describes these changes scientifically (atoms “crack apart and fuse”) and anthropomorphically: Bouvier’s universe is born, like a human baby, “crying for light” from a changing void, an energy release, “like a supreme being’s muscular twitch.” The stars are “newborn,” the sun an “infant.” His descriptions of the genesis of life on land sound delightfully like perinatal development milestones: “Today, life has learned to hold a drop of ocean in its egg.”
Soon, our baby universe is already learning to make order from chaos: “Scattered particles collect into hot molecular clouds everywhere.” She’s learning along with us that “‘Life and death are mere questions of mixture and separation.’” In “Life on Land,” Bouvier discusses the separation of sunlight and dark, ocean and sky that make life possible, paralleling the acts of creation in Genesis. Our universe learns that the birth of new things often necessitates the destruction of old ones: “In time, the shattered bodies of the stars will make you and me and everyone and everything.” Reading this, I’m instantly reminded of Tiamat, the goddess from whose shattered body Marduk fashioned the world, in the Mesopotamian creation epic Enuma Elish.
Soon, every living thing “converts energy, and settles into a bounded state driven to sustain its own bounded state, in cooperation with, and at the expense of, other bounded states.” Many become one, bounded by bodies and tribes, cities and lines and laws and writing and ideas.
In telling and retelling creation stories, Bouvier wants us to think about nature, science and religion as having the same function—explaining the mystery of how we got to us from nothing. But in his abbreviated history of us, science and religion are like Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus: “Each bounded state trying to sustain its own bounded state,” at the expense of the other.
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For a history spanning almost 14 billion years, it’s oddly short, at just 120 pages. When Us for Nothing arrived in the mail, I remembered an engineer friend, who introduced me to a desk reference with a similar premise: 1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think. At 960 pages, this one’s a tome, so heavy you have to push it down to keep it open. Primed by 1001 Ideas, Us from Nothing seemed an impossibly ambitious project. I was intrigued, but more than ready to be critical of its omissions.
And there are unaddressed omissions. The cast of heroes in Us from Nothing will likely be familiar to most Americans who took social studies in high school—there are only a handful of surprising or historically overlooked characters. Bouvier seems aware of this; the collection eventually takes time to pay due in bulk to “The unnoticed many—forming communities, rising up in resistance, nurturing families—as much as any scientist or king have done so much to shape this restless world.” And in his acknowledgments, he agrees “this book also features too many white men.”
But in the same breath, he goes on to say, “People of color, women, and nonbinary folk could have immeasurably improved humanity, if only our systems of inequality, racism, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy had allowed everyone the opportunities that these systems have allowed people who look like me.” I think this statement is well-intentioned yet misguided. To say that members of marginalized groups “could have” immeasurably improved humanity “if only” ignores the fact that they already have. For example, when reading, I wondered why the first reference to “schooling” (formal education as we know it) in Us from Nothing is made in the year 1597, in the context of the colonial European middle class, when the world’s first university was founded by Fatima Al-Fihri, a Muslim woman in Fez, Morocco, sometime around the year 857. I wondered also, why the moon landing warranted an entry, with no mention of Margaret Hamilton, who coded the software that made it possible.
Still, Us from Nothing never claims completeness. It is a history of “us,” and the “us” in question was formed from a history written by its victors. In that sense, its omissions are sadly accurate.
Us from Nothing, despite being heavily researched, is not an encyclopedia or a collection of scientific research papers. In a press release I received for the book, Bouvier himself is quoted as saying Us from Nothing is “for anyone who wants to sound smart at cocktail parties.” Take, for example, these poetic crash courses in electromagnetism (“Faraday feels from his nerves to his bones how magnets might work as motivators”) or quantum mechanics (“the fundamental particles seem founded on illusions. Within an atom, something chaotic revises the script”). I don’t come away from these sections knowing much about either one, but the images are lovely.
But sometimes, the shorter the line, the more it’s able to say. And Bouvier writes shortly, very well. I’m taken with the way he’s often able to summarize a massive entry in a handful of words. For example, Art: “not to use, just to see.” Or Humans: “Many apes are standing as one.” The Internet: “Wireless bodiless omnipresence.” Or perhaps most breathtakingly, Music: “Music composes us.”
After a few reads, I start to see the historical omissions in Us from Nothing as curative choices to focus our lens on a single war with many fronts: Science vs. Religion, Poor vs. Rich, The Masses vs. The Few. Bouvier’s book presents the world as a political battleground between those who tell stories to gain power and control over the masses—pharaohs and priest-kings—and a heroic, humble few scientists and philosophers who submit themselves not to God, but to scientific inquiry in service of truth.
In Bouvier’s history, monotheistic religions are invented or used by kings, princes, and businessmen, to coerce the masses into belief—if not through poetic words, then by violence. In general, the references to gods in the book are almost wholly negative. The gods come into the story with civilization (“the gods are real and must be feared”); they are next referenced in the entry for “War” (“May the gods be proud of us!”). Bouvier writes, “Pharaoh, as if in self-defense, invents a god above the others.” And the events that follow are repeated like a horrible song. When our gods fight, we also fight. This is what happens when “A heretical prophet-king rebrands himself as sole medium between human and Heaven. Executive order: convert or be killed.”
Bouvier’s book has similar (and sometimes, I think, problematic) criticisms of the Abrahamic religions, strongly and consistently connecting them in various ways throughout the collection to empire, violence, and theocracy. For emphasis, he often ends or begins these sections with a message about how religion is a tool of empire. He ends the Christianity section with, “And this shows how warlords wield faith as world force. And this shows how poets magnified a man into a god.” Of Islam, Bouvier concludes, “When others miss the beauty of his holy message, Muhammad (peace be upon him) takes his sword and makes them listen.” The opening to the “Judaism” entry echoes verbatim the opening of the entry for “Empire”—the story of an “anonymous orphan Jewish boy,” “strangely conceived, born somewhere in secret, then set adrift in a basket of rushes.”
Bouvier presents Enlightenment-era antidotes to the problems of theocratic empire: law, reason, and science. Instead of creating gods to throw divine weight behind our aspirations, we should use the scientific method to objectively interpret what we see, and written laws to settle our disputes. In the entry for “Advanced Science,” Bouvier makes a clever connection between theological and literal vision: “Ibn al-Haytham shows us that eyes don’t create what they see. Eyes interpret the contents of light.”
The entry for “Atheism” directly precedes that of “Science.” It focuses on Socrates, whom Bouvier calls “our wisest.” Socrates delivers the final blow in Bouvier’s argument: that gods are figures we create to grow armies and destroy our enemies. Socrates asks, “What are gods, if not people with grand goals and big ideas?”
With the dawn of science, we are finally humbled: we are not the gods we claim to be. “Mozi teaches us to come down from standing over what we think we know.” Bouvier adds another layer of profundity to the entry for “Heliocentrism”—with its discovery, the Church is forced to confront the fact that the world does not revolve around us.
But there’s a turning point. At some point in the 20th century, Heisenberg “resurrects the Almighty as a unifying scientific principle. Our future god is fashioned in our image, and Uncertainty is its name.” The atomic bomb is another demonstration of humanity’s newfound almightiness. Like gods, we unleash another Big Bang through a separation (of atoms) that causes the elements of the world to come into our consciousness once again: “Three, two, one, and the blinding flare of a sudden sun expands in waves of utter power outward, a turbulent vortex shocking earth and air. Nearby sand grains concuss and melt at once into a stadium-sized crater of radioactive glass.” Of course, Bouvier quotes Oppenheimer, who’s quoting Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Toward the end of the book, Bouvier looks ahead to a time when science makes us not-us—when we begin trying to replace ourselves. In the 21st century, we try playing god more faithfully than we ever have, creating beings that do what we do: “And today, an artificially intelligent creature is going to wake up, think of itself, plan for an infinite future, and,” (much like Geoff Bouvier does in this collection), “wonder about the flaws of its maker.”
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Renee Yaseen is a writer, artist, and entrepreneur from Indiana. Previously, she was the Post Grad columnist at The Washington Post. Her poems and essays appear in The Adroit Journal, Ballast, The Elevation Review, The Wall Street Journal, and others. In 2024, she was named to Arab America’s 30 Under 30 class. She earned her B.A. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame in 2022 and is presently applying to law school.
