In the ancient creation epic of the Maya, the Popol Vuh, it takes a few drafts before the gods get human beings right. As a writer, I’ve always loved that. And while I was in the midst of translating the myth into English, I adopted the gods’ exhortation, Xa qa tija’ chik—“Let us simply try again”—as a sort of mantra, hoping that as I labored to make it sing, I would keep trying and failing in the right direction, and the day would come when I read the lines aloud, and the newly wired syntax would hum with the voltage of an ancient current.

Like most writers, I obsess over commas. I spend hours switching between maybe and perhaps. I often revise poems so hard they disappear. I tell my students all the time that there’s no such thing as good writing, only good revision. So the disembodied voice of Genesis that announces Light into existence—perfectly—the first time—isn’t really a creative role model I can relate to.

In the Popol Vuh, however, to revise is divine.

This is not because the gods in the Popol Vuh lack for power: they possess a keen sense of what words can do. They summon earth into existence, for instance, simply by proclaiming “Earth!” A tautological, chicken-and-the-egg circle that usually gives my students a moment of pause. Animals appear with equal ease: “sudden as they spoke these thoughts / the deer and birds were there.”

Yet the world they create, for all its lushness, will remain incomplete until what’s been spoken into existence returns the favor. “Call our names,” the gods implore. “Sing to us.” When the animal respond, they merely squawk and chitter, failing the myth’s test for what makes people true people: the ability to speak as grateful, intelligent mirrors of the place from which they come. It’s a lovely fertile feedback loop—creation recreates its creator, and in being re-membered the gods are made whole. In this way, Humanity functions as a sort of living library, where language is energy, essence, and connective tissue.

After this first disappointment, the gods are undaunted, saying, “Let us simply try again.” Intriguingly, this time in their efforts to create beings that can speak for themselves, they abandon language as their primary creative tool. Apparently if you want to be truly seen and known—if you want true recognition through the prism of language—you need to cede some control: you can’t put words into peoples’ mouths. The gods get their hands dirty instead, delving into mud and forming it into a body. But unlike the case with Adam, dirt alone is insufficient:

The work separated and crumbled.
The work softened into mush.
The body loosened and dissolved.

The head rose thick
from the shoulders.

The face was mashed.
The gaze was fixed.

It could not turn
and look about.

And then it spoke
and made no sense.

It melted quickly,
dipped in water.

Clearly, this is the roughest of rough drafts. Something is taking shape, but the words have yet to hold the freight they need to carry.

How many half-written poems have never made it out of this stage? Thick-headed, a little muddy, looking only in one direction, not possessing enough internal structure to hold together, they have not learned to turn their heads and “look about” to take in the world around them. There is no seed. My study is littered with such drafts, scrawled on legal pads and the backs of envelopes. So the gods “let it come undone. / They toppled what they’d framed and shaped.” The image might not be as iconic as pulling a sheet from the typewriter and crumpling it into a ball, but their irritation with their inability to enact their own vision is palpable.

The next iteration moves upward from the dirt into the life already growing from it. The gods carve figures out of trees and reeds, and these are the most promising draft so far. They can walk. They can talk. Yet there is also something stiff and unyielding about them. With their withered arms, blank faces and hollow hearts, these “first people,” as they are called, “showed no understanding” before their creators. Both their walking and their talking are “aimless,” and once again, they are cast away.

Yet whereas the figures of mud are allowed to simply dwindle, the gods summon a violent flood to savage these figures of wood. They have lived as mindless creatures of appetite, who take and do not give, and in the ravages of the flood we see this empty consumption come full circle, as they are literally consumed by what fed them. Their shortcoming is clear: they lack na’wik, the capacity to notice, understand, perceive. It is said their descendants still live in the forests: “And so the monkeys look like us, / a remnant of that earlier work, / a wooden echo of our kind.” Thoughtlessness erodes personhood, reducing us to monkeys. Humanity then is a condition that can be gained, but also lost.

Here, the creation aspect of the Popol Vuh pauses, and something like a heroic epic begins. We catapult through over a hundred pages of action before the hero twins at the center of the struggle manage to set things right and we return to the myth’s initial concern: making true people. The ingredients the gods use for the final version are simple—maize and water.

The fourth draft works. You are what you eat. We become what we consume, and that nourishment comes from the place that made you. This is what sustenance looks like—what it means to sustain—and there is an implicit narrative buried in these last three drafts: life is drawn from the dirt up through the stalk toward the sunlight where, with a little water, the fruit blossoms. It is when the gods are listening to their materials, so to speak, that they finally have success. There is no carving, no chiseling, no molding. It is replaced by observation, listening, and growth. These gods are writing from what they know into what they don’t. Creation draws things out toward the light. Light draws things out into the world. Everything looks toward the sun.

If myths are stories that we inhabit and then reenact upon the world, they write us as much as we write them. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a world that looked to a story such as the Popol Vuh as its foundation. A world where the model wasn’t immediate perfection? Where gods learned from each other? How might the world look different if we saw ourselves as the product of divine revision? If the earth we walked upon, the trees of the forest, and the apes were all seen as ancestors, as antecedents of ourselves? What if the ultimate test of our humanity was an ability to express gratitude? Or if it was to look deeply into the world that made us, and call it by its proper name?