  In his Keter Malkhût poem (Kingdom's Crown), Ibn Gabirol further describes God's creative act as a splitting open of nothingness: “…ve-qara el ha-’ayîn ve-nivqa…,” (“…and He called out to the nothing and it split open…”; in Gabirol's poem, Keter Malkhût, canto 9; See Schirmann 1967, p. 262, line 82; for a treatment of this line, see Pines 1980). Here, the void of precreation—the pre-existent ’ayîn, or “nothingness”—is split open by God's own voice in the moment of creation—a moment arguably described by Ibn Gabirol in his poem ahavtîkha (“I Love You”) as the material “proto-existence” (kemô-yêsh) awaiting its fulfillment through  form,[21] and described in the Fons Vitae as a complex unfolding of and downward manifesting of a first pure matter through the introduction of (or unfolding of) forms by the Divine Will. The material nothing—in all three images—is the ground of existence, as it is at once the site of desire, a yearning to be en-formed, which is to say, to become more and more manifest. We will say more about this emphasis on desire below (see section 4.3).