Exile of the word/ V

…In the first desire of The King, He engraved an engraving in the supernal purity…

Zohar (1:15)

…Thus I have received that the world in its entirety is a book that God, blessed be He, made, and the Torah is the commentary that He composed on that book…

Rav Tzadok

…There is nothing outside of the text…

Derrida

Letters are formed. They gather in herds to create words. Words become sentences. Sentences carry the meaning. The meaning is imparted onto/into the blank space. The emptiness of the world is filled, subsumed with the fullness of the letters.

When examining the phenomenon of communication, the spoken word has enjoyed the position of directness. Yes, we read the written word, yes letters carry meaning, but speech implies proximity, closeness and thus ensures correct understanding. To write, to read that which is written is to risk the crooked path of misinterpretation. Talking, speaking is the assurance that the words will hit their intended mark. Writing, engraving is the dubious attempt at conveying meaning in the absence of presence.

The hierarchical position of speaking over writing is predicated on the assumption that presence, that which is revealed, speaks more of the origin than absence. In speech the listener is never too far from the source of the spoken. When re/tracing the trace of writing, we lose ourselves in the margins and shadows of the writer, the original in/scription, now absent from the scene. The letters engraved on the blank space of infinite possibility point back towards an absence, a secrecy more ancient than any presence.

The letters are the vehicles of nothingness. The chariots, horses of fire, that present the unspoken, unspeakable presence of that which cannot be named. The letters, the markings, are the residual presence of an ancient absence. The trace of a prior hiddenness. The nothingness that was, is engraved through the nothingness that is.