To Write Through Erasure

…In the first desire of The King, He engraved an engraving in the supernal purity…
Zohar (1:15)

…the tablets were written on both their sides, on the one side and the other were they written.
Exodus (32:15)

Ten things were created at twilight…the script of writing and the inscription of the tablets…
Avot 5:8

The scene of writing, the pen emptying its ink onto the blank surface. What was once empty and void is now endowed with substance, markings on the page create meaningful statements. This creative act moves from nothing towards something, from empty to full.

As the written word attaches itself to the page, a symbiotic relationship is created. In order for writing to take place, the page must carry the ink, as the ink must rest on the page. Far from morphing into a unitary whole, the ink and paper remain separate entities, joined together by the desire of the writer. The movements of the writer, the thought expressed through the point of the pen, maintain and sustain the creative act of text on page.

In contrast to the creative act of writing, the destructive act of engraving forms its message through erasure. The wholeness of the stone, the tablet, is destroyed through the piercing cut. To erase the wholeness that was, is to form the space of absence. To carve a place, the opening of possibility through which emptiness can be read. Removal, withdrawal of a prior plenitude opens the void of infinite possibility.

As the engraving is carved into the surface, the demarcations of content and space fall away. What was whole is now absent, as the absence fills the whole. The inscription becomes the tablet, just as the tablet becomes the inscription.

This miraculous relation between empty and full, between carving and carved, is the vehicle capable of translating the untranslatable. The prior classifications of creation and destruction, writing and erasing collapse as the impossible unification of opposites is revealed.

…the tablets were the act of the infinite…