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.

Exile of the word/ IV

…everything is profoundly broken…

…everything must be rebuilt…

Words fall apart. With the deconstruction of language, meaning vacated the scene. Speech fell to mumbling, struggling to find the right word.

History pointed to the death of the word as the death- or impossibility of communication- of inter-subjectivity. They exclaimed, “the king is dead…the king is dead”, and in the place/space of coherent language, nihilism entered the scene. As the revelers and the prophets of doom danced in the wreckage of the word, redemptive speech appeared lost.

In the veil of darkness, there emerged a new form of seeking. Searching through the ruins of the word, a luminous glow, a faint murmuring was heard. Within the breakage of the whole, the parts, the letters were seen for the first time.

These enlightening letters, osiyos mach’kimos, lay dormant, repressed as long as the word, the whole appears full and self-sufficient. The letters, once perceived as necessary stones, avanim, for the construction of a greater whole, battim, were now shown to represent a sign of a wholly different/other purpose.

The letters, osiyos, or signs, point beyond their utilitarian purpose. Beyond the word, beyond the function of an individualized part serving a greater whole- only to lose its meaning in the collapse of the whole.

The letters point to an ancient past.  A time/space beyond moment or place, beyond language. The letters are signs pointing towards the origin of letters. The letters are the message,  the letter, which promises to always, inevitably arrive at its destination.

The osiyos are the spiritual residue of spiritual potencies that have long been absent, present through their absence.

The letters are the trace, of a past presence, present through its trace. They call us to lift them from the wreckage. Read them. Interpret them. To connect to them.

To be continued…

Exile of the word/ III

Exiled, the word lost its vehicular capacity of getting the direct point across. Words, devarim, initially capable of expressing the davar– or thing-in-itself- were relegated to the secondary role of description. Postlapsarian language, once the solitary mode of coherent interaction, fell beneath the flux of misunderstanding.

With this collapsing of linguistic connectivity, human history embarked on the long, exilic road of misapprehension. People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening… Mis/heard, mis/spoken, mis/taken, words became signs, signs pointing to other signs, words moving towards better, clearer words. The perpetual search for the perfect word, the description to end all descriptions, re/presents the trace, the residue of devarim long absent from the scene.

A gaping hole separating spoken intent and interpretive assumption was opened.

Within the deconstruction of the word, the devarim were opened up. In the chaos of broken houses, battim, the rebuilders found stones, avanim. With the shattering of the word, we meet the letters. Within the letters themselves, devoid of semblance and order, we find the opening towards redemptive language.

To be continued…