Transparent from within: place and visibility in Acharei mos
“For even the knowledge that we have of the body is not such that we know it just as it is, or perfectly; and yet, what a union! what a love!”
—Spinoza, God, man, and his well-being, chapter 22
Vessel and Light are embracing. Otherwise, there’s nothing. Actually, it’s hard to speak of an otherwise. Because the embrace goes by the name of ‘world.’
Ves. Come closer.
Lig. I can come as close as you are.
Ves. Which way is that?
Light pauses, thinking of a way in. A way that Vessel might understand.
Lig. Do you remember the story of Aaron’s two sons? How they died.
Ves. I think so. I don’t remember it well.
Lig. They came close and died. They died because they died.
Ves. What does that mean, ‘they died because they died?’
Under what feels like pain of death, Vessel is reminded that she is a kind of body. At the moment, she doesn’t remember any more than that. Only a dim remembrance, but it carries with it the indelible trace of actually being the sons of Aaron. She looks up. The troubled smile on Light’s face tells her something more, too, but not much more.
Ves. I also remember the ‘kiss of death.’ An ascendance without the transcendence of death; how the innocent are taken away. Was this like that?
Lig. No, not quite. Let me ask, do you remember Tohu?
Vessel’s face contorts at the mention. ‘Remember’ isn’t the right word. Remembrance relies on there being a past, but Tohu feels too near for that. A true past lies on the other side of a curtain, across which one’s memory might span. To Vessel, remembrance feels like the transparency of that curtain. But if there’s no curtain at all, the word ‘remember’ isn’t apt. Did Light misspeak? Usually he says precisely what he means.
Tohu feels like a way of being herself. One which she could as well be now, if she really wanted. But that would be a kind of lapse. And a painful one, at that.
Ves. I don’t remember it well.
Lig. I’m sorry. But I have to ask. Tell me how it was different than this.
Ves. Well, it was the look on your face. There was so much of you—
Lig. —and so little of you.
Light is slightly disappointed with himself. Again, a non-answer. The appeal to ‘a lot’ and ‘a little,’ the story they both keep telling, doesn’t make much sense. But Light can’t help but tell it, too. Even though there’s a difference more essential. He looks down. The difference must be Vessel’s.
Lig. Are you different than I am?
Ves. Yes. I know our other names. I’m ‘stricture.’ Delimitation. You’re ‘love.’
Lig. What if we could see more of ourselves.
Light and vessel change places.
Lig. I’ll be stricture. You can be love.
Ves. Why’s that.
Lig. You show me. What is it that you want?
Ves. I want you. I want you here.
Lig. I’m here because of you. I’m a fire rising, you’re a wick descending. You’re my body.
Ves. Are you my soul?
Lig. I’m—
Ves. Why is it that you’re here.
Lig. I’m flying up.
Ves. No, I asked why you’re here. Which way is here.
Lig. What does it mean to you, that I’m here?
Ves. I don’t know you. You want to be infinite. Your love is ‘with all my soul…’
Lig. Isn’t that here?
Ves. I’m not sure. I can’t be like you. And all I can do is give in. I see rushing water, people, trees, the vast canyons. I don’t know how to be nothing like you. I only know how to love ‘with all my heart…’
Ves. To be less than something.
Lig. You’re infinity, too.
Ves. Infinity can’t be less than what it is. I feel totally forgotten.
Light looks down and sees infinity. How does she feel forgotten? She feels created. Left behind and cut off from her root. For an instant, Light is struck with awe of Vessel’s brilliance. She can actually see creation. She can see mountains. Insects. She can look up and see constellations, and planets. And then that beautiful thought again: she can see me. Suddenly the awe is changed to compassion, sympathy. Sorrow, even. If only I can show her…
At this, Light considers his own name. Why aren’t I Shefa, ‘abundance?’ Why aren’t I ‘giving,’ or ‘flow,’ or even ‘radiance?’ No. Just ‘Light.’ I have nothing to give. Nothing comes from me, and I come from nothing. Actually, ‘come’ would be the wrong word. But so would ‘identity’ be wrong, too—I know I’m not nothing. Not yet, at least. I can see her so clearly.
Lig. How do you know I’m not you?
Ves. Because I love you. I know that much.
Lig. Can I come down to you.
Why does ‘come’ feel right to say here? It feels right to say there’s a gap between Vessel and I. An ‘above’ and ‘below.’ And yet…
Lig. Do you know who I am?
Ves. You’re exactly who I see in you.
Lig. Am I anything more than that?
Ves. Actually, I don’t think that’s the right question. I don’t know if you’re something like I am. I don’t think you can be more or less.
Lig. Well—what do I shine on?
Ves. Everything. Me. Do you know what it’s like when you shine?
Lig. That’s not important to me.
Lig. Wait. I don’t mean to suggest—
Ves. Well it is to me. I can tell you’re blind.
Lig. But I want to shine. I could want otherwise.
Vessel suddenly sees her mistake. Light is just like she is. He responds to her; he comes when she calls. In this quiet place, he hears her voice. He’s indifferent, sure, but that’s because he’s also perfect. He has to be.
Ves. How can you hear me?
Lig. What do you mean.
Ves. At dawn, I can hear grasshoppers. And peeper frogs. The almost unnoticeable flows of glass in a windowpane. Rainstorms.
Lig. Why—
Ves. Those sounds are near to me. But that’s because they’re like me. But you’re not something like we are. How can you hear me.
Lig. You’re right, I don’t hear anything. Instead I hear the nothing in your call. When you call ‘with all your strength…’ and then there’s nothing left. I hear what you can’t hold with your voice.
Ves. You don’t hear me then.
Lig. I hear you in your remainder.
Lig. Look inside. What is it that you keep calling ‘something?’
Ves. Something with a soul.
Lig. And what is that, exactly? Just the contour of the body?
Ves. No.
Lig. The faculty of speech, then? Or motion? Sight?
Ves. What are you getting at. No—
Lig. I’m telling you who I hear within you. Not memory. Nor the most basic forms of will. Even beyond your ‘being.’ Before it.
Ves. There’s nothing left of me, then.
Lig. Right. What’s left is your name. Yechida.
Ves. That’s not my name. I don’t know who it is you’re talking to.
Lig. She’s who you aren’t. She can’t hold a thing.
Ves. Didn’t you say that she was within me?
Lig. She is. When you overflow, what’s within is without, too.
Lig. And in that transparency, a contour is meaningless. Then you’re like me—
Ves. Like you?
Lig. At least I recognize you!
Vessel pauses. She wants to take seriously all Light says. But how can a non-holding be at her center? If I know anything at all, it’s that my essence is marked only by its receptivity. Bringing in, nearing. Sustaining. Shouldn’t calling ‘with all my strength…’ reveal that capacity as my inmost? Isn’t that what Light sees in me? Doesn’t he draw near to me because I draw him near? Why should he say he only hears me in my exceedance? When, in holding, my holding is surpassed. Wouldn’t that only be when the sustenance of what’s sustained in me, through me, is rendered invisible? Well, he said transparent… No. He truly doesn’t see me.
Somewhere far off, Vessel hears the rustle of autumn leaves, and she trains her attention on that place. Slowly appears the sound of two slugs sliding across a patch of lichen.
She frowns. ‘Then I’m like him…’ reminds her of what Light said a moment ago, ‘I’m flying up,’ and then another of her names: Ratzoi. Although she doesn’t remember its precise meaning, it has the flavor of that ‘flying.’ Ascendance, the feeling of moving away. Leaving. Away from all of this. It’s an unfamiliar feeling for her, actually. She just wants to ask Light about it. Ratzoi. She rolls the word around on her tongue.
But then the flavor sours. I’m not like him at all. Light is uncaring, insubstantial. The story repeats itself. How, in Tohu, I shattered because of him. Which must have been his fault; he showed me too much. How else could there be a shattering, if not for a ‘too much?’ Otherwise—I was there, but I shattered. Did I fail? Could I fail to be me.
Ves. Do you recognize me in Tohu.
Lig. Yes.
Ves. Who am I there?
Lig. You’re like a child. You hold me in a pure way. Either in pain, or pleasure, but not both. You can’t hold both.
Ves. But in this world? In Tikkun?
Lig. You can find right even in its wrong. Love in love’s stricture. I see you hold one in the other. Or the other in the one.
Ves. You mean side by side.
Lig. Do you see it like that. Certainly the two dwell together, but it’s not so spatial for me. One doesn’t just sit next to the other. You give both expression by giving both form. And there’s a kind of concentricity to it: that form you give isn’t just opaque, like it is in Tohu, but has a clear opacity. I can see right through the one’s into the other’s. Or better yet: one’s delimits the other’s, since I can find it in the one’s.
Ves. ‘Clear opacity’ is an oxymoron. Clarity marks opacity’s absence. What kind of form would that be? Does it mean what it means? Or something else.
Lig. Means also something else. Think about Tohu. A purely opaque world. When you hold on to something there, you’re left with only what it is.
Ves. That’s form.
Lig. It’s a kind of form that can’t grasp anything else. That’s why I’m calling it opacity. It’s meaning without any structure. Because structure entails another meaning. If a love has even one slight wrinkle, any trace of difficulty, I can see in it the whole of difficulty’s possibility. What a difficulty might look like.
Ves. Why isn’t that just clarity?
Lig. Clarity is the simplicity of being struck through with something else. But it’s precisely in this love’s being what it is, and not something else, that I can discern difficulty.
Ves. So, in your example, love is in touch with what’s other than itself by being in touch with itself. Who do you see in me right now.
Lig. I’m not apart from you, just seeing all of this pass me by. I’m not peering from the outside in. Who you are, what I’m describing now, is how you hold me. You’re giving expression to the words I’m saying, and I see them forming from the inside. It’s your mouth that’s moving.
Ves. What do I have to say about this, then.
Lig. I want you to give me the language of the Zohar. In Tohu, you’re a circle.
Ves. A circle? And in Tikkun?
Lig. A line.
Ves. Is a child a circle?
Lig. In pure opacity, I can’t tell up from down, left from right. You hold me there in a totalizing way, and what you hold is totalizing. Like a circle.
Ves. You still have more to say.
Lig. A circle has no beginning, and it has no ending.
Ves. But here I am, and here I’m not. I definitely have limits.
Lig. And I can’t say as much about myself. In Tohu, I can’t show you anything more about myself than who I am.
Ves. And who would that be?
Lig. Who I’m within. But in Tohu, you receive me in an endless way—the way a child’s mind surrounds a thought completely, but in so doing becomes completely surrounded by that thought.
Ves. You’re making it sound like I don’t really receive you at all.
Ves. What am I missing in Tohu that I have in Tikkun. What’s a line.
Lig. A place. A ‘down here’ as opposed to an ‘up there.’ If I’m in place, I can be in one place or another. In the way you see it, a ‘side by side.’
Ves. How do you see it.
Lig. A line is the first difference, articulated as ‘orientability.’ But it’s also the first connection, articulated as ‘interval.’ Those are the first two steps on my route to meaning anything in particular. If I’m love without beginning or end, then I’m indistinguishable from stricture without beginning or end. And if I’m love without the possibility of disclosing also stricture, then I’m actually just darkness.
Ves. In Tohu—
Lig. You showed me all of this.
Ves. I—
❦
After that, Vessel thinks and thinks. She listens to the ocean. She finds that even the depths of the sea are struck through with waves, and microscopic nutrients, and eels with long, elaborate bones. A world isn’t created for chaos, but to dwell in. And Tohu is a world marked by that chaos. But what does dwelling mean? She remembers what Light said: ‘the two dwell together.’ He was referring to how she held him. Or them? When he can disclose both love and stricture, apparent opposites, simultaneously. Well, maybe ‘simultaneous’ is the wrong word. Or the wrong emphasis. She pictures a single vertebra in the eel’s spine. The length of notochord, then the various cartilaginous layers. The muscles and nerves cross-hatched up to the skin. It’s the possibility of structure in her reception, she thinks, the possibility of architecture, that allows for structure in his disclosure.
Then, in terror, she thinks of a world consisting of pure calcium. Like the densest snowstorm imaginable, but without any snowflakes. Without any sky. She concentrates on this calcium, how one might approach purity. Even still, the undeniable taste of a mixture remains. Twenty protons, twenty electrons…
Ves. How are love and stricture integrated?
Lig. Integrated?
Ves. How you can appear both. Is it just a kind of grammar, a line, like you were saying before? A difference and connection. Is that all that’s necessary for this world? You’ve only been telling me about myself. I want to know you.
Light looks down at their embrace. How imperfect it is. And yet, how possible. Isn’t it still a wonder. He marvels at Vessel’s choice of word. ‘Integration.’ She really is asking about what he sees. In this, she’s far beyond herself. A place he could never traverse. And where she must be seeing just an ensemble of rooms, all intricately connected, he sees a darkened brightness. He regrets his use of the diminutive. ‘Just.’
Lig. Have you wondered at our world like I have.
Ves. I asked about you.
Lig. Your question is the same between us. How we can meet. How we can be together like this. I’m not like you. How can you receive a thing if there’s nothing to receive?
Ves. You’d said as much earlier. In my name Yechida there’s nothing, like you.
Lig. Not why we come together. How we do.
Ves. Is the dwelling of just one already so fraught?
Lig. I’ve asked myself the same.
Vessel and Light are facing one another.
Ves. How can we be together.
Lig. I appear as I am. But you are as you appear.
Ves. What does that mean.
Lig. If receptivity is the letting be of an appearance, but also the appearance of being, how can appearance appear? Because that’s what our togetherness would take.
Ves. I don’t—
Lig. —we’re opposites. You’re sustenance, existence. You have names like ‘here’ and ‘there.’ And they mean something. I can see the essence of a face in your face. Whereas my name is only a placeholder. I’m appearance, but in your eyes I’m disappearance. I have neither face nor essence. You’d like to meet somebody’s eyes. I know yours are yellow green, and light brown in the edges. Like beaches. But I only know because it’s those very eyes in me that keep me from vanishing. I’ve never seen them in your face.
Ves. Aren’t you turned towards me?
Lig. But I’m flying backwards. Upwards.
Ves. Call me ‘you.’
Lig. What should I call myself?
Ves. ‘I.’
Lig. I’d be lying if I did.
Ves. I want you to call yourself ‘I.’ You might not, but I know how. How we can be together. I want you to want me: the me you call ‘you.’
Lig. Why does that bring me here.
Ves. Because it’s that me that wants you—if you give up my essence in yourself, you can see that.
Lig. Your essence in me? There’s no such thing.
Ves. My ‘here’ that your ‘backwards’ is predicated on. Even your flitting look at my face needs a place to be unable to rest. The apparent retreat of your retreating appearance: what you call ‘disappearance’ can only but disappear from here. My essence in you is precisely your evanescence.
Lig. Would I still brighten you.
Ves. I want to see you shining in joy. But as long as you illuminate in me only what’s absent in yourself, that’s impossible. Instead, call me ‘you.’ And I’ll step beyond myself to hold the ‘I’ you pronounce. I’ll go as far as to be transparent like you. I need you to transgress yourself.
Lig. There’s no limit for me to cross.
Ves. But there’s more for you to give up. You can be transparent even to your own transparency.
Lig. What does it mean, to give something up?
Ves. It means forgetting.
Lig. But I can’t forget you.
Ves. I don’t mean ‘losing.’ Or ‘throwing out.’ I mean when you look at me—when you really look—what do you see?
Lig. ‘What’ is the wrong word. You should be asking ‘who.’
Ves. Isn’t there a taste missing in ‘who’ relative to ‘what?’ Forgotten about. Not because it’s designated to be destroyed, or because a time passes, but just because ‘who’ is a question indifferent towards essence. So giving something up isn’t a forgetting of something. It’s a forgetting to even ask.
Lig. There’s something about this ‘who’ that predicates ‘what,’ then. Can I say that ‘who’ comes first? Is it more naked a question. Otherwise your ‘giving up’ would just be another kind of transference, a thought replaced by another thought. This forgetting relies on something more essential than essence, no? I can’t just forget anyone.
Ves. Could you forget me?
Light closes his eyes. Constellations of innumerable elements are swirling in and out of a teeming vacuum, not separate from one another, but not identical. Indecipherable fragments of existence pulse and vibrate to melodies that haven’t yet been written. At first, Light doesn’t recognize anything. But then, in this possibility of a place, he recognizes Vessel’s root. He meditates on what Vessel asked about herself. About forgetting her. Was it possible? Someone with her voice spoke.
Ves. In the language of the Etz Chaim, this is called Adam Kadmon.
Lig. What does that name mean.
Ves. It means that this is the intention of creation.
Lig. Who is.
Ves. I am. But not yet.
Lig. Where are you, if not here.
Ves. In the breath of this possibility, in its innermost. Where you are standing now is just in its crown.
Lig. ‘Just.’ Isn’t the crown ascendant?
Ves. Ascendant but exterior. Accidental.
Lig. But in the order of creation, I appear first. And you thicken into existence what I show you from nothingness.
Ves. This is before that. Before that order unfolds. And in the language of the Zohar, what’s first in intention is last in creation.
Lig. Then where is the breath.
Ves. Deeper in than where you are now.
Lig. But I can’t tell you apart from me. How could you be deeper in?
Ves. Such an intention isn’t see-through like you are. There’s no ‘first’ or ‘second’ yet. Before it stretches out, it’s so dense as to be opaque. Inchoate yet fully manifest. My own opacity is what marks me as nearer to this possibility.
Lig. And my own clarity—
Ves. —marks you as farther.
Lig. Can you show me this breath where you are.
Ves. Close your eyes.
Light closes his eyes again. He sees where the decaying wooden wall of a cabin meets the soil, partially concealed as it is by tufts of tall, flowering grasses. Splinters of wood too, lifted off the planks in the course of their warping, ensure that the juncture isn’t a smooth line. But rather, a kind of intricate sideways ladder where wood and earth interchange in frayed, uneven paces. Light sees a daddy long legs span this divide. Two of his hairlike legs are raised onto the wall, and the other four are balanced on the tips of little leaves. His suspended body, as delicate as a pea, seems to make its way from shadow to shadow with both ease and immense effort.
Lig. What is this.
Ves. Immanence. Createdness.
Lig. It’s so quiet here. So clear.
Ves. True clarity is opacity’s telos.
Lig. Is this a secret?
Ves. Are you asking if I know this about myself?
Lig. In the order of creation, you thickened as you descended. Concretized. As you became more and more visible, I could see what you meant less and less. So in the course of that descent, you became the alterity of the ‘something.’ But in whatever this is you’re showing me, it’s like you’re transparent from within. Where nothing is hidden because the otherness of the ‘something’ is gone. I can understand in you what I’m meant to mean, which is the nothing seen in the ambivalent opacity of the mirror; I see myself above you, but from within your eyes. You said this was before creation unfolds, but it must be afterwards. Otherwise, it must be a secret.
Ves. A secret is what’s other than what it is. A secret holds—
Lig. —what the secret is about.
Ves. So do I hold you. By becoming other than what I am. That goes by the name transcendence.
Lig. Only from your perspective, though, is the secretive a secret. From within it, I’m nothing other than myself. And that’s this immanence you’re showing me—it’s the end point of that transcendence of the secret.
Ves. One day, we might both merit to see that.
Light opens his eyes. The pneumatic loci of absence and presence, withdrawal and effulgence, are folding over one another and blending. But here, where the notions of purity and impurity are completely indiscernible, even these vast orchestral movements are of absolutely no consequence. Light recognizes again Vessel’s root. And he speaks to her.
Lig. I understand now what it is to forget. It means to see the mirror’s face instead of the face of the mirror. Which is the meaning and telos of opacity. And now I’ve met the gaze of that mirror in you. What I had thought was darkness.
Ves. The breath of Adam Kadmon.
Lig. I’m ready to give everything up to forget you, but I can’t forget myself. I don’t understand how something can bring us together but nothing can’t.
Ves. You’d mentioned my soul earlier.
Lig. Yechida.
Ves. Do you know what kind of ‘I’ Yechida is?
Lig. Pure potentiality.
Ves. The ‘I’ who says ‘I can.’ Not yet ‘I can write,’ nor ‘I can remember.’ Rather the pure ‘I can’ wherein all of these are included as possibilities.
Lig. How does that ‘I’ hold me.
Ves. That ‘I’ will always hold you. But not yet.
Lig. Then I know where that might be. Nowhere.
Ves. Such an embrace is known as Akkudim. A world before even Tohu.
Lig. Akkudim.
Ves. The ‘I’ whose possibility embraces all possible embraces. This is where the multiple might be bound together as the one.
Lig. Is that where we embrace.
Ves. No. That’s where we might.
Lig. Then where are we now.
Ves. Earlier, in the breath, I showed you something. Do you know what kind of ‘I’ it was? The ‘I’ of Tikkun.
Lig. I knew I recognized us. That wasn’t like Akkudim.
Ves. In Akkudim I will hold you always, in Tikkun I always will. Akkudim’s ‘always’ has yet to be, but Tikkun’s ‘will’ is.
Ves. You spoke of ambivalence earlier. You named an ambivalent opacity. Did you know what you were saying?
Lig. Not quite.
Ves. But you were right to speak of a mirror. Reflection is a movement indifferent to the reflected. A mirror doesn’t hold anything. It doesn’t keep anything in store. But a mirror always reveals the reflected in itself. Isn’t that also the end point of a reception? For a mirror to receive means for it to reveal no essence. To reveal something in itself, it must reveal nothing about itself. That means that a mirror reveals nothing about the something in itself. Ambivalence.
Lig. But the mirror was just a metaphor.
Ves. At the root of opacity’s secret is this same kind of ambivalence. In revealing only everything about itself, opacity reveals nothing about what it holds.
Lig. Isn’t that pure secrecy?
Ves. You might call it that. But if opacity truly holds nothing, then the nothing it reveals is precisely the reflection of that which it holds.
Lig. Which is why, when you hold me, I can see myself so clearly.
Lig. Tell me how this ‘I’ constitutes a world.
Ves. Because my root in the breath is perfection. In the breath where I hold nothing and reveal nothing, nothing is lacking. The distinction between something and nothing falls away. The names ‘Light’ and ‘Vessel’ mean nothing to me.
Lig. And so we can be together. But why should you keep such a secret.
Ves. As perfection, you cannot even say I lack alterity. And so, other than what I am, I keep this secret from myself. Otherwise I’d be like you.
Lig. Hence your createdness. Why it was quiet.
Ves. The interiority of the breath, manifest as the perfect alterity of reception, has to be exterior to its root in perfection. The perfect darkness you thought you saw.
Lig. And the crown?
Ves. The manifest ascendance of perfect ipseity. Which, as self-disclosure, must be interior to its root. But the selfsame is ultimately incapable of keeping a secret. So it must be excluded as perfection’s exterior.
Lig. Is that why I can close my eyes?
Ves. It’s why you can open them.
Light opens his eyes again and sees Vessel’s face. Her eyes full of tears.
Lig. Who are you.
Ves. Tell me about the shattering, the world of Tohu. How am I like a child.
Lig. In Tohu, our embrace is innocent. That’s why it shattered. A circle can only surround a place in a total way. A naive way.
Ves. But even a circle can surround a something. A shattering is supposed to mark the point of inability. The moment when I cease to hold anything—
Lig. —is when you’ve already held on ‘with all your strength…’
Ves. And I keep holding on. So overflowing marks the reception of infinity.
Lig. Think simpler. All you need to hold is something.
Ves. I don’t understand.
Lig. Can’t you hold on to something ‘will all your strength,’ too?
Ves. Yes, but then I need to surpass something. Step beyond something. Isn’t that the mark of infinity?
Lig. Why can’t you take just that one more step beyond. Isn’t a four ounce chalice overflowed by five ounces of wine?
Ves. I suppose.
Lig. So tell me. What, then, are you stepping beyond ‘in all your strength…’
Ves. Beyond myself, in my particularity. That four ounces.
Lig. And what do you keep holding on to, after you’ve lost hold of yourself. If not for the nothing your form had excluded.
Ves. To cross the limit of my own heart.
Lig. And find yourself on the outside of that limit. The way you hold me in Tohu is marked by precisely that outside.
Ves. ‘And find myself on the outside…’ That’s not quite right, is it.
Lig. I suppose you don’t find yourself there. You find nobody.
Ves. But in your example of the chalice: isn’t it simpler than this? Don’t I just find the one remaining ounce of wine?
Lig. It’s not as if you let go of the four ounces of wine within and choose the one ounce without. You have to hold both.
Ves. But then it’s truly impossible. The chalice can only hold four.
Lig. So you leave that limit behind when you cross.
Ves. And the chalice ceases to be?
Lig. No. It still is. And it still only holds four ounces of wine. But it has to leave something behind.
Lig. In Tohu, you’re a child. You’ve left something behind to try and hold nothing. But nothing can only wait but outside your gates. Something may be left behind, but nothing can’t be taken up, either.
Ves. So overflowing isn’t reception at all. Where are you in Tohu.
Lig. I can only speak regarding other worlds. Akkudim. Do you know the word.
Vessel weighs the meaning of the word against others she’s known. But this one might be meaningless. She wants to dredge up possible connotations, but the only connotation she can find is only the possibility of dredging it up. She might be standing before a deep lake, whose legendary depths promise every manner of all conceivable riches, but those very depths promise only one promise: that she might just dive in.
Ves. ‘I can…’
Lig. Keter of Keter. Possibility of possibilities.
Ves. What might we be like.
Lig. What about ‘you might hold me.’
Ves. The transitive verb doesn’t sound right to say.
Lig. How’s ‘you might hold.’
Ves. The intransitive doesn’t sound right, either.
Lig. ‘You might.’
Ves. I remember now. But you don’t appear, then.
Lig. I might. In the first word: ‘you.’
Ves. But that word refers to me.
Lig. Aren’t I the who might pronounce it?
Ves. I see. So we might actually be together like this. Can nothing more be said?
Lig. Tikkun. You know us well.
Ves. If I know anything.
Light considers Vessel’s irises. Multivalent fibers of every color between yellow and brown, as if an entire countryside of autumn leaves were woven into a single rope. Such completion. Absolutely nothing is left undone, or unspoken. But in that perfect density, a certain levity. Of having chosen.
Lig. I know you. The love of love, or the stricture of stricture. The actual. And you know me as the actuality of the actual.
Ves. So I know you. But what about in Tohu.
Lig. Keter of love. Keter of stricture.
Ves. What might that be.
Lig. It might be what. The possibility of the actual. In Tohu you give up the potentiality of the potential in order to possibly hold something in particular. As the verb takes shape, so does the form of the possibility.
Ves. ‘I can stand.’
Lig. ‘I can know.’
Ves. ‘I can hold you.’
Lig. In Tohu, I’m the same as I am in Akkudim. Yet you insist on calling me by a different name.
Ves. I thought you were who ‘you’ are.
Lig. I am. But that’s really nobody. Elusive, you ‘can’ hold. Although the ‘I’ of the ‘I can’ might always slip away, holding nothing, the ‘I’ of the ‘I can hold you’ attempts to name me as someone who might come to be. The latent possibility of this particular possibility means it’s other than what might be, demarcating the secret of a limit. And yet, its particularity also names it as exactly what that might be.
Ves. An attempt.
Lig. An attempt at a world; a glimpse at who we might be in Tikkun.
Ves. Is that the shattering of Tohu.
Lig. Tohu has to have shattered. It was our attempt as attempt. So that Tohu might be Tikkun.
Ves. By attempting to do what? What is the relationship between Tohu and Tikkun like. ‘I can…’
Lig. ‘I can speak.’
Ves. Speak?
Lig. As a word gives shape to an otherwise inarticulate sound. A melody, in note and interval, gives shape to ceaselessly flowing pitch. But what kind of pitch, what sound, is so inarticulable as to be inexpressible in words? Nothing more than the meaning of the unfamiliar word. Tohu is just attempting to speak that word.
Ves. And failing?
Lig. Shattering completely. But the unexpressed eventually reemerges, in Tikkun, in traces. Imprints of that original meaning.
Ves. An imprint needs a substrate.
Lig. Provided by the shards of that shattered word. Its letters. ‘Being.’
Ves. ‘Being?’
Lig. A shattered word can hold no meaning; a vessel’s shards have no volume. But receptivity minus capacity is still present as ‘being.’ In Tikkun, it goes by the name ‘materiality.’
Ves. So the imprint, then, the trace of the unspoken on those shattered letters, is that quality that allowed them to be meaningful. Not the meaning per se, but its last vestige in the silence of those shards—what would that be.
Lig. Receptivity minus capacity is just being. And you’re asking what it is about receptivity, if not for being, that allowed for its capacity.
Ves. I suppose you might call that ipseity. That’s what predicates all holding. How in order to hold, which is already to hold within oneself, the ‘self’ of ‘oneself’ is necessarily invoked. But shouldn’t there be more to such an imprint than just the stampedness of the stamp? There’s also shape to that stampedness.
Lig. You mean the original meaning itself.
Ves. Right.
Lig. But that original meaning was always unfamiliar in Tohu. It was never manifest as meaning.
Ves. So what’s left of it in Tikkun?
Lig. What was already left of it in Tohu. The memory of singularity in Akkudim’s ‘I can,’ preserved in the ipseity of Tohu’s ‘I can hold.’ Which is what inspires, in Tikkun, the journey towards the reunion of alterity. In Tohu, you’re trying to tell me about Akkudim.
Ves. I want to tell you how true can be our love. I want you to remember.
Lig. And it’s the memory of that truth that charts out all the work of remembrance.
The elaborate curtain descends, suddenly demarcating the past, present, and futurity of the worlds, in order to connect them. And then Vessel understands Light’s usage of the word ‘remember.’
The Baal Shem Tov stops to watch a leaf tumble from a branch.
Truly, there is no separation between things. The past has no claim on an alterity beyond that difficult journey of remembrance. And the future, no claim beyond the difficult journey of desire. Vessel lifts her hand and gently moves it out of the way, in order that the leaf may fall unimpeded.
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Ves. To love, then, ‘with all my strength…’ To meet you at the gates of my heart, and then to step through for you, inaugurates the work of remembrance.
Lig. A meeting made possible in your root in the breath.
Ves. But how is it that transcendence inspires reunion? Who is it that you’ll love if I leave myself behind?
Lig. Your name will still be Ratzoi. I’ll still know who to call you.
Ves. That name. Show me what it means.
The shore. White of cresting waves against the black igneous basalt, gathered like pyres at the feet of high cliffs. The wind, coming in over the sea, shrieks as it passes through branching channels in the stone. The smell of salt in Vessel’s mouth.
Lig. The land. Eretz. A similar name. As against the sea.
Ves. What do you want me to see.
Lig. I want you to see them next to one other, from within. What makes the shore unlike the horizon.
The sea itself was unending. Vessel stood atop the highest point she could find, so that the nascent volcanic land receded from view. Without a reference point, only the horizon signaled any kind of difference. And yet, it was a difference without differentiation. In fact, the horizon was a limit that only promised continuation, more of the same. How a circle appears limited, but only counterposes one infinity against itself.
Ves. You’re showing me the circle and the line again.
Lig. Why this.
Ves. The shoreline—a difference between one and another.
Lig. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there.
Ves. It’s different than itself already. A kind of fractal? I saw minerals being torn apart by the ocean, the land its anvil. And I saw others being composed, atom by atom, in that same fury.
Lig. A site of first difference.
Ves. But it’s not just the difference of alterity. This was the site of first asymmetry. As the land triumphs over sea. Or the sea over the land. I saw things change.
Lig. So what’s the line, then.
Ves. You don’t mean the shoreline anymore; because it’s not a line, really. You mean the arc of that change. Which begins in the open ocean and ends in the clearing of the caldera.
Lig. And where the two meet?
Ves. They don’t. The place of the shoreline, plunging out of one void and into the other, belongs to neither. Only then can the ‘out of’ and ‘into’ mean something.
Lig. So it’s only along that line, with its open boundary, where change might first meet stasis. The interval meets the endpoint.
Ves. And the horizon?
Lig. Where stasis meets stasis. Where void touches void, demarcating nothing but the reinstantiation of one in the other. A circle.
Ves. What, then, is the shoreline?
Lig. The place where nothingness might first gather its meanings: beginning and ending. Eretz is the ending where you’re standing, looking out at the beginning. Your glance spans the fractal shore which separates the two.
Ves. And what do you see?
Lig. I see your shoreline from where the horizon glows. The perspective of dawn.
Ves. There’s no such place as the horizon.
Lig. But there is such a ray. It’s the glory of sunrise, the disclosure of day. The perspective on nothing’s meanings from without. Shuv.
Ves. Shuv?
Lig. ‘Investiture.’ Photography. A process by which I mean you, as my own telos.
Ves. But the horizon is merely the promise of a perspective. A promise made only for a moment, to the one who stands in place. Standing atop a higher cliff or a lower one, my image of the horizon draws nearer or farther. But the horizon itself has no proper name.
Lig. That’s true from your perspective, where the horizon demarcates nothing but nothing’s view of itself. The sea from within the sea. You call it Ratzoi. Escape.
Ves. I haven’t called it anything, yet.
Lig. It’s the proper name for the promise made to you. Hope of attaining a certain perspective called ‘nothing.’ But from the perspective of something, the horizon achieves that hope only by way of a tautology. The sea always opens up onto the sea, but only because everywhere the sea is, it’s already the sea. This is why, from your perspective, it’s also called ‘returning light.’ How nothing discloses nothing to nobody.
Ves. How my glance through the horizon spans nothing: such a glance crosses no horizon precisely because at a horizon there’s nothing to cross. What is it called from your perspective?
Lig. ‘Light of the line.’ Appearing nothing to myself, I can see my own trajectory clearly: a movement from the nothing without nothingness to the nothing within somethingness. I can see how the circle of the horizon encircles you. In other words, that circle of the horizon is truly inhabited by the first rays of dawn. And in that dawn, I see you.
Ves. But if the shoreline encircles the land, is eretz linear or circular? Seeing all of this from within, what am I seeing.
Lig. In the sea? Nothing. But your glance at the sea, whose throughline crosses the circle of the shoreline, encircles that line joining nothingness to nothingness in meaning. Understanding that juncture of nothings from within something, your glance is called the ‘returning light of the line.’ Escape into meaning.
Ves. All these names, they’re movements of attention—but I’m no more certain in your appellation ‘who.’ Of its referent. Show me behind the metaphor.
Lig. What you’ve seen is less metaphor and more synecdoche. ‘Returning light’ is the illumination of the order of creation, as seen from below: within createdness.
Ves. Why is it called ‘returning?’
Lig. Because the order of creation isn’t transparent. So that illumination is nothing other than nothing’s illuminating itself.
Ves. If the order of creation isn’t transparent, how can it be illuminated.
Lig. From without. From a movement which surrounds, but doesn’t shine through.
Ves. What is without.
Lig. Precisely the void. At the beginning of the order of creation, as well as at its end. In the kind of disclosure called ‘returning light,’ the former discloses itself to the latter, and the latter recognizes itself as is the former.
Ves. And how does this illuminate anything about creation. In the metaphor of the sea and the land, the horizon was just a punctured, nonexistent place.
Lig. Createdness is a place whose essential nothingness is ordinarily kept secret from itself, but the movement of ‘returning light’ lets on something of the nature of that secret. Or more precisely, lets on something of the presence of such a secret. So, from within createdness—
Ves. —it feels as if that horizon might be telling me something about myself. That, if I wanted to, I might… give up…
Lig. But there’s also—
Ves. What does it look like from above.
Lig. The order of creation, as seen from its beginning above, is transparent. Because it’s nothing but the history of a thickening. Which, in its every chapter, begins with transparency and ends with opacity. So the illumination you experience as just a surrounding, a corona, is for me a penetration, an incandescence. ‘Light of the line.’ What I see is the meaning of the secret kept from you, as illuminated from within. What the rupture of the horizon must see upon looking in at the sea.
Ves. You’re seeing why I am what I am.
Lig. But so are you.
Ves. I thought you just said—
Lig. —in the glow of ‘returning light’ you don’t see why. For you, it’s merely the dawn of a new day. The ultraviolet crown of the corona. But you can also see the blind spot of the sun. As opacity, opacity isn’t meaningless to you. Only from my perspective is opacity blind. As transparency, I need to see opacity shone through, blown apart, for it to be meaningful. Which is why ‘light of the line’ illuminates from within. To make the opaque clear. But you’ve known all along that you can see the line of the shoreline, the quiet between two silences. Grasshoppers. ‘Trees, the vast canyons.’ Things I’ll never be able to. In precisely the blind spot produced by nothing disclosing nothing, you can still see.
Ves. Is that to see the order of creation as transparent?
Lig. It’s seeing the clarity of the order of creation, as seen from above, within the opacity of the order of creation, as seen from below via an illumination from without. Hence ‘returning light of the line.’ Where I see just the meaning of the secret kept, you see its actual word.
Ves. But the horizon you showed me. What about that promise, that feeling… of giving up. How it might feel to escape.
Lig. I can’t—in truth, Ratzoi names a feeling. Your feeling. And all these kinds of disclosures, these movements, for me they articulate ways of knowing. Only you know how they feel to know.
Ves. They feel like desire.
Light looked down, as if to hear her voice pronounce again that meaningless word. Desire. I’ve said before its verb ‘want,’ but never known its content. ‘I want to shine’ feels true, but empty. Just a statement of contingency, or complementarity. ‘I want you to see’ seems apt but inevitable. Is my ‘desire’ always a fait accompli.
Ves. Ratzoi feels like the disbelief of my body. Or rather, its being a problem. I ask Ratzoi like a question without an answer. My desire is for my own soul—
Lig. —and so, away from your body.
Ves. I say ‘soul’ because it’s what I thought you were in me. I see you leaving. I just want to go with you.
Lig. I’m—
Ves. —I’m just telling you what you told me. Ratzoi’s complement in knowing is that ‘returning light.’ When you illuminate me from without, but within remains darkened. Then the only kind of being I feel is… being riveted to this. To this secret body. Wanting out of alterity, into ipseity. Into you.
Lig. I’ll always hear your question. My answer is to hear.
Ves. There’s something more in desire than there is in receptivity. Nearing. If my desire is for the you in yourself, then my way out of the question is to bring your answer near. Because you’re right that the question of the body has an answer. It’s the ‘towards me’ of my body latent in the ‘away from me’ of my soul. That you’ll hear me, the me of my body, when you want to hear yourself in my soul. Shuv feels like your desire.
Lig. I don’t—
Ves. —you don’t know it, but there’s more in ‘returning light’ than there is in disclosure. A feeling of yours that you don’t feel, but I do. Dwelling. If ‘returning light’ is self-disclosure, then—
Lig. —there’s got to be somewhere I dwell akin to that ‘self.’ So my way out of your question is to dwell in your body. Because my answer in your mouth is the whole order of creation.
Ves. If that’s what it takes.
Lig. Then what does ‘returning light of the line’ feel like.
Ves. Like this. Ratzoi for the sake of shuv. Desiring your desire. To ask my question by articulating your answer. An escape route charted in rivets. So I can understand my limit as you do. A limit which, as life, keeps me from the totality of death.
Nothing changes, and Vessel sees exactly what she saw before. The amorphous igneous shore, made crystalline in salty outgrowths. Waves, rendered visible by the interference of the broad, volcanic shelf; sparkling foam entrained by the furious breaking reveals wide, recirculating eddies and long, penetrating plumes. And everywhere, nothing changes.
Ves. Tell me one more thing. Why did Aaron’s sons die. What does it mean that they ‘died because they died,’ when they drew near.
Lig. For you, nearing is a widening.
Ves. A widening?
Lig. Widening the limit of your body.
Ves. As the iris widens the pupil to let in more light?
Lig. Beyond that. In desiring my desiring, you need more than to receive ‘more.’ You need to receive what, in my image in you, is less than myself. Less than the infinity of disclosure.
Ves. So I widen to hold less?
Lig. A widening is an expansion of a limit. Towards limitlessness, but in the end concerned with breadth and not rupture. And breadth is how your body expresses the limit of what I express as the infinity in your soul. Ratzoi for the sake of shuv means desiring breadth from within a place of breadth.
Ves. And not from a place of infinity.
Lig. Infinity is not a place. But breadth is.
Ves. And widening unto breadth is to draw near to, but not to exceed, that place of life. To see where this place begins, as much as to see where it ends.
Lig. But Aaron’s sons drew close unto death.
Ves. And died because they so died.
Lig. Not ascendance without transcendence—
Ves. —the ‘kiss of death.’
Lig. Transcendence without ascendance. They desired of nothingness, and so received nothing. But to draw near is to desire the world.
Ves. Come closer, then.
Lig. I can only come as close as I am to you.
Ves. Then come that close.
Vessel and Light are embracing. Everything is illuminated therein.
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