Author: gnox

In the beginning is the •

Of making many books there is no end.

— Ecclesiastes 12:12

And sometimes no beginning. Those with too much to say, it seems, do not write. Isaac Luria, when asked why he didn’t put his teaching into a book, is said to have replied,

It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book?

— Scholem (1946, 254)

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.

— Tao Te Ching 32 (Feng and English)

Sometimes the best time to stop is just before beginning.

The universe is, as it were, an awakening Mind. Now just as we say this man has such and such a character, not because of any ideas he has this minute present, but because under suitable circumstances such ideas are bound to be evolved by him, so the universe may be said to be governed by a God insofar as it is bound more and more to conform to the ultimate result of the evolution of pure ideas. But the sole Ancient of Days is Continuity in the abstract, a spontaneity which might be assumed to be very slight, though it is probably enormous.
As to the continued existence of the soul after death, the general idea of Continuity, if unreservedly accepted, hardly permits us to doubt it. The difficulty is, that there is no positive evidence in favor of it. It seems, however, easier to account for such defect in other ways than by a breaking off of consciousness. That the second element of consciousness, the reactive consciousness, ceases when external stimulation ceases, is certain. We see it in sleep. But the mind does not cease to exist in sleep; and many persons perform their most difficult operations of thought best in their sleep. They wish to ‘sleep upon’ a difficult question. There is no more reason to suppose that death at once causes the annihilation of mind. Whatever may happen later, at first it can be nothing but a sleep. To be awakened, the soul must in some way be acted upon. But there our information ceases.

— Peirce, unidentified fragment (NEM, introduction to Volume 4, xxiv)

There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussofthlee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

— end of Finnegans Wake

To write something down is only to testify that for somebody in some situation, it meant something worthy of notice. To publish it is an expression of faith that it might mean as much to somebody somewhere else. But can anyone tell how to read it?

What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
What can be shown, cannot be said.

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus (4.121, 4.1212)

Dogen, in one of his Shobogenzo essays, tells the story of a Chinese poet who realized the intimate truth upon hearing the sounds of a valley stream flowing in the night. He wrote the following verse:

The sound of the valley stream is the Universal Tongue,
the colors of the mountains are all the Pure Body.
Another day how can I recite
the eighty-four thousand verses of last night?

— (tr. Cleary 1995, 116)

Who would presume to comment on this? I will close for today with a bit of Henry David Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. We not unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel to the written and comparatively lifeless body of the work. Of all books this sequel is the most indispensable part. It should be the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, “He said,” ἔφη. This is the most the book-maker can attain to. If he make his volume a mole whereon the waves of Silence may break, it is well.

It were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the Silence. She cannot be done into English. For six thousand years men have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. A man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made; for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. Nevertheless, we will go on, like those Chinese cliff swallows, feathering our nests with the froth, which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the sea-shore.

(ed. Bode 1964, 226-7)

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? – our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.

— Annie Dillard (1999, 30)

The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me.

— Scholem 1946, 350

Tomorrow? Why not today?

… and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.

— John 15:27 (RSV)

In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

— John 1.1

Can you bear witness to that? Why not? You’ve been here from the beginning.

And certainly you’ve heard this one before:

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

— T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

The scroll is rolled up, and rolled out again: e-volution. The seed unfolds itself: de-velopment. These are time-lapse views of dis-covery, re-creation of original nature that was, and is, and will be, revealed and concealed in its implicit intricacy.

With the light created by the blessed Holy One on the first day, one could gaze and see from one end of the universe to the other.

— Zohar (ZP I.45)

The light created at the very beginning is not the same as the light emitted by the sun, the moon, and the stars, which appeared only on the fourth day. The light of the first day was of a sort that would have enabled man to see the world at a glance from one end to the other. Anticipating the wickedness of the sinful generations of the deluge and the Tower of Babel, who were unworthy to enjoy the blessing of such light, God concealed it, but in the world to come it will appear to the pious in all its pristine glory.

— Haggadah (Barnstone 1984, 16)

The ‘world to come’ is the Firstness of the world apocalyptically revealed in all its pristine glory.

A turning sign can be like a sword in the soul or a tidal wave in the brain, destroying old patterns as it creates ‘a new heaven and a new earth.’ The role of the Prophet or Savior is to provoke a violent revelation which is at once the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the dead. Simeon’s prophecy about Jesus, spoken to Mary in Luke 2:34-5, foreshadows the coming conflict:

Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel,
and for a sign that is spoken against
(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also),
that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.

(RSV)

The living sign is set that he may be spoken against, bringing out the contrast between the falling and the rising. The Judgment is not imposed from the outside but is spoken from the heart; it is the heart which is, in the end, revealed by its actual response to the Word or Sign.

Every actual judgment – that is, every judgment that is acted upon or embodied – is the last judgment that can be made at that moment, for it cannot be unmade or its consequences called back.

As for the Present instant, it is so inscrutable that I wonder whether no sceptic has ever attacked its reality. I can fancy one of them dipping his pen in his blackest ink to commence the assault, and then suddenly reflecting that his entire life is in the Present,— the “living present,” as we say,— this instant when all hopes and fears concerning it come to their end, this Living Death in which we are born anew. It is plainly that Nascent State between the Determinate and the Indeterminate …

— Peirce, EP2:358

It is also what Buddhists call ‘birth-and-death’ (shoji), and the impermanence which according to Dogen is the buddha-nature.

The determination for enlightenment is the seed of all elements of buddhahood … it is like an all-encompassing net, taking in all beings who can be guided.

— Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1476-8)

The determination (or aspiration) for enlightenment is the turning sign whose final interpretant reveals the nascent buddha-nature. How long does this revelation, this realization take? As long as the time.

The ‘principle of the identity of man and Buddha’ (Bielefeldt 1988, 165) has informed a wide variety of Buddhist practices through which sentient beings might overcome, here and now, the delusions masking that identity. The prophetic writings of Blake develop a parallel idea in three themes: first, ‘the loss of the identity of divine and human natures which brought about the Fall … second, the struggle to regain this identity in the fallen world which was completed by Jesus; and, third, the apocalypse’ (Frye 1947, 270). In Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas (subtitled ‘The Last Judgment’), we learn that all dominator gods are really distorted images of fallen Man. If they resist this recognition of their true nature and try to assert ‘their Dominion above The Human form Divine,’ they will be ‘Thrown down from their high Station,’ and in the apocalypse (after a protracted struggle in the subconscious) will resume their true function

In the Eternal heavens of Human Imagination: buried beneath
In dark Oblivion with incessant pangs ages on ages
In Enmity & war first weakend, then in stern repentance
They must renew their brightness, & their disorganizd functions
Again reorganize till they resume the image of the human,
Cooperating in the bliss of Man, obeying his Will,
Servants to the infinite & Eternal of the Human form.

Likewise in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are tasked to recognize the terrifying wrathful gods as projections of our own fears, and thus to overcome our own delusions and recover our true form.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

— Joyce (Ulysses, 42)

And when we do wake up, and the curtain falls on all the struts and frets we call history, what does this mess finally mean?

The gods did this, and spun the destruction of peoples, for the sake of the singing of people hereafter.

— Odyssey, VIII

One day, in all probability, there will be no people to sing. Why not sing now then? For all you know, your chance may be the last.

Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

— 1 Corinthians 10.11

This, the time you are living, is the end of history. This is where it was all heading: that you should see it now like the moon in a dewdrop. The responsibility to make some sense of it can’t be passed off to eternal or future beings. For them as for you, it will not be the future when they live the time. Even in contemplation, making sense takes time – time and a body. The readiness is all, the readiness to read the signs; and the readings are signs again. Even the Book of Revelation was and is a reading.

We have noted that the last book in the Bible, the one explicitly called Revelation or Apocalypse, is a mosaic of allusions to the Old Testament … What the seer in Patmos had a vision of was primarily, as he conceived it, the true meaning of the Scriptures, and his dragons and horsemen and dissolving cosmos were what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah, whatever or however he saw on Patmos. … For him all these incredible wonders are the inner meaning or, more accurately, the inner form of everything that is happening now. Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

— Northrop Frye (1982, 135-6)

The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.

— Frye (1982, 138)

The mind that has been authentically transmitted is: one mind is all things, all things are one mind.
Thus, an ancient teacher said, “If you realize this mind, there is not an inch of land left on earth.”
Know that when you realize this mind, the entire sky collapses and the whole earth explodes. Or, if you realize this mind, the earth raises its surface by three inches.

— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Sokushin zebutsu’ (Tanahashi 2010, 46)

We begin in the middle, in the space between you and me, and the sign living there is the means of meaning. When we build relationships or construct guidance systems, we do not begin with ‘fundamentals’ as if we were building with stone. The material of which meaning is made is alive, is life itself, the water of life. Living beings do not have foundations. Instead, they make default assumptions – apply principles which are acted on as if true, unless and until the consequences of acting call them into question. Often it is the failure of the default, or rather an unexpected consequence of applying it, which causes us to become conscious of it for the first time. This opens up new space for the emergence of other possibilities.

And the answers? Sometimes the answers just come in the mail. And one day you get that letter you’ve been waiting for forever. And everything it says is true. And then in the last line it says: Burn this.

— Laurie Anderson, ‘Same Time Tomorrow’

All created things have the nature of destruction. This is the last statement of the Transcendent Lord.

— Shakyamuni Buddha (Thurman 1995, 93)