Category: Apocalypse: Opening Time

There is still time.
Time is never still.
Time is never there.

The Greek word apocalypse means literally discovery, the uncovering or revelation (revealing) of what was hidden from consciousness – sometimes hidden because of our immersion in it.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

— Wittgenstein (PI I.129)

We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.

— source unknown

The veil of habit hides the Firstness of the phenomenon, generalization dissipates the force of discovery, percepts are overgrown with perceptual judgments. Yet ‘there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed.’

It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature.

— Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

— George Orwell (1946)

If a sign or a sentence tells you anything,
you have to believe it in order to read it,
and you have to read it in order to tell
whether it tells the truth or not.

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.