Clasp tightly to the hand of St. Bernard;
Invoke the Virgin, humanity baring forth Divine Light,
Remember the earth, for behold, dust brings forth
Salvation and Eternal Life,
And all have become silent,
Imperceptive of the totality of self beloved
In the love of God.
These things I say that you may remember the Locus of the Apophenesthai; these things must you dwell upon, that at the third crying of the flightless bird, the Gestell will be in mind, in and from and towards an unformed matter touched upon by numinous fear. Rectification of the momentary leads towards the desert, and there do we dwell not for forty years, but forty times forty: all the generations of man. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept.
For it is the Theotokos, the maternal over and towards both changing flesh and Unmoved Mover, who testifies of all Revelatory perception both in this age, and in the age to come. I am in the midst of the disastrous;
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Job 3:3-4
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.”
“Acute consciousness of having a body – that is the absence of health…Which is as much as to say that I have never been well.”
Cioran
I am in the midst of Eternity:
“Before Abraham was, I Am.”
John 8:58
“Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.”
Psalm 74:14
It is needful for us to consider this: that the heartbreak of existence is the crushing power that breaks Leviathan. I will begin now with a hermeneutic of humanity, and if the rest must be a mystery, it is well for us that it be so.
“I have never been well,”
for to be well is to be in communion with what is highest, and the highest excludes itself from the beginning of language, and, as we know, all connection with the flesh is corrupted by language. We do not recognize illness before we have already declared to ourselves, “I feel ill.” Similarly we do not become overwhelmed by loss without the unfortunate intrusion of the thought, “I am alone.”
Language is the grand disaster which torments us as we attempt life. It is the invasive species which is always a thorn in the flesh. So long as language is needful, flesh is inseparable, and we become lost in the struggle for apathy. But to say it is different for the Christian as for the heathen is preposterous, for the Supreme Subject of fear and awe, the Logos, the gathering together of all things into one, is at all times asserted upon us as we are subject to Him regardless of creed. We can not delineate the truly religious from the hopelessly atheistic, for both have come unto a state that is fully aware of the oppression of Signification. Both seek reprieve from this torment in the cloud of unknowing, and the harder each strives towards it, the farther away it falls from them and rises above them and parts from East to West.
But whether we follow from morning til night the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, or whether we wander forever in the wilderness which we have chosen, yet at no point do we become farther away or closer to the promised land, for it is neither space nor time which separates, but the reprieve of God is only as close as our willingness to be silent before Him.
How can man will this? When the will of man is united in the will of God. From whence can this Will emerge? From the divine maternity, when out of the dust Light is perceived. The Unmoved Mover is the source of this Will which comes to us as the recognition of life is perceived as unspacial Unity. Yet in all places, this Unspaciality influences and moves the affairs of men, and who can deny this? For all men are formed in the Unspacial realm of thought, ever unable to realize the incapacity to unite with the momentary. Everything dwells for us in a doubled darkness of Cartesian self-delusion until the day we realize that if all men are incapable of placing themselves in the world, that this is unity: unity in the Unspacial. Yet this wondrous idyll of universality in our time is null because of the surplus of signification.
The Divine gift of Logos is not to be found in the hypersignification of capital. It is not in the surplus of sign but in the surplus of Signified wherein the truly religious and the hopeless atheistic unite in fervor. The Word of infinitude swallows up the Ouroboros of infinite words, with finite meaning devouring itself over and again in an eternal recurrence of aesthetic infatuation. Here in the Ouroboros, the self relates to itself in relation, but the relation cannot return to the selfsame relation; so it returns over and over into the sea of memory. But with the rise of Leviathan the cycle of self-consumption collapses, and the overbearance of memory is cut short. This forces a collapse of language, and this collapse of excess produces an inevitable revival of Logos as gathering together of the totality, and we have expectation of the Sign of Jonas: we are swallowed up, we are entrapped by the desire for escape, and we land upon a foreign shore.
Leviathan swallows the Ouroboros, and we are only aware of desire to come out of ourselves for the first time. When we realize that the entrapment is the only freedom accessible, in this moment of revelatory consideration of radical pessimism, we become free in a way which was before as unseen as it was unnecessitated. Darkness gives us the rich silence, the fertile soil of despair, and this despair is the Gate which thieves would climb over. But possession, or Ousia as possession and being, of this despair, can only be accessed through the Gate of the rich darkness created by Leviathan. The future holds for us this pattern of Unspacialization: wherein collapse ignites universalities.
Now this is not merely an outlining darkness; true horror can not be justified as a contrast for light to appear. This horror is not necessitated by any goal of transcendence. For the actualized horror is in the realignment of Logos itself. The reconnection and realignment of the self-relating relation of the self comes to us always as true numen when we convert to the narrow path of the definitive Word. Yet it is this horror which is as much drawn out of us as it is drawing us unto it, and the source of this is beyond comprehending: the mystery not of Being, but veiled by being.
“I have never been well,”
and to know that we never will be well is the first designification on the pathway towards the Cross. But this is a road which we must go down at another time, in another place, and by then it is my hope that I myself shall be found as somehow more realized in the closeness of the Divine Light borne out of dust, and that I shall be partway designified from this wasteland, this heap of broken images where the sun beats.
But let us come under the shadow of this red rock
And perhaps He shall show us something different.
There may we find fear in a handful of dust.
H. Ellis Williams was born in Regensburg, Germany, and is a Marine veteran who currently works in outdoor lighting. They have been writing for the last several years. Among their favorite authors are Heidegger, St. Bernard, and Ezra Pound. They reside in the state of Texas with their wife, Rachel.