I am a cello that plays itself, creates itself, listens to itself, takes pleasure in itself.
I harmonize with myself, fight with myself, lament and exude in myself.
I have no audience except for myself.
I am the ever altering pulse of life, enjoining vitality to duet with death,
transmuting the vibrations of strings into vibrant breath.
I am the melody to which the winds of fate sway on a mundane day,
and the deep bellow of content that grounds the way.
I sound eternity into time with my every bow’s brush,
my fingers pluck the strings that separate night and day.
I resound with mystery and tremor, even when I hush.
My silence signifies the truly new, the wholly other,
the pause from which all emanates I never dare to rush.
For in the pause, existence hinges,
my freedom rosins up, since nothing is contingent.
The heavens in the hollows of my soul,
whisper to each other their predictions,
but my next move will suffer no depictions.
My past may be explained, my present analyzed,
but my future walks the bridge of noreason,
appealing to the ears, but never to the eyes.
For you see, I do have an audience, several, in fact,
who watch me as I stroke a wooden vessel of fine craft,
but they do not hear the wordless words I speak,
too busy admiring the wood and the bow, and my arms,
and thinking about their week.
They speak of my virtuosity,
write reviews encapsulating me to satiate their curiosity.
But do they hear me as they return from the theatre in their cars,
when they go to their dull work, twirling in their chairs, rearranging their desks
or when they play my CD to entertain guests?
I play for the omnipresent corners of the universe,
I bow to the applause not of laws and maxims,
but to the pastures of consciousness,
to those who inhabit their worlds,
and graze not in the details, but in the sheer magnificence—
who role in the snow, because they are snow,
or revel in another creature’s face,
because its countenance unveils that it is boundless.
I do not play the cello. I play the me.
But if I did not say I played the cello, would you understand?
Listen to my words as the soil does.
Rescue me from myself, but do not capture me.
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Into Life
The Messiah will come only when it is too late
The Messiah Ben Joseph Contemplates the Eschaton
Franz Rosenzweig
Into Life
Posts
Welcome to my blog
I like to write theological musings and parables and ditties. Here they lie awaiting your interpretations. More forthcoming. Below are pictured two great modern secular Jewish thinkers who inspire me and haunt me to give color to the page.
I've named the blog after a Kabbalistic concept, according to which, the truth exists not in names, not in letters, but in between them, in their interrelationship. Truth dwells not in the ink, but in its absence. Schlegel, a German Romantic theorist of irony puts the idea nicely when he says, "Words understand themselves better than we who use them." On such a view, the idea that God's name is unpronounceable is not a negative statement. For God's name is not a word. Rather God's name is language itself. In every breath and every pause, in ever noun form and verbal utterance, lingers the conspicuously inconspicuous stage upon which meaning discloses itself. Our aim is to seek out the meaning, to reverse the shattered world order, to elevate the sparks, to overturn the fallenness of language and the schism between signifier and signified that is just another name for the abyss between heaven and earth, being and nothingness, perception and reason, body and soul, time and space, me and you, and dare I say, good and evil.
The story, the parable, the musing, the rambling, the ditty, are ways through which we can attempt to unconceal the primordial letters out of whose fire we sprang. For by making the strangeness of life stranger, we exalt it and bring it back to its origins.
I've named the blog after a Kabbalistic concept, according to which, the truth exists not in names, not in letters, but in between them, in their interrelationship. Truth dwells not in the ink, but in its absence. Schlegel, a German Romantic theorist of irony puts the idea nicely when he says, "Words understand themselves better than we who use them." On such a view, the idea that God's name is unpronounceable is not a negative statement. For God's name is not a word. Rather God's name is language itself. In every breath and every pause, in ever noun form and verbal utterance, lingers the conspicuously inconspicuous stage upon which meaning discloses itself. Our aim is to seek out the meaning, to reverse the shattered world order, to elevate the sparks, to overturn the fallenness of language and the schism between signifier and signified that is just another name for the abyss between heaven and earth, being and nothingness, perception and reason, body and soul, time and space, me and you, and dare I say, good and evil.
The story, the parable, the musing, the rambling, the ditty, are ways through which we can attempt to unconceal the primordial letters out of whose fire we sprang. For by making the strangeness of life stranger, we exalt it and bring it back to its origins.
Joseph K.
The Messiah will come only when it is too late
Walter Benjamin
The Messiah Ben Joseph Contemplates the Eschaton
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