When Pygmalion, either out of vanity or selflessness, fell in love with one of his sculptures, and when, with his powers, brought it to life, transforming it from a stone It into an enfleshed Thou, from an unnamed thing into a woman named Elise...
Pygmalion could not continue sculpting other beautiful forms, having already attained perfection. But what had most impressed Elise about her lover and creator, what had urged her out of ur-life into the broad and much enduring world, namely, that Pygmalion was an artist, ceased to be the case. And when this happened, although it happened before history itself could take place, in the primordial occurrence of their twain metamorphoses, she became a sculptor, while he became nothing but a fawning, yet impotent lover.
Elise went on to sculpt her own idols, until one day, she, like her creator before her, became enraptured by the lifeless form she had rendered so full of life. She went on living as if it were alive, but nobody can say for sure, whether her power proved to be sufficient. Pygmalion, for whatever it's worth, however, never ceased loving her.
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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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