I sent off for three plates yesterday. The ultra-thick Crane’s Lettra I ordered is supposed to arrive day after tomorrow. I have studio time scheduled for the week after Christmas.

My first priority is the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet.

Another piece is the (extremely cool-looking) circular Sefirot (Iggulim), which depicts the ray of Divine Light (Kav) penetrating the bubble of finite Nothingness within Infinitude (Tzimtzum), shattering it. I tried a Hebrew-English version, but it looks better with just Hebrew, so that is what I am printing.

And finally, I may be printing a highly unorthodox and questionable — possibly heretical — Sefirot, of extremely suspect origin, which has been sternly rejected by every Kabbalah expert I’ve shown it to. I have found a way to bring it into better alignment with the tradition, though, through strategic use of parentheses, indicating non-sefirah status of some of the beings included in the symbol, bringing the number to yod.

My hope is that what seems unorthodox through the template of convention, might eventually turn out to be postorthodox.

But most notions like this are just wrong.

My guts, though, tell me it is right.

But contrary to mystical romantic prejudice, guts are quite capable of being wrong.

Isolated guts are as unreliable as isolated brains and isolated hearts and isolated hands.

Only when guts and brains and hearts and hands converse in conflictual mutual respect, and unite the whole self in sensus communis of heart, soul and strength — and then, together, a whole community of united bodies convene in conflictual mutual respect and unite in greater sensus communis of hearts, souls and strengths — and with this thoroughgoing imperfect oneness approach the perfect Oneness — now we have a fair chance at clear, meaningful, practical, sharable, common-sensical truth.

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.