Category Archives: Kabbalah
Sense, common and uncommon
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
Structural account of the Sefirot
Another (edited) passage from Schaya, published here for future reference:
Malkhut, the ‘lower mother’, is from the cosmological point of view what Binah, the ‘highest mother’, is from the ontological point of view; like the latter, she is on the one hand the ‘mirror’ and on the other the ‘prism’ of divine emanation. On the one side she sends back to the ‘king’, Tif’eret, all the radiation she receives from him through the intermediary of his act, Yesod; and she is thus eternally united with him, her “husband”, who in turn is infinitely united with the ‘supreme crown’, Keter Elyon. On the other side she projects the influx of the ‘king’ out from the causal or Sefirotic unity and thereby creates the cosmos; and in her cosmic manifestation she herself ‘descends, as immanence, into the created being in order to connect him with his transcendental source.
However, in considering these attributes and principal modes of activity of Malkhut, we have not yet answered the question as to what it is as substance. Now it is not a distinct substance, but rather the undifferentiated, uncreated principle of all substance which in no way emerges from the infinite and indivisible unity of the creative causes: this principle envelopes them and is yet hidden within them, like ‘very pure and imperceptible air. What is this ‘air’ which is not breathable in the same way as the air which surrounds us? It is avir, the universal ‘ether’, the quintessence of the four subtle or celestial elements and of the four corporeal or terrestrial elements. And what is the ether itself? It is none other than the infinite receptivity of the divine ‘intelligence’: Binah. ‘The father (Chokhmah) is the spirit hidden in the “Ancient of days” (Keter) in whom this “very pure air” (identical with Binah) is enclosed.’ The universal ether envelopes the intelligible emanation of Chokhmah from the moment of its first emergence from the ‘ancient of days: ‘it unites with the (spiritual) flame issuing from the (supreme) and brilliant lamp’ and follows it in the whole course of its descent towards cosmic possibility and throughout the cosmos itself.
‘Above’, the ether is the infinite receptivity of Binah, by virtue of which God reveals himself to himself; ‘below’, it is the cosmic receptivity of Malkhut, which becomes concrete in creative substance. In other words, that which is pure receptivity in Binah and creative contraction in Din [Gevurah] becomes cosmic emptiness in Hod and finally undifferentiated and causal substance in Malkhut. This process of principial ‘substantialization’ has its positive point of departure in Chokhmah, whose luminous plenitude is manifested by Chesed, and which, having received its universal form from Tif’eret, is manifested by Netsach as the life of the worlds, which Yesod communicates to Malkhut, the substance.
In this way, all the Sefirot descend’ from Keter, in perfect co-emanation and co-operation, and are finally concentrated in Malkhut and manifested by Malkhut in the cosmic mode.
However, as we have seen, if one wishes to remain close to pure and superintelligible truth, there can be no question of anything having emanated or being distinct from the supreme, the only reality, the ‘One without a second’.
I have been looking for a structural account of the Sefirot, analogous to the obscure relationship between the typological description of Jungian/MBTI and the Jungian functions which combine to produce typological effects, or the yaos of the double-trigrams that combine in the hexagram descriptions of the I Ching. I’ll need to return to this and study it closely.
Metapretty
A beautiful passage on beauty from Leo Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (spellings edited for consistency with Kabbalistic vocabulary used elsewhere on the anomablogue):
The essential principle of divine beauty is the identity of the absolute (ayin) – which excludes all that is not itself — and of the infinite (ein sof) — which includes all that is real; it is the unity of the more than luminous darkness of non-being with the dazzling plenitude of pure being, the supreme and most mysterious of unities, which is revealed in the saying (Song of Songs 1:5): I am black, but comely. This essential principle of divine beauty, from which radiate both the pure truth of the only reality, eclipsing all that is not it, and at the same time unlimited bliss in which each thing swims as though in a shoreless ocean, is nothing other than keter, which encloses all the polar aspects of God, eternally and without distinction. When keter reveals itself, its infinite and unitive aspect is expressed by chokhmah and by chesed, while its absolute or exclusive character is manifested by binah and by din [gevurah].
These two kinds of antinomic emanations are indispensable in view of creation; we have seen how, in order to create, both rigorous truth and generous bliss are necessary; or, in other words, measure in all things, judgement of their qualities, universal law on the one hand and on the other the unlimitedness of grace, giving rise to all life, joy and freedom. And in order that these two opposites, in which are concentrated, in one way or another, all the divine aspects, may be able to produce the cosmos, there has to be, not only absolute identity ‘above’ between these two, but also their interpenetration and existential fusion ‘below’. This fusion or synthesis of all the revealed antinomies of God, which can be summed up in the two general terms ‘grace’ and ‘rigour”, takes place in tif’eret, ‘beauty’. In tif’eret, the rigorous truth which God alone is, differs in no way from his mercy which unites everything with him. In God’s ‘heart”, the eternal measure of things is as though dissolved in the incommensurability of his redemptive grace. When divine beauty is manifested, grace crystallizes mysteriously in the created ‘measures’ or forms and radiates through them, leaving the imprint of its author on the work of creation.
It has been a few minutes since I’ve written an exclamation and star in the margin of a book. *!
Holy words.
I needed a taste of bliss this week, and I am grateful for it.
A side note on Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah. This is the only major work on Kabbalah from the Traditionalist/Perennialist school (Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Burkhardt, Cutsinger, etc.).
I was exposed to this theosophy early in early adulthood, and despite early incapacities to comprehend it (or, rather, my early incapacity to reduce all intellection to comprehension!) and despite my animosity toward its reactionary retro-rigidity, I cannot shake my deep conviction that the problems I have with Perennialism are not with its truth, but my own understanding.
I read this book with extreme, respectful caution. Another passage from this book:
Grace and rigour are essentially one, that One who rules over all things and who, according to the Zohar (Beshallah 5Ib), is comparable to “…a king who combines in himself the balance and harmony of all attributes, and therefore his countenance always shines like the sun and he is serene because of his wholeness and perfection; but when he judges, he can condemn as well as acquit. A fool, seeing that the king’s countenance is bright, thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of; but a wise man says to himself, ‘Although the king’s countenance shines, it is because he is perfect and combines benevolence with justice. In that brightness judgement is hidden, and therefore I must be careful.'”
This distrustful trust is the essence of transcendent orientation. It can also appear as a humble hubris, or any number of cheap, priceless paradoxes.
Antiromantic
In the four worlds, literary truth stands below philosophical wisdom.
That this rings heretical in the modern, postmodern, postpostmodern ear, is firm evidence of its truth.
Temperance
The essence of tradition is practice oriented by keen awareness that others have gone further than we have.
We can always situate I within All, but that All is situated within Nothing. All is perpetually All-but-not-All-enough, and this is wisdom learned the hardest way, by being right, not not nearly right enough, over and over and over again, painfully, until temperance develops.
Whatever I say about Kabbalah is provisional and personal. My words are meant as testimony, not verdict. Whenever I make proclamations, I do so provisionally with concern bordering on dread.
This might go without saying, but I’ve learned the hard way that what goes without saying cannot go without saying and must be repeated forever, like a prayer or declaration of love: Check your own trusted sources and your own experience and exercise your own self-sovereignty.
Ex Halo
Keter d’Assiyah is the boundlessness of space and time.
Keter d’Yetzirah is the infinitude of enwordments.
Keter d’Beriah is the pregnant nihilo from which creation and revelation irrupt between enworldments.
Keter d’Atzilut is boundless beyond being.
Instauratio
One face of all is material.
This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.
This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.
One face of all is spirit.
This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.
This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.
Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.
This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.
This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.
Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.
This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.
Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.
Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.
The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.
Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.
Metareform Judaism
Ultimately, I see Judaism not as an original revelation of an absolute truth, but as an initiatory constitution (covenant) and an initiating thrust toward relationship with an inconceivable, incomprehensible Absolute. The present of Judaism is suspended between from and toward. This is radical Reform Judaism.
One of Adonai’s favorite rebukes is “stiff-necked people”. Plato also wrote about stiff-necked people:
Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.
This is just how we are, we humans.
Sometimes we need to de-fascinate our eyes, unfasten our heads, loosen our necks and look from side to side. We might even turn around to see what is going on behind the backs of our heads. And once we get used to a stationary 360-degree view, we might stand up and walk around. We might even interact with the things around us. Some of those things might be other people, and here it might occur to us to converse with them and enlarge our understanding. Finally, we might summon enough courage to go full-on peripatetic and start feeling for exits, openings and entrances to elsewhere and otherwise.
Welcome to Beriah!
A great many religious people today, seeking religious intensity within their traditions, believe that they have found it in activism.
And indeed, they have found something.
But what they have found is the furthest thing from God. They have found collective misapotheosis in totalizing ideology.
They believe they are taking their faith to the streets, when in fact they have imported the street into their sanctuaries.
Their escape from illusion is an intoxicating delusion. Their spiritual awakening is the climax of a collective ideological dream.
Chuang Tzu never said:
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He had awakened from the delusion that he had ever been Chuang Chou. He realized that it was his duty to make everyone around him “do the work” required to wake up to the fact that they are butterflies dreaming that they are people.
I look forward to the day that Reform Judaism turns to its proper from-toward present and, overcome with teshuvah, grinds up and drinks its political ideoidols.
Protected: Russian reversal metaphysics
She was already root
Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.
Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.
Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.
I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.
Kabbalistic Nietzsche
The symbology I internalized close-reading Nietzsche maps harmoniously — neatly, even — to Kabbalah. Maybe I will write a Borgesian review of a fictional book by a mystic of unknown tradition named Ronald Challah, titled The Kabbalah of Zarathustra — a Zohar-parody commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Sophia
From Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives, “Weeping as Mystical Practice”:
I shall begin my description of the techniques by focusing on a practice — unnoticed before — that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia. I refer to the recommendation of the use of weeping as a means for attaining revelations — mostly of a visual character-and/or a disclosure of secrets. …
It is obvious that, for Luria and Berukhim, weeping is an aid to overcoming intellectual difficulties and receiving secrets. It is plausible to interpret the final sentence as referring to a revelatory experience, in which the supernal gates are opened. This text is recommended for a practical purpose; it appears that R. Abraham Berukhim indeed had the opportunity to apply this recommendation, as it is reported that Luria had revealed to him that he would die unless he prayed before the Wailing Wall and saw the Shekhinah. It is then reported:
“When that pious man heard the words of Isaac Luria, he isolated himself for three days and nights in a fast, and [clothed himself] in a sack, and nightly wept. Afterward he went before the Wailing Wall and prayed there and wept a mighty weeping. Suddenly, he raised his eyes and saw on the Wailing Wall the image of a woman, from behind, in clothes which it is better not to describe, that we have mercy on the divine glory. When he had seen her, he immediately fell on his face and cried and wept and said: ‘Zion, Zion, woe to me that I have seen you in such a plight.’ And he was bitterly complaining and weeping and beating his face and plucking his beard and the hair of his head, until he fainted and lay down and fell asleep on his face. Then he saw in a dream the image of a woman who came and put her hands on his face and wiped the tears of his eyes…. and when Isaac Luria saw him, he said: ‘I see that you have deserved to see the face of the Shekhinah.'”
It is clear that the two visions of the woman — that is, of the Shekhinah — are the result of R. Abraham’s bitter weeping: the former a waking vision of the back of the Shekhinah, the latter a vision of her face, which occurs only in a dream. The first one provokes anxiety; the second, comfort.
In my own philosophical experience, perplexity and angst — sacred dread — always precedes revelatory insight, instaratio ex nihilo.
This recalls Nietzsche’s mysterious and beautiful preface to Beyond Good and Evil:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.
Beriah is the home of the enveloping alter-subject beloved by philosophers, forever beyond possession or mastery. She is Sophia, the Shekhinah. In Assiyah, she appears through the sefirah Binah. When we approach her dogmatically, she turns her back on us and we despair. When we approach her as she wishes to be approached, she reveals her face, shading the blinding light flooding in behind her.
Mid-December 2025 letterpress
Helen and I spent Monday (December 22, 2025) at the letterpress studio. She designed an amazing logo. I printed two sefirot designs.
Kabbalistic everso
I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).
Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.
For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.
Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.
Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.
Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.
To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.
Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.
Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.
Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.
Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.
What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.
Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.
The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.
Instauratio ex nihilo
When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research.
But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is sublime instauratio ex nihilo.
Language of reception
I’ve returned to an old line of thought this morning, thinking about synesis, “together-being”.
In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:
“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”
I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of a given something, there is imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness that precludes even absence. When nothing is present, nothing is missed.
I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.
From Etymonline:
Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.
The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.
As I said last week,
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.
Confessions of a material misogynist
As a kid, I was a bad painter.
While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”
And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.
Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.
So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.
(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)
But all this is preface to another idea.
The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.
It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.
There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.
But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.
I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.
She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.
I think I will print this new Sefirot.
The plate arrives today.
Some quotes I’ve quoted before:
Bob Dylan:
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden
Nietzsche:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.
Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:
We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.
One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?
Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.
One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.
So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.
No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …
Nietzsche, again:
Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!
A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.
I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.
The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.
Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.
My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.
Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”
Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.
Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.
Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”
ack ack ack ack
One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”
You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.
My life sucks, and it is glorious.
Key to Sefirot reference sheet
While we are seeing, our eye is excluded from our field of vision. While we are thinking, our mind is excluded from our field of thought. While we are receiving a given world, our receptivity is excluded from the field of givens. Only in reflection does our eye see an eye, does our mind know a mind, does our receptivity receive itself as a given.
So, reflecting on Jacob’s Ladder:
The excluded Da’at d’Assiah is named Nefesh.
The excluded Da’at d’Yetzirah is named Ruach.
The excluded Da’at d’Beriah is named Neshamah.
The excluded Da’at d’Atzilut is named Chayah.
Nefesh receives the givens of Sefirot d’Assiyah in pshat comprehension.
Ruach receives the givens of Sefirot d’Yetzirah in remez participation.
Neshamah receives the givens of Sefirot d’Beriah in drash sourcehood, revealed from Ayin, ex nihilo.
Chayah receives the givens of Sefirot d’Atzilut in sod luminance.
While we are seeing, we focus on our given field of vision, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a part of what can be seen in the visible world. While we are thinking, we focus on our given field of thought, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a part of what can be thought in the intelligible world. While we are receiving a given world, we focus on our given field of revelations, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a partial disclosure of this given world, and worlds beyond this, to whom, in whom we belong.
Behind and beyond the excluded subject is more, infinitely more, absolutely more.
Ten, no more, no less
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.