--.
Disorder is reckoned to be the opposite of
order. Evil is recognized as the
opposite of good. But this is not
to say that order is good and disorder evil. No, there is order that is evil, and disorder that is
good. Good and evil are more
nuanced, harder to pin down, than by the mere mark of order or disorder.
Stasis is not the epitome of good. The kingdom of heaven is certainly not
an eternal stasis.
--.
Evil exists, but where does it reside? Evil is not simply the "resistance
of formless matter to God's creating will." I'd have trouble in any case believing there is such a thing
as "formless matter."
Evil resides rather in a kind of willful coup of some part of God's
creative forming. Evil is a
willful coup of forms that, taking unto itself further form-like character,
propels what might be called pseudo-creations. Detached from the divine,
pseudo-creations bear the stamp of non-being. They ring hollow, and this hollow ringing can be recognized
as their mark of provenance.
--.
The word is not an immaterial thing like the
Platonic Idea. Rather it is
material. The word strikes us as
immaterial only because its relations with other more palpable material things
are occult. We can only begin to
grasp that to which these relations refer, and so we conceive of the word
itself as somehow immaterial.
--.
A blank notebook. A slim blue spiral notebook made by the Koyuko company, a
Japanese brand. The notebook is
new, completely blank, and it contains one-hundred narrow-ruled leaves of
paper.
I know that on the meeting of these blank
pages with this ballpoint pen, upon the careful tracing out of the looping
lines of written words, it is possible, it is at least possible, for this blue notebook to
contain a text that would overturn the world, a text of such necessity as to
complete what is essential in all previous texts, while relegating to oblivion
all that is inessential.
This notebook and the pen in my hand evoke
the thought of what is there as potential: they suggest what could be brought forth in the act
of their being used up.
Michelangelo was supposedly able to
envision the sculpture hiding in the block of marble. Or at least this was one of his confidence tricks. His work was to bring forth the latent
sculpture, to chisel away the marble that still imprisoned it.
What I'm thinking now of the blank notebook
and pen before me--is this in any way similar to Michelangelo's thought of the
sculpture waiting to be liberated from the marble? Perhaps it is, but only in some slight way. Perhaps the two instances of creative
vision are at best allegories of each other.
A sculpture is a three-dimensional object:
one can visualize it in space, and so it can be there already in the marble. The outlines of a text cannot be
visualized, of course, or at least not in the same manner. What kind of text would one come up
with if one thought of writing as the chiseling away of all that one did not
want to say, if one imagined the literary tradition, and one's language, as a
sort of block from which one chiseled away all that was inessential? Some have through of writing this
way. Certainly there are
writers--I think of the American minimalists, or the melancholy Duras--whose
poetics have elements of this.
But the text I imagine above, the
potential text in this notebook, the one text whose appearance would overturn
the world--this text is surely something other than that of the master
sculptor. Its appearance would be
something positive, something breathed into the writer, rather than something negative
in the sense of having been chipped out of dross. Its appearance would necessarily be a kind of theophany.
Though certainly written in a fallen
language (English, for example) such a text remains beyond all imagination as
to its outlines and details. Only
God could provide it.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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