4.7 Sporen van God
noch vor einer Stunde verhiess der Morgennebel
nicht diese Klarheit, diesen riesigen Himmel
und das Überlaufen der Fische im erwärmten Wasser des Teichs;
die Freude, wenn die zum Plug abhebenden Wildenten
eine deutliche Spur hinterlassen auf der gekräuselten Oberfläche
des Augusttages,
lange den immer ruhigeren Blick auf sich ziehend.
Die Schüsseln der rostigen Gärten füllen sich,
Ähren rieseln.
Und du wirst still, seltsam unschuldig. Rein:
die sanften Hügel stehen in prächtigem Licht,
in den Gräsern, unten, bettet sich der Tod
Marzanna Kielar(1)
Edmond Jabès, geeft in The book of Margins een mooie beschrijving van het spoorzoeken naar God waarmee we in de vorige paragraaf zijn geëindigd. Daarom zijn woorden zonder commentaar, opdat ze mogen werken in de lezer.
“There Is No Trace But in the Desert
With Emmanuel Lévinas
1
I know he exists. I see him. I touch him. But who is he and who am I? We know, one and the other, one for the other. On this basis …
This face, perhaps of a face forgotten and regained.—Mine before mine? Or after?
What this voice says, which is perhaps only the voice of unsayable sayings telling its misfortunes, hence saying nothing. The emptiness of what is said where it gets lost, where we get lost.
And yet …
A passive, though gnawing absence.
There is no trace but in the desert, no voice but in the desert.
The beginning of action is passage, wandering.
From the unsayable to the unsayable.
Leaving familiar, known sites—landscapes, faces—for an unknown place—the desert, the new face, the mirage?
The infinite face of Nothing, with its weight of Nothing, of all faces reduced to a single one, mine, and lost.
And passage?—Perhaps what has neither end nor beginning, unfixed trace, non-trace of a burning trace; raw sensibility of sand and skin in their extremity.
On skin, the trace, and in the heart.
Perhaps this trace approaches the face, approach always delayed, revealed. What carries us to the infinite.
What beats in our chests.
Then rhythm would be intuiting the trace. We would be the trace.
If I am the trace, I can only be so for another. But if the other is yet another—otherness to yet others—who will notice the trace?
Perhaps others are the abyss of the trace.
Thought in infinite regress, writing of the abyss. At the edge. But if the trace is in me, flows, beats within me? Every impulse of my body is a recorded, counted trace, multiplied by fever—by love, pain, delirium. The trace is tied to being, to essence, as to the emptiness with which it perhaps resonates.
2
Of this trace, a face. Which? Everything—and nothing—is in the face, in the effaced face that is reborn of its effacement, that rises out of the emptiness of its traits forgotten, lost, and restored by death. As if death knew it, knew all faces with their particularities and their leveling banality, the test of likeness. With their names: faces of pronounceable or unpronounceable names.
This obsession with faces become face itself, obsessive trace of passage, passage that takes the form of a face, models its traits. Witness face, mute, garrulous, listened to, blamed. A name is no doubt a trace. But whose name? A name as name, as vocable. A name as impossible proof.
A face asleep, a face waking, some trace of clark or light.
To step on a trace means stepping on a face.
We should, on these paths, walk on our mouths: advance on our lips to kiss the trace. Love rules the road.
But is there any road without a trace?
Yesterday is the trace of tomorrow but tomorrow wants to be without a trace, virgin or, rather, would like to be its own trace heralding its advent, anticipated by our expectation. Then yesterday would be the promise of a trace always still to come. Then the trace would be marked from day after to day after a trace of the future. What happens would be what in some way has already left traces at the heart of our daily expectations and hopes, tracing the outline of hope, of hope as a trace.
And also fear, because death is both the trace we dread and the loss of all trace.
And the face? Perhaps it is what is given as universal, human, divine trace, as reason—motive—for passage and as figure of its indestructible absence, as what lights up and goes out in the face of the other become night and morning of his ungraspable face, the absolute otherness of any face.
Turned back into nothing, but also a mirror of Nothingness, a reflection of its broken mirror, its oval broken in reflected distance.
Could it be that death is the only trace? But how would it be marked? Not only would it not be marked, but, on the contrary, it would escape all established traces. It would even present itself as this escape, as its shore and crest, with the ocean roaring and the wind blowing to deafen the nonexistent trace, to hound it down and mark it in salt or knock it out with immense breath; as if it had been noticed and grasped in its dazzling negation, its inviolable transparency.
3
At these limits, what desire would dare declare itself desire, unless infinite desire, the untouchable sky at the foot of which our desires died along with our limits, unless azure in love with the azure beyond horizons?
This tension toward another face as if come out of the clouds or the pure light of unsuspected heights; this blind attraction to a distant, blinding face, these contractions of our features at the real or imagined approach of other features, like ours in their apparent difference; this repressed appeal, held back to the point where it is but need, desire, hope of an appeal among all appeals, all encounters, and all rejections; this outcry, this small noise, this commotion and confused contentment that menace us, hovering, and whose heirs or victims we are; this love of love, this pain of pain, this trace of a trace which would proclaim them by proclaiming itself, explain them by explaining itself? Perhaps this “third person” “beyond being” “who is not defined by the self?” But is it a matter of that? Unless this “third person,” this third character, is death, absent reality whose name makes all reality founder in its name.
4
The Good—what is, first, good in itself for others and, in others, good for itself—this bond, this intimate, repressed, and flaunted solidarity, this announcement, this coming of a drawn, empty face, this distance stealing in, outlined against space, forming and unforming, this space gathered and momentarily folded in on itself so that it seems an image of what is without image and yet so regarded, so loved—What can be more intimate than a face? It glows as at the heart of faith, at the threshold and end of all proximity—, this imperceptible grazing of, we might say, leaf against leaf, this frail, light, airy contact of feverish nakedness with nakedness itself, this shedding of leaves evoking the natural misery of tree and book at their end; all this and also the seizure, the sudden shock, the fright and wonder in front of the unknown we have always known, but so buried in memory, so disfigured: Is this truth? Is it what we do not dare directly to call truth, so much does it escape us? Is it the unidentifiable face of truth through which our face reaches its truth, as if we had to visualize its invisible features on the model of our own to believe in it and by and by, see it, though it be only the presentiment, ardent desire, and mad need we have of its presence—sublimated image—to which we are eternally committed like the blue of the sky to the blue of the sea? Face of the time before day, smooth and getting smoother with each showing, each short-lived—fatal—metamorphosis until the last, total, transparency?
5
God, as the absolute Other of others: as if we must first become familiar and share responsibility with other faces before we can approach through them the absolute Other without face. As if on all drowned faces there glowed the loss of His. As if His face had paid the loss of all of ours.
Here is distress, the despair of love within love, infinite pain within pain, delirium blazing within delirium. Here is passivity rent in its deep sovereignty. Here, like a bottomless cliff, like the clark of all nights.
How far does our responsibility go? The void is forged by our hands.
6
Then, the question.
The question means that, for the time of its formulation, we do not belong. We do not belong with belonging; we are unbound within bonds. Detached, in order to become more fully attached and then again detached. It means we forever turn the inside out, set it free, revel in its freedom, and die of it.
Cruel calling and recalling into question. Double responsibility.
I am. I become. I write. I write only in order to become. I am only the man I become who, in turn, stops being to become the other he has potentially always been. I am all the others I will be. I will not be. They will be me who cannot be.
The question leaves a blank: the page.
Writing is erased in writing. Black turns blank in the clark. The blank remains.
Blanks are contagious. Black opens into blank, which fills its opening. Blank duration.
What is said leaves no trace. It is always the already said, the trace stepped over—neglected?
To set out to discover the trace means perhaps to continue writing, to circle around the unfindable trace.
All traces of words are in the word.
Word: overload of nothing.
Alliance of step and trace. Does the trace come due with the step? Unless the step co mes due with the trace.
. . . a step, like a well.
The question of the word, the question of the written, the question of the book are questions put to blankness, to emptiness, to the void.
Passage. The passing of a wise man, of wisdom—or a fool?
A blank means passage into death.
The water of passage quenches our thirst for the unknown.
The unknown is our last passage, the most perilous. Death, in this sense, displaces the unknown.
Writing is perhaps only a way of dying of the words of our death; and a trace, only the progressive unveiling of a shadow, O ultimate blank.
Under this blank, we repose.
Under this immaterial blank face.”(2)
Erinnerung
Es laufen die Schneefäden
weiss den weissen Himmel herab.
Ich bind die Gedanken los,
und so kommen die kindlichen
durch das Gewirr,
die Jugendzeit fassend,
da ich durch den Wintertag
gestromert bin
auf der Suche
nach dem Christkind.
Ich hatte seine Klingel gehört
laut den Berg herab.
Ich hatte seinen warmen Hauch gespürt
in der Stube,
wo es nach mir sah und verschwand.
O, es zu finden,
bin ich weit gegangen
und hab gestaunt, dass es nirgends war.
Ich ging dahin, und es piepte ein Vogel
unter einem Dach,
ein Vogel, der es suchte und auch nicht fand.
Ich hab geweint.
Johannes Kühn(3)
Dit is een deel uit mijn essay: God in de leegte. Het hele essay is te lezen (eventueel te koop) (en te downloaden) op:
Noten:
1 Ibid., p. 7
2 Edmond Jabès, The book of Margins, Ibid., pp. 160-167
3 Johannes Kühn, Und hab am Gras mein Leben gemessen. Gedichte, München 2014, (Carl Hanser Verlag), p. 96
betekenisgeving & levenshorizon 