and a time in which creation is enacted. The result, as Bloom says of psychoanalysis, is "another parable of a people always homeless or at least uneasy in space, who must seek a perpetually deferred fulfillment in time."
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There is a prose passage in
Spectral Emanations
in which these ideas are embodied in an odd but revealing way. A voice both comic and frighteningly portentous instructs the questing poet (or is it the poet who instructs his readers?) in the building of a sort of infernal machine, for "when bought already assembled, these things work very badly, and may leave dangerous residues" (33). Dissatisfied with what has been "already assembled," the text / machine builds itself, an assembly in time and space which finally presents itself as a parable of the state of contemporary literary creation. We are told that "There can be great variation in the exterior design. But it is the circuits alone which are terrifying, and the interior spaces where tolerances are so minute" (33). As is always the case with parabolic writing, we must pay heed to the interiority of the text; the parable insists upon its exacting, meaningful depths, however variously it may present its exterior. Furthermore, the writing (or reading) of such a work puts us at psychic risk: "The energy it consumes is enormous; it is almost too expensive to operate. But of course, one must" (34).
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As Hollander and Bloom understand, writing of this sort is a ritualized struggle with the past, an acknowledgment of an original failure (Bloom's "catastrophe creation") which still has great power over the present. Thus we are warned that "After the red light goes off, there will be a period of waiting; do not disintegrate them at this stage, or you too will never have existed." Nevertheless, as the passage concludes, "If you get it to work properly, it will put an end to them, your predecessors" (34). Presumably, the successful writing of the present rectifies the past. The predecessors are laid to rest in a text that self-consciously realizes itself in time and space.
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In the larger schema of
Spectral Emanations
(and in this sense, he text/machine is a parable within a parable), the task of putting an end to one's predecessors is equivalent to that of finding the lost menorah, making this a Bloomian (perhaps overly Bloomian) poem indeed. This leads in turn to a basic question: as a modern Jewish quest, what does the search for the lamp really signify? In the Prologue, "The Way to the Throne Room," the poet first appears among a company of questers who fail to reach "what we might read as the seat of vision in the
merkabah
or throne-chariot of Ezekial."
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As the poet explains,
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