The Ritual of New Creation (27 page)

Read The Ritual of New Creation Online

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

 
Page 93
To have been kept, to have reached this season,
Is to have eternized, for a moment,
The time when promise and fulfillment feed
Upon each other, when the living gold
Of sunlight struck from the amazing corn
Seems one with its cold, unending token,
The warm time when both seem reflections from
The bright eyes of the Queen of the Peaceful
Day being welcomed with these twin burnings,
These prophetic seeds of the Ripener,
Brightness rising and getting on with things. (14)
The Shekhinah as Sabbath Queen is strangely but movingly conflated with the figure of a fertility goddess, a Demeter "Of sunlight struck from the amazing corn." We experience the timeless peace of the sabbath, which in the kabbalah is understood as a foretaste of messianic redemption, while at the same time acknowledging and taking pleasure in our temporality, "Brightness rising and getting on with things." In the following stanza, the poet recognizes this female figure to be his muse and his fictive creation as well; their lovemaking presents the Shekhinah as mystical bride coming to the initiate, as well as the pagan union of earth and sky:
The man of earth exhales a girl of air,
Of her light who lies beside him, gentle
And bare, under the living shawl of all
Her long hair, while her short below softly
Touches his tired thigh with welcoming.
It is that she is there. It is the pure
Return of everlastingness in her
Hands and the readiness of the sweet pear
In the touch of her mouth that fill the air
Even the air within the circle of
His emptied armswith light beyond seeming. (1415)
In these lines, the Shekhinah is at once mistress of presence and absence, immanence and transcendence. In giving herself to the poet (as in
Chelmaxioms
), she rewards his persistence in the wandering ritual of writing, but in her disappearance from "the circle of / His emptied arms" into "light beyond seeming," she maintains his condition of exile.
 
Page 94
This encounter proves to be most instructive. In "Green," the next section of the poem and central among the seven colors of the spectrum, Hollander, beginning with a line from Goethe's
Color Theory,
expresses his understanding of the limits of his wandering, spectral text, which are the same limits as those of his temporal existence:
Man will nicht weiter, und man kann nicht weiter:
we
Desire nothing beyond this being of green
Nor can we reach it; and even that overworked
Part of us, the eye, wearied of the vivid, stuffed
With the beneficence of leaf, seeks not to raise
Itself toward the new giddiness of heaven, clear
Though that blue may beit would be to leave too much
Behind, the old heaviness of earthbut vaulting
The whole sequence of empurplings to alight in
Blackness, if anywhere else, in the condensed dust
Of being seen as green, turning to which darkness
Is no roving of vision, no dimming of trust. (18)
Blue, the heavenly color of the inaccessible Law, is rejected in favor of the earthy fullness of vegetative green, the ripeness of mortality's aggadic text. (As Hollander notes at the outset of the poem, "Only at the moment of green is there time for a story.") The blackness of death, when there is no longer any "roving of vision," is "the condensed dust / Of being seen as green," the fulfillment of organic existence, not the pure transcendence of blue, the "giddiness of heaven." This is confirmed at the end of "Blue'': "Dawn comes when we distinguish blue fromwhite? / No, greenand, in agreement, eyeing the / Dying dark, our morning wariness nods" (33).
This interplay of dawn and dusk, immanence and transcendence, beginning and end of the spectrum, is reworked yet again in "Violet," the last section of the poem. Here too nature is close at hand, reminding us of mortality: we stand "in the pale tan of/ The yet ungathered grain" (38) asking "in a / Mown oatfield what text will / The dallying night leave?" (39). The answer is provided by a number of tropes representing the menorah, now found through the completion of the poetic quest. In a beautiful expression of continued hope in continued exile, we see
a last
Candle that may be made
 
Page 95
To outlast its waning
Wax, a frail flame shaking
In a simulacrum
Of respiration. Oh,
We shall carry it set
Down inside a pitcher
Out into the field, late
Wonderers errant in
Among the rich flowers.
Like a star reflected
In a cup of water
It will light up no path:
Neither will it go out. (3839)
A single spark has been restored to a single vessel, though this one small, enduring candle may become
A tree of light. A bush
Unconsumed by its fire.
Branches of flame given
Sevenfold tongue that there
Might be recompounded
Out of the smashed vessels

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