Resurrection of the Word : Mahoyael: Book One

I WILL tell a tale of Time and Duration, of Space and measures, of sound and light, of achievements and frustrations. I will tell it for your benefit, for fear you would not understand that which is of no Time and no space, of no past or future, and in very truth of no Word, so that no tale would be told. Do not forget that all tales are only tales. Would that mine conveyed a glimpse of that that is! (When things were created by the force which made them, and when this power acquired in man an organic radiant body, the radiance was living and the Powers were able to receive their Name, YHWH. Both this name and this Ineffable--essence of beings, being of essences, the indeterminate in the determinate, the-that- which-is in that-which-is-light, life regained from light -- returned to themselves in this completion and were in that which was made and in that which was not made: in the more probable and in the less probable. Was in the execution of cach thing and in that which was not made. Combined with itself in Number: was the realised solution of what had been the power of the universe: was seven, prisoner of seven, escaped from seven, engendering seven, engendered by seven: was that which had been the crucifixion of the Word, the death, the enshrouding, the glorification, the resurrection: was the mind-structure of matter: was wholly matter in movement. Its signature: the Universe.) Such was the origin of heaven and earth when they were made: this origin was the ineffable Compression-Explosion. What had been formed could receive nothing more. No life could be created on land which was still a desert. Had not Expansion re-entered the womb of the spheres? Had not the Ineffable accepted its capture? These Powers had only to rise up alive and create everything, or to die. Nothing would come 46 to their aid. The Ineffable in the numbers could not make the Earth fruitful from the outside, as if it were a beneficial rain. The Earth was desert but life had to arise from its own womb and fall upon her as a fertilising rain. This life produced by the Earth increased and subsided on the Earth, and the Earth fertilised herself. The symbol of this is that there is no God that can be called upon from outside. Man was the conjunction of the Powers with the Ineffable, and because of this was given the force to create. He was the creator Of living radiance. It was the proper time for the Earth to attain to its configuration, and man was the seed that was adaptable to this new life: he was likely to live and subsist in Nature, having survived vast upheavals. Both the Ineffable and the forces were in Nature, and Nature was beautiful and nutritious. In the midst of the human abode grew the tree of life, organic light. It rose from the essential part of the seed that had been spared and expanded. But this organic light was not alone: with it and beside it was another tree that sprang from the centre of the human seed: the opposite in action. And from this human seed -- of the human abode -- burst forth a current of life which acted like a cross. The first arm of the cross was physical reality, hidden in which is the gold of the inner light in matter. The second arm was the external fire of matter. The third arm was the swift propagation of energy, from one thing to another. The fourth was resistance to everything. Man was the guardian of creative life and the one to have actual experience of it, for he was the conjunction of the Infinite and Numbers. Basically and cogently he was the result of creation, the expansion of the seed of the Earth. In him the Powers were united to their own resistance. Now from the human seed (the one moving towards maturation) there began to come into the world seeds, similar to him, born before their time, which he recognised and named: 47 the animals. He named everything and then felt lonely. He did not see himself in Nature. He contemplated the world, but was separated from it, a spectator, in his distinctive consciousness. He contemplated everything in terms contrary to matter: himself. therefore he saw only his dream. From the very fact that he had been born, man was profoundly asleep! Seeing the world established, and seeing himself as apart from the world, he lost his unity. He felt alone and feeble. "This lack, this interior void like a shore to which he had been carried off, became outwardly visible, assuming form and corporeal beauty. This same interior void became his intellect. The human being, potentially dynamic, was weak and clothed his weakness. This static and passive aspect is symboliscd by woman, represented by her, and intellect is the human function identified with this aspect. This void within man was created by the immediate Powers, and by the Ineffable creative life in him. And man's mind was identified with this void that thus offered itself to him, clothed in eternity. And he said: "Here am I truly offered the universal substance of my personal substance, and I take her into partnership (I marry her), identify myself with her." And man became identified with his own passivity, with his interior void. "That is why man abandoned the Ineffable which, as a Father, had begat him. And he also parted from the Powers springing forth from matter which, as a Mother, had created him. He abandoned them and was caught by memory and the intellect with its void externalised and clothed: he became the victim of empty passivity, symbolised in the stories by woman and flesh. And he identified himself with this flesh, making one flesh with her. I will comment again on this cosmogony, with respect to the following propositions: By its very existence the universe is a sign that number answers to the requirements of infinite movement. 48 By its very existence the universe is the sign that infinite movement surpasses number. If infinity were not responded to adequately it would break the world to pieces, and it does not break it because it cannot. Light resists it to the extent of containing it. This contradiction is the movement of everything there is. Everything that is is movement. Israel predicates our world and the Eternal which rises from our world. The forces of Expansion originating this world came to an end, crucified, because this world assigns an end to these unbounded forces: its light. Infinite swiftness is crucified to this constant: Light. Resistance, the process inherent in the formation of a Universe, stimulates the shock which enables unrestricted Movement to pass through it and become light, the means of its existence in it. Although light may not be unresricted movement it is one resolution of it, for, if it were not, the Universe would not be existing and would be divided into fragments again. To provide enough for the primordial Explosion's creation of new forms it would have continued to break up everywhere. In terms of mythology there is a struggle: sometimes God (the powers of expansion), in vengeance and anger, explodes and smashes everything, but when he feels imprisoned and bored, buried under quantity, he is content to prevail. The proof of this satisfaction is the world itself, as it is said in Genesis according to Israel. The world is the proof of YHWH's presence in the world. The Indeterminate wins, so to say, by the insinuations of the Determinate, acting in it. And this action is life, evolution. It is not YHWH who creates the world, but the Numerals of the equations that are proffered and welcomed. Forces of expansion imprisoned in the process and becoming Numerals in the deed. The expansive Forces of the Indeterminate arc resolved gradually. Manifestation is the most probable breech of the equilibrium and, being the most probable of possibilities, this is exactly what happens. This breech is a resistance whose gradual 49 destruction by the explosive forces locked up in its heart is the evolution of the Universe. In what had been homogeneous and undifferentiated the explosion determines the heterogeneous and differentiated. Absolute Movement, which is absolute, permanent, total equilibrium, and as a result of which all specific equilibrium is only temporary, is even that which creates such temporary equilibriums as the stars, in the way that an explosion produces fragments whose existence proves that they have been resisted. These fragments, as soon as they are thrown out satisfy the forces of expansion in the particular equilibriums opposing it: a totally conflicting state: a moving universe. Thus each fragment is static to a degree that the dynamics are satisfied. Next, these masses, by their attraction, regulate the explosion in gyratory movements. New clash: each propulsion is frustrated by the others. This shock reverberates within each fragment: crucifixion of the word. Each new equilibrium is the most probable coincidence of the greatest possible inertia with the greatest possible explosion, from which come the atoms. Matter organised itself and its radiation. The Word comes to life again through a larger and larger heterogeneity of matter, of which it is the vital force and radiation. Its birth, or evolution of organic life, forms individual equilibriums of ever greater stability. But for an individual equilibrium to be increasingly stable it must be increasingly dynamic, not static, and adaptable to the movement of the world, flexible. For a rigid and stable equilibrium is conditioned by external changes; whereas a supple equilibrium dominates them. Putting an individual equilibrium into the movement of the Indeterminate assures its stability. When mankind was born, plastic composite masses had overcome one of dynamic equilibriums, one with such an adhesion to the mind-processes of the world that its end, when attained, hastened the disorderly and confused movement in which all static equilibriums -- instincts, functions, specific 50 constants, accumulations from the past, purely mechanical movements -- were carried away. Man having lost his way, blind, frightened, all natural perception being destroyed within him, was thrown into the unreal because he had assayed the real. The sudden appearance of men isolated in their egos, and the relative stabilisation of the earth's mass were but two aspects of the same phenomenon. The mind-process revived organic, human radiations. Being radiant these are light-bodies: being organic and individual they oppose the light. They oppose their organic perfection by dividing their faculties into adverse categories. Organic radiation being the faculty of perceiving life, individual consciousness possesses a weapon against itself: its isolation. Fatal, but also vitally necessary, it is not in eluding this isolation but in staving it in that the Word is fulfilled. Since the foundation of the world the fight is the same. The dynamism of the Word, its formative adhesion to the world is, in each self, the seed of the light-body which must complete itself and live. The movement which begins to grow has to be an essential catastrophe for the self. It has to be destroyed. The individual and the collective past must become like one another, a substance from which the self in its shell is made. The new life must shatter the isolation of the individual, which (although it may seem paradoxical) is proof that the self belongs to the collective consciousness. A deep analysis of isolation rejects the whole of collective consciousness, because it is entirely the product of individual dreams. At birth we bring the whole of our ancestral past with us, coiled up in the depths of our being like a cluster of serpents. But quite by chance -- it is a strange, surprising event -- it happens that another serpent, an interior fire ignited in some unknown manner, obliges these innumerable bundles of curled up serpents to uncoil themselves, puts them into confusion 51 and miraculously expels them from us for ever. A new vision of the world then rises from our purified bodily ground, while Time that has been ignominiously expelled unfolds inside out, making mincemeat of the unconscious substance of which wc were, for the most part, made. Until then stories of the unconscious were related in picture-books, in which characters such as Oedipus were caught up in historical facts, or such as Cain who were not. These stories were expounded back to front as far as they were true: invented, but true psychologically. Now their real meaning is revealed to us and informed psychologists will accordingly be able, by means of certain symbolical offshoots, which I leave out, to confirm their authenticity. Here I shall set forth a number of hypotheses for discussion. Prehistoric man was perhaps still less of an individual than the militiamen of our contemporary troops. His sensibility was not condensed like a drip from mist, but was part of a collective fog in which each felt alive only so far as he was an undifferentiated fragment of the mass. Nevertheless, this pre-human species began eventually to detach itself from the animal. Of all living seeds not only was his the single one not to founder for ever in some specialised function, but phenomena produced in the body and the nerves made it henceforth impossible to be engulfed in the ant hills. Evolution of the species had stirred up two contradictory forces. The whole of evolution had been only a representation of this contest. It came about that the contest began to be characterised by consciousness. It came about that the curve of this evolution, which had been a mere sketch of its own struggle, assumed the will to be prolonged, identifying with its own movement. This will was Israel. Israel identified herself with this movement, with this essence, with this contradiction. This living contradiction which was called Word, and is today, in philosophical terms, called Dialectic, became incarnate in Israel by the will of Israel, so that the Flesh might be Word, so that Matter might be Dialectic. If this will, from Jesus to Marx, 52 faithfully conveyed the significance of the events determined by Israel it was, nevertheless, present and complete from the beginning of Time, when the individual, the mark of Mankind, of Israel, began. If the human foetus goes through embryonic, animal forms, it is due to its not stopping there. The human embryo maintains its possibilities intact, when the forms through which it passes are more limited than itself. On the one hand, evolution of the species has been the maturation of the primordial, human seed, and, on the other hand, sideshoots of the same seed but without possible continuation, degenerate and fall into specialisations: the species. Throughout their development content with too few forms, human seeds left behind them multitudes of their own kind which were going to give a constitution to all living beings. Passing through metamorphoses without pause, the human seed continued to be developed and slowly to ripen, until the Earth attained a volume and a weight capable of begetting it. Then in harmony with Mother-Nature the seed was born and became conscious. Man was face to face with himself. He saw living beings and acknowledged them: they were he, as he would have been, but had not wished to be: he as he was at one time, and then as he was at another. Confronted by certain animals, he recognised what he could have been if, in such circumstances, he had sunk down. He recognised his less indomitable ancestors, who had foundered. He saw again his own hesitations, the struggle with conflicting desires. He recognised disgrace in the proud looks of animals and legions. For that it was written: "Out of the ground YHWH formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to the man to see that he would call them, and whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof"". * For it is from before the maturation of the eternal seed that animals proceeded and man named them according to his recognition of them. * Genesis Il, 19. 53 But that was after man had become self-conscious and understood his name Adam. Before that there were very long and confused periods when man, on the point of being born, could not tear himself away from his animal ancestry because he was still too strongly identified with it. There were periods characterised by totems when contradictory desires fought against one another even in the blood of each man, in the depths of his nervous system. There were periods when neither continuation nor the Intemporal was yet entirely extant. There was always a pitiless struggle between two powers. On the one hand there was the universal Dialectic, the contrasting movement that made the Universe what it is, (and for this reason everything that is must one day cease to be) on the other hand, there was the same movement in everything, in each living cell and, above all, in each organic being. Organic beings, becoming more and more supple, became better and better at dominating the surrounding world. Their equipoise, becoming more pliable, succeeded in sustaining and in being sure of itself. Thus the best balanced was the least rigid, the most unstable the most shifting, the most dynamic the least like an animate object, but most like the Word. But what was this equilibrium appearing from matter and its radiation if not the Word in its own creation? However, there was an epoch (and this epoch is still lasting today and will continue to last for centuries of bestiality) when these organisms which had broken away from Dialectical existence wanted to ascribe the permanence of this equilibrium to themselves. Because they were the Word they set themselves to oppose it: the feeling these men had of permanence in immortal souls was murdering the Word, and periodically cast them into the group-soul of the herd. Is this contradictory? Certainly. Taken in its preposterousness such is the human drama, incarnated in Israel, consciously or not; established in Israel which brings humanity to birth, implanted in its blood. Henceforth it is impossible to extirpate it. Until when? Until the explosion, whether men will it or 54 not. Until birth, until the Messiah, the Human Being. This is YHWH: unrestricted balance, indestructible dynamic movement of everything there is, and, in man, liberation of his creative ability. For life to be born alive there is need of bodies so supple as to bc capable of routing the inanimate and functional balance of the instincts of the species. Not that these instincts have vanished from man. Our authorities for this, stressing nations' and peoples' past, make that clear enough. with the pressure of the as-yet inhuman side branches of the tree of life the tendency to degenerate summons the accumulated burden of past generations to its assistance and fastens on to it, just as formerly it fastened on to the animal totem. But here comes in the revelation of Israel. The ancestral model of the seed which reached its complete maturation in the expansion of humanity, this seed which would have debased itself in any specialisation has preserved its universal possibilities intact, and by so doing conquered the absolute equilibrium of the Dialectic. Its ancestor is not at all what the seed almost became, but what it refused to be: it is nothing like what it was before birth. No, its ancestor, in the true meaning of the word, its real Father, can be nothing but what may be derived from it. He can be only the origin of what he himself is, without yet becoming it: in essence the Word which preceded him, before Time began, he who is to come, who is present, YHWH. The ancestor who is to come! The vehement affirmation of him who fulfilled Israel and its Scriptures: an affirmation that springs from the depths delineated in history by Israel's blood: an affirmation that must be all mankind's, which Israel incarnates, and of which the Jews are the negation. For to the affirmation of the essence of Israel a by no means less vehement negation opposes all Jews, because they affirm Israel. An innumerable, restless, swarming multitude, bound, 55 chained down: ten thousand tons of iron chains fasten them to trifles. "This is done, that is not done. Not On Saturday but on Sunday. Blessed be the Lord. I the son of, the son of, the son of, for ever my forefathers. Long live the Jewish Nation, its capital and its ambassadors. Adonai, Adonai, the voice of your people has too many throats to be one single sound; is there a national voice when there are no two opinions alike?" We a nation, when three people cause four disputes . . "The Eternal is my Lord" . . but they have never seen his face. Do they seek him and invoke him so as not to find him? That is Israel? Yes, its shadow. Israel casts the shadow of what is yet to come, on that which is no more. But, for there to bc a shadow, there must be a hard, precise and pure light. Israel is the contradiction of the shadow. Is this a vindication? No; for why is there a shadow and not light? They are contradictory: the one which contains the seed will harden and become petrified so as to smother the Messianic seed. For if it is "He" who is there, he will not be suppressed but will smash the hardest of shells: if the shell proves to be the stronger it is because "He" is not yet there. The container of the ineffable seed will not refrain from filling the world with speeches, notes, commentaries, explanations, opinions, shouts and words, words, words. If "He" is the seed he will make himself heard: but when the shouting is at its loudest it will be because "He" has not yet come. The container of the more versatile, lively and dynamic seed must make itself more rigid, more lifeless, heavier than lead. The perfected seed will have to bear witness to its power. It will have to master enormous difficulties and overcome all the might of the dominion over YHWH; and, at the same time, foil the duplicity, bad faith and sheer brigandage of YHWH. When Moses, trusting his promise, stretches himself out to sleep YHWH springs at him to kill him. If he dies it is just as well, because he would not have been able to live. That is why it is written: YHWH said unto Moses in Midian. Go, return into 56 Egypt: for all the men are dead who sought thy life, And it came to pass on the way, in the place where Moses spent the night, that YHWH met him and sought to kill him. * For in the tree of life there is ceaseless conflict between temptations inciting the human sap towards new branches derived from the parent-stock, before the seed has had time to ripen, and YHWH who retards the breaking forth, never ceasing to hinder it, so that finally the perfect seed opens when its sap matures! Exodus IV, 19, 24, 25. 57

Carlo Suares, Resurrection of the Word, Shambhala, 1974, pp. 46-57