| The Song of Songs : Midrash | |||||
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The so-called SONG OF SOLOMON A Version by George Buchanan from Carlo Suares' French text THE TITLE ACCORDING TO QABALA The Residue of Residues OR Quintessence of Quintessences I Poet The Residue of Residues is the witness of her Peace. 2 Psyche (thinking of Breath ) Let his fire set me aflame. Breath Two resistances call to me from you. For in Earth, my Fire makes nothing but wine. 3 Psyche You are in your Name, generous giver. You cause the Immanence to well in the depths. Therefore you are loved by her who seeks your impregnation. 4 Breath Let me be lodged within you. The knowledge of kings is tempting me but cannot contain me. Only in the joy of loving you can I find my depth. 5 Psyche Breath , you take me from the daylight. Already I am not what I was. New life starts in my inmost being. Girls who live in quiet cities, see, uncertainty is my peace! 19 6 Blackness of the sun puts conflict into me. The sons of Earth despoiled in me what was lush. I didn't want my vine any more, 7 Woman No question of my hiding from the world. Show me your place of work, your place of leisure. I want to be along with you in the open. 8 Breath If you don't know where I am, most lovely woman, let timelessness come alive for you: bring into duration two lives and two existences as one. 9 1 see you are still under the spell of those with worldly prestige. 10 But I shall fertilize your duality. In you will be the whirling of opposites. 11 Which will transmute love into gold. But your silver desire will transmute that gold into love. 12 Psyche I am not any more under the seeming eternity of the strong. My sharply awakened senses drive me into the universal Unknown. 13 Because you are in me I am the Holy Apostasy. Breath from the lower depths, over against Breath from on high. 14 From contact with my resistances you turn again into yourself in an endless resurrection to new life, which is my Knowledge. 15 Breath How lovely you are, my friend, how lovely! This rising Spring in you speaks for Israel. 16 Psyche What beauty, my loved one! We delight in our newness. 17 The place where we rest together cannot be destroyed 20 II 1 Breath I am in your body, depth of the upper Breath, Breath of the depth, double Emanation. 2 Lover (to woman) And you are these two Breaths, in existence and life, among unshaped substance. 3 Woman I see you as you appear to me. I was full of joy, inhabiting my body, and there you sprang to life from your tabernacle of glorified dust. 4 You carried me to an intoxication where consciousness must stop or lose itself. But your new life in me is a response to love. 5 Oh that I could be strong enough to take your seed into my body! And be living Breath in its living support! 6 His left hand conveys the sacred Name. His right hand is about me and makes me breathe it. 7 Girls of the city! I send you the Heavenly Company. Do not shut away the universal splendour inside your frozen institutions. Don't dispute it; it is the Emanation. 6 See, Breath rushes through Space towards me, violently breaks into my strength, rays out inside me. 9 And this radiation is a new birth, original, organic, developing in me. 10 Saying "Enter your own organic movement, then go into the world's, towards yourself". 11 For the sake of shared pleasure, my feminine sex opened the way to Breath. I have gone beyond myself and come to my Essence. 12 Now I have knowledge of universal impregnation. Constructive energy works in the two lives of nature. Breath is conceived in the flower buds, is welcomed by the songs of time. 21 13 Lover Everything is made vibrant by Breath, even the fig tree in the dry sands. Get up, beautiful friend, move towards your selfhood. 14 Breath 1 am reborn. Immanence rises from your depths, having passed through a cycle in primordial stuff. Developed forms conceal the living drive within them. Guard against the spell of their rhythm, since you are true perception, mysterious presence of uprightness, symbol of Israel. You voice my name. 15 Guide the new life which is growing in you. The young foxes ravage the flowering vines. But your vine, need you abandon it? 16 Psyche Breath is mine. I am his. Let him stir and guide me. Two Breaths as one 17 Before the day leads you to an irreversible event, be, my love, the indeterminate freshness of your universal home. 111 1 Person I heard him, he came into me, but I am still looking for him. His breath and my body are united, yet I do not know where this union took place. His presence in me was radiance; so brighthow could I catch hold of it? 2 1 set out to look for him among the items of my work. Contradictory, they turned me round and round upon myself, and I did not find him. 3 Their energies swirled in self-protection, closing in, pressing upon me as I went on asking: where is my love? 4 Psyche They emptied me out. Then I found him who was being born, found him in the cell that was engendering me: a union of two who were because they were not yet. 22 5 Women Daughters of the false styles of peace! I send the Heavenly Hosts against you. Love which is not a source is only unsatisfied desire. 6/11 Poet At a certain distance from the false styles of peace I see another false peace: of passiveness. What smoke rises from that desert? King Solomon, whose name is pretended Peace, for whom the quintessence is what perfumers make, burns day and night those scented extracts, a pretended residue. He puts himself, as it were, in a box, a stately conveyance. War-men to the number of 60 (the number of the female sex), the bravest of Israel, watch over his night fears, for he does not resist life with suppleness; rigidly he resists death. His passiveness holds Emanation in check. When Breath enters into him, he will burst. The shell concealing him depends on the stuff of female submission. They are busy about his inertia. Pretended royalty is on his head. Crowned by his mother on his wedding day, this Solomon, this pseudo-king, is the female queen! IV 1 Lover How beautiful you are, my friend, how beautiful! Through the veil of appearance your eyes are the fountain of Israel. You are the vision where time and timelessness meet, to be prized as a multitude that springs from eternity. 2 Poet Such is the dominance of your femininity. The second or female aspect of your energy I have seen represented by a pompous and nervous actor wearing a crown, who lay on a scented cloud. His hands are full of wealth but he carefully washes them. Compare him to a flock of sheep, dead though not dead, without understanding. 23 3 This second aspect of your femininity is dullness, like a sin separating you from yourself, a flaw behind the smooth exterior. 4 You are different from that, supple and strong, for your two resistances fructify one another. They build a stronghold for Aleph, the defender of those that rest in Him, the All-Powerful. 5 In and through your two resistances the Breath of Life and the Breath of Existence are at the same time taken in and given out. 6 Breath Before the dull day takes from me what is possible and makes it irreversible, I give life to your two aspects. One is your holy uncertainty, the other will go back to unshaped substance. 7 You, my dear one, are the beautiful transfigured sanctuary of my indetermination. 8 Come with me, come and contemplate our common origin. Your person is double and so is your lunar symbol. I bury myself in you and I come out from you: one act in two opposite directions. 9 Sister of Breath, your organic life redoubles my unity. You are able to build me and still be one with me. 10 Companion of Breath, my Fire in the Earth is only wine, but you breathe me out and this breathing surpasses the whole content of the skies. 11 Companion of Breath, blessedness of the perceived Incarnation, you sustain organic movement and are that movement itself. You are, from depth of your origin to depth of your presence now, an endless movement of contraries. You are the peace of that movement. 12 To look at what exists is to look at absolute Mystery. To look at you is to open oneself to the mysterious metabolism Emanation, for your presence creates it. 24 13 You are the apple of the tree and the sensuous taste of it. You are the fragrance of fruit and of stimulating drugs. 14 In you are the fruits of the earth that go back into the elements. In you are the Principles of the waters animated by Breath: in you also is the intelligence which conceives those Principles. 15 The double movement of the waters rises in the wells and comes down from the hills. 16 Person May the depth of depths free the depths of Indetermination! May my twofold organic resistance enter the organic life of Breath! And Breath live its own life! V 1 Breath I have gone into my bodily support. In response to your call I have gathered in you what is mine. I have gathered my exchange money - go pieces - which you kept inside my name. I have used up what wildness still remained in you. I have founded the unity of my work. The beginning and the end are one. You who hear me, be happy! 2 Person Though I am asleep in Duration I perceive my heartbeats and the world's heartbeats in identical discontinuity: that of living and dying Breath. He lives and dies: lives dying, dies living. He says: "Open yourself for me, from you I am being born". 3 He says: "I am stripped of the symbols that disguised me. I have no appearance, for any form would exclude others. But your form is purified by the emptiness which begat me. Therefore you can evolve in duration and yet be clean." 4 Woman My love makes him resilient. As soon as he appears in the richness of my body he disappears in the empty places of my mind. 25 A contradictory movement! He goes inversely to his coming, yet the cave of my being is quickened by his vibration. 5 1 was set going by his Breath, so that I should give birth to something without blemish. But his seed is impaired by his being fixated on me: everything I touch is of the past. 6 1 am open to my love, Breath has gone back to its origin, has disappeared. Through hearing his Word I found that origin, There, among the creative Forces, I invoked our Union, and two lives spoke to me. 7 The Powers-that-be who in buying Breath build their cities send their agents against me: strip me of my latest form. See me now naked and free. The veil of my appearance is lifted, showing the visible One to be twofold. 8 Girls of the misleading peace of cities, if you meet him I love, tell him that what I built in myself has disappeared. My love for him is no more than the rhythm of a holy dance. 9 Girls of the cities (singing) Mah-Dodekh Midod, Ha-Yafah, Benashim, Mah-Dodekh Midod, Schekakhq, Hishbaatanou. To this incantation she dances rhythm 3.2.3-3-3.2.3-5. (She dances the interrogation of the girls, as follows). Who is your lover among lovers, most beautiful among us? Who is your lover among lovers, that you so cry out to us? 10 Feminine Sex From the pinnacle of my depths, I see my Love. Edom, son Of Earth, of royal birth. He is the cell united with mine, to elaborate earthly strength. He and I are two bodies in one. 11 Phylum The Principle of Breath, Fire in Matter, is Adam, of perfect red and pure gold. But as soon as he penetrates the formative 26 energy he is Edom. Woman, his emanation shoots spirally in the shadows of the womb. 12 Poet The brilliance of his eyes is as wet mud which he washes in milk so as to appear purified. He makes his home among the shapeless human mass. 13 He revives his life with ointment and drugs, as one might give new scent to the petals of withering flowers which are losing their smell. 14 Woman With a turn of his hand he changes love to gold and the Sepher to Sapphirs, for in him are two Breaths. What would become of the upperBreath if the Tabernacle of Edom had not the lower Breath to resist it? 15 Poet I see him, a marble idol on a golden plinth. In truth his legs go in opposite directions, one from back to front, the other from front to back, he pivots continually on himself. Woman If I did not see him as an idol I would not see him: if he did not modify Breath I would not hear him. But he speaks and arouses my desire. Such is my love, such is my Shepherd, daughters of the cities. VI 1 Poet Where has he gone, beautiful woman? You called him, visited him, and you have seen only an idol that turned love to gold. Answer my cry! What has become of Breath? 2 Psyche He has gone down into himself in the organic sphere. There he nourishes the human herd with pure sap and takes hold of two 27 Breaths that exist and live together. True, I dreamed an idol) but beyond that idol I recognized him. 3 Woman I have found unity again: the intemporal and thc temporal arc two Breaths in one. 4 Lover My dear one, you are as beautiful as the solution of a difficulty. Your life as lived creates Breath, like peace descending; and Breath creates you, an intense proliferation. 5 Let me sink in your stream of energy. You offer all that's possible, all the possibilities opened by your two resistances to life: your biological existence and your Breath breathing with mine. 6 Breath The female that underlies your femininity is like a flock of sheep, aaaa biological magma, unfertilized by me. Among the sheep, some will go back into primal substance, others into the evolutionary flow, being innocent and pure. 7 But you, pure like them, fertilized by me, safeguard indeterminancy, strong because you are the residue of successive forms. 8 Lover There are 60 queens: the female sex figure; there are 80 concubines: the figure of undeveloped substance. 9 But you are unique, in you is the ever virginal beginning. To me you are the ideal of a pure woman. 10 Poet What is this dark unearthly light? It is energy going down into the female and rising in the male. Between them is uncertainty 11 Psyche I am this uncertainty. Who am I in whom the two poles of life meet? I have sunk into my biological sphere to see if the Principle which bore me has endowed me with its rising sap 28 In the Father's vineyard I have seen Breath put under the ground, there meeting with its universal Tabernacle, its bounding through the whole Creation, its reburial, its setting- out again, and I knew that that very pulsation was the life of all nature. 12 In my dream I did not know it. I was still under the spell of those with worldly prestige. Vll 1 Poet Return, return, but to lived reality, you whose name chimes I have made you speak and with Peace. Return, return . . . your voice came now from one sphere, now another. It is time you came to earth, so that we could see you, and that Breath restores me to my exact self. Why did I see you like a hesitation between two Breaths? I want to sing my love: 2 Noble girl: how beautiful has been your evolution, as your looks show! The curves of your hips seem to torment themselves as if they wished to be independent even of what made them. 3 You rule over the borderline of the lunar crescent in its shrinking phase, you rule over the lunar energy which fills the bellies of women: you control births according to your wisdom. Your anger is that of Sarah face to face with the woman-slave Agar. 4 Your divinity is in you. It forms two free Emanations, from four Elements. 5 Your head is Fire. The Air, through your neck, nourishes the temporal part in your body made of Earth and Water. The length of your neck is a measure of Time. Your eyes flash with the essence of intemporal Fire. They give benediction. Your bright thought waits for the iron bars to open behind which are the rabbis. Your anger is as a great whiteness facing the spilt blood. 29 6 Earthly fire is activc in your fertile body. The fire of your thought transmutes the blood in a way unknown to kings 7 The blending of Breath and its vessel, how actively organic it is; blcnding in you, girl of delight! 8 You grow straight upwards as if your blood were transfigured, omnipotcnt as if thc Fire of Knowledgc burned in you. 9 I said to myself: "Rise to this high condition, take this two-fold fullness, that it may becomec Omnipotence for you, where all branches of knowledge meett. Let thc one of the beginning be as the many of the End." 10 My love, your desire is wine to me ... goes towards thc one I love. Its utter rightness makes words come from our sleeping lips. 11 1 am his. But his desire weighs upon me. 12 It depends on you, my love, whether our union can reconcile the contraries. 13 Come with me, let us go and see if the spring is yet here. I shall reveal the names of things as they are renewed, and you will learn who you are. 14 The flowers of earthly love give off their scent. Everything exquisite is at our doors. But my love for you is not in these aspects of Duration. VIII 1 Woman Who will teach you to be for me like a newborn brother not yet depraved by time? I would quench your thirst in the realms of Space and, moreover, do so as a free woman, 2 1 would unite your incessant bcginnings bcyond time with my inheritance through the generations. Living together, we would mingle these two streams ... 30 3 But his left hand brings me the Sacred Name while his right hand embraces me: one hand does not know what the other hand is doing. 4 By the living Seven, girls of false peace, why in your cities, in your fortified cities, do you well up love in a non-stop state of desire? 5 Voice Who is this woman who stands up in a place where there are no cities, in a desert quite different from the desert where Solomon lies in his palanquin? She is by herself, sustained by her only love. Woman Breath, through my love I woke you under the tree where pure juice rises, where your mother Earth kept you in holy sleep till I came. 6 Breath Let me be as a seal in the centre of your being, a seal on the arm of your doing. Love is powerful as death, absolute as the grave, excluding what is unreal. Its heat is that of the Fire, the Fire of the daughter of Yah. 7 Lover This love cannot be extinguished by water, even rivers of water could not put it out. A man who tried to get it with heaps of money would be met with contempt. 8 Woman Our sister, a woman-child not yet awakened by Breath, what will we do about her when she receives Breath? 9 Breath If she is only organic matter, she will be shut away in her desires. If she is responsive, circumstances will help me to shape her. 31 10 Woman I am organic matter, but I am all powerful and give answer to Breath. In this twofold existence, as far as concerns Breath, lies the origin of his Peace. 11 Among his other riches Solomon had a vine. He had its fruit pressed by country workers. Each gave a thousand coins for his share of the grapes. 12 My vine is organic Breath in my organic life. Yours, Solomon, the thousand coins, and two hundred coins for those who keep the fruit. 13 Breath Woman symbol of all life and you who listened to my call, hear me ... 14 Person He is gone! ... Go out, my love! Be like the Armies of Breath who transcend the Heavenly Hosts. 32 | |||||
| Carlo Suares, The Song of Songs, Shambhala, 1972 : Index |
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