Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 09:47:43 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Man Against Time


I'm reading a kabbalistically minded Dutch novelist named Harry 
Mulisch.  The novel is called THE PROCEDURE and it is, among other 
things, a meditation on one of the strangest, most esoteric of 
kabbalistic texts, the Sefer Yetsirah, (Book of Creation). Written 
around the 3rd Century, it reads (insofar as it is "readable') as a 
sort of code book of God's creation of the world by means of the 
word.  But the code is not so much the words as it is the letters 
(Otioth, in Hebrew), and the numerical permutations and combinations 
based mainly on the numerical equivalents of the 21 letters of the 
Hebrew alphabet.

In case you were wondering, it turns out that the world had to have 
been created in Hebrew because it is the mathematical infrastructure 
of the words God used to create the world that gave the words their 
power.  This particular text ( and a text the world definitely is at 
this level of kabbalistic understanding) is a perfect text, 
untranslatable. ( Even God's name as it appears in the Torah is a 
deficient form of the original.)  The letters in God's originating 
creative words correspond to the only possible geometric 
relationships by which the universe holds together.  ( The anonymous 
author of the Sefer Yetsirah was among other things a neo-Pythagorian.

Anyway, the reason I bring all this to your attention is because of 
the connections Mulisch spins out between the creation of the world 
according to the Sefer Yetsirah and the pyramids.  He begins with the 
observation that no one is interested in the "mystery of the Rock of 
Gibralter" even though it is much larger and much older than the 
pyramids, Stonehenge etc.  " The Rock of Gibralter is not mysterious 
because it is not the work of human beings."  Then, as he begins to 
wonder whether that is in fact the essential difference, he turns to 
the pyramids and Hegel's calling them " Colossal crystals. . ." . . 
.the top halves of octahedrons, regular eight-sided figures, the 
bottom half of which you can imagine in the desert sand where it 
point down to the center of the earth."

It is the shape of form that trumps time, no matter who does the 
shaping!  As he went on about the pyramids, I thought of Heidegger's 
notion of authentic historicity:

Im zukuenftigsein ist das Dasein seine Vergangeneheit; es kommt 
darauf zurueck im Wie.. . . Nur das Wie ist wiederholbar. 
Verganangenheit-- als eigentliche Geschichtlichkeit erfahren--ist 
alles andere denn das Vorbei.  Sie ist etwas, worauf ich immer wieder 
zurueckkommen kann.

In being futural Dasein is its past; it comes back to it in the how. 
. . Only the 'how 'can be repeated.  the past--experienced as 
authentic historicity--is anything but what is past.  It is something 
to which i can return again and again.

It's the capacity of the "how" to be repeated that sets time on its 
heels.  Such  created forms in texts, in structures,  persist through 
time in way that makes of time almost an irrelevancy.  I touch 
certain words, certain stones ( as they touch me) and I find myself 
at the . . . But here Mulisch takes over:

Man fears time, goes an Arabic saying, but time fears the pyramids, 
you can see how time has bitten its nails to pieces about the sole 
remaining wonder of the world.  As I looked at it, I really had the 
feeling that I was looking with my naked eye at the atoms of a 
crystal.  With a deep sigh--as if I'd finally achieved something 
really important--I put both my hands on one of those cubic yard 
blocks, warm from the sun which had been shining day after day for 
thousands of years and looked up.  The awesome mass of stone stood 
out golden brown against the blue sky; it emanated such weight that 
it surprised me the pyramid hadn't long since sunk beneath the 
surface of the earth and plunged into the magma. . ."

So Heidegger on the words of Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Allen
-- 
  Allen Scult					Dept. of Philosophy
HOMEPAGE: " Heidegger on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics":	Drake University
http://www.multimedia2.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html	Des Moines, Iowa 50311
PHONE: 515 271 2869
FAX: 515 271 3826


     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---