A kind of Pythagorean terror.

In the last entry of her diary Virginia Woolf wrote:

"Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls."

Four days later she walked into the River Ouse, her pockets full of stones, convinced that her work, her life, and her relationship with her sister Vanessa were irreparable failures. She believed she was again slipping away into the mental illness that had recurred throughout her life, and that she no longer had the strength to recover. She had saved herself several times already, it could be argued, and had been saved more often by the interventions of her husband, friends and family, and there is no telling why this time was different; maybe it was the threat of the German invasion of England, a very real threat in 1941, with serious implications for her own and her husband's well-being. She had completed the first revision of her last novel, Between the Acts, and at some point just after its completion she'd decided that the book was fundamentally flawed, and couldn't be fixed; she felt herself unable to write at all, telling her general practitioner, "I've lost all power over words, can't do a thing with them.", and maybe it was this loss of ability in the medium that had defined her life and brought her some feeling of independent success that she couldn't endure. She had begun to hear voices, she was sure she would become a burdensome invalid, and she must have thought she was doing what was best for everyone around her. The final letter she received from her sister might have convinced her this was so; this sister, her closest friend and ally, and at the same time her partner in a lifelong intellectual and emotional rivalry, writing to her that she must pull herself together in a time of great hardship for the whole country, and that she musn't create more worry to add to it.

She thanked her sister for this letter in the suicide note she left propped on her writing desk, and then she took a walk. And I haven't written this to praise, explain, or elegize what she did--it happens all the time, a person holding themselves up to the light and deciding that they can't cut something precious from the mess of inclusions they find, a ringing silence thickening the air to a bloodless, icy fist in which they're trapped. In a different context, earlier in her life, she had written, "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." The last hope of many, as it appeared to be hers, is to slip the bonds of the one life that feels so flawed from its very beginning and take on another, full in all the ways ours is found wanting, infinitely superior in its accomplishments and promise from the vantage-point of our own cramped, drafty corner. Virginia Woolf seemed to wish for this, appraising herself always in the light cast by her sister, whom she revered as a bountiful earth-mother, by her contemporaries in art and society, and by her predecessors.

We all do this. And if we do it enough these other lives crowd our own out of the picture entirely. We formulate a theory of the beautiful and worthy life using the examples laid out by others, and if we can't make an elegant proof of our own result from it, there is the fear that a life's work is lost. We're constantly running up against parts of ourselves that don't fit our view of what we should be, what we could have been, and the impossibility of reconciling the theory with the facts is often insupportable. This is the "Pythagorean terror" of Beckett's Three Dialogues; like Pythagoras, whose entire system of intellectual and spiritual belief was jeopardized by the discovery of irrational numbers, like Virginia Woolf, who said, "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order" and couldn't support the loss of that ordering power, we can find ourselves left hollowed out and breathless as the foundations we've constructed are blown away.

I don't know the remedy for this, if there is one. I'm just as suceptible to this kind of terror as anyone else, and I've felt the products of my life, myself among them, to be a pale reflection of the creations of others who came before and did it better, and always not what they should have been. Even as I write this I feel it, and I'm reminded of so many others I know who are feeling it, and the killing punishments we dole out to ourselves, the mountains of work we've destroyed.

I'd like to find a way out of that corner where the light doesn't reach and we're "shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to." Maybe feeling around within that blindness for the outlines of a life where we can at least express that terror, understanding that there is little perfection to be found in any theory, is the best we can do.

The union forever.

So often we are not at all what we thought we would be, are not, in fact, what we think we are. The problem seems to be one of twos; there is the self, and there is the projection of that self, almost always lost in translation, in the same way poets speak of never quite writing the poem they have in mind. There is what we can only understand as the self, which is a falsehood from the moment we recognize it because recognition requires us to separate from, and think of as other, whatever it is we're recognizing. There is something beyond that self, we can comprehend that with little effort, but there again is another divide, and all these splits and dualities build up in layers around us until they are absolutely opaque.

I'm quite sure even talking about it is a mistake. So often all we do is talk, and this particular subject is not a novel one. Language itself contributes to the problem, as Aldous Huxley tells us when he says, "To formulate and express the contents of the reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages." It's nothing but a code that we've invented and don't, ourselves, understand. Some can find a way to work within its constraints, wrapping themselves in those layers in order to make a daring escape, using a heap of language as a fulcrum to achieve a momentary lift.



This is one way, and it's as ambitious and elegant a use of the tools and weapons we have as any other, but it doesn't go far enough. Maybe a better way to at least begin to formulate an idea of how the divide came to be is to think a bit smaller. We can think of a letter, and a few numbers.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There is some debate whether Aleph should be assigned to the number one or zero; it comes first, after all, but is last in presenting itself before God in the creation myth recounted in the Zohar. God chooses Bet, the second letter, to begin the Torah with, and Aleph is kept as the first letter, but with an important difference from the rest; it has no sound of its own---more properly it's the letter before sound, the preparation for sound, an inbreathing. For this reason it seems more logical to connect it with zero, which is the nullity that exists before we begin to count, the potential ability to define the size and shape of the palpable world.

Aleph is attributed to the element of Air, the breath and lungs in man, and the mind or thoughts of God. It's also associated with Kether, the first Sephiroth, in Kabbalah; this is the primal nothingness, the beginning of all that is, the void which may be glimpsed in the gaps of existence. It encompasses the beginning and end, and is present in all that unfolds in between. It's both part and whole, minimum and maximum, the source and completion, singular and myriad. This is all, of course, quite beyond the boundary of perception. It's at best unknowable, and usually unspeakable. To know it is to be distinct and separate from it, which is exactly the problem we're trying to solve when we think of it.

So zero is already perfect, in a state of unity with itself and the universe and the nothingness behind the universe, but since it is itself perfection and not separate from that perfection, it doesn't know that. Being the center itself, it can't know that it is the center. Potential wishes to realize itself, and seeds, by their nature, grow; we all have a desire to see our own reflection, become a being of matter. This is the beginning of consciousness, and this is how the break happens. The circle divides itself in half along a perfect line, and we have one. With it is born two--each number has in itself the next one, and every step can be traced back to the first one. When the circle splits, one (the fracture) and two (the halves) are born together.

One, and oneness, are an illusion, because oneness is not unity, it's the fracture, zero was the whole being. One lies between two severed halves, both uniting and separating them, as thin and unreal as a shadow, but still there. Nothing really keeps them apart, other than illusion. The veil of Maya, the ego which is another manifestation of one, whatever you want to call it, maintains the delusion of separation, keeps it in place, giving it the solidity of a concrete wall and strengthening it with the fear that is born of an ego that will do anything to maintain itself.

Two is, simply, duality, opposition, us and them, the always inscrutable Other. Zero was looking to know itself, but didn't realize that by breaking away from itself to look at its own face, it created the divide. Crowley came up with some bogus math telling us that 0=2, and this is valid, but I think what has to be done is to work in the opposite direction. The point isn't to go forward to two, but backward to zero--the journey isn't so much one of discovery, as it is one of recollection.

When we're caught in the illusion of two, we're stuck on the outside. Energy dissipates through the fracture. The self is a construct, built of stereotypes and imitation, it's literally the second-hand life. What is needed is a reversal, we need to go back to the unknowable and unspeakable, or so it appears to us from our side of the split. If we can go through that concrete wall that seems so solid, if what we see and hear stops being merely its corporeal self, it becomes a door to what can't be said. It is changed, and we are changed with it. The ego isn't judging, and putting things into their little boxes. When we are forced out of the rut, off the tracks, we can get a glimpse of the truth behind the surfaces. We're all stuck on the wheel, and maybe the idea is to turn the wheel backwards. And open the door, behind which waits the Aleph.

All of this is nothing more than a raft of symbols, which is not to say it's completely useless. The word "symbol" derives from the Greek symbolon, literally "to throw together". A symbolon was a piece of wood or porcelain that would be broken in two pieces, then held by two individuals that were about to be separated for a long time, and would eventually need something to recognize each other when reunited. A symbol is, therefore, a way of recognition, and the sign of a broken but repairable unity. Symbols give us the hope that reunion is possible.

All of this is nothing more than ornament, a fancy escutcheon around a keyhole we press an ear or an eye to. Where is the master key? If I find it, I'll let you know.

resurrected and revised. sometimes old emails are useful.