on 06-Oct-2016 (Thu)

Writing is the anguish of the Hebraic ruah, 24 experienced in solitude by human responsibility; experienced by Jeremiah subjected to God’s dictation (“Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee”), or by Baruch transcribing Jeremiah’s dictation (Jeremiah 36:2,4)

or further, within the properly human moment of pneumatology, the science of pneuma, spiritus, or logos which was divided into three parts: the divine, the angelical and the human. It is the moment at which we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear.

And each existence continues to “express” the totality of the Universe. There is, therefore, no tragedy of the book. There is only one Book, and this same Book is distributed throughout all books.

In the Theodicy, Theodorus, who “had become able to confront the divine radiancy of the daughter of Jupiter,” is led by her to the “palace of the fates;” in this palace “Jupiter, having surveyed them before the beginning of the existing world, classified the possibilities into worlds, and chose the best of all. He comes sometimes to visit these places, to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him.” After being told all this by Pallas, Theodorus is led into a hall which “was a world.” “There was a great volume of writings in this hall: Theodorus could not refrain from asking what that meant. It is the history of this world which we are now visiting, the Goddess told him; it is the book of its fates. You have seen a number on the forehead of Sextus. Look in this book for the place which it indicates. Theodorus looked for it, and found there the history of Sextus in a form more ample than the outline he had seen. Put your finger on any line you please, Pallas said to him, and you will see represented actually in all its detail that which the line broadly indicates. He obeyed, and he saw

To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no other dwelling place, does not await us as prescription in some topos ouranios, or some divine understanding. Meaning must await being said or writ- ten in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning.

In a fragment of a book he intended to devote to The Origin of Truth, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Communication in literature is not the simple appeal on the part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori of the mind; rather, communication arouses these meanings in the mind through enticement and a kind of oblique action. The writer’s thought does not control his language from with- out; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself.” 31 “My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think,” 32 he said elsewhere

There is thus no insurance against the risk of writing. Writing is an initial and graceless recourse for the writer, even if he is not an atheist but, rather, a writer. Did Saint John Chrysostom speak of the writer? “It were indeed meet for us not at all to require the aid of the written Word, but to exhibit a life so pure, that the grace of the spirit should be instead of books to our souls, and that as these are inscribed with ink, even so should our hearts be with the Spirit. But, since we have utterly put away from us

To create is to reveal, says Rousset, who does not turn his back on classical criticism. He comprehends it, rather, and enters into dialogue with it: “Prerequisite secret and unmasking of this secret by the work: a reconciliation of ancient and modern aesthet-ics can be observed, in a certain way, in the possible correspondence of
the preexisting secret to the Idea of the Renaissance thinkers stripped of
all Neo-Platonism.”

Structure is then the unity of a form and a meaning.