0.12 Breaking paths of broken light: luminal darkness

image --> Complementary themes of retention and surrender, holding on by letting go, are evident in Wolfson’s paradoxical painting Luminal Darkness (2005), and in his poem “arrow&bow”:

broken vav,

unutterable,

too dense

to judge

subtle truth

like spider dance

on circumference

judgment stand

to disarm

to disown

alone

to break

arrow

by bending

bow

to take

hold

by letting

go

With its opening reference to the “broken vav”—a fractured version of the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet As Lawrence Kushner notes, the vav signifies “the sound of being joined. And vav is the sound of and. One and other.” See Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Letters: A Mystical Alef-Beit (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1990), p. 35. I am grateful to Gregory Kaplan for bringing this source to my attention. —the poem begins by conjuring a torn hinge, a broken joint, a snapped wishbone. Yet this fractured character creates a new letter in the unwritten language of flowering light. Upon doing so, Wolfson’s poetic imagery shifts to another form of language-making, a web spun from the gossamer footsteps of a spider, while the weaver stands alone at the edges of his own story. This simultaneously eccentric and concentric vantage point marks the solitary place of creation, just as this imagery signals a break with those who would break others. Following the fragmented path of these lyrical threads, viewers encounter the final image of the archer and bow, a figure whose actions create a release through an act of surrender. Arrow&Bow, Alef&Beit, A&B: the beginning that comes before, and after, the beginning. Like the bristles of a paintbrush and the threads of a canvas, the strings and feathers of the bow and arrow are instrumental tools of self-creation in a poem where patterns of language arise as webs of broken light.

At the heart of these interwoven yet fragmented strands lies a sense of “luminal darkness.” Wolfson’s scholarly writings offer important clues as to the significance of this cryptic phrase. When discussing the hermeneutics of light in medieval kabbalah, Wolfson has noted that sacred texts and contemplative practices are characterized by “the mystical articulation [that] is pushing beyond the limits of language to speak the ineffable: The light that is seen in the concealment of darkness is the word that is written by being erased.” Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hermeneutics of Light in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Matthew T. Kapstein, ed., The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 110. In this palimpsest, apophasis and kataphasis are, once again, intimately conjoined to form an aesthetics of the impossible that strives to express the inexpressible: a light so bright that it can only be seen as darkness, as luminal darkness.

This elusive imagery also calls to mind the early kabbalistic view of the oral Torah as a white fire written on black fire, and the written Torah as a black fire written on white fire. In the essay “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” Gershom Scholem cites the writings of Rabbi Isaac the Blind, who “interprets the fiery organism of the Torah, which burned before God in black fire on white fire, as follows: the white fire is the written Torah, in which the form of the letters is not yet explicit, for the form of the consonants and vowel points was first conferred by the power of black fire, which is the oral Torah. This black fire is like the ink on the parchment.” Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism , trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 49. On these themes, see also Scholem’s discussion in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” p. 295. For discussions of the gendered meanings ascribed to the written and oral Torahs, see Wolfson’s study Through A Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In a volume of essays notably entitled Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic Literature (2007), Wolfson translates and analyzes a related zoharic text. When engaging this imagery, he emphasizes the mutual containment and reintegration of seemingly oppositional elements into a single field of being in “the primordial Torah [that] was written as black fire upon white fire. ‘R. Isaac said: The Torah was given as black fire upon white fire in order to contain the right in the left, so that the left would be restored to the right , as it says, “From His right hand a fiery law unto them”…R. Abba said: The tablets were before their eyes, and the letters that were flying about were visible in two fires, white fire and black fire, to show that the right and left are one.’ The Torah ‘comes from the strength [the left] and is contained in the right.’” Elliot R. Wolfson, Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic Literature (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), p. 14.