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In the Jewish Mystical Tradition
- University of Illinois Press
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17 In the Jewish MysticalTradition In the Jewish mystical tradition, the body flying is also the body falling. So to skimp or savor just one person amounts to fortress and crypt, night sweats for the minor characters. But if the body stirs in several directions at once, if the human heaven’s more than a gasp and a shriek, we come back to the stirrup, the nurse cupping her hands for the all-at-once person, bloodied and self-absorbed. That’s the thrust of it, followed by washing your hands several times a day to get the blank off, finding the spoon veers away from the mouth, the door to her room’s slammed shut, the tongue making ala-ala-ala-ala sounds in high-pitched shrieks as if houses had been razed by bulldozers and lasers.You might bypass injunction, impasse, you might call up the elixir of a person, the hoarseness of her voice, brittle as enamel on the teapot. The devotion’s dumbfounding, shifting, forgetful, philanthropic: a slip billowing up, a wheeze in the surgeon’s waiting room. Ideally we like directness in a person: but what’s to shelter us from splintered and defective, infantile and helpless, the want want want that wells up and scatters 18 in the place where we’re broken, in the blank space where the industry of everyone means nothing? You can’t raise a person like a subject, you can’t erase her, can’t take her with you.You can’t forget the body shining. If not shining, raw and scrubbed clean. Let someone else pray for a miracle, get on his knees, be all briar and thorn: let them board the train, stack the wood, powder the face, the face of all that stillness. ...