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CHAPTER EIGHT Symbols and the Search for Unity . . . for all the things [that is, the Sefirot], and all the attributes, which seem as if they are separate, are not separate [at all] since all [of them] are one, as the[ir] beginning is, which unites everything “in one word.” —Commentaries of the Sefer Yezirah To fix our ideas suppose players playing with dice . . . —Charles Sanders Peirce, “Design and Chance” Don Alejandro once aspired to be a deputy, but the political bosses closed the doors of the Uruguayan Congress to him. The man got irritated and resolved to found another Congress of much more vast reach. [. . .] Don Alejandro conceived the idea of organizing a Congress of the world that would represent all people of all nations. —Borges, “El Congreso” For some years now it has seemed of interest to me to invoke the genies of place. Close to Hollywood, Los Angeles,1 it would have been opportune to speak of the angels to whom today’s reflection2 and imagination3 have dedicated so much recurrent attention. I do not know if it was satellite networks or the ubiquitous messages of an explosive mediatic communication or the readings of Walter Benjamin or the angelic proliferation of Paul Klee, or if it was, above all, cinema that gave birth to this new advent of angels, but I would dare to conjecture that any one of these reasons, tightly related to one another, is not alien to it. It is hard not to notice the bibliographical, cinematographic frequency , the notable works in which angels abound and, if perhaps few 93 today would wonder if “ten thousand of them could dance on a needle’s point” or “why are they not more interesting than the bewildering varieties of insects which naturalists study,”4 what is of interest is their status of intermediation between two worlds, the transmission of messages in silence that is attributed to them, their movement between the visible and the invisible, the announcement that bears witness to other realms, their constant fugacity that is also permanence. The ambivalencies of the angelicological condition turn out to be generally valid for attending to certain aspects of cinematographic language and the properties of the word in the electronic image. Said or written, mute or in movement, the word is seen. Silence and voice, word and thought, coincide in a single vision, a disquieting move that erases the frontiers between seeing and dreaming, saying and thinking, saying and desiring, showing and telling; all at once. The word put into an image synthesizes differences, crosses limits: the eye that sees, hears; the image in movement contracts voices and figures ; in film, showing and saying do not require each other like opposite or rival actions. The animation of film that is emotion and movement, motivates the word (le mot, in French, says it all). Everything is in view. The image shows and says, shows what it says, concurs to realize the miracle of the gaze (mirada), an elegy of the gaze, ad miration. One sees, one hears, one reads, one looks, everything is seen and there is nothing behind or outside of this vision. What would bishop Berkeley have argued faced with that impression of the senses? For him these too would be “truths so clear that to see them it is enough to open our eyes.”5 In an Augenblick the correspondences that angels establish also allow us to glimpse an instant of eternity. Film breathes this neo-angelic air that brings to light another vaste clarté, as if the stars of a seventh heaven vaguely illuminated the seventh art that, in the meantime, turns the image into time. Beyond the figures animated by light and movement, film diffused new hybrids of verbal and visual images, promoted different aesthetic tensions enabling vision, registering, as of not so long ago, the metamorphoses of the written words that transformed into things that represent, magisterial images demonstrating the magic of a movement, a prestidigitation that the nature of language did not know. Suddenly the image is no longer the illustration of diction but rather goes on to be the impossible vision of its idea. It is in film that where the apparition of the “invisible man” was not unusual, nor ghosts unheard of. Similar to the evangelic annunciation of gestation, a new gesture of deixis announces another language of angels. A communication by way of messengers who also engage themselves in a rite of passage, require passwords to slip around borders...

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