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C H A P T E R S I X E nvisioning Eros : Poiesis and Heeding Silence They turned their spotlights on the eroticism of the word, but it was the eroticism of silence that dazzled. —Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins Erotogenic Semiotic As scholars have long noted, a salient feature of medieval kabbalah is the portrayal of religious experience in intensely charged erotic symbolism. Any attempt to separate the sexual and mystical threads in the tapestry of Jewish esotericism will prove to be futile.1 From the kabbalists’ vantage point, ecstatic experience—ek-stasis, standing out, which conveys metaphorically leaping to the ground in taking flight, turning inward by projecting outward2 —facilitates knowing the secrecy of secrecy, the doubling of secret as secret, the eros of mystery wrapped in the exposé of the mystery of eros. The specific qualities of erotic consciousness—a term that denotes both consciousness of eros and eros of consciousness—that may be elicited from kabbalistic teaching lends support to a more general insight: that matters pertaining to the spiritual have repeatedly been depicted in erotic images.3 Years ago, George Ryley Scott characterized the eros of what he considered the religious impulse: ‘‘Eroticism . . . and religion, are emotional concepts betraying parallels and correlations. The one may easily prove to be a safetyvalve for the other.’’4 Mircea Eliade offers another formulation of this theme when he describes the confluence—or, in his precise locution, ‘‘coincidence of opposites’’5 —of the sexual and spiritual: In addition, one mustn’t forget that sexuality, and especially sexual imagination and symbolics, have played a significant role throughout all of the spiritual history of humanity. I will give only one example of this, that of the ambiguity of sexual symbolism and vocabulary. All terms can be understood simultaneously in their concrete sense and in their spiritual, ‘‘mystical’’ sense. For certain Tantric schools, the PAGE 261  ................. 11059$ $CH6 12-21-04 14:30:50 PS L A N G U A G E , E R O S , B E I N G Sahajiya, among others, the vocabulary, which is both paradoxical and enigmatic, aims to surprise and shock the noninitiated. Extremely arduous exercises of yoga meditation are presented in erotic terms: ‘‘coupling with an outcast prostitute,’’ means in fact ‘‘a state of nirvanic joy’’ and ‘‘absolute liberty.’’ For the initiates, this confusion in terms, permanent and omnipresent, aims to hasten the passing from a profane condition. The coincidentia oppositorum succeeds, on all levels, in revealing that ultimate and mysterious reality that is as inaccessible to understanding as is religious faith. It is quite obvious that there are circumstances in which, taking into account the disciple’s level of preparation, the sexual techniques of yoga must be carried out concretely. Even in this case, the sexual experience finds itself in some way transfigured, and ceases to be of a uniquely physiological nature.6 I assume that some or perhaps many of the readers who may happen upon these pages would agree there is much with which to quibble in Eliade’s account of the Sahajiya sect.7 As I am no expert on Tantrism, I limit my reaction to the implication of his remarks for the understanding of religion more generally.8 The ‘‘ultimate and mysterious reality’’ that is inaccessible to human understanding, is a theme well known to those familiar with the thought of Eliade, his taxonomic description of religious experience as hierophany, the appearance of the sacred, an appearance that is concurrently an occlusion, the sacred other in the tremendum mysterion, revealed only to the extent it is concealed from the one to whom it is revealed as concealed and concealed as revealed. In the above passage, Eliade makes the point that it is especially in the realm of sexual behavior that the mystery unfolds in its enfolding. Surely, if truth is a coincidence of opposites—coincidence and not identification—then it would follow that the mystery’s re/veiling would conjure images of erotic yearning and that, inversely, fleshly thoughts of erotic yearning might convey—through gesture and word—the play of secrecy, duplicity, engendering possibility . In these merging vectors, wheel within wheel, one re/covers truth uncovered in the enfolding of noetic poiesis unfolding poetic noesis. As I argued at length in the previous chapter, in kabbalistic lore, fully articulated in Castilian authors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the somatic points beyond itself as sign, for the body, or, perhaps more accurately, bodiliness, is to...

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