Every expression of human spiritual life can be instinctually understood as a kind of symbol, and this understanding, in the manner of the ancient method and the method most recently discovered by our finest scientific minds, extinguishes all questions and all questioning. The symbol lies in eternal repose and so only elicits from man action insofar as his finite and temporal struggle will lead him to infinite repose, against which his worldly actions are nothing and come to nothing. As the symbol is whole and non-discursive, it is possible to talk about symbols only provisionally and with an eye to their finite dissolution into unity, but the existence of symbols is coextensive with the existence of absolutely everything and so some connotation of ancient balance lingers in all corruptible things as trace of what cannot be said or thought. There is nothing that is not a symbol of the ancient wisdom. Not only every mural, fresco, statue, painting, carving and book but also every toaster, turtle, and rock. This use of the word “symbol” is in no way metaphorical, for insofar as all things symbolize they communicate only the ebb and the flood of pre-original primordiality. That all is one is immediately intuitable at every point and in all things. The overflowing of the Eternal Feminine into the world and the return of the world to the origin is immediately present in all things and retained forever in them, subject only to the relative illusion that is the low tide of Being and which obscures balance and unity temporarily as power, materiality, masculinity, greed, interpretation and diversity. We live at the cosmic low tide and even now all things rush back into one, carried along by connotative chain toward their own identity. This is symbology as such, but within this incorruptible truth another thing is called “symbology” and manifests itself as the same drive in all stages of history, from its roots in the sages of the Orient to the alchemists of the Dark Ages to the physicists in their labs today.
As above, so below. The ancient teaching of symbology is the mirror image of that perfect and immobile symbology that is also the fountain of overflowing and return. Thus there is a superabundance of worldly symbology called the symbology of man that is the intuition of the world and the passage from worldly symbology to symbology as such. This worldly symbology consists in the cursory and expressive passing over of worldly things towards a docility that resembles the primary docility of the truth. As symbology as such takes away all questions and questioning the symbology of man gives obvious answers to unasked and unaskable questions through the superficially varied adumbration of what is already known. Every time the worldly symbologist turns his hand and eye to the disclosure of symbology in some speculative science or entertaining fiction, symbology irrupts with theory. What is theory? Toward what end this apparent entrance into the discursive field? This passage through the abyss is necessary in one sense since all things can be shown to be all things immediately and obviously, non-existent in another, for while the symbologist too must talk to his neighbor and buy his groceries he is also aware of the etymology of “theory.” The greek world for “theory” is θεωρία and does not mean theory at all but “vision” or, better, “intuition,” for it is the kind of vision that man receives when he looks at a painting of a familiar sunset or rural domestic scene. All worldly symbology is in the end the same and its appearance of superabundant variation in content and terminology hides a primary connotative identity: it is all the same in the end since it all leads to the same place. The mystical Zohar is understood side by side with marine biology, quantum mechanics, and Buddhism through the uncovering of certain core tenets of ancient wisdom. But to whom does the symbologist communicate?
Before this question can be eliminated, we must again inquire: How does the symbologist communicate himself? The answer is: badly. For the symbologist does not wish to give the impression that there lie in things any difference that makes a difference, but wishes to “communicate” the identity of all things before their origin, and so the symbologist puts in place of one term another and then switches them back and around again, each time moving from known to known through the casual association of term with term. Thus symbology communicates nothing definite in all its theoretical diversity, but in theorizing symbology the symbologist communicate nothing but the truth. That is to say, worldly symbology therefore communicates nothing but symbology itself. All symbology elicits a passage to itself that is no passage at all. Symbology is itself. Symbology is symbology.
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