Alphabets of Creation
Peter Cole
Z is for the aim that gives us an origin. Again and again. In again that lets the light get in, as though through a window, or along a wind, into the circles of splendor’s transmission, the great Zero the poet gropes toward, or hopes for, “at the bone,” says one, that nothing giving rise to everything, and the brightness of the Hebrew book that conjures it all with its name—Zohar, the Book of Splendor, of Radiance:
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold itself but pours its abundance without selection into every nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
writes A. R. Ammons, in his poem “City Limits,”
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them, not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
all that, and more, says Ammons,
[ . . . } then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
“The breadth of such,” with and without that “d.” Of such “high testimony” is Ammons’s “radiance”—the “dark work” deep within heard as “of a tune” with what’s without—“the heart . . . roomier.” And so it is, or might be, in that central, decentering, inspired and often maddening 13th-century Scripture-like text, or set of texts, the Zohar, The Book of Radiance, long kept out of sight at the heart of the Jewish mystical tradition, or Kabbalah, a term that means, literally, something received, which is to say, passed on, transmitted. A tradition. In this case, a library and a forgery. A fiction of framing, in revelation’s name.
A highly eccentric exegesis that, in a way, undermines its source, this Book of Brightness, or maybe the brightness itself, leads us back, through hidden layers of Scripture (which the Zohar suggests conceals as much or more than it reveals). But the Brightness also leads us on, through the future of further interpretation. Hence the book’s manic detonations and reaching through reading, its hyper-extension of content through comment. Hence its endless running along seams, its being always between. And whence the tale that gives us our title, from the book’s gloss on the Story of Creation: “Some two thousand years before the Beginning, prior to the first poesis, the great making, the Holy One Blessed be He gazed at the letters he’d hidden away, and he played with them.” [Zohar I:2b]1
And then, the rabbis of other ages tell us, between the lines of the Zohar’s tale, “the twenty-two letters of the aleph-bet descended from the crown of God, on which they had been engraved with a pen of flaming fire.”2
It’s an opening that continues to open, to expand through magical dimensions and linguistic permutations, echoing letter- besotted text after text, starting with the Talmud, where we hear of Bezalel, maker of the Mishkan, the Desert Sanctuary or Place of Presence, knowing “how to combine the letters by which the heaven and the earth were created.”3 The inkiest of origins are reported:
“And the earth was void and without form” (Gen 1:2): . . . dregs of ink clinging to the point of a pen— . . . and the world was graven with forty-two letters . . . When they’re combined, letters ascend and let- ters descend, forming crowns for themselves in the four corners of the world, which comes to exist through them, and they through it. [Zohar I: 30a]
Which is why we might see the letter itself—Z—as parallel planes of being, linked by an I inclined just so, even of a certain mind, bowled and nearly knocked over by what it receives, as it channels—like a filament—a current and currency between the two planes, hoping to tell the truth, “but . . . slant,” as it tries to link what’s above and below.
But back to our brightness: What do these letters at the beginning of creation do in the Zohar? Before a power beyond depiction, one that transcends representation, in a primary scene of presentation, they . . .
Yearn, earn, with a “Y.” As though asking, “Why?” Standing there on the line of the page as though with arms opened wide to the sky, to the lines and letters or white space on high. Like a tuning fork, waiting to gather and give off sound (which, say the Vedas, gives rise to the universe and through which all of creation runs).
Why do the letters yearn? One by one, last to first, tav through aleph in the Zohar’s story, they yearn to be given the privilege of having creation begin through them. In the end—and this matters for poetry, matters for the matter and material of poetry—the second letter, bet, holds sway, even over the initial aleph, the unvoiced glottal stop from which the other letters emerge in this (and not only this) version of the world’s story. In this mystical beginning of signification, of significance, the privilege of primary mediation is given not to that ironized, talismanic Borgesian aleph (א( in the basement beneath the home of our being in the world, that lurking of infinite possibility of perception and perspective, that silence into which all might fall or remain, but to the humbler bilabial second letter, bet (ב), which on its own means “ in” or “at,” and which makes the sign for “house” and “home,” closed on three sides and open on one, and out of which opening the world comes forth, first by a shutting, a bringing together of two lips, and then by their parting—beh: “bereshit bara,” “In the beginning of creating,” Genesis says.
Creation, in both the Zohar and the much earlier Otiyyot or Letters of R. Akiba, commences with a “bet,” a wager on sound and substance, also because it gives us the word for blessing—berakha. Origin, firstness, begins with the sign for what’s second, for things in relation, for two-ness, with a letter formed by a kind of kiss. The blessing of givenness.
Not, then, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, the Message, but in the beginning was the letter and its sound, the desire to build and the blocks to build with. “Twenty-two letters to start with,” says the sui generis Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation. And at least from late antiquity, or the early medieval period on—though according to the book itself, as far back as Abraham— initiates have known how, taking the twenty-two Hebrew letters, “the Lord, Yah engraved, quarried, and weighed, / exchanged and combined— / and with them formed all of creation / and all that He was destined to fashion”—
Twenty-two letters
carved through voice,
quarried in air,
and fixed in the mouth
in five positions:
certain sounds in the throat,
certain sounds on the lips,
certain sounds against the palate,
and certain sounds against the teeth,
and others along the tongue.
Twenty-two letters fixed
in a wheel like a wall
with two hundred and thirty-one doors.
The wheel whirrs back and forth…4
It whirrs with desire, not to get beyond language, but to enter into it far more fully, through a choreography of the mouth— danced, as the passage’s continuation has it, by twenty-two “figures of longing, in a single body bound.”
X is a variable in that longing, in all aspiration. It’s for exasperation, or the aspirant herself X-ed out in pursuit. Or maybe our X is simply two conflicting impulses—paths or words or swords crossing, two ways of knowing at a critical junction, interacting, then heading out in different directions.
The mystic seeks. The poet makes. The mystic wants to know, to experience a radiance that comes with a name, and then, in time, to account for it, to explain and map it by removing motion and change. The poet refuses what Wallace Stevens calls “the rotted names.” He wants to sound the radiance, to produce it by continuously naming anew or renewing the naming, if only through deflected reflection. She doesn’t explain. Or explains oddly. “Poetry,” says Gertrude Stein, in “Poetry and Grammar,”
is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun…Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is.
“A rose,” she goes on, “ is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
The mystic’s mouth or eyes are, etymologically, closed; the poet wants them open, along with the ears. Poetry and mysticism meet on axes of our algebra’s X.
“Parables…conceal and hide secrets from the rude and vulgar sort…[and] sweetly lead the mind of the true searcher into the depth of wisdom’s council,” writes the 18th-century German mystic Jacob Boehme, “to let you know the inward power and property by the outward sign.” Which also accounts for the action of poetry. But often the mystic goes further and freezes with his system, or greases and teases with endless slippage. So the chorus of literary skeptics grows. Of Boehme Samuel Johnson seems to have said: “If Jacob saw the unutterable, Jacob should not have attempted to utter it.” And from within German itself, Goethe drily observes: “Mysticism: immature poetry, immature philosophy.”
But then,
Wisdom wafts in on W’s wind, or wells up in its wake. Wisdom, which, in the normative Judaic vision, is there with God and, some commentators say, with Scripture itself, “at the beginning of His course. / As the first of His works of old…….. / In the distant past……. / At the beginning, at the origin of earth” (Prov 8:22).
“Lift up your eyes on high,” Isaiah exhorts us, through a translation by Robert Lowth, author of the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, which sees in Scripture the Hebraic Homer and banner- bearer of the Judaic Sublime: “Lift up your eyes on high / And see: Who created these?” he asks (40:26), referring to creatures on earth and the “skies spread out like gauze.” How do we account for, or do justice to, what’s granted but not to be taken for granted, is the question Isaiah and so much Scripture and rabbinic thought asks, and George Oppen modestly echoes in his twentieth-century
Psalm
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there! […]
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.
W, then, is also for those strange “woods” that yield such a sight and light, and lightness of touch, and for the spread “wings” of the poem that takes us to them, often in an innocence. But W is also for the wit of experience, opening and closing like an angel’s wings, cutting the air, possibly like prayer:
Maybe an angel’s confused with an angle
so often because the slip lays bare
something these envoys are trying to tell us—
that what we’re missing is already there.5
“Magia and Cabala,” says Boehme, in his Three Principles of the Divine Essence,
are accounted the most mystical [of the several parts of Wisdom]; the magia consisting in the knowing how things came to be; and the Cabala, in knowing how the words and forms of Things express the Reality of the inward mysteries.”
“For it is opened unto me,” he said in Epistle 15, “ in some measure to sound out the spirits of the letters from their very original.” Which already betrays an ambiguous impatience with the letter itself, with language, with learning and the lamp, and posits a notion of purity beyond them (or before them), an impatience which becomes explicit in other Epistles. “It is the greatest and most toilsome misery of mankind,” he writes in Epistles 6 and 12,
that they run, and seek altogether in blindness, and begin to seek the shell in the bare letter, and its expression . . . [whereas] the Creator is known in and by the Creation”; . . . ”for the Pearl lieth not in the letter.”
V, then, is for what we value and don’t, in poems and in life, in the life of poems. (And in libraries—what do we need? What will we weed? What should be always at hand? . . .) It’s for the vitality in a vocabulary, through learning that sheds real light on life and doesn’t just stink of the burning lamplight. It’s for the palpable movement that the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem said Kabbalah, and, really, all mysticism, is about—a pursuit of “something more . . . something else vibrating” within our trying to reach one another in speech. When it comes to the music and focus of poetry, that “something else vibrating” yields a vision that moves us beyond the eye and into the ear and its tiny drum—to a place where, as Exodus 20:18 has it, at the foot of Sinai (in certain translations), “The people saw the sounds.”
“Through you will the blessing be brought to Israel,” sang the Sabbatean crypto-Jews of 17th-century Salonika—outwardly Muslims and at home something wholly of their own:
Through you will the blessing be brought to Israel—
through the secret of the Valley of Ishmael,
for the redeemer has come to restore
through the secret of the Valley of Ishmael. [. . .]
These things are seen as though through a Veil,
and they are most abstruse as well,
but in them I have found the real
through the secret of the Valley of Ishmael.6
V, then, is for that veil and valley of vibration-registered, on the ear and along the skin (Ishmael meaning “God will hear,” or maybe “be heard”). It’s part of the Y that funnels the vibrating sound into the underground “I,” which acts as its anchor and foundation.
Historically, V has also stood for
U—and now for you, whoever you are, as Whitman says, “walking the walk of dreams / . . . I place my hands upon you / that you be my poem.” And so in a very different way does Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, in his 18th-century Hasidic Yiddish “Song of You”:
Lord of the World.
Lord of the World.
Lord of the World,
I’ll sing You a little Song of You.
You-You-You
Where will I find You?
And where won’t I find You?
So – here I go – You,
and – there I go – You,
always You, however You,
only You, and ever You.
You-You-You, You-You . . .
The heavens – You. Earth – You.
On high – You, and below . . .
In every direction, and every inflection.
Still You. However You. Only You. Ever You.
You — You — You7
Which is to say, U is for us (since U didn’t used to be at all), and for what is at once both veiled and unveiled, available and valent, but only in its being embodied, clothed in sound or letters, speech and form, only in its being charged within the particulars of song. “U” is the “V” of a veil understood, value put to use.
There is no kernel without a shell,” a classic commentary to our commentary tells us,8 discussing the place of translation in the public reading of Scripture, and the inevitable and indispensable veiling transmission entails: “A single voice is needed, and a single translator,” says the Zohar to Sinai’s scene of instruction, “and this is the mystery of the shell and the kernel: this world and the world that is coming.”9 Which is to say, one reader should read in the Holy Tongue, then another should read a version in the vernacular. Why? Because, explains a scholiast, “the divine lights can be revealed in this physical world only through grosser form, which is like a shell around a kernel.”10 In this paradoxical dynamic, translation of Scripture in no way diminishes the power coursing through the circuitry on high. On the contrary, through this translation the flow between worlds is enhanced.
“O God,” says the wobbly and fraying Hamlet, in the epigraph to Borges’s story “The Aleph,” and perhaps riding a ripple of the ancient Hermetic Corpus—”I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space.” And that same dynamic pulses through Spanish Kabbalah, and finds expression in a motto-like 14th-century Hebrew poem by Yosef Gikitilla, author of The Nut Garden, a book about the secrets and nourishment that words hold as anagrams, acrostics, and numerological encodings:
The Nut Garden holds things felt and thought,
and feeling for thought is always a palace—
Sinai with flames of fire about it,
burning though never by fire devoured.
On all four sides surrounded so,
entrance is barred to pretenders forever.
For one who learns to be wise, however,
its doors are open toward the East:
he reaches out and takes a nut,
then cracks its shell, and eats….11
T while we’re at it is also for Thoth, ancient Egypt’s inventor of writing, guardian of script and heart, Thoth of the double-t’d palette and ink-jar, who reaches us from The Book of the Dead, also a library (framed as a canon, as the Bible is, and, again, the Zohar). Thoth is there with “What comes forth by day”—the divine intelligence uttering words that bring on the world. In spells that spell out his power, he’s a weigher of words, who sets the heart against a feather of Right and Truth.12
Such a tender poise, our T is, a precarious balance of aspirations outward and upward, downward and in—like the sound they make when they touch.
How is it done?
“Only by
Sucking, not by knowing, can the subtle essence be conveyed”— writes the Provençal Kabbalist Isaac the Blind in his 13th- century commentary to Sefer Yetzirah, that Book of Creation. So one goes to the woods—to Oppen’s forest of small nouns, to Thoreau’s words from the woods, on paper which once was wood, “to live deep and suck out the marrow of life.” To make that subtle essence run through, to make it nourish the lines of poems. So that words conducting that life-lived-deeply reverberate throughout the body, along the limbs and down through the back of the head and neck, the collarbone and sternum, into the pit of the stomach and even down through the loins, the genitals, the knees and toes, carried by breath, the shifting shapes and relations kept up between the tongue and mouth and lips and teeth—what’s within and what’s without:
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy
on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng;
writes Gerard Manley Hopkins, symphonically—though the other end of the scale, or its quiet middle—can work just as powerfully, as Lorine Niedecker in Racine, Wisconsin, shows:
Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham:
pay particular attention
to my pets, the grasses.13
So S swerves in its searching, snaking its way through syntax. It’s a sign that changes its mind, more than once, that follows out a line of thought, and risks winding up where it started, Infinity halved and stood on its head. It stands for silence, but isn’t, as silence sounds the glory of words in order to
. . . ride the chariot’s wheels
and explore in the world,
to bask in the blessing
of the Crown . . .
to utter praises
and link letters
to utter names
and behold what is
above and below,
to know the meaning
of the living
and see the vision
of the dead.
To ford rivers of fire
and know lighting.14
. . . thus one of the hymns composed to help writers and readers “go down to the Chariot,” as the literature has it, to the Merkavah, the vehicle of composition (harkavah), possibly to the chambers of the heart, in order to rise on words and ride them.
So that’s the first thing
R is for—that riding writing is, as it’s also for that same radiance we’ve been circling, conjuring, invoking. That lightning of the chariot’s race, the vehicle of composition, its poem—its gift of attention comprising letters, all those kernels and shells.
R is the P of Poetry putting its best foot forward, bracing itself for that influx of light. Refusing—refusing both the standard fare and quietude, but happily entering into the queerness of, say, a
Q, which is quirky no matter how you cut it, quark-like, even, its tail a snail-like trace or trail, ground to the All-or- Nothing it touches, in theory.
P is for the poet’s particular, as one way of doing it. “One needs a bridge into the particular, the subjective,” James Merrill writes in his journal on January 29, 1976, age 50, and often he finds it in the objective, out there.
“Labor well the Minute Particulars,” Blake adjures us in his “Jerusalem.” Something Kenneth Rexroth does in his poem inspired by Boehme:
Stretched bathing in the sun, I lie
Reading beside the waterfall—
Boehme’s Signature of All Things.
Through the deep July day the leaves
Of the laurel, all the colors
Of gold, spin down through the moving
Deep laurel shade all day. They float
On the mirrored sky and forest
For a while, and then, still slowly
Spinning, sink through the crystal deep
Of the pool to its leaf gold floor . . .
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air.15
P is a pennant in that air, or a prayer wheel. Whirring and turning like Sefer Yetzirah’s with its scores of doors constructed of letters, or these particular permutations in Merrill’s marvelous “Farewell Performance,” where he shows us how
in three lucky strokes of word golf LEAD
Once again turns (LOAD, GOAD) to GOLD.
O all those O’s. For an opennness? A oneness? An origin or oracle? For ornament as equipment and embellishment, as cosmetic that conjures order? O is an opened mouth or an eye, an anus even, or a nostril. It’s the exact middle of “j O y”—and doubly so of “s O r r O w”.
N holds “Now and theN” within it, and also “Never agaiN.” As bookends, though N isn’t for the end. It’s closer to the middle (and M). It might be for Novalis, or an old sort of newness, the novelty of the old made new, again and again: “Language is Delphi,” Novalis writes, meaning, what exactly? That what we need to know is latent, steaming at the heart of our hills, along the veins of the ore of where we are or might be, calling . . . waiting for translation?
And of course in this context N is for absolutely Nothing. The generative Nothing around which kabbalists swarm, like bees at a hive, or a source of what will become honey.
Though in the poet’s book, it should also be for normal—the normal mysticism of ordinary words arranged in rows and made to glow.
M is for too many things. For the Many in tension with the One. And for those upper-case peaks and valleys, those lower-case rolling hills and folds (of our Delphi?). “’Tis the use of [a] life to learn metonymy,” said Emerson, under the eaves of our cosmic M, by which he means, linkage, analogy.
M is also, as we’ve seen, for more, that “something more” Kabbalah is, as Scholem says, but here it’s mostly for Henry More, a refreshingly skeptical and God-as-Reason-fearing Cambridge Platonist who goes back in his Conjectura Cabbalistica to what he believed to be the esoteric revelation granted to Moses (who is, he writes, nothing but Christ still-veiled). As More conceives it, the hidden tradition of Cabbala (with a C, as though for Christian) carries those who are “born of the Spirit, and not mere sons of the Letter” into the “ inward and mysterious meaning of the Text.” Never mind that More’s particular version of “something more” turned out to be considerably less than Kabbalah as Jews and Christians had come to know and develop it, and that when, some twenty years after composing his “Cabbalistical Enterprise,” he encountered “authentic Cabbala,” he came away disappointed, admiring chiefly its “ invincible obscurity.”
In More’s Literal, Philosophick, and Moral or Mystical and distinctly Philo-like exegesis of the first three chapters of Genesis, all that remains of the Zohar’s primordial inkpot and pen is a “vast Capability of things unsettled [and] fluid,” the “tempestuous Passions of the flesh contending and struggling over that Abysse of unsatiable Desire which has no bottome . . . ”—until an “inward Word . . . exhibited . . . the seminal forms of all things.” More’s primary “Word,” is, needless to say, and unlike the Kabbalists’, inkless.
L is, well, for a leg to stand on. And doubly so at the bottom of that well, where it’s for libraries amassed and stacked: “A cool of books,” as William Carlos Williams has it, in Book Three of Paterson, “A cool of books,”
will sometimes lead the mind to libraries
of a hot afternoon, if books can be found
cool to the sense to lead the mind away.
For there is a wind or ghost of a wind
in all books echoing the life
there, a high wind that fills the tubes
of the ear until we think we hear a wind,
actual,
to lead the mind away. [. . .]
. . . a roar of books
from the wadded library oppresses him
until
his mind begins to drift.
Beautiful thing:
—a dark flame,
a wind, a flood—counter to all staleness.
And L is most definitely, and lovingly, for all the letters our libraries hold—or try to—though in Paterson’s case they were lost in all too literal flames.
“And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, which parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Thus Kings. Zohar to that passage has: “Horses of fire—this refers to the letters of the Torah” [Tikkunei HaZohar spirit and soul. Other Kabbalistic works identify the letters as the vehicles of vision, the chariots—and tell us the letters are “palaces, chambers inhabited by the divine presence” and leading to the Infinite’s radiance.16 “Rabbi Shimon arose and opened up words in front of the Shekhinah [the Presence]. He opened up and said, ‘The enlightened [or enlightening] ones shine like the shining of the firmament’ [Daniel 12:3] . . . haRaqi’a (the firmament) is ha’Iqar (the essence)” [Tikkunei HaZohar 1b], in the great Jewish ode to per-mutability.
“The enlightened ones shine”—says the 20th-century Jewish mystic Avraham Kook, citing the Zohar, “these are the letters” [Zohar I:15b, Tikkunei haZohar 4a and 12b]. And he adds, “The soul is full of letters.”17
Is the soul a library?
In a process extended out from what one scholar has called God’s “inlibration,”18 the Islamic world at times saw the universe as the writing of God and essentially one great book—“whose first and last page have fallen off,” as the Persian poet Jaamii has it. Which in turn finds odd echoes in what we might call Borges’s bibliomography: “The universe (which others call the Library) . . . is endless,” he writes in “The Library of Babel” . . . and in “The Total Library” he describes “a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.”
While Islamic lettrism didn’t perhaps go as far as the Kabbalists, and suspicion of language always lurked, poems born of Jaami’s spirit rode the cusp between speech and silence in powerful fashion: “God has said,” Rumi tells us, in Coleman Barks’s translation, “The images that come / with human language / do not correspond to Me, / but those who love words / must use them to come near.”19 Letters and words, sounds sounded, need to be windows onto the world within and the world without, lest we be flooded by all that “fluid Possibilitie,” as Henry More put it, lest we lose hope of seeing into the actual, the Real, what Wordsworth called “the life of things.” Hasidic tradition understood this in the 18th century when it noted that the Hebrew word for “ark” (teivah) is a homonym for one of the words for “word,” and so when Genesis 6:16 commands Noah “A window shalt thou make to the ark [teivah]),” and for “window” uses the Hebrew word “tzohar,” which sounds like “Zohar,” and in fact is etymologically linked to it, and can also mean “light” or “brightness”—when God says all that to Noah, the text is, kabbalistically, saying that words, like the ark, hold the remnant and extension of creation and should be windows of light to that extension and that creation.20
It makes sense, then, sensory sense, that L is also for the licking of letters in the Jewish rite that brings three-year-olds into the fold of the most meaningful study by having them lick up honey poured on a board into which the twenty-two Hebrew letters have been carved: “Twenty-two letters to start with . . . ” Or in the Islamic equivalent, at age four, in which the Bismillah prayer—”In the Name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful”—is written with a sweet liquid on a slate to be tasted.
So L might also be for lousy, as in this passage from James Schuyler’s hardly mystical, bookish, learned, or theoretical “The Morning of the Poem”:
So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What’s the problem?
No innate love of
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love,
Mistake, promise, auto
Crack-up, color, petal
The color in the petal
Is merely light
And that’s refraction:
A word, that’s the poem.
A blackish-red nasturtium. [. . .]
“Come and see,” the Zohar tells us, repeatedly, and most definitely or defiantly in its gloss to a technical phrase at the start of Psalm 46, which anticipates Schuyler’s kinesthetic poetics: “’al ‘alamot ha-shir,” the Psalm begins, “Upon the ‘alamot, a song [shir]”— meaning, a song on a stringed instrument called ‘alamot. Refracted by the lens of the Zohar, however, ‘alamot is read not as a musical instrument but as the plural of ‘almah, meaning “young woman” or “maiden”—indicating angelic and maybe even muse-like figures:
Come and see: The Blessed Holy One fashioned the lower world along the lines of the higher world… The nine orders [of the maidens and instruments of song—’alamot haShir] are conducted by letters en- graved . . . When those letters soar through the air of spirit that’s appointed over all, [the ‘alamot] stir, and song turns fragrant. One let- ter strikes from below, and that letter goes up and down and two let- ters fly above it. And that letter from below raises the order [of angels or messengers] below to above. Therefore, one who knows them and is careful with respect to them, is beloved above and below. . . .These letters are male and female, to be contained as one, in the mys- tery of upper and lower waters. . . . Come and see…[Zohar 1:159a-b]
K—how could it not be—is for Kabbalah, the tradition received through refraction. Though sometimes it’s for Kabbablahblah, as it does tend to run on and on, formlessly into the language it just about worships. K, therefore, is also for the Key—to proportion, to turning reception into extension, to navigating the labyrinth of signs and lines.
K is really an “I”, receiving those slants of light from Dickinson’s winter afternoons, their radiance taking us—through “heavenly hurt”—to “ internal difference, / where the meanings” are.
J, dangling there in the mind’s eye, or the mind’s I, in and from the ear even, on the page, is for the Jew that Russian poet Maria Tsvetayeva says all poets are, and Edmond Jabés writes of repeatedly:
“He is a Jew,” said Reb Tolba, “he is leaning
against the wall, watching the clouds go by.”
“The Jew has no use for clouds,” replied Reb Jalé.
“He is counting the steps between him and his life.” 21
I is someone else”…… is Rimbaud emerging from John Ashbery. Rimbaud who in fact helped give us Ashbery. Rimbaud who left us the color of the vowels: “Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O.” Like flames emerging prismatically from the Hebrew letters of God’s name, the Tetragrammaton, tattooed acrostically into the spine of a four-stanza 16th-century devotional poem that one Eliezer Azikri wrote and meditated on daily, longing: “Soul’s beloved, merciful father, / draw your servant to your Will; / he’ll run to you like a gazelle / and bow before your splendor…”22
“The point,” wrote that modern master of the “hidden wish of words,” a sorcerer of the rainbow alphabet arched across the affirming “We” and “Oui” of the Ouija board, “the point,” James Merrill wrote to a young poet in 1995 “ is to feel your feelings in the presence of something ‘ in the outside world’—a tree, a portrait: the hood of a car, an article about a new scientific discovery— which will reflect your heightened state of mind back to you. You will not have to say ‘I.’”
H’s cross-bar links two I’s in a third person stretched between them, raising them all to the power of Thoth, who in Greco-Egyptian time becomes Hermes, messenger-god of boundaries and crossing, then morphs, most likely in the late Hellenistic period, into a mythical sage, Hermes Trismegistus, Thrice Great, and reportedly Moses’s contemporary. This man- god’s teachings spread through the cultures of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, eventually into Renaissance Europe and to the likes of Boehme and the Cambridge More, even to Shakespeare. In the syncretic doctrines of the Hermetic Corpus, salvation of the soul is achieved through esoteric gnosis, and only by a few. “Tell me again,” Hermes Trismegistus asks the Presence that visits him, in one of the Corpus’s principal works, “how shall I advance to life, O my mind?”
“The light foot hears you and the brightness begins / god-step at the margins of thoughts”—writes Robert Duncan, in “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (a line he more or less made up), Hermes the thief-god as Mercury leading him on. . .
G looks like a reader or writer curled over her book or table, or tablet. Under the cover and curve of a garment. Of language. It’s all there in the letter, which also gives us the word Geniza, generally a repository for worn out texts containing the name of God, but also as in the Cairo Geniza, where the medieval community in question extended the practice to all writing with Hebrew letters, from banal bills of lading to poems of sublime and rhymed petition. And so its unconscious archive accrued, like a reef rising from a seabed of abstract value embodied in practice— an ultimate statement about the worth of words and their place in Jewish life. Discovered in the 19th century, the scrap heap yielded some 300,000 items, including hymns to the radiant life of language, like this one by a 6th-century Hebrew poet named Yannai, whose complete body of work had been lost for a thousand years. Strung along an alphabetical acrostic, the poem is a lyric commentary on Exodus 3:2—“And the angel of the Lord was revealed to him in the heart of the flame”:
Angel of fire devouring fire
Fire Blazing through damp and drier
Fire Candescent in smoke and snow
Fire Drawn like a crouching lion
Fire Evolving through shade after shade
Fateful fire that will not expire
Gleaming fire that wanders far
Hissing fire that sends up sparks
Fire Infusing a swirling gale
Fire that Jolts to life without fuel
Fire that’s Kindled and kindles daily
Lambent fire unfanned by fire
Miraculous fire flashing through fronds
Notions of fire like lightning on high
Omens of fire in the chariots’ wind
[Pillars of fire in thunder and storm]
[Quarries of] fire wrapped in a fog
Raging fire that reaches Sheol
T[errible fire that Ushers in] cold
Fire’s Vortex like a Wilderness crow
Fire eXtending and Yet like a rainbow’s
Zone of color arching through sky23
As though the entire alphabet—within the flames—descended from and led back to heaven.
F is for that fire—and also for the fear of it. It’s for the foreign become oddly familiar, or the familiar made uncannily strange, within mercurial changes.
F is really just the P of our prayer-pennant, tattered and frayed by desire’s flames . . .
E should be for the ear, which it looks like, a little, and through which the poem is earned in a hearing: Blake’s “ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in” (Thel, IV:17). So that E is also, and simply, for everything. Every
Detail, which is one thing that D is for—the small looming large, and lighting up what’s around it. It’s also for the primordial Dot, in Sufi thought beginning creation and all being, and giving rise to the first letter, alif (ا), from which all others are drawn, or set beneath the second Arabic letter, ba (ب), which is linked to creation, as in the Bismillah that opens the Quran.24 “We were letters not yet pronounced / latent in the highest peaks of the hills,” writes the 13th-century poet and mystic Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi.25 And in his Meccan Revelations he goes further still in his elision of language, the human, and a higher order idea of the real: “The [twenty-eight Arabic] letters issue from the breath of the breathing human being. . . [And these in turn] have issued from the breath of the Merciful, . . . the fog in which God was before He created creation.”26
Which brings us to the D that’s been waiting in the Delphic hills for Diwan, as in the 14th-century Arabic historian Ibn Khaldun’s saying that “Poetry is the Diwan”—or Archive—“of the Arabs.” Our D, then, might be a rounded door on the frame of an I, opening into the learning and life it holds.
C is for change, and how it comes round. It’s for the care involved in change’s conveyance, through chariot-letters of fire, as we’ve seen—fire banked and stirred, forking, cooking, destroying or lighting the way. C is also for the call—the calling to it all, and also for the curse of neglecting the call.
B is where one properly begins, the beginning that’s always already begun, against the lips, in resistance, admittance, twoness, relation, what’s at the heart of the rubbing of hands, and, says the Talmud, of baby’s breath: “The world is sustained through the breath created by children’s study” [Shabbat 119b]. And it’s for the bone that backs that breath.
B is for “both” when forced by the C of choice to choose. Both open and closed at once. It’s a studious pair of glasses on end— windows, again, to the ark of the word. But it’s also for those glasses broken, for the brokenness at the heart of the blessing, which gave “B” or bet priority in the Zohar’s tale, and without which nothing would, forgive me, be. And finally,
A, as in “Ah” and “At last,” is barely there, barely breath. It’s the sound a tongue-depressor makes us make, or, on other occasions, an indication of pleasure and, when pressure’s applied in just the right place, at the right time, ecstasy.
A kiss to the wall,
to the aleph-bet
that hung there
writes the American-born Hebrew poet Harold Schimmel, now eighty:
and Mr. Pakh asks me:
Still on the
aleph-bet? Still
not beyond it? No,
not yet! The beginning
of wisdom is the fear
of Heaven: the initial
letter, aleph.
The secret of secrets
in aleph: kisses
to the spot
on the wall where it hung.27
There’s “the infant A . . . on infant legs” (Stevens) and the A-frame holding up the desk we write on. A is also for also, and for and, and in this case for amulets that bring on advancement to life through that work, by warding off our own dark thoughts.
And, as we’ve seen, it’s for the windowed ark and word at the heart of our archives, and for the alphabet’s rainbow arching through their hives, again and again, giving birth to origins through what comes after. So we arrive where we began, with a construction that culls these beginnings and ends, turning them into a Muse in waiting. To give us light. Light we can hear and sounds we can see. “In great darkness,” as one unlikely rabbi put it, late in his life, “a little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendor.”28
NOTES
1 All translations are mine unless otherwise
2 See, for instance, the opening of Midrash Alfa-Beita d’R. Akiva, version
3 Berakhot
4 Peter Cole, The Poetry of Kabbalah (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012), 45.
5 Peter Cole, The Invention of Influence (New York: New Directions, 2014), 6.
6 Cole, The Poetry of Kabblah, 200-201.
7 Ibid., 236-237.
8 Yehuda Ashlag, Sefer haZohar, Vayaqhel
9 Zohar II: 206a
10 Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. David Goldstein (London: Littman Library for Oxford UP, 1989), 1038.
11 Ibid., 121.
12 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead (London: Arkana [Penguin Group], 1899/1989), 21-34, 133, 149-151, 621.
13 Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U. of California Press, 2002), 105.
14 Cole, Poetry of Kabbalah, 13.
15 Kenneth Rexroth, Collected Poems (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), 275.
16 Cole, Poetry of Kabbalah, x and 253
17 Abraham Kook, Orot, trans. B. Naor (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 93.
18 Annemarie Schimmel, What Is Islam, p. 71 (citing Harry Wolfson).
19 The Soul of Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (San Francisco: Harper One, 2002).
20 Cole, Poetry of Kabbalah,
21 Edmond Jabés, The Book of Questions, Rosemarie Waldrop (Middletown,
CT: U. of Wesleyan Press, 1976), 21.
22 Cole, Poetry of Kabbalah, 137-138 and 362.
23 Cole, Poetry of Kabbalah, 24.
24 Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1975), 420.
25 Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York: NYU Press, 1984), 89.
26 Sarah Sviri, “Kun—The Existence-Bestowing Word in Islamic Mysticism,” in The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and Sign, ed. by S. La Porta and D. Shulman (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007), 50 (translation adjusted).
27 Peter Cole, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017).
28 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1979), 797
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This essay evolved from a talk given at the University of Utah’s Willard Marriott Library, on October 21, 2015, and is based on materials from the library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Departments. The sources cited below include more widely available editions of the material on which the essay drew.
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