64
PARTISAN REVIEW
darkness which
is
starkly presented, and faced with open eyes. First
must come the full awareness of the exile's bleak inheritance. His
fingers must explore in depth the old wound of a life spent
ill
waiting:
Ce que l'homme a perdu, c'est Ie monde lui-'meme,
il survit au milieu d'une absence de monde
pour sculpter Ie visage aveugle de la nuit.
Il n'y a plus de monde, et pourtant nous vivons,
nous marchons, nous parlons, comme s'il etait proche,
lui qui s'est esquive. Silence. Plus de monde.
(Le Doigt dans la Plaie)
L'attente,
waiting, represents that still but crucial middle point, the
mediating agent between the absence we are heir to and the loving
presence of the world towards which the spirit still strives. That
bliss is really here, if one could only grasp it, by holding out, by
straining and yet keeping quiet during the journey through the void,
-by waiting. To wait is to die without dying, to commit a slow
hara-kiri of all past expectations. For the self which has given up
its previous demands for an immediate life, to wait means to open
up, to ripen (like an autumnal fruit), to change into
another.
Such
a conscious vigil must be relentlessly pursued at the heart's midplace,
between Yes and No, between rootedness and exile from being. Wait–
ing in the midst of nothing is neither easy nor futile. It means to
hold this nothing in check, not to succumb to it, not to become its
tool or advocate. Therefore, such active waiting can procure victory
over exile. This is the significance of the struggle of Jacob with the
Angel throughout the night at Phanuel near the river Jabbock. For
to vanquish this angel of the night, this aggression of a murderous
inner and outer absence, is to turn it (and oneself through it) into
the reality of the hidden world. For the lonely Jacob, who "remained
there that night," it is the sole means of securing the blessing, of
gaining a foothold on the promised land, of reaching towards the
future, history, the children beyond the river.
«The tree of life,"
concludes the critic quoted above, "is not the tree of good and evil,
but the tree of the only science worth knowing, the science necessary
to survive, to endure and surmount, to draw from hostile fate an
even greater harvest of days:
