The Body On The Days of Awe
Rosenberg, Joel
THE BODY ON THE DAYS OF AWE JOEL ROSENBERG I don'l remember when it was that I began to understand how many people can inhabit one body. My own, for example, appears to me to be something like a...
...All 600.000 of us inhabit one body...
...You are My rented garment, and your usefulness from year to year is being judged...
...We must not condemn ourselves unauthorizedly...
...Arise, and call upon your God...
...Sometimes a garment must be discarded...
...I am part of a Big Mind, but I myself, during these times, am lost, annihilated, just a swinging gate moved by my breath...
...We converge in the rented garment of a person to play fool...
...Soul and body together as one person...
...Sometimes I keep a garment out of tenderness or sentiment, well past its time of use...
...We rent movie actors to metamorphose through extensions of ourselves...
...Just as we become one soul amid one body on this day, the world becomes a child, whole and one, in strength of body, purity of spirit...
...But how single...
...In the correct posture—with my back straight and my weight evenly distributed around the lower abdomen—it is possible for me not to exist, and so to engage in that profoundest imitation of God...
...Once I recognize the infinite extensibility and richly variegated divisibility of my bodily boundaries, some mistake of mine is no longer solely "my" fault...
...The judge placed one upon the other's shoulders and judged the two as one...
...One thinks of Jonah weeping for a gourd plant, "here tonight and gone tomorrow...
...This is the birthday of the world...
...But you must suffer the ravages of the give-and-take...
...You cannot hide...
...God is the only body, all the rest just shades, contortions, modes, inflections, agues, bodily humors, pretensions, still played, of course, by God, that protean and partly protein player, God...
...A soul unable to inhabit its person or its people...
...Are there not in me bodies of the mind like the Gutenberg Bible, the House of Shammai, the prayer of Rinzai...
...Now it stands out like a sore thumb...
...Some lead, at turns by tyranny, at times by patient, tolerant slewardage...
...Some of these persons schooled together, prayed together, plotted together...
...When caught, they pleaded: "1 am blind" and "I am lame...
...This is the only life you have to live...
...This people Israel...
...As if there were one of me, this body, I and no one else...
...And yet we arc all too much in danger of over-judging...
...I can do this running on the shoreline of Fresh Pond in Cambridge, as I pass, or am passed, by dozens of live-wire bodies, male and female, all of them parts of my bodiless body...
...A miracle we cherish when we greet each other, kiss, embrace, tell stories, joke and tremble inwardly...
...We dwell in a land which is a type of body, with skins of mists, of sands and fountains...
...A soul hiding in the belly of a person, the belly of a ship, the belly of a giant fish, the belly of divine word...
...I check things over, sigh, begin again...
...One thinks of Jonah, fleeing from his hody and his body-politic...
...It is our fault, that of the "we" of me...
...Indeed, how me...
...alone along their fierce, baroquely arched byways of the spirit, locked into temporary hells of company along the necessary way stations...
...A soul that flees to Tarshish...
...Why me...
...Whether it will be among those who live or die...
...Are not these my few cubic centimeters of speech apparatus their own body, with whatever remaining armature and armor they may need to get around and be distinct...
...hero, victim, destroyer...
...Go speak to Nine-vah," he is told...
...We, the signs of past worlds lingering in this newborn-child world must prove our claim to stay around another year...
...All of us, and especially the quietly lapping lake, are momentarily God, and so No-body...
...The Judge finds reasons that escape us...
...as it were, a noisy, obstreperous commonwealth of the body, a body-politic of the body, nervously plotting the careening vessel of a single physical being, me...
...Perhaps a sense of humor...
...Why us...
...Going through the tight bottleneck of the Gates of Life, there is room for but one body at a time...
...With these I am intertwined...
...all of those passions and intentions that have collaborated in producing "me...
...Perhaps a nagging question about this tenuous union you or I call "I" that will take some years to answer...
...The Judge's reasoning is subtle...
...Why this world...
...Perhaps we are a single body, and this is our birthday...
...We unite in a praying body to release ourselves from spite we produce against our own body...
...As for us, says the Psalmist, we are but dust and vanity, a passing fancy, as if we never were...
...Who gave man a mouth to speak with, or an ear to listen...
...We migrate through bodies of different generations...
...We are here for reasons that escape us, but we're here...
...Or, some say...
...We go down to Egypt and we go up out of Egypt...
...My own body is the theme...
...As in the parable about the blind man and the lame man who wished to rob an empty house...
...Beethoven's Ninth...
...Regardless of how many inhabit it, regardless of how annulled it is in running or in contemplation...
...Perhaps a soft spot...
...God says: You cannot plead "1 am a transient...
...Descend into the body, ? soul, and live...
...The biologist Lewis Thomas says that we are actually the cementing structure for colonies of mitochondria, or for elite castes of DNA, or, in our turn, each single, whole body an organelle of that membranous, spheric one-celled organism I .inh But also are we not the organs of those intermediate beings and bodies: nations, peoples, swarms, unions, corporations, schools, sexes, households, families...
...Jonah's name means "dove...
...My own, for example, appears to me to be something like a rented garment for a consortium of persons who have agreed among themselves— tenuously, not always synchronized in their respective intentions—how and under what circumstances the space is to be occupied for a given purpose...
...The Judge finds reasons for maintaining us...
...If there is a Love's Body, there is also a body of hate, and a body of hale literature...
...A strange lot, all of us...
...One to a ticket, we go naked on this day as on our birth, under our dress and finery a vulnerable and trembling bit of flesh, whose wills and whims are judged together as one person...
...We cheat, we steal, we lie...
...At such times, I conceive myself as having returned home to my natural-born physical body, regained the shock of childhood strength and beauty I had long lamented lost...
...Land which is a robe for the body of the dead...
...In ancient art a dove stood for the soul...
...There arc languages like bodies, wars like bodies and piles of victims' bodies like hodies...
...Venus on the half-shell, the death of Enkidu, the Tower of Babel...
...God is where the body ends, where the buck stops, where the body becomes nothing, that is, no-thing, and so nobody...
...Only when entering into relation with the world does God take on the specifics of a mouth, a hand, a rush of anger or love, or, as George Burns demonstrated, a nylon wind-breaker and a fishing cap...
...Some only ride to see the others...
...Shanah tovah...
...Some, as we say, go their own way...
...Joel Rosenberg's most recent work in MOMENT ("Enacting Our Texts.'' a review of Elizabeth Swados' Passover Cantata) Indeed, how physical...
...Your words are consequential, even to a multitude of 120,000 "who know neither their right hand from their left, and also much cattle...
...The blind man carried the lame man on his shoulders: the legs and hands of one, the eyes of the other, robbed the house as one thief...
...Yet I intertwine with so many other bodies...
...Perhaps a deeper purpose...
...We write a Bible...
...Happy birthday, us...
...This group...
...Says a Zen Roshi: what I call "1" is but a swinging gate moved by my breath...
...God, we are told, has neither the likeness of a body, nor is a body...
...Only on the Days of Awe do 1 return to my natural-born physical hody, which I feed, fast and place in judgment...
...I am...
...But judged it is continually: I never cease to judge...
...But I am not, at times like these, myself...
...Do "1" not open out like a mollusk into folds that have imprinted in them thee and he and she and we...
...With these I am intertwined...
Vol. 5 • September 1980 • No. 8
