nicholas of cusa

The first time I saw Uri Weissman he was helping my math-phobic ex-girlfriend with GRE algebra. He was going to Penn business school in the fall. I sat in the office they shared drinking spring water and thinking of a costume she had worn to Purim a few years before. The three cornered shoe box hat which had been the best loved part of that costume, I had made, and it became afterwards the bed of my then-roommate's cat Marleance, named after an inexplicable one word paragraph in the short story of an equally inexplicable former classmate of ours, Rochelle Ziggler from Long Island, entitled Seaching for Nothing, Searching for Something? The hat presided for an extended time under the circular Rolling Rock table in our living room, and then between the wall and the dining table that had wheels. At some point the cat grew out of it and we threw it away.
Marleance.
I sat at a table with an empty Dixie cup in my hand while Uri hunched over Raisa as she made her way through another word problem. I offered my advice which was intuitive and highlighted the presence of multiple solutions but was shunned as popes had once shunned the plague, encircling themselves with rings of fire that could be moved as they paced the Vatican or rode from Avignon to Babylon. In Raisa's case the fire was an endearing, saliva-heavy wrath that had been smoldering since before she was six and her father Eitan, who was a robotics engineer, had decided to teach her base 8. His favorite insult for her was buffoon, a name she hated and a role she drew on in certain, usually awkward social, sometimes private blissful moments. It was with fire and buffoonery that she said to me regarding my advice, "Edward, I am poop in your shoe. I am to you but the poop in the shoe of your sad poopy-advice-choked life. Attempting to resume that life now will only be met with more poop until I finish these problems, at which time I will resume being myself and we can go to lunch."
We had a history of making faces to which I added. I remember our first scary face-making contest, in front of the bathroom mirror in that same apartment in which the three cornered cat bed lived. Her main technique consisted in tilting her head to one side, opening her mouth as wide as possible and leering into the mirror with mirthful animosity. It must be said that I had seen her face assume fearful properties many times before. Upon noticing her complete inability to inspire fear or revulsion, I reasoned that it was perhaps difficult for her to summon the proper mental basis for such reactions without the right emotional cues. To elicit such a state I put on hideous faces and taunted her, to which she replied with similarly ineffective attempts. Perhaps it was my bias to her beauty and her face, which it is true was normally wildly expressive, but I had been creating intriguingly grotesque faces and gestures for as long as I could remember and I found it obtuse and even unsettling in a humurous way that she seemed so uninitiated. It was then that I chased her along the hall and when she ducked into my roommate's bedroom we showed him our faces and he pushed his eyelids and gums back with his fingers in reply. He said he had been working on it the night before.
From upper-middle child to snub-nosed, pro-gun marine to Raisa's colleague with the American flag and past Israeli prime ministers adorning his office, there exist large swaths of Uri's life I am unable to account for. The thread may be picked up however, at these offices of a modest Zionist and Socialist leaning organization left over it seemed to me from the intellectual bustle of the 1940's. Still in existence in large part as the umbrella organization for a collection of youth camps, its main business has become preparing for the death of its members. File cabinets full of in memoriams and cemetery recommendations exude a mustiness that infects the entire floor, including Raisa's half of the office, which has nothing to do with those cabinets, but instead with the two youth movements, one with socialist the other with communist leanings, and the cadre of summer camps alotted to both: the saplings of the organization. Such mustiness can sometimes seem to the outsider indicative of most things related to religion in the 21st century, yet the atmosphere at any one of the youth camps has much more to do with swimming, gossiping, sneaking around at night, and building consensus about the hows and whys and whats of young jewish identity while gossiping, swimming, sneaking, and drinking powdered ice tea ot Tang. The mustiness is perhaps relegated to a dryness of the mouth and a general pasty fidgetyness that tends to develop if God is invoked in the midst of all this, which in my experience is rare. We thus turn to the cultural aspects of Judaism which today seem as spiritually relevant to the jews I have known as the notions of God or codifications of life espoused by the jewish religion. However, as Hannah Arendt has noted, the meaningfulness of traditions may fade or change while their influence grows. It must also be noted that notions of God and codes of life have a way of influencing the shape and nature of the culture to which they belong.
One may turn to generation gaps in order to get a better sense of the tragectory of the Jewish people and the importance of God as well as the word of God within the Jewish faith. It was not surprising to me that a pronounced curvature of the will such as that which might befall a body increasingly at odds with its duties was emblematic of Uri's attitude toward his job; he managed an increasingly meager collection of conferences and fundraisers that made up, like a slowing molasses river delta out of which most of the sugar had been sucked, his organization's non-youth-related activities. His most difficult charge was motivating an aging membership, loyal in degrees to the Labor Zionist Alliance though largely unfamiliar with (or unreminded of) sneaking around at night and drinking powdered ice tea for months at a time, to attend receptions in honor of the old guard while financially contributing each year to the increasingly alien - politically as well as culturally - youth movements of which Uri was a product. In fact many of the youth movement's participants had begun to voice concern over whether Socialist and Zionist goals were in conflict, whether they had ever been compatible. The majority of this younger and more left leaning contingent began to advocate Socialist ideals over Zionist ones in places where they felt the two did conflict. Meanwhile, the mostly older and more conservative members of the LZA itself had gravitated toward the same questions, but instead coming out in favor of Zionist over Socialist objectives.

This brings us to Nicholas of Cusa and a discussion of Uri's road to business school. Nicholas was an early Christian thinker who didn't believe in straight lines. He also invented, tangentially perhaps, the notion of a ''Wall of Paradise', a divide between our world and the next in which opposites unite, what has been termed a 'coincidence of opposites', wherein sight is synonymous with blindness, white of the eye also black, dry eye wet. In order to pay homage to the former of Cusa's ideas, I will now embark on an arch which will hopefully return to the questions at hand.

I remember wondering as a child whether all things had an opposite. "What is the opposite of an eagle," I asked, and I decided it might be a rock. In a house with infinite rooms (such as childhood seems in memory) like the one I imagine having grown up in (is it possible that I have been able already, to find my way out?) everything must have an opposite. Each pair then is finally (re?) united, not at the gates of heaven, but at the wall. I wonder if I will meet my opposite then, when the time comes to scale my way into providence. I would like to, but then, perhaps that means my opposite would not, which seems, at the moment, obscene and obtuse.
The name Raisa means, "rose", but when the emphasis is place on the third syllable it means, "rude". Her father would remind her of this latter pronunciation in times of conflict as a way of illustrating, perhaps, the unbearable breadth of what she meant to him, and thus, the unbearable breadth of his life, the world, his faith, etc. I am reminded here of Kafka's parable of the law....(more here...)
It might be true in light of these revelations that the 'light', Dante's Rose, from which both we and the gods have come emanates not only from that jewel in the lotus, or the odd fluorescent bulb shedding its skin on one of the twelve hundred pillars of the Zahir, a skin of shiny mercury donated gladly out of the reservoir of the origin of obsession, one of the 1200 denouements of mustiness and curvature, a fragile but headlong grimed boot of time, a boot that won't be taken off without undoing many, many laces, laces of nakedness, vulnerability, sex, certainly betrayal of some fortress or other, and in such a way that the way of the weddings of smooth-skinned young calves and pom-pom'd children to neon light, resistance exercise, remedial speech phrenology, and bestialness will quickly be paved with slippery, gold. The shape of a half-hounded mind and its conversations with itself, the discovery of the other half of the hounding, the untying magnesium of eroticism, able to burn through whole manufacturing sectors, through the engine blocks of entire classifications of disorder, reverse spells cast in the infancy of attention deficit, and expose the supposedly pathological anarchy latent in all things that remain stubbornly childish to an adult life that can uphold its holy laws.
From the left-handed child who is a butterfly, from the man, myself, who loves him. From future lovers that, only then, we realize, were descended from half-tiger/half-fishes, glimpsed in near-eastern myths and birthed by dinosaurs who hunted south america at low tide, the antarctic burning up under the ultra violet gaze of that Rose which also looks down on the gods, to whose message we, unlike them, have yet to respond adequately. From the left-handed child, whose eyes are the color of running into a green road, whose heart's brim is perpetually a gray road flooding, a response is forthcoming, one that spills and carries him out into the direct light of the gaze, terribly unfiltered, which erases the way back as well as the purpose of going there, and yet serves to elicit the response of his gifts and troubles.
We go to this place seeking to engage these two messengers, and sustain with their collaboration our usual void, our seat of the self in the shaded grass beside all torrents. We go to obtain a new dialogue with that face that first paid us that kind of attention which makes us older. Something here will show the light to function, simultaneously, as darkness. If as light it shows us depth, as dark it deepens.
Perhaps it is so dark that no light could ever seem like light next to it, that no light could escape, today, without acquiring the same second-halfness that would render it dark again, a warm patron at the north pole of relativisms that act like absolutism. Remember again, the rationality, the ration, of the wall of paradise, mote of the Rose, that says what is looked to is also the staple of forgetting, of dismissing. Is it also the logic of history? It is Uri Weissman's logic.
There is a Zen of some activities, some logics, in which the laws which govern what makes their expression possible are often beholden to different rules and limitations than the activities and logics themselves. Examples? Fuckers.... and goddamn hair shirts.