The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
A Restless Messengers Blog SymposiumReturn To Main Symposium Page
Draft 6: Midrush
Midrash on Midrush:
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Golemic Polemics
by Adeena Karasick
In Hebrew, the word midrash midrāsh means exposition, from derash, to inquire or investigate. Through a mid-rashic rush, of ruched ash, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 6 presents a hauntingly elegiac ’drash[1] on how death is never the end, but a kind of bpNicholesque, “journeying and the returns.”[2] Intertextually read through the Kabbalistic concepts of the breaking of the vessels, golem construction and a kind of zerotic sefirotics, it reminds us how everything, “in a covenant of breaking” inevitably results in a tikkun, a healing. Through the palimpsestic layering of “broken saucers,” shards, sparks, “muddy marks,” “snags”, rifts, drifts, slips, “drafts,” it highlights how all is forever re-formed in the murky ferment; as we “work / thru the dead to circle / the living flood-flung expectations.
Reminiscent of an actual midrash, where biblical commentary surrounds the main body of text, (“all raggy and margined”), splayed as a series of vertical and horizontal stanzas that speak to each other, opening itself for multiple simultaneous paths of reading / interpretive possibilities, in both form and content this merz-ey midrash, a mad rash (or as an elegy to her mother), a madreish meshed rush of “flexing thorns” all “lavish and ragged;” “layered [like a] scattered tabernacle.”
Not only pairing text and exegesis, (with intertextual shout outs to Schwitters, Oppen, Zukofsky and the Merry Macs), Draft 6 highlights a twining of presence / absence / place and displacement read through the pairing of letters: “the doubled yo[ke] of “two names”…everything paired / with words in secret twin,” or “cowering pairs in a dark ark,” “pairing the letters”…siting / citing / the writing under writing.” This pairing of the letters is reminiscent of the ancient Kabbalistic practice of creating a Golem[3] (through the recitation, permutations and combinations of lettered pairs).
According to Rabbi Eliezar Rokeach in theBook of Formation, to make a Golem, one must assemble the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and permute them with the Tetragrammaton, and all the vowels, in the array of the 221 gates of meaning. Each sequence contains 442 letters, so to complete all 22 letters of the alphabet, one must use 4862 letters. Each of these letters must be pronounced with every possible combination of the 5 primary vowels and the 4 letters of the Tetragrammaton, a total of 9724 pronunciations for each lettered pair. The entire exercise makes use of 486,200 pronunciations. Estimating 4 syllables a second: 11⁄2 hours per sequence resulting in 35 hours to complete the uninterrupted process.[4]
And through the garment of lettered light, the recitation of these doubled letters activates life; a “living” avatar formed in the image of their maker—created to serve their creator[5] and in some cases used to temporarily raise the dead—brought back to life by having a paper bearing a Name of G-d stuffed into their mouth. And mirrored in Draft 6, within whose open mouth is placed a parchment of letters, where “flooded / shards drifted up “forever” / thru the clay”—the midrash itself becomes a kind of golem, breathing life into itself, pounding it new.
This sense of re-newal is further highlighted in the 15th stanza where amid “writhes of poets, Oppen and…Zukofsky renew their o[p]pen engagement with me / wreathing smoke-veils.” Again reminding us that through a vertiginous revisiting, what seemed dead or old or gone is never gone but flooded with shadows, shade, traces, fragments smoke, veils, auras, ash — “glutinous with erasure,”[6] “wraithing.” And this all graphematically manifested by an open smoke ring wafting atop the 3rd page of the poem.
This open smoke ring, however, can also be read as a Tet, the 9th letter of the Hebrew alphabet:
According to Otiot de Rabbi Akiba[7], not only does Tet reference the clay of earth, hence, resurrection, but encompassing that which is both bent and straight, Tet metonymically stands in for how all that which is authoritative, dominating and erect, must be mediated with that which is curved, malleable, distorted. And, with its head slight bent, curving inward, it can also be seen as caressing itself. Thus, in an auto-erotic gesture this smoke-ringed styled letter foregrounds the alphabet, not only as a system of reproduction and multiplicity, but an erotic economy of substitution and exchange. With the infusion of it, in Draft 6, DuPlessis subtextually highlights the embrace of duplicities / “opposition[s],” “gardens” and “promises” silted thru “unseasonable rip-tides,” and “claim-ragged dirt.”
Zeroing in further, read as an open “zero,” this smoky glyph reminds us how nothing is never nothing, but like how for 12th C. mathematician and Biblical scholar, Abraham ibn Ezra[8], “zero” is not a number representing an empty quantity, nothing or absence, but (as in the decimal system) “zero” serves as a place holder, which he calls a wheel, a galgal to “save the position” in cases where that position has no value.
Thus, between presence and absence, the no longer and the not yet; the not yet and the always already, Duplessis’s hauntingly complex Draft 6: Midrush silently screams in a lacunaic liminality, extolling the omnipresence of a past re-pattered in a volatized hyperreality—where all that is absent, lost, broken, shattered or unrecognizable, is not “no where” but “clambers forth / in exilic displacement where “rustling voices” “walk thru the living,” flooding through days, homes, nests, underscoring how “death in the moment / when / what / has been given / away / must [and is always already] reclaimed.”
Adeena Karasick is a New York-based Canadian poet, performer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and media artist, and the author of 18 books of poetry and poetics. Her most recent books includeOuvert: Oeuvre: Openings (Lavender Ink, 2023), Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink, 2023), Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018); and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, 2017). She teaches Literature and Critical Theory in the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute.
[1] From the Hebrew word lidrosh “to seek” or “to inquire,”a drash isa Jewish method of interpretation that encourages questions and dialogue about the text, fostering a lateral, palimpsestic reading, often marked by contradiction, paradox, extension.
[2] bpNichol, Journeying and the Returns, Coach House Press, Toronto, 1967.
[3] As laid out by the Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Formation.
[4] According to Rashi (10th C.) commenting on the Talmudic account explains that Rava made his Golem "by means of theBook of Formation". “An initiate should not do it alone, but should always be accompanied by one or two colleagues. The Golem must be made of virgin soil, taken from a place where no man has ever dug. The soil must be kneaded with pure spring water, taken directly from the ground. If this water is placed in any kind of vessel, it can no longer be used. The people making the Golem must purify themselves totally before engaging in this activity, both physically and spiritually. While making the Golem, they must wear clean white vestments… One must not make any mistake or error in the pronunciation … no interruption whatsoever may occur…”
Further outlined by Aryeh Kaplan in his translation and commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, creating a Golem was primarily not a physical procedure, but rather, a highly advanced meditative technique. By chanting the appropriate letter arrays together with the letters of the Tetragrammaton,the initiate could form a very real mental image of a human being, limb by limb… Once the conceptual Golem was completed, this spiritual potential could be transferred to a clay form and actually animate it. This was the process through which a physical Golem would be brought to life. Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice, Bloomington IN, Indiana UP: 1993, p. 127ff.
Eleazar of Worms, in his Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, that after kneading virgin soil from the mountains with pure water, the first stage of creation is to form the "limbs" of the golem ("limb", in this case, seems to also represent the torso and head) . Each limb has a "corresponding letter mentioned inSefer Yetzirah", and this letter is to be combined with every other letter of the Hebrew alphabet to form pairs. Then a more general permutation is done (again for each limb separately) of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with every other letter into letter pairs, "each limb separately". This second, basic method of combination is called the "221 gates". Then you combine each letter of the alphabet with each vowel sound (apparently for each limb). That concludes the first stage, the formation of the golem's body. In the second stage you must combine each letter of the alphabet with each letter from the Tetragrammaton (YHVH), and pronounce each of the resulting letter pairs with every possible vowel sound. In this case the use of the Tetragrammaton, even though it is permutated, is the "activation word". Gary Zabel, “Practical Kabbalah, Techniques”: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Kabbalah/golem02.shtml.html
[5] See Idel, Moshe.Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press, 1990. Also Faye Levine, Practical Kabbalah, http://kabbalah.fayelevine.com/golem/pk008.php. Throughout history there are many instances of Golems. Some performed simple tasks like drawing water from a well or protect villages from attack. In the medieval period, Rabbi Samuel, father of Judah the Pious, was said to have had a golem as his valet. In the 16th Century, Rabbi Elija of Chelm created his as a servant, and Rabbi Yehuda Loew, the Marharal of Prague, used his golem (which he named) Yosele to protect the Jews of his community, who were under constant threat of slander and attack from the local Christians, who believed the Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in rituals, or to make Passover matzot. Yosele was sent to patrol the Jewish quarter of Prague, on the lookout for wrongdoers; he rooted out evidence against the people trying to frame the Jews for murder; he helped round up sinners; he assisted the rabbi in investigations. It was only when Emperor Rudolf II decreed there would be no more blood libels against the Jews and Thaddeus, the primary instigator of the accusations, had been discredited, that Rabbi Loew deactivated Yosele. The golem's clay remains, to this day, in the attic of the synagogue, which was then proclaimed off-limits.
[6] From Draft 5.
[7] The Letters of Rabbi Akiva, basically a midrash on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet by the 2nd C. Kabbalistic sage.
[8] Among being one of the leading translators, commentators, poets and philosophers of the 12th C. Abraham ibn Ezra (c. 1089 — 1167), was a renowned mathematician and most notably the first to introduce the concept of “zero” to Europe. His 1145 groundbreaking, Sefer ha-Mispar(The Book of the Number) was the first book to feature a Hindu-Arabic numeral system, (a decimal system in which the weight of each digit depends on it distance from the decimal weight of its position)—and “invented” a NEW DIGIT “Zero” O which he calls a wheel, a galgal to “save the position” in cases where that position has no value. As ibn Ezra’s, TheBook of the Number was written in Hebrew, never translated into Latin, and thus credit for the concept of zero has historically been mis-attributed to Fibonacci (Leonardo Bonacci)—whose 1202 work was published 50 years after ibn Ezra!