Arche-writing

A desert landscape: dark skies and white sand, nothing else. A cube-shaped thing rises up out of the sand, and once it’s arisen, looks something like a temple. Then, a man rises up out of the sand and sits down behind the object like a desk. He raises his arm, seems to pick up a quill out of thin air, and begins writing, diligently, at his desk. He stays there for a long time, writing. Every once in a while he pauses.

After some time, maybe three minutes, a hand the size of the man himself descends from the sky, wearing a black glove. This barely-discernible hand descends and drags its finger across the ground in front of the man and his writing desk. It seems to be writing something in the sand, this hand that descended from the sky. We, the audience, cannot see what is written. The man bends forward, over his desk, reads the writing, and then cranes his neck to look back up at the sky, where the hand came from. Then, unceremoniously, the hand lowers to the ground, fills itself with sand, and scatters sand over the man and his desk. He does this a few more times, and then pushes the man and his desk back into the sand where they came from. The hand ascends back where it came from and disappears. In the end, the final scene is exactly the same as the beginning: darkness and sand.

This is the synopsis of a five-minute puppet performance I saw at the Chicago International Puppet Theatre festival last weekend, called “La Méridienne” by Théâtre de la Massue. Having attended the puppet festival for the last few years with my grandmother, I have come to develop a tremendous admiration for this form. Paul Celan wrote in his speech “The Meridian” that “art, you will remember, has the qualities of the marionette and the iambic pentameter.” (I’m not sure if this puppet piece was named after Paul Celan’s speech on purpose, but it might be a reference to this quote specifically.) Art is all puppetry, that is to say. In what other genre could the parable I just described be offered so elegantly? This short performance, given to one person at a time, is little more than a physical, 3-dimensional rendition of a simple concept. A creation myth, one might say. I am almost convinced that puppetry is the most efficient form of art.

This puppet performance resonated with Jewish themes for me. First of all, it is a story about writing, and if this puppet play is an executed concept, writing seems to be one of the central pillars of that concept. After the show, I told the puppeteer my interpretation (with the help of a French translator,) and asked if it had any grounding: it seems to me, I said, that this is a play about writing. Writing has multiple senses, as we see in the play. First, the man is writing, using a quill, in the mundane sense of the word “writing.” Then, we see a force beyond the man, writing in the sand, the surface of the Earth: this is perhaps writing in the higher spheres, a more transcendent form of writing, writing that the divine does in the face of the earth. Ultimately, though, the greatest writing in the play is when the hand descends and covers the man up entirely. He writes out that man’s very existence. We come to understand that by the same logic, his very entrance on the scene was a form of writing: he was written into existence, and written back into non-existence again.

Maimonides writes a great deal about the claim that “the Torah speaks in human language.” His most fundamental claim is that God is unknowable, transcendent, and beyond human perception or even human thought. Rather than knowing God, we should aim to know the very fact that we cannot know, and this is the basis of monotheistic belief. However, how is it possible that scripture, divine revelation, takes the form of human speech and text? The divine must find a way to communicate itself to human beings, even though for humans to really understand the divine would be impossible. For the Torah to speak in human language is not only a concession, but a paradox. Writing is at the crux of the transcendent divine’s translation into the world of limited, imminent creatures.

The Jewish Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote extensively about writing. In his first work, Of Grammatology, written in France in the 1960s, he offers what we might consider a philosophy of writing. Here, he critiques Claude Lévi-Strauss, a Jewish-French anthropologist whose work in the 1930s was pathbreaking and led to the establishment of post-structural philosophy as a whole. Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil and observed indigenous societies that, according to common sense observation by Europeans, did not have any form of written language. The idea that anyone on Earth does not possess written language is a claim we should be highly skeptical of for myriad reasons. For one, it becomes co-extensive with an idea of civilization that excludes indigenous populations, who suffered near extinction due to colonialism and are still subject to global matrices of violent oppression. The claim that they do not have the ability to produce written language justifies their exclusion from the idea of the human or the civilized. Furthermore, any amount of close observation reveals that a wide range of indigenous societies did have technology for the preservation and communication of language and stories through marking objects; tattooing in French Polynesia and the knot ledgers of the Inca in Peru are two obvious examples. Writing is much more than we might think.

Derrida turns our assumptions about writing upside down through his concept of “arche-writing,” which draws upon Aristotelian philosophy. In Greek, arche means first principle, origin, or source. An-arche, or anarchy, for example, is the abolition of first principles, the suspension of foundational laws. Derrida uses the term arche-writing to convey that there is foundational writing which precedes writing in the sense of the mundane, human action. Arche-writing and writing are not completely unrelated, though; there is a meaningful correspondence between the two terms, in a way that the puppet play alludes to. Gil Anidjar writes that our mothers write us into existence, deciding our stories before we have the agency to do so ourselves. As Henry writes about Wallace Berman in his column above, Eve created life like God did, and Berman created the undetermined stuff of imagination like God did, as well. 

Writing is one thing we do that the divine does also. If God created the world using the Hebrew letters as his primordial material–as the Sefer Yetzirah communicates–then we imitate his act of creation by inscribing the letters to create new things, new ideas.