God's first
creative
act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous effect, create time.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
Why only this?
The logic of negation configures matter,
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]). How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
If we are to enter into the theology of the Wake, then we must remember a theology ofthe bible, following the Wake's command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the bible "[w]ith tears for his coronaichon, such as engines weep, Was liffe worth leaving? " (230. 24-25). The logic of creation reenacted in Genesis 1through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process o f
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? separation, from the earth and the waters to Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise,andfromGod. ThemetaphysicsofGod'sactions,hiscreating,isequivalentto the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function of God's initial acts. The theological possibilities that allow Paul Tillich to claim that sin is separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
The pressure of nocturnal nonsense in Finnegans Wake constructs a "Theoatre" (587. 08) o f "one continuous present tense integument" (185. 36-186. 01). Time becomes a God-theater,atheology. Inordertounderstandhowweareembodiedwithinthistime- theology, we must learn how we transform counting, the succession o f moments we perceive as time during the day, into becoming, into time as a creative flux. This transformation is exposed as the "noughttime" described and enacted within Finnegans
Wake, where matter becomes "on the whole only holes tied together. . . " (434. 21). The darkened world of the Wake blurs the meanings of words into "three score
and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), where the identity o f a word dissolves into a plurality of meanings. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge, and of definition: "may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder! " (20. 16), and in this divide into identities. Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but "the creative becoming of being as a continuous becoming," and yet such a claim does not
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? meananythingtous. IfthisclaimabouttheWakeistrue,itcannotbetrueinthisform,it cannot mean anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The difference lies in how we invest ourselves in these two statements. We cannot invest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize itassomethinglikeourworld. Andyeteverythinginthetextresistssucharecognition.
When we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit o f how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance o f the umbrance" (220. 30; underline added). This "cyclology" describes both Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake and our psychology. This cyclic history and psychology, wedded to logic and the following "is", reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end, where we are ourselves. But in the Wakean "sinse o f the world" (83. 12) "the first riddle o f the universe" is "when is a man not a man? . . . --all give up? --; when he is a . . . Sham" (170. 03-24). In Finnegans Wake we are ourselves by not being ourselves. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows ("umbrance") o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing, but not our existing as ourselves, as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non- existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless, insubstantial present that opens up the possibility o f substance in our consciousworld. Thus,the"cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow"heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" (473. 8),
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? "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility ["ifs"] o f matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends": "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhere in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive," a future constructed out of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation to objects, which do not exist within the future now. Thus our very being is constructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of"ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). 7 Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the conceptofeven. Theoddnumbers,however,measuretheabsenteven. Onemightcall this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing both in and as the Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace" (FW12. 10), face and phase into, nothingness in sleep
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? and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness of nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness o f sense, is another way o f answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a "sham" and a whim ("It wham. But whim I can't remember" [FW493. 17]).
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals oftime", in order to determine the measure ofthe present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline of befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition of the "now" characterized as a form of being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes, what Wittgenstein might call, different language games. What do
we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition of time "as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"(3. 7. 11). 8 For Augustine, iftime is the measure of "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Conf.
Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
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? In the nocturnal world ofFinnegans Wake our everynight practices rewrite the theology ofthe Bible, following the Wake's own command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the Bible "[w]ith tearsforhiscoronaichon,suchasenginesweep, Wasliffeworthleaving? "(230. 24-25). The logic o f creation reenacted in Genesis 1 through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process of separation, of the earth from the waters and of Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise, and from God. The metaphysics o f God's actions, his creating, is equivalent to the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function o f God's initialacts. ThetheologicalpossibilitiesthatallowPaulTillichtoclaimthatsinis separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
10. 3 "Renove the Bible": the logic of creation in Genesis
Some years before Joyce "writhefiilly rate in blotch and void," YHWH floated the
wor(l)d on the deep (Ps. 24. 1,2) and "the earth was without form and void" (Gn. 1. 2). In the Priestly description of creation in Genesis, God does not exist within the text prior to his creative acts. His identity is empowered solely through his own creation and His possession o f the series in which he is defined as an origin: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"(v. l).
God's first creative act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous effect, create time. In both Hebrew and in English one can distinguish three grammatical readings o f this opening phrase:
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? 1) verse 1 is a subordinate temporal clause to v. 2 and v. 3: one would translate this as 'when God began creating. . . the earth was a formless void (v. 2). . . then God said(v. 3). " Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) proposed this interpretation, defending it on "the order ofthe acts of creation," for water must have been created first, as its existence is not explained when it first appears in v. 2 9
2) v. 1isamainclausedescribingthecreatioexnihiliooftheprimalchaos described in v. 2.
3) v. 1 is an independent main clause describing the total creative act. It, therefore, has a disjunctive relationship with the succeeding two verses, which cannotberesolved. Itrepresentsaseparatetheologicaltradition,whichhasbeen
juxtaposed with what is primarily a Babylonian myth, and serves to introduce the Priestly description ofthis myth.
Any resolution o f this ambiguity requires and constitutes a theology o f creation. Any theology "fundamentialy" built across or within this unclarity begins in untangling versions of identity, conceived by Augustine, in his Confessions, as "constant eternity" (XI. . x [12]) and, in my interpretation o f the text, as a-temporal forms o f created being.
Verse 1 does not describe the process of creative transformation from nothing into something, but it describes the creation of the primary identities of being by God. The origin of "the heavens and the earth" lies in the agent of creation, not in the material substance or non-substance, the beingness or non- beingness, of what existed before. God
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? hasnottransformedonestateofbeingintoanother. Ascreationisgenerated,atthis point, solely from and by the agent o f creation, the text, in effect, dissolves the "before," and substitutes a node of power, God, as a mathematical origin. But as an origin without a before, God becomes enmeshed within the series o f moments which can unfold only from his own power, and in relation to his own identity as "origin. " This series, however, is actualized within the temporal succession of God's creative acts. Time is present without being created; God is present without creating time; being is present as the logos of power, distinct from flux.
The ontological pattern ofverse 1, erasing all movement, all flux, in the static identity of created being, shifts and is re-constituted into a potential ontology of temporal flux and becoming, a dynamism of substance, in verse 2. The "spirit of God" opposes the "deep": "Theearthwaswithoutformandvoid,anddarknesswasuponthefaceofthe deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters" (v. 2). In its nature, water is opposed to the qualities of created being, and is even described as encroaching on God's creation in Jer. 5. 22 and Ps. 104. 7-9. And yet it appears to have physical presence, which is understood to be a (non)presence: it is formless being. The opposition between the "spirit o f God" and the "waters" represents a 'potential' conflict between the negative actuality o f deconstructed chaotic (non)presence and the Spirit's positive creative potential to construct forms of being. The creative principle, the "Spirit of God," has become disassociated from God himself and thus has become an element within the metaphysical
universe in which being "exists. " God's spirit is spatially limited in relation to chaos, that is,
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? it is not infinite, for it moves in relation to this chaos and in relation to the physical (non)presence o f the waters.
Within verse 2, Spirit does not interact with, or alter the form of the deep, or of the waters. The formless nature of being does not change or alter its identity or position. Being, therefore, exists without being involved within the dynamics of temporal change. Movement, and hence change, is solely a function of spirit, transversing through and withinspace. Temporaldynamismis,therefore,acomponentofGod'sspiritandnotof the physical presence, the chaotic beingness, o f the "waters". The separation o f God's creative presence from God himselfrepresents an ontological crisis. This crisis re-enacts God's creative process, which will increasingly become defined as a process of differentiation, separation and loss. In verse 2, God has lost his creative power to the metaphysical universe o f created being, just as he lost his temporal independence "in the beginning".
The images o f "the waters" and the "Spirit o f God" disappear in verse 3, as does the possibility o f their unification in the recreation o f time in the infinite calculus o f their meeting. Thetextrecastsitselfintheontologyofidentity(non-flux)introducedinverse
1. God reappears; created being reappears. Verse 3 establishes a structural equivalency between the creative process of differentiation and God's verbal commands, the formal cause of created 'reality. ' The process of God's creation becomes a process of verbal identification, where the actual act of creation is the word, the voice, the language of God "And God said, *Let there be light'; and there was light" (v. 3).
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? The text fails to describe a "real" becoming trapped as it is within a hermeneutic circle that establishes the ontological primacy of identity by overlooking the present. Thus God's initial creative act, which begins a series of differentiations, fails to take place within the text. We are told there will be light, and that there was light, but we are not shown the moment when there is light. "Let there be light" looks forward to a moment o f becoming, which is not itself but which it causes by its looking forward. "And there was light" looks backtothebecomingoflightfromwithinacontextinwhichlightalreadyexists: an absent moment of the past is revitalized with the quality of presence found in the present. Creation becomes a form of knowledge, a hermeneutic hypothesis, that structurally excludes the "I am he who is or who am" from the "now" of creation. The "present" of Being (YHWH) is disjunct from the "present" o f His creating, and hence from dynamic becoming and loss. God is consigned to the before and after framing creation. As an integration o f imperative and subjunctive moods, "Let there be" serves as a command that articulates a possibility, a command that frames the succeeding "light" as an effect. This
"Let" frames itself as a subjunctive yet to have happened, before the fact, as if letting loose the light, allowing the light or granting or offering the light to his creation. "Let" expresses, therefore, the boundary ofthe category ofthe real separate from its physical cause. "Let" marks the category of possibility embodied in both God and his language prior to the category of existence, and thus separates out will from creating and from speaking. Godspeaks'belight'onlywithinthecontextofthepossibilityopenedupbythe force of "Let. . . " The question ofhow our words attach to the world is translated into God as a gap between his willing and his speaking. God's creation functions through our
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? recognitionofthecategoriesofbeingbetrayedbyGod'sspeaking. Goddoesnotsay, "Light! " The phrase "And there was light", in describing the effect of God's subjunctive command, admits, instead o f denies, that language cannot speak with the ontological force ofthe sort suggested by, but not expressed through, God's command. God is given a language that can create the world through translating the problem o f reference in human language into an internal division within God.
The light that God creates in verse 3, therefore, does not emanate from any material cause. He creates light before he created the sun, stars, and the moon. In verse 5, this immaterial light and darkness gains a substanceless temporal character and identity: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. " As light is called Day, it becomes Day: a day without any material form or cause. As darkness is called Night, it becomes night: a Night without any substance or material being.
Through the interaction of the substanceless beings of Day and Night, the first temporal cycle is completed: "And there was evening and there was moming"(v. 5). The temporal transformation between Day and Night is not based on an underlying dynamism within the process o f creation, nor within the nature o f "the heavens and the earth. " Changedoesnotariseoutof,norisitcausedby,createdbeing. Thequalityofthisfirst temporal cycle is purely the result ofan opposition in Day's and Night's quality ofbeing, which is translated into time through the alteration o f identity within a temporal frame consisting o f the categories o f day and night.
Change remains purely a function of God's creative power. This power functions through the differentiation of static identities of being; thus, time, at this point, is not
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? dynamic. Within the first diurnal 'scene,' the earth, the heavens and the light cannot act, cause or effect themselves or each other. Night and Day are attached to qualities of presence, that is, light and darkness, are not temporally related, but simply differentiated. The identity o f all being in a particular moment alters in character, and becomes another moment. The identity, the integrity, ofbeing is not destroyed, it is simply replaced. Thus, God's creative acts take place in an established temporal cycle, which is based on an alteration in being, from Night to Day, from light to dark, and from evening to morning. Identity remains; only the context in which being is expressed changes. Thus, creation remains a process o f identification, and not a manifestation or an ordering o f an underlying flux. Time exists as God's calling light Day and dark Night. Time is enacted through God's naming, and is a function of the meaning o f Day and Night as opposed to the experienceorrealityofchange. Anoppositiongeneratedoutofatemporalbecoming, however, is fundamentally different from the simultaneous presence of, but formal separation between, the waters and the land. Temporal becoming has been leveled into a single plane oftemporal presence: night and day simultaneously exist. 'God,' therefore, has
erased the syntagmatic becoming inherent within the existential experience ofNight and Day. This flattening is the effect of subliming our language into an "unmoving mover", of forgetting our failure to speak God's actual creating.
Time exists only in God's creating. God's creative acts take place within a temporalsuccession. Godhimselfnevercreatestime. Evenwhenhecreatesnightand dayhefailstodefineamechanismthatwillcausetheirsuccession. Time,however,isnot banishedfromthetext. Theclause"inthebeginning,"whateveritsrelationshipwiththe
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? first and second verse, places God's creating within a pattern of succession, which is relative to the future "now" from which the text is written and or/read. Thus the static forms o f being are temporalized simultaneously through God's creating and through the human interpretive description of this act. God and humans, holding the static forms of created being between them, meet in a temporal unity built out of the isomorphic structure defining human experience and divine creating: in a succession of identities. The succession o f days defining God's creative acts establishes syntagmatic becoming as a limitation on God's power, a temporality that God does not create Himself, although he creates the structures through which this change is understood.
In verse 11, God integrates the insubstantial being o f light and darkness within particular material forms ofbeing:
And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament o f the heavens to give light upon the earth". . . and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set then in the firmament o f the heavens to five light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the dark. (v. 14-18)
The sun and the moon "separate the light from the darkness", and therefore "rule over the day and over the night'. The temporal cycle between night and day mirrors the process of creation, in that the function of the heavenly lights is to separate the day from the night. God creates a hierarchical universe, consisting o f material forms o f being, which embody,
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? in varying degrees and in different contexts, his power to rule and differentiate 'reality. ' The qualities o f Day and Night are integrated into the material structure o f the universe.
In Genesis, the generative force behind the alteration from Night to Day does not arise from a dynamic temporal quality embedded within the created universe. Temporal change flows through specifically defined identities: time becomes a relational matrix unitingbeingwithinauniversedefinedaccordingtoaprincipleofdifferentiation. God's creative acts divide the universe according to a language and a grammar (a relational pattern), whose locus o f meaning lies within the concept o f being as identity, where what counts as real can be placed into the equation x=y, outside o f any idea o f temporal flux. Thus, God's creative commands divide the external primal universe into identities o f being: being defined and discriminated by difference. He divides the light from the darkness, the "waters from the waters," the land from the water, and the day from the night. These divisions serve to crystallize the nature o f created being and pull the earth from its formless state.
God's actions are themselves contained within a diurnal 'scene. ' God did not create the universe in a single moment of infinite and eternal presence, but in a succession of days. Godcannotcreatebutthroughtime,throughasuccessionofactswhichconstitutea series o f creative moments, expressed diachronically, syntagmatically. God's presence functions through a becoming in time, and, therefore, he cannot create except in time. The disjunction between God, in the before and after, and his creating, in the surrogate present oftextualpresent,allowsforatemporalcontinuitywithoutcreatingtimeasflux. The chaotic "now" in which creation takes place, in which being must exist and be lost, is
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? erased by the causal axis leading to us. Time is castrated of its "nows", but survives as a succession of identities formed through a principle of differentiation. In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the substrate o f apart form hissheory whre the Theophil" (163. 24-25).
The Wake resurrects the elided "now", the eunuch time bereft of its dynamic function, created in Genesis. The Wake translates this eunuch into the feminine ALP; the NewTestament,ontheotherhand,resurrectsthiseunuchasChrist. IntheGospelof John temporal becoming flows through a series of identities, which are united within what willbecometheTrinitarianGodhead. Theprocessofrelatingtwomomentsintime becomes the process of relating the being, i. e. , the identity, of one moment with another. The gap between these two moments corresponds to the substanceless action of becoming, through which being becomes, or reaches, another moment. This is the same gap that provides for the transformation between God and Christ, and which is integrated into the being of both of them. Thus within Christ the gap between the beginning and the end is self-contained and totalized within his identity. Christ is the substance o f his own being, and transcends the intangible space between two moments: he is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end"(Rev. 1. 8). His identity, therefore, defines a process of creation, or temporal becoming. The breath of God becomes transformed into the spirit of life, which is equivalent to Christ. As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but this identity is self-renewed.
Within the Gospel ofJohn, as one ofthe sources for this Trinitarian theology, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within
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? the same moment, but within the same identity: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made" (Jn. 1. 1). The Word represents a symbol o f relation, connecting God and man, spirit and flesh in the person o f Christ. They are connected through the symbolic transformation o f their identities,suchthatthecreated,thecreating,andthecreatorareultimatelythesame. Itis primarily out o f this re-conception o f creation within this transformation o f identities that the logic of the Trinity arose, with the subsequent re-conception of the relation between being and identity. One sees this already in Clement o f Alexandria when he interprets the Genesis "In the beginning" to mean "the first-bom" and thus translates it as "In Christ the Son" (,Stromata VI. 7. 58. I). 10
As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but in John this identity is self- contained. Consequently, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within the same moment, but within the same identity. Through this identity, which is Christ, man returns to God: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. " The light that separated the day from night, and represented the creative spirit o f God, re-enters the world, through Christ, as a connective pathway leading to God: "I am the light ofthe world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light o f life". The light o f life is God: "God is light and in him is no darkness at all". Thus, God and Christ are one: "For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell". Light, as the division between the substanceless Day and
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?
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]). How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
If we are to enter into the theology of the Wake, then we must remember a theology ofthe bible, following the Wake's command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the bible "[w]ith tears for his coronaichon, such as engines weep, Was liffe worth leaving? " (230. 24-25). The logic of creation reenacted in Genesis 1through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process o f
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? separation, from the earth and the waters to Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise,andfromGod. ThemetaphysicsofGod'sactions,hiscreating,isequivalentto the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function of God's initial acts. The theological possibilities that allow Paul Tillich to claim that sin is separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
The pressure of nocturnal nonsense in Finnegans Wake constructs a "Theoatre" (587. 08) o f "one continuous present tense integument" (185. 36-186. 01). Time becomes a God-theater,atheology. Inordertounderstandhowweareembodiedwithinthistime- theology, we must learn how we transform counting, the succession o f moments we perceive as time during the day, into becoming, into time as a creative flux. This transformation is exposed as the "noughttime" described and enacted within Finnegans
Wake, where matter becomes "on the whole only holes tied together. . . " (434. 21). The darkened world of the Wake blurs the meanings of words into "three score
and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), where the identity o f a word dissolves into a plurality of meanings. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge, and of definition: "may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder! " (20. 16), and in this divide into identities. Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but "the creative becoming of being as a continuous becoming," and yet such a claim does not
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? meananythingtous. IfthisclaimabouttheWakeistrue,itcannotbetrueinthisform,it cannot mean anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The difference lies in how we invest ourselves in these two statements. We cannot invest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize itassomethinglikeourworld. Andyeteverythinginthetextresistssucharecognition.
When we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit o f how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance o f the umbrance" (220. 30; underline added). This "cyclology" describes both Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake and our psychology. This cyclic history and psychology, wedded to logic and the following "is", reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end, where we are ourselves. But in the Wakean "sinse o f the world" (83. 12) "the first riddle o f the universe" is "when is a man not a man? . . . --all give up? --; when he is a . . . Sham" (170. 03-24). In Finnegans Wake we are ourselves by not being ourselves. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows ("umbrance") o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing, but not our existing as ourselves, as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non- existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless, insubstantial present that opens up the possibility o f substance in our consciousworld. Thus,the"cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow"heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" (473. 8),
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? "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility ["ifs"] o f matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends": "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhere in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive," a future constructed out of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation to objects, which do not exist within the future now. Thus our very being is constructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of"ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). 7 Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the conceptofeven. Theoddnumbers,however,measuretheabsenteven. Onemightcall this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing both in and as the Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace" (FW12. 10), face and phase into, nothingness in sleep
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? and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness of nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness o f sense, is another way o f answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a "sham" and a whim ("It wham. But whim I can't remember" [FW493. 17]).
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals oftime", in order to determine the measure ofthe present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline of befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition of the "now" characterized as a form of being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes, what Wittgenstein might call, different language games. What do
we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition of time "as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"(3. 7. 11). 8 For Augustine, iftime is the measure of "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Conf.
Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
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? In the nocturnal world ofFinnegans Wake our everynight practices rewrite the theology ofthe Bible, following the Wake's own command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the Bible "[w]ith tearsforhiscoronaichon,suchasenginesweep, Wasliffeworthleaving? "(230. 24-25). The logic o f creation reenacted in Genesis 1 through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process of separation, of the earth from the waters and of Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise, and from God. The metaphysics o f God's actions, his creating, is equivalent to the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function o f God's initialacts. ThetheologicalpossibilitiesthatallowPaulTillichtoclaimthatsinis separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
10. 3 "Renove the Bible": the logic of creation in Genesis
Some years before Joyce "writhefiilly rate in blotch and void," YHWH floated the
wor(l)d on the deep (Ps. 24. 1,2) and "the earth was without form and void" (Gn. 1. 2). In the Priestly description of creation in Genesis, God does not exist within the text prior to his creative acts. His identity is empowered solely through his own creation and His possession o f the series in which he is defined as an origin: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"(v. l).
God's first creative act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous effect, create time. In both Hebrew and in English one can distinguish three grammatical readings o f this opening phrase:
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? 1) verse 1 is a subordinate temporal clause to v. 2 and v. 3: one would translate this as 'when God began creating. . . the earth was a formless void (v. 2). . . then God said(v. 3). " Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) proposed this interpretation, defending it on "the order ofthe acts of creation," for water must have been created first, as its existence is not explained when it first appears in v. 2 9
2) v. 1isamainclausedescribingthecreatioexnihiliooftheprimalchaos described in v. 2.
3) v. 1 is an independent main clause describing the total creative act. It, therefore, has a disjunctive relationship with the succeeding two verses, which cannotberesolved. Itrepresentsaseparatetheologicaltradition,whichhasbeen
juxtaposed with what is primarily a Babylonian myth, and serves to introduce the Priestly description ofthis myth.
Any resolution o f this ambiguity requires and constitutes a theology o f creation. Any theology "fundamentialy" built across or within this unclarity begins in untangling versions of identity, conceived by Augustine, in his Confessions, as "constant eternity" (XI. . x [12]) and, in my interpretation o f the text, as a-temporal forms o f created being.
Verse 1 does not describe the process of creative transformation from nothing into something, but it describes the creation of the primary identities of being by God. The origin of "the heavens and the earth" lies in the agent of creation, not in the material substance or non-substance, the beingness or non- beingness, of what existed before. God
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? hasnottransformedonestateofbeingintoanother. Ascreationisgenerated,atthis point, solely from and by the agent o f creation, the text, in effect, dissolves the "before," and substitutes a node of power, God, as a mathematical origin. But as an origin without a before, God becomes enmeshed within the series o f moments which can unfold only from his own power, and in relation to his own identity as "origin. " This series, however, is actualized within the temporal succession of God's creative acts. Time is present without being created; God is present without creating time; being is present as the logos of power, distinct from flux.
The ontological pattern ofverse 1, erasing all movement, all flux, in the static identity of created being, shifts and is re-constituted into a potential ontology of temporal flux and becoming, a dynamism of substance, in verse 2. The "spirit of God" opposes the "deep": "Theearthwaswithoutformandvoid,anddarknesswasuponthefaceofthe deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters" (v. 2). In its nature, water is opposed to the qualities of created being, and is even described as encroaching on God's creation in Jer. 5. 22 and Ps. 104. 7-9. And yet it appears to have physical presence, which is understood to be a (non)presence: it is formless being. The opposition between the "spirit o f God" and the "waters" represents a 'potential' conflict between the negative actuality o f deconstructed chaotic (non)presence and the Spirit's positive creative potential to construct forms of being. The creative principle, the "Spirit of God," has become disassociated from God himself and thus has become an element within the metaphysical
universe in which being "exists. " God's spirit is spatially limited in relation to chaos, that is,
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? it is not infinite, for it moves in relation to this chaos and in relation to the physical (non)presence o f the waters.
Within verse 2, Spirit does not interact with, or alter the form of the deep, or of the waters. The formless nature of being does not change or alter its identity or position. Being, therefore, exists without being involved within the dynamics of temporal change. Movement, and hence change, is solely a function of spirit, transversing through and withinspace. Temporaldynamismis,therefore,acomponentofGod'sspiritandnotof the physical presence, the chaotic beingness, o f the "waters". The separation o f God's creative presence from God himselfrepresents an ontological crisis. This crisis re-enacts God's creative process, which will increasingly become defined as a process of differentiation, separation and loss. In verse 2, God has lost his creative power to the metaphysical universe o f created being, just as he lost his temporal independence "in the beginning".
The images o f "the waters" and the "Spirit o f God" disappear in verse 3, as does the possibility o f their unification in the recreation o f time in the infinite calculus o f their meeting. Thetextrecastsitselfintheontologyofidentity(non-flux)introducedinverse
1. God reappears; created being reappears. Verse 3 establishes a structural equivalency between the creative process of differentiation and God's verbal commands, the formal cause of created 'reality. ' The process of God's creation becomes a process of verbal identification, where the actual act of creation is the word, the voice, the language of God "And God said, *Let there be light'; and there was light" (v. 3).
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? The text fails to describe a "real" becoming trapped as it is within a hermeneutic circle that establishes the ontological primacy of identity by overlooking the present. Thus God's initial creative act, which begins a series of differentiations, fails to take place within the text. We are told there will be light, and that there was light, but we are not shown the moment when there is light. "Let there be light" looks forward to a moment o f becoming, which is not itself but which it causes by its looking forward. "And there was light" looks backtothebecomingoflightfromwithinacontextinwhichlightalreadyexists: an absent moment of the past is revitalized with the quality of presence found in the present. Creation becomes a form of knowledge, a hermeneutic hypothesis, that structurally excludes the "I am he who is or who am" from the "now" of creation. The "present" of Being (YHWH) is disjunct from the "present" o f His creating, and hence from dynamic becoming and loss. God is consigned to the before and after framing creation. As an integration o f imperative and subjunctive moods, "Let there be" serves as a command that articulates a possibility, a command that frames the succeeding "light" as an effect. This
"Let" frames itself as a subjunctive yet to have happened, before the fact, as if letting loose the light, allowing the light or granting or offering the light to his creation. "Let" expresses, therefore, the boundary ofthe category ofthe real separate from its physical cause. "Let" marks the category of possibility embodied in both God and his language prior to the category of existence, and thus separates out will from creating and from speaking. Godspeaks'belight'onlywithinthecontextofthepossibilityopenedupbythe force of "Let. . . " The question ofhow our words attach to the world is translated into God as a gap between his willing and his speaking. God's creation functions through our
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? recognitionofthecategoriesofbeingbetrayedbyGod'sspeaking. Goddoesnotsay, "Light! " The phrase "And there was light", in describing the effect of God's subjunctive command, admits, instead o f denies, that language cannot speak with the ontological force ofthe sort suggested by, but not expressed through, God's command. God is given a language that can create the world through translating the problem o f reference in human language into an internal division within God.
The light that God creates in verse 3, therefore, does not emanate from any material cause. He creates light before he created the sun, stars, and the moon. In verse 5, this immaterial light and darkness gains a substanceless temporal character and identity: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. " As light is called Day, it becomes Day: a day without any material form or cause. As darkness is called Night, it becomes night: a Night without any substance or material being.
Through the interaction of the substanceless beings of Day and Night, the first temporal cycle is completed: "And there was evening and there was moming"(v. 5). The temporal transformation between Day and Night is not based on an underlying dynamism within the process o f creation, nor within the nature o f "the heavens and the earth. " Changedoesnotariseoutof,norisitcausedby,createdbeing. Thequalityofthisfirst temporal cycle is purely the result ofan opposition in Day's and Night's quality ofbeing, which is translated into time through the alteration o f identity within a temporal frame consisting o f the categories o f day and night.
Change remains purely a function of God's creative power. This power functions through the differentiation of static identities of being; thus, time, at this point, is not
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? dynamic. Within the first diurnal 'scene,' the earth, the heavens and the light cannot act, cause or effect themselves or each other. Night and Day are attached to qualities of presence, that is, light and darkness, are not temporally related, but simply differentiated. The identity o f all being in a particular moment alters in character, and becomes another moment. The identity, the integrity, ofbeing is not destroyed, it is simply replaced. Thus, God's creative acts take place in an established temporal cycle, which is based on an alteration in being, from Night to Day, from light to dark, and from evening to morning. Identity remains; only the context in which being is expressed changes. Thus, creation remains a process o f identification, and not a manifestation or an ordering o f an underlying flux. Time exists as God's calling light Day and dark Night. Time is enacted through God's naming, and is a function of the meaning o f Day and Night as opposed to the experienceorrealityofchange. Anoppositiongeneratedoutofatemporalbecoming, however, is fundamentally different from the simultaneous presence of, but formal separation between, the waters and the land. Temporal becoming has been leveled into a single plane oftemporal presence: night and day simultaneously exist. 'God,' therefore, has
erased the syntagmatic becoming inherent within the existential experience ofNight and Day. This flattening is the effect of subliming our language into an "unmoving mover", of forgetting our failure to speak God's actual creating.
Time exists only in God's creating. God's creative acts take place within a temporalsuccession. Godhimselfnevercreatestime. Evenwhenhecreatesnightand dayhefailstodefineamechanismthatwillcausetheirsuccession. Time,however,isnot banishedfromthetext. Theclause"inthebeginning,"whateveritsrelationshipwiththe
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? first and second verse, places God's creating within a pattern of succession, which is relative to the future "now" from which the text is written and or/read. Thus the static forms o f being are temporalized simultaneously through God's creating and through the human interpretive description of this act. God and humans, holding the static forms of created being between them, meet in a temporal unity built out of the isomorphic structure defining human experience and divine creating: in a succession of identities. The succession o f days defining God's creative acts establishes syntagmatic becoming as a limitation on God's power, a temporality that God does not create Himself, although he creates the structures through which this change is understood.
In verse 11, God integrates the insubstantial being o f light and darkness within particular material forms ofbeing:
And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament o f the heavens to give light upon the earth". . . and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set then in the firmament o f the heavens to five light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the dark. (v. 14-18)
The sun and the moon "separate the light from the darkness", and therefore "rule over the day and over the night'. The temporal cycle between night and day mirrors the process of creation, in that the function of the heavenly lights is to separate the day from the night. God creates a hierarchical universe, consisting o f material forms o f being, which embody,
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? in varying degrees and in different contexts, his power to rule and differentiate 'reality. ' The qualities o f Day and Night are integrated into the material structure o f the universe.
In Genesis, the generative force behind the alteration from Night to Day does not arise from a dynamic temporal quality embedded within the created universe. Temporal change flows through specifically defined identities: time becomes a relational matrix unitingbeingwithinauniversedefinedaccordingtoaprincipleofdifferentiation. God's creative acts divide the universe according to a language and a grammar (a relational pattern), whose locus o f meaning lies within the concept o f being as identity, where what counts as real can be placed into the equation x=y, outside o f any idea o f temporal flux. Thus, God's creative commands divide the external primal universe into identities o f being: being defined and discriminated by difference. He divides the light from the darkness, the "waters from the waters," the land from the water, and the day from the night. These divisions serve to crystallize the nature o f created being and pull the earth from its formless state.
God's actions are themselves contained within a diurnal 'scene. ' God did not create the universe in a single moment of infinite and eternal presence, but in a succession of days. Godcannotcreatebutthroughtime,throughasuccessionofactswhichconstitutea series o f creative moments, expressed diachronically, syntagmatically. God's presence functions through a becoming in time, and, therefore, he cannot create except in time. The disjunction between God, in the before and after, and his creating, in the surrogate present oftextualpresent,allowsforatemporalcontinuitywithoutcreatingtimeasflux. The chaotic "now" in which creation takes place, in which being must exist and be lost, is
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? erased by the causal axis leading to us. Time is castrated of its "nows", but survives as a succession of identities formed through a principle of differentiation. In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the substrate o f apart form hissheory whre the Theophil" (163. 24-25).
The Wake resurrects the elided "now", the eunuch time bereft of its dynamic function, created in Genesis. The Wake translates this eunuch into the feminine ALP; the NewTestament,ontheotherhand,resurrectsthiseunuchasChrist. IntheGospelof John temporal becoming flows through a series of identities, which are united within what willbecometheTrinitarianGodhead. Theprocessofrelatingtwomomentsintime becomes the process of relating the being, i. e. , the identity, of one moment with another. The gap between these two moments corresponds to the substanceless action of becoming, through which being becomes, or reaches, another moment. This is the same gap that provides for the transformation between God and Christ, and which is integrated into the being of both of them. Thus within Christ the gap between the beginning and the end is self-contained and totalized within his identity. Christ is the substance o f his own being, and transcends the intangible space between two moments: he is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end"(Rev. 1. 8). His identity, therefore, defines a process of creation, or temporal becoming. The breath of God becomes transformed into the spirit of life, which is equivalent to Christ. As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but this identity is self-renewed.
Within the Gospel ofJohn, as one ofthe sources for this Trinitarian theology, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within
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? the same moment, but within the same identity: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made" (Jn. 1. 1). The Word represents a symbol o f relation, connecting God and man, spirit and flesh in the person o f Christ. They are connected through the symbolic transformation o f their identities,suchthatthecreated,thecreating,andthecreatorareultimatelythesame. Itis primarily out o f this re-conception o f creation within this transformation o f identities that the logic of the Trinity arose, with the subsequent re-conception of the relation between being and identity. One sees this already in Clement o f Alexandria when he interprets the Genesis "In the beginning" to mean "the first-bom" and thus translates it as "In Christ the Son" (,Stromata VI. 7. 58. I). 10
As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but in John this identity is self- contained. Consequently, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within the same moment, but within the same identity. Through this identity, which is Christ, man returns to God: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. " The light that separated the day from night, and represented the creative spirit o f God, re-enters the world, through Christ, as a connective pathway leading to God: "I am the light ofthe world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light o f life". The light o f life is God: "God is light and in him is no darkness at all". Thus, God and Christ are one: "For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell". Light, as the division between the substanceless Day and
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