Doubt and Distance - On Taurus 1 and the Five of Disks
Five of Disks, or the Hesitation of Nourishment
The Five of Disks, titled Worry, depicts a moment of material strain—but its pressure is theological. Governed by Saturn in the first decan of Taurus, the card stages a ritual field where nourishment is delayed, where support flickers, and where the scaffolding of meaning stays standing, emptied of its light. Its central image—five mechanical disks interlocked into an inverted pentagram—suggests a geometry of compression, where structure folds inward under its own pressure. The elements endure, suspended in a ritual that can no longer release them. What once flowed now clenches shut. Something essential—trust, grace, ease—has been withheld.
In the Kabbalistic structure of the Thoth deck, the Five of Disks belongs to Geburah in Assiah—divine force etched into matter. This is the weight of correction showing up through the body, through time, through gesture. The architecture of the world holds, but the current inside it begins to drag, to tighten. This condition is lived by Lazer, a character in Autobiography of Red, who describes mortality as moments of divine doubt—flashes when presence recedes and the self begins to flicker. He does not treat this disappearance as failure. Instead, he learns to offer care from inside the gap it leaves behind.
Paul Celan, a postwar Jewish poet writing in German—the language of both his mother and her murderers—enters a similar field. His poems continue in the aftermath, shaped by a tongue that survived atrocity but now stumbles under its own weight. The line still forms. The syntax still turns. But reception falters. This is not collapse. It is the slow, haunted rhythm of survival—structure strained, spirit dispersed—where nourishment must be re-learned inside a language that still speaks, but no longer shelters.
This card is the moment after my ancestress Miriam died, when the Israelites arrive at Kadesh and find no water. It is the silence before Celan’s poem, when language has not yet returned from the thousand darknesses. It is Geryon’s photograph, pinned to the wall, holding the ghost of time rather than its presence. It is what Lazer calls a “moment of death”—not an end, but a flash of divine doubt, a pause in the structure of one’s confident reality.
The Five of Disks marks the place where desire still exists, but the field of response has warped. Where the ritual still performs, but no longer comforts. The priesthood survives, but only through stripping and negation. This is the metaphysical space this essay enters. Not to resolve it, but to remain with its hauntings: the eidolon mistaken for the real, the gesture that misreads its god, the inheritance shaped by the fullness of absence.
Through the figures of Geryon, Lazer, and Celan, this essay unfolds under the sign of the Five of Disks. It asks what happens when the world does not break, but falters. When the structure remains, but the divine has turned its face. When nourishment still arrives—but only after we learn how to receive it in another tongue.
Introducing portions of Vs actual thesis on the Alchemy and Soteriology of Anne Carson. Hope you enjoy my babies <3
Rituals of Offense
What is Time Made Of?
What is time made of?" is a question that had long exercised Geryon.
Everywhere he went he asked people. Yesterday for example at the university.
Time is an abstraction—just a meaning
that we impose upon motion. Geryon is thinking this answer over as he kneels
beside the bathtub in his hotel room
stirring photographs back and forth in the developing solution. He picks out
one of the prints and pins it
to a clothesline strung between the television and the door. It is a photograph
of some people sitting at desks
in a classroom. The desks look too small for them—but Geryon is not
interested in human comfort. Much truer
is the time that strays into photographs and stops. High on the wall hangs a white
electric clock. It says five minutes to six. [1]
We begin with a question—not just a question Geryon asks, but one that exercises him. This is bodily language. The word “exercised” suggests effort, agitation, maybe even strain or discipline. Geryon is looking outside himself for answers. He believes others might know. This externalizing is epistemological: he sees time as something that can be known, or defined, as if it exists apart from him. The phrase “for example at the university” gestures at systems of knowledge, places that supposedly house answers. But it also flattens them—there’s a mild irony, a shrug to it. As if the university is just another stop in the search, not a special one.
To say that time is “just a meaning that we impose upon motion,” allows the word ‘just’ to perform a subtle but loaded minimization. It frames time as merely meaning, suggesting a dismissal of Geryon’s deeper, more visceral inquiry. Yet just also echoes justice, opening a quiet ethical tension beneath the surface. If time is something imposed—rather than discovered or felt—then its authority becomes suspect. Geryon’s question “what is time made of” seeks substance, texture, maybe even fairness, but the answer he receives strips time of all material or ethical grounding. It is abstracted from his lived experience.
As Geryon thinks about this, he kneels. To kneel is evocative: it's a vulnerable, humble, perhaps devotional posture. He is not simply contemplating—he is in a position that suggests submission, waiting, maybe prayer. His temple, a hotel room, a non-place that is both transitional and impersonal. A setting without a sense of rooted time. He is displaced.
The word "stirring" links back to the earlier “exercised.” This is a tactile, cyclical motion. The photos are already latent; he is coaxing them out. This is key: He is trying to develop time, make it emerge in an image. However, the image he is developing is strange. The people are out of place. The desks constrain them. The visual detail is specific: we see this discomfort. The implication is quiet but jarring—these people don’t belong here, or they’ve outgrown the frame they’re placed within.
The classroom itself is not a neutral setting; it is a site of discipline and institutional power. That the desks “look too small” suggests a misfit between body and structure, revealing how systems designed to teach or shape subjects also constrain and distort them. Yet Carson interrupts our empathy with the line, “Geryon is not interested in human comfort,” a startling declaration that reveals much about Geryon’s own emotional orientation and little about the subjects of the photo. His refusal to care about comfort comes across as a refusal to acknowledge vulnerability, especially his own. By denying the scene’s discomfort, Geryon attempts to suppress the mirrored recognition that he, too, is shaped—uncomfortably—by time, structure, and systems not built for him.
Geryon wants to understand time, even master it, but his method—developing photographs—betrays a deeper desire. As he stirs the photographs in their chemical bath, he performs a paradox: trying to bring time into visibility while freezing it in place. The photograph becomes both a medium of capture and a site of subjugation. Like the people in the classroom, Geryon is caught between motion and fixity. He manipulates the image—choosing what to pin up and where—but in doing so, he also aligns himself with institutional power: the power to define, frame, and display. At the same time, he resembles the subjects he photographs, bodies confined by systems of knowledge and vision. This double-bind—being both subject and subjugator—reflects a deeper ontological instability. Geryon seeks control over time, yet the process he engages in makes visible his own entrapment within it.
What Geryon ultimately privileges is not the moving flow of time but “the time that strays into photographs and stops.” This is a different order of temporality—accidental, ghostlike, and stilled. The photograph, for him, contains a truer time than abstraction ever could. It does not explain time but suspends it. And yet, the final detail—a white electric clock on the wall frozen at “five minutes to six”—undermines even this fragile victory.
The clock, a symbol of institutional time, is trapped in the image, stripped of its function. In trying to capture time, Geryon ends up revealing its hollowness. The photograph now reflects a space where power, discomfort, and failed knowledge echo. Geryon’s gesture, then, is both devotional and defensive—a ritual that longs for understanding while resisting the very discomfort that understanding would require.
There is a repetition of the question, "what is time made of" throughout Autobiography, which seems to play with a similar idea as Geryon's repeated returns to the Red Patience photograph. A photograph appears to capture time, to hold a moment in stillness, to fix meaning—but, like Geryon’s assertion that he does not care for comfort, it is always already unstable. The image suggests permanence, yet it is the product of a process—a moment of flickering development, an emergence from negation. The gaze of the image, what is captured, held still, fixed, is not the same as the embodied reality that produced it. What is being revealed is not just a moment frozen in time, but the very structure of time—something that negates, flickers, hesitates, and moves even in the attempt to hold it still.
This crisis of the image—its promise of permanence, its failure to contain the real—extends beyond time. Carson is asking us to consider what happens when an image is mistaken for truth: when the act of fixing something into visibility becomes, a form of misperception. Geryon’s attempt to fix time—to hold something real in stillness—demonstrates a form of representation that feels hollow, off-center, even false. This suggests that the image may always contain a kind of betrayal—a substitution, or illusion, that cannot be reconciled with the fullness of lived experience. What Geryon develops is not the-thing-in-itself. It is the thing in-spite-of-itself after confrontation with shadow.
Palinode
Throughout Autobiography of Red, Carson returns again and again to the question of image and representation—not only as a formal concern, but as a mode through which desire, time, and perception are structured. This is evident in her decision to position Stesichoros as a foundational figure in the opening chapters leading up to Geryon’s romance.
For example, within the fist essay, when speaking on the difference Stesichoros makes, Carson tells us that;
To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment. This is a big question, the question of the blinding of Stesichoros by Helen (see Appendices A, B), although generally regarded as unanswerable (but see Appendix C). [2]
Carson’s statement suggests that Stesichoros’ act was not merely a poetic correction, but a confrontation with the power of language to construct—and therefore to unravel—an image that had become mythic truth. To “unlatch” Helen’s epithet is to sever her from the fixed linguistic structure that had long defined her, and in doing so, to release her from the sedimented layers of erotic blame. But this gesture does more than redeem Helen’s reputation: it disrupts the entire logic of mythic perception that had positioned her as a visual and narrative object. In stripping the epithet away, Stesichoros does not simply revise the story—he exposes the mechanism by which the story was made.
This logic of severing image from assumed truth is elaborated in Appendix A, where Carson compiles a series of fragmentary sources regarding the Palinode. Yet, as with much of Carson’s work, there is an inherent ambiguity in these testimonia. Are they direct translations of ancient sources, or has Carson reworked, stylized, or even invented elements of them? The first, seemingly from a Greek lexicon dictionary tells us the definition of the word,
Suidas s.v. palinodia: "Counter song" or "saying the opposite of what you said before." E.g., for writing abuse of Helen Stesichoros was struck blind but then he wrote for her an encomium and got his sight back. The encomium came out of a dream and is called "The Palinode." [3]
A palinode, then, is not simply a correction but an act of negation that generates a new way of seeing. Carson extrapolates only by giving us philosophical fragments of the original poem. For example, a quote from the Phaedrus which reads;
Plato Phaedrus 243a: There is in mythology an ancient tactic of purgation for criminals, which Homer did not understand but Stesichoros did. When Stesichoros found himself blinded for slandering Helen he did not (like Homer) just stand there bewildered—no! on the contrary. Stesichoros was an intellectual. He recognized the cause and at once sat down to compose [his "Palinode"].... [4]
In order to fully appreciate what Carson is doing here, it is helpful to revisit the source text. One of the first speeches Socrates gives in the Phaedrus is a strange and ironic performance: a case against love, delivered as though it were being forced out of him against his will. He begins by veiling his head, declaring, “I shall cover my head so that I can get through my speech as quickly as possible and not be put off by embarrassment if I catch your eye.” [5] The gesture signals not just shame, but the desire to disconnect from vision, to speak without being witnessed. At the same time, he calls upon the Muses to “grant me your support in the tale which my excellent friend here is forcing me to tell”—mocking the idea that the speech is divine even as he slides into poetic rhythm. Already, there’s a sense that eros is entering through the very form of the speech: its cadence, its image-making, its bodily gestures. What begins as a critique of irrational desire becomes increasingly entangled in its own affective texture.
In this speech, Socrates performs an argument that defines love as a form of excess—“when irrational desire rules one's reasoned impulse to do right and is carried towards pleasure in beauty... it is named after that very strength, and is called love.” [6] We will return to this, but for now I ask that we pay attention to the speech’s scaffolding.
Even though he’s supposed to be giving a rational, critical speech against love, Socrates begins to act like someone caught in a growing wave of inspiration. This ironic destabilization becomes explicit in the lines that follow. Upon finishing this monologue, Socrates turns to Phaedrus and the following exchange takes place;
Socrates: Anyway, my dear Phaedrus, do you think I've been inspired by a god? I do.
Phaedrus: Well, it's certainly true that you're being unusually eloquent, Socrates.
Socrates: Keep quiet and listen to me, then. For in fact this spot really does seem infused with divinity, so don't be surprised
if, as may happen, I become possessed by the Nymphs as my speech progresses. As it is I'm already more or less chanting dithyrambs.
Phaedrus: You're quite right.
Socrates: It's your fault. But listen to the rest of the speech. After all, the fit might be averted, I suppose. But we had better leave this in the hands of the gods, while we resume the speech to the boy. [7]
Here, Socrates seems to confess that he feels something more than eloquence is occurring—that the place is infused with divinity, and that he may be possessed by the Nymphs. He adds: “As it is I’m already more or less chanting dithyrambs.” This language is mythic, poetic, and alarmed. A dithyramb is a frenzied, ecstatic hymn to Dionysus—associated with divine madness, wild rhythm, and loss of rational control. And the Nymphs, as minor deities of place and nature, are often associated with poetic inspiration, possession, and madness in the landscape.
When he adds, half playfully, that “the fit might be averted,” the word fit does something subtle. It marks the speech as no longer entirely his own. A fit is something involuntary, physical, and contagious; it suggests the entrance of a force that is not rational, but also not entirely unwelcome. As Socrates continues the speech, we can hear that force gathering—the rhythm of his speech swelling into accusation, invective, image, and epic myth. The criticism of love becomes frenzied, even gleeful, and by the time he ends, there’s a kind of theatrical excess that outpaces the content. He jokes again that it’s Phaedrus’s fault—“you have deliberately exposed me”—but this “blame” is less about the friend than about the conditions of speech itself. The landscape, the hour, the speech, the body: something has been set in motion that cannot be easily reversed. The speech ends not with resolution, but with avoidance—Socrates says he will cross the river and leave, lest he be forced into “something even worse.” [8]
This is where Carson’s particular quoting of Socrates comes in, appearing within an interesting hinge within Phaedrus; As Socrates prepares to leave after delivering his harsh speech against Eros, he is abruptly halted—not by Phaedrus, but by the voice of his daimonion, his divine sign:
I seemed to hear a sudden voice telling me not to leave until I have purified myself from some offence or other which I have committed against the realm of the gods….And so I do already understand beyond the shadow of a doubt what my offence was. After all, the soul too has something of the same ability that seers possess. [9]
Socrates now performs the consequences of having misrepresented Eros. The daimonion interrupts—not with logic, but with a sudden voice, telling him he must not leave until he has “purified [himself] from some offence or other... against the realm of the gods.” The divine enters as a sign, a stoppage, a correction in motion. Socrates says, “I do already understand beyond the shadow of a doubt what my offence was,” suggesting that the soul, like a seer, is capable of recognizing its own transgression.
Socrates does not soften the gravity of what has occurred. When Phaedrus asks him to explain the nature of his offense, he replies without hesitation:
Socrates: It was an awful speech, Phaedrus, just awful—the one you brought with you, and the one you forced me to make.
Phaedrus: Why?
Socrates: It was stupid and almost irreligious, and speeches don't come more awful than that.
Phaedrus: No, they don't, if you're right.
Socrates: Well, don't you think that Love is a god, and the son of Aphrodite? [10]
The language here shifts the register entirely. The failure is not rhetorical, but spiritual. To misrepresent Eros is to speak falsely about a god. “Don’t you think that Love is a god, and the son of Aphrodite?” Socrates asks—not as a metaphor, but as a genuine religious proposition. In this frame, the earlier speech becomes a kind of blasphemy, a violation that demands purification. The palinode is no longer optional; it is a ritual obligation, required in the wake of divine misalignment.
From here, we get the exact quote Carson fragmented from Plato, which reads as follows;
But if Love is a god, or at least divine, as indeed he is, he cannot be bad, but both the speeches which have just been given about him made him out to be bad. Not only did they commit this offence against Love, but their stupidity attained exquisite heights: although everything they said was unsound and false, they gave themselves solemn airs as if they were important, to see if they could deceive some pathetic people into admiring them. And so I must purify myself, my friend. Now, there's an ancient tradition governing how those who commit an offence in the domain of story-telling have to purify themselves, which Homer may have failed to recognize, but Stesichorus didn't. After losing his sight as a result of slandering Helen, Stesichorus didn't fail to recognize his fault, as Homer had. No, as a man of culture he recognized how he had sinned and immediately composed the following lines:
False was the tale I told.
You did not travel on the fair-decked ship,
Nor came to the citadel of Troy.
And no sooner had he finished composing the entire Palinode, as it is called, than he regained his sight. Well, I shall prove myself cleverer than them in one respect, anyway: I shall try to recompense Love with my palinode before anything happens to me as a result of slandering him, and I shall not keep my head covered out of embarrassment as I did before, but shall speak with my head exposed. [11]
What matters here is not just that Socrates reverses course, but how he stages that reversal as an act of atonement. The shift from veiled to unveiled—from the covered head to the exposed one—signals more than a change in mood. It marks the moment when philosophical inquiry becomes indistinguishable from ritual obligation. If the earlier speech was ironic, detached, and affectively disavowed, the palinode insists on a different mode of relation: one in which the speaker must re-align himself with the truth of the god he misrepresented. Carson seizes on this gesture not to moralize it, but to preserve its epistemological and poetic value. The palinode is thus a mode towards transformation of vision.
But this transformation is not merely rhetorical. What distinguishes both Socrates and Stesichoros from Homer is not just their capacity for correction, but their mode of knowing. Socrates explicitly criticizes Homer for failing to understand why he was blind—an accusation that doubles as an epistemological critique. Homer reproduces myth without questioning its vision, repeating received forms rather than interrogating their structure. In contrast, Socrates presents Stesichoros as a poet-philosopher, someone who recognized the error in his own body—who understood blindness not as a divine sign.
This bodily awareness becomes a condition for knowledge: Socrates’ own daimonion interrupts him through sensation, not logic; his correction begins with a sudden inner voice, a fit, a disorientation that cannot be reasoned away. The palinode, then, is as Carson calls, a counter-song—a ritual of attunement to divine and bodily knowing. To see truly, one must not only revise the image, but undergo a transformation of perception itself. Carson lingers here to show us that the cost of seeing falsely is not narrative failure—it is spiritual misalignment.
Of course, if Socrates invokes Stesichoros to frame his own reversal, it’s worth asking what Stesichoros himself was doing—and what kind of seeing that gesture required. Turning to Hellenistic commentary in POxy 2506, we can get some further context;
he (Stesichorus?)
blames Homer because he placed
Helen in Troy and not her eidolon;
in another poem (?) he blames Hesiod; for
there are two different palinodes, one begins,
"Come again, song-loving goddess,"
while the other begins, "Golden-winged maiden,"
as Chamaeleon has recorded; Stesichorus
himself says that the eidolon went to Troy
but that Helen remained with Proteus; and so
he made the story new... [12]
So it is said, in composing a palinode for Helen, Stesichoros does not simply rewrite her story—he performs a rupture in the logic of mythic vision. His declaration undoes the image of Helen that had come to define her as a blameworthy spectacle—icon of erotic shame. What he offers is not a factual correction, but a poetics of negation. Plato’s framing as this as a purgation of mythological error hinges on a deeper question of perception: the problem is not Helen herself, but how she is seen.
The commentary tells us that in the Palinode, Helen never actually went to Troy—what the world mistook for Helen was only her eidolon, a word often translated as “phantom” or “image,” a kind of illusion or projection. The real Helen, we are told, remained far away with Proteus, the shape-shifting sea god. This revision doesn’t merely exonerate Helen; it reveals that the catastrophe of Troy was driven not by her actions, but by how she was imagined—how her image was misperceived and mistaken for truth.
In Plato’s reading, this mythic misrecognition becomes a model for rhetorical and erotic error. Just as Helen was wrongly blamed for destruction, so too has love—Eros—been falsely represented as corrupting or irrational. The failure is not in Helen or in love themselves, but in the stories told about them: in the way perception is shaped by desire, and how desire itself constructs its objects through projection, fantasy, and distortion.
Like Socrates, Stesichoros recognizes that the offense is not narrative inconsistency, but false seeing: the failure to perceive reality beneath the weight of inherited vision. His act might then be read as a ritual reversal that attempts not only to purify the error, but to reconfigure what it means to see—and what it costs to look falsely.
At this point, it might be appropriate to ask; what force has Geryon misapprehended? What god has he, however unknowingly, profaned? The answer appears to be time. His repeated question—“what is time made of?”—is not merely intellectual, but devotional. It carries the texture of longing, the bodily strain of someone trying not just to understand time, but to hold it.
Like Stesichoros before his revelation, Geryon’s vision remains trapped within the illusion. He treats time as something that can be captured, developed, made visible through image. But time—like Helen—is not what it seems. What Geryon calls time is closer to an eidolon, a phantom mistaken for truth. His photographs try to stop motion, to render experience into fixed form, but instead reveal the distortion inherent in that gesture. The offense is not blasphemy through denial, but projection: a ritual mis-seeing that stains the image with its excess.
To fix time in an image is to commit the same epistemic violence that blinded Stesichoros—to mistake a phantom for a truth, and in doing so, to preserve error as vision. So we will again say that Geryon’s photographic practice becomes a kind of sacred performance—only this time we suggest that it currently parodies Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus. Like Socrates veiling his head, Geryon kneels beside the bath in a posture of shame, exposure, or preparation. The photographs become his speech—not rhetorical, but visual—attempts to frame what cannot be held. Though, the rhythm of stirring, the pinning of images, the refusal of comfort: these gestures betray their own fragility. Geryon does not yet know he is misrepresenting the god of time, just as Socrates did not realize he had slandered Eros. But the conditions for reversal might reveal themselves within his soul. The body is already in error, and with attention to its shadow, perhaps Geryon might see.
Deathbringing Talk
Divine Doubt and Ancestral Nourishment
After working on his photographs, Geryon sets out, arriving at Café Mitwelt to meet up with some of the philosophers he had met at the conference. It is here that Geryon finds himself seated across from a man named Lazer;
He glanced across the table. Your name is Lazarus? said Geryon.
No my name is Lazer. As in laser beam—but
do you wish to order something? Geryon glanced at the waiter. Coffee please.
Turned back to Lazer. Unusual name. Not really. I am named
for my grandfather. Eleazar is a fairly common Jewish
name. But my parents
were atheists so—he spread his hands—a slight accommodation. He smiled. [13]
Lazer’s introduction immediately sets up a conversation about inheritance, absence, and transmission. His name sounds almost like Lazarus, the biblical figure resurrected from the dead, yet instead of evoking rebirth, Lazer’s name suggests light, sharpness, and precision. This already introduces a contrast between resurrection and clarity—between being brought back to life and seeing sharply.
His name holds a subtle contradiction. It gestures toward inheritance—Lazer is named after his grandfather—but also signals a break. “My parents were atheists,” he says, “so—a slight accommodation.” The name is preserved, but its original meaning is displaced. What remains is something partial: a trace of tradition without its original structure. In this quiet tension, Carson begins to suggest that inheritance is not always about preservation. Sometimes it is about the ways meaning is carried forward in altered forms.
And you are an atheist too? said Geryon.
I am a skeptic. You doubt God?
Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me.
What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God
suspends assent and POOF! we disappear. [14]
Lazer’s reversal of the usual idea of doubt reshapes the way we think about both existence and skepticism. Rather than humans questioning g-d, he suggests that it is g-d who hesitates, who withholds certainty. In his view, mortality is not a single, inevitable event but something that happens in flashes—moments when divine assent is withdrawn, and existence temporarily vanishes. This reframing suggests that life itself is not continuously given, but something that flickers in and out of being, structured by hesitation. If existence depends on divine affirmation, then divine doubt means that reality itself is unstable, prone to moments of disappearance and return.
Carson uses Lazer’s perspective to reflect on time, mortality, and the transmission of meaning. His name, stripped of its original religious weight, becomes a symbol of how meaning can persist through absence. Mortality, like inheritance, is not fixed—it unfolds through disappearance and return. What is passed down is never whole, but partial, altered by time and context. In this way, life is not a continuous state but a series of thresholds: affirmations, hesitations, and ruptures.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them. Have an olive,
he added as the waiter's arm flashed between them with a plate. [15]
This idea of “moments of death” reinforces the structure of flickering negation—to die is not a singular event, but something that happens repeatedly, like a pulse, a rhythm. This particular scene aligns Lazer more deeply with the Eleazar story in Numbers 20, where priestly inheritance does not pass smoothly from father to son, but only after rupture, disobedience, and divine withdrawal.
But if moments of death flicker within the individual, they also reverberate across generations. The Tanakh’s account of Eleazar offers a vision of rupture not only as loss, but as a precondition for transformation. In Numbers, we are told that the Israelites—having recently escaped slavery in Egypt, "have arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there." [16] Her death marks more than the passing of a prophetess; it ruptures the very conditions of sustenance. Immediately afterward, the Israelites find themselves without water, as if her absence unravels the world’s hidden structure. Their cries to Moses and Aaron—"Why have you brought יהוה’s congregation into this wilderness for us and our beasts to die there?" [17]—reveal not only thirst, but theological panic—a moment when divine provision falters, and faith begins to shake.
This moment of desperation and divine absence leads to Moses’ mistake. Commanded by G-d to "take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. Thus you shall produce water for them from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their beasts", Moses instead calls his congregation fellow "rebels" and strikes the rock twice in frustration. [18] The water still flows, but something essential has been broken—not just divine command, but the structure of faith itself:
Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them. [19]
This passage, particularly in G-d’s response—“Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people”(my emphasis)—reveals that faith is not just about obedience, but about perception. Moses misreads the moment of divine hesitation, treating absence as something to be overcome through force rather than moved through with trust. He does not recognize that the Israelites’ desperation is not rebellion, but a failure of nourishment, a rupture in divine presence that they do not yet know how to navigate. His failure is not just disobedience but a failure to see rightly, to respond to absence in a way that maintains relation rather than breaking it. This ties directly into the Socratic problem of sight and misrecognition—to misunderstand the nature of absence is to misunderstand the nature of faith itself.
Lazer, by contrast, does not try to force resolution. After describing his own moments of disappearance—“moments of death,” as he calls them—he simply offers Geryon an olive. There is no spectacle, no miracle, no command. Just a small gesture, timed precisely after a rupture. Where Moses struck the rock in frustration, misreading his people’s thirst as rebellion, Lazer allows the absence to remain unfilled. He does not overcome it, but moves through it with care. The olive is not a solution—it’s a response. In place of water from the rock, Carson gives us food between strangers. Nourishment, here, is not divine intervention but relational offering. It does not reestablish certainty. It affirms mutual presence in the face of doubt.
His offering of the olive then becomes an answer to this existential tension—a gesture that recognizes sustenance is never guaranteed, only passed between hands, shaped by loss and return. Just as Eleazar inherits the priesthood through rupture, Lazer—who has inherited doubt rather than belief—passes nourishment to Geryon, offering community in another form. The olive, then, is more than food; it is a transmission of meaning, a lesson in how to live with what can never fully be possessed.
Divine Doubt as Jewish Inheritance
Returning to the story in Numbers, it can perhaps be said that the real rupture comes at the moment of inheritance. Before Aaron dies, he is taken up to Mount Hor, where his priesthood is not simply passed down but forcibly removed: “Strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. There Aaron shall be gathered unto the dead.” [20]
Aaron’s priesthood is thus passed down to Eleazar as an act of negation, marking a rupture rather than a seamless transition. His garments—symbols of his divine authority and priestly role—are forcibly removed from his body before he dies. This act occurs in the wake of a larger crisis: Miriam’s death, the loss of water, and Moses’ failure at Meribah, all signaling a moment of divine withdrawal, where both physical and spiritual nourishment have been disrupted. Aaron, as high priest, becomes the site of this rupture. His stripping is not just a transfer of power—his priesthood does not remain with him until his final breath. It is un-written from his body, leaving him bare before death so that it may be re-inscribed onto his son, Eleazar.
This stripping suggests that priesthood is something inscribed, something that must be continuously performed and embodied. Unlike kingship, which is tied to lineage, or prophecy, which is sustained through personal revelation, priesthood exists relationally—it is defined by its function as a bridge between the human and divine. Because of this, priestly authority is not personal but mediated, requiring visible markers—vestments, ritual, and embodied performance—to make it legible.
The priesthood does not pass from Aaron to Eleazar through natural succession; it is transferred through a visible rupture. Aaron must be stripped of his garments before death—not as a ritual of comfort, but as an act of un-inscription. If priesthood is fundamentally relational, then its transfer depends not on continuity but on rupture. Aaron’s vestments do not express something inherent—they inscribe the body as a conduit between divine and human. Like sacred text, this inscription must be erased before it can be rewritten. Aaron’s disrobing is not merely ceremonial; it marks the end of his priesthood within him so that it can take form in another. Inheritance here is not preservation—it is transformation. What passes on is not the person, but the role, sustained through visible negation. Therefore, priesthood belongs not to the individual but to the structure of relation itself—between body and garment, presence and absence, past and future.
Just as Eleazar receives the priesthood through the act of Aaron’s undoing, Lazer—named in echo of Eleazar—comes into an inheritance formed by absence. Faith does not arrive whole in his hands. Instead, what lingers is the shape of something already stripped away. Doubt becomes the framework through which he relates to what came before, not as denial, but as a gesture still tethered to memory. When he says he credits God with the good sense to doubt him, he reveals a theology rooted in withdrawal, not assertion—a faith that holds its shape through hesitation. This is the structure of double negation: inheritance marked not by affirmation, but by what has been removed and refigured. Meaning survives as outline, not essence—as something defined by prior erasure. In Carson’s framing, inheritance does not transmit stable content; it transmits relation to loss. Like Aaron’s vestments, meaning must be stripped before it can be worn again. What is passed down is not the garment itself, but the imprint of its removal—the memory of its absence, shaping how it is worn next.
Celan - Language as Inheritance of Estrangement
In order to better grasp this with more clarity, we must understand a bit more about the way memory of loss and rupture is carried by the Jewish people. While there are many ways I could choose to handle such a delicate topic, I will stick to my methodology of close reads of Carson's text and return us back to Economy of the Unlost and Paul Celan.
He [Celan] lived in exile in Paris most of his life and wrote poetry in German, which was the language of his mother but also the language of those who murdered his mother. Born in a region of Romania that survived Soviet, then German, occupation, he moved to France in 1948 and lived there till his death. “As for me I am on the outside,” he once said. I don’t think he meant by this (only) that he was a Romanian Jew with a French passport and a Christian wife, living in Paris and writing in German. But rather that, in order to write poetry at all, he had to develop an outside relationship with a language he had once been inside. [21]
Here we see that Celan’s relationship to German is not simply multilingual or diasporic—it is existentially fractured. The language of poetry, which for many is a site of intimacy, becomes for Celan a site of estrangement. German is both the language of his mother and the language of her murderers; it nourishes and violates in the same breath. Carson’s framing—that Celan had to develop an “outside relationship with a language he had once been inside”—captures this ambivalence with precision.
Writing in German is not a return for Celan, but a confrontation. It is an act of proximity to a language that has already betrayed him. He does not inhabit it so much as haunt it, making meaning through a form of linguistic estrangement. The intimacy of language is not refused, but made uncanny—something familiar rendered foreign.
Just as Celan is forced into an externalized relationship with German, Jewish inheritance, both textual and priestly, has long been shaped by rupture. Take the story from Numbers, for example. When Miriam dies in the wilderness, water vanishes, as if her absence itself severs the flow of nourishment. Once, the Israelites drank freely; now, they wander in thirst, searching for what was lost. Miriam’s presence can perhaps then be read as having been a maternal fountainhead of spiritual nourishment that ensured survival for both people and beasts.
Celan experiences a parallel loss—his mother, his first source of language, is taken from him, shattering the innocence of his relationship to German. His mothertongue, once a vessel of intimacy, is now contaminated by the voices of those who murdered her. Like the Israelites wandering in thirst after Miriam’s death, Celan is left seeking sustenance in a language that no longer offers comfort. His search is not merely for words, but for the intimacy, stability, and belonging that language once held.
Language, like water, is more than a tool—it is an inheritance, a tether to history, a vessel of memory that carries both our nourishment and our rupture. We use it because there is a difference between me and you, yet we long for communication, to show what is inside to the outside. When ruptured—by death, exile, or violence—it must be sought again, not simply as a means of relation, but as an act of mourning, a struggle to reclaim what was once whole. Celan’s search for language is not only intellectual but deeply affective—a grieving process, an attempt to bridge the irreparable break left by his mother’s absence. Just as the Israelites’ thirst in the wilderness is not merely physical but existential, Celan’s struggle with German is about recovering intimacy, identity, and the possibility of meaning itself.
This leads us to wonder what tool might have been lost along with Miram’s death and her fountainhead of water. Returning to the Tanakh, we can see that Miriam’s earlier mode of leadership demonstrated in Exodus 15:20-21, where she leads the Israelite women in celebration after crossing the Red Sea, exemplifies a much different mode of speech than Moses or Aaron:
Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a hand-drum in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with hand-drums. And Miriam chanted for them: Sing to the Eternal, for God has triumphed gloriously; Horse and driver hurled into the sea. [22]
Miriam’s speech is not merely declarative—it is rhythmic, bodily, and infectious. She does not command or strike; she calls for song, urging the Israelites to sing to the Eternal. Her mode of transmission is not vertical but horizontal, moving through dance and music, through gestures that invite rather than dictate. Her invocation of “horse and driver hurled into the sea” reframes liberation as the undoing of control itself: those who once mastered movement—the mounted, the charioteers—are overtaken, their dominance dissolved. This is not the logic of conquest but of release.
Miriam’s mode of speech echoes what Socrates attributes to the nymph-possessed: speech that arrives not through reasoned mastery, but through divine infection. It is a form of knowing that overtakes the body, reshaping thought through rhythm, breath, and motion. Her story draws our attention not just to the content of such speech, but to the way it moves—how it circulates power without seizing it. Miriam’s speech does not dominate; it gathers. It transforms through collective participation, through choreography.
In this light, Moses’ failure at the rock becomes a crisis not just of obedience, but of language. Commanded to speak, he strikes instead—mirroring a system that no longer trusts in speech as a source of nourishment. If Miriam’s mode of communication invokes water, freedom, and song, Moses’ act reflects a breakdown: the turn to force where invocation once sufficed. Aaron’s priesthood, too, is transmitted not through speech but through stripping—a silent, bodily rupture. In both cases, transmission is no longer fluid but extracted, a stark contrast to Miriam’s moment of song. Her short four line invocation in Exodus offers a counter-song-of-the-sea to masculine forms of mastery: her body and voice refigure power not by seizing it, but by moving like water—drawing others into rhythm, undoing control through collective motion and surrender.
Miriam’s death seems to potentially then be a link in the chain of ruptures that define and redefine Jewish survival. When she dies,what once flowed freely must now be fought for. Her absence is a turning point—nourishment, once sustained through presence, movement, and song, is now bound to uncertainty, to the work of seeking. This moment sets a pattern: each time something is lost, Jewish tradition does not restore what was, but reconfigures the world around its absence.
The destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE) tore apart the priestly order, turning exile into a condition of faith. The Second Temple’s destruction (70 CE) shattered the last remnants of sacrificial worship, replacing it with a religion carried in texts, debates, and laws. With each of these deaths, elongated through time, what once anchored Jewish life becomes undone, and survival meant rebuilding in the void, turning loss into continuity through transformation.
Centuries of persecution deepened this pattern. Expelled, exiled, forced into ghettos, the Jewish people carry this memory in their rituals, linking them across vast borders. Though, language could not remain untouched. Hebrew withdrew into sacred texts. Yiddish and Ladino emerged in the mouths of the displaced. The Holocaust was the final, most brutal rupture—not just a loss, but an attempt to erase the possibility of return. It might be argued that he perhaps never inherited the language whole. Thus, when the illusion of its former intimacy vanished, he goes blind. He must drag it through silence, through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech, forcing it to reemerge. His poetry does not restore what was, nor does it abandon it.
Celan’s exile within language therefore follows a history of Jewish survival through divine abandonment. His relationship to German mirrors a broader pattern: meaning is never preserved intact but must be rebuilt after devastation. The loss of the Temple, the burning of sacred texts, the forced dispersions—each shattered what came before, leaving only the work of reconstruction. Celan’s poetry enacts this same struggle, not simply inheriting German but forcing it to bear the weight of what it has endured. His distance from his mother tongue reflects the Jewish experience of tradition after persecution: not seamless belonging, but the relentless labor of reinterpreting what remains.
Clearing Up the Question of Language After the Thousand Darknesses
This connects to Lazer’s inheritance of Judaism—not through faith, but through lack. His parents reject religious belief, yet his name, Eleazar, lingers as a remnant of what has been stripped away. In this sense, Lazer’s inheritance is similar to Celan’s: both are working within structures where what remains is shaped by negation. For example, in a speech Celan gave in Breman he is quoted as saying;
Erreichbar, nah und unverloren blieb inmitten der Verluste dies eine: die Sprache. Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem. Aber sie musste nun hindurchgehen durch ihre eigenen Antwortlosigkeiten, hindurchgehen durch furchtbares Verstummen, hindurchgehen durch die tausend Finsternisse todbringender Rede. Sie ging hindurch und gab keine Worte für das, was geschah; aber sie ging durch dieses Geschehen. Ging hindurch und durfte wieder zutage treten, „angereichert“ von all dem. In dieser Sprache habe ich, in jenen Jahren und in den Jahren danach, versucht, Gedichte zu schreiben. . . .
Reachable, near and unlost amid the losses, this one thing remained: language. This thing, language, remained unlost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to go through its own loss of answers, had to go through terrifying muteness, had to go through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing talk. It went through and gave no words for that which happened; yet it went through this happening. Went through and was able to come back to light “enriched” by it all. In this language I have tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems. . . . [23]
Here, Celan is articulating not only how language survives catastrophe, but how it must be cleansed by passing through it. His phrase “the thousand darknesses of deathbringing talk” does not merely name a poetic metaphor. It marks the point at which language becomes an accomplice to genocide—where speech, once a vessel of connection and love, becomes an instrument of erasure. Bureaucratic orders, euphemisms for slaughter, slogans—these were not distortions of German, but utterances within it. His mother’s tongue became the voice of her murderers.
To write again in this language, Celan suggests, is not to reclaim it whole. It is to force it, syllable by syllable, through silence and collapse—to bring it back enriched not with purity, but with ruin. It “gave no words for what happened,” he says. “Yet it went through this happening.” This is not resurrection. It is not redemption. It is a palinode—a counter-song sung not to reverse death, but to face it, to stay with it, to speak after it.
Unlike Stesichoros, Celan does not hope to regain his sight. He knows that what has been seen cannot be unseen. The speech that once slandered has become the silence that holds the unsayable. In this way, Celan performs the most harrowing version of the palinode: one sung to death itself, to that which no language can revise.
If Stesichoros’s palinode was a poetic reversal—to say, “False was the tale I told”—Celan’s is a doubling down. It is to say: “There is no tale to tell. But I will say it anyway, because not to speak is another kind of murder.” His poems do not undo what was done. They do not offer clarity. They murmur back to death in the same language that was used to carry it out—making each line a kind of haunted contradiction, a prayer in a poisoned mouth.
His palinode is not addressed to Helen, or to Eros—but to the god of death who speaks through silence, who answers in absence. And yet, still he writes. Still he sings. Language, though broken, remains. This is the most terrible offering: not a healed vision, but a vision shaped by ruin. Celan’s poems become the scar tissue of speech—fragments reassembled after the thousand darknesses. And in that act, he becomes a kind of priest—not of faith, but of witnessing. Not to restore what was, but to stand beside what is lost and say, I saw it. I went through it. I still speak.
This connects directly to Lazer’s reflection on doubt and mortality in Autobiography. When Geryon asks if he doubts God, Lazer replies, “Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us?” His framing of existence as something flickering—a moment of divine hesitation—resonates deeply with Celan’s description of language passing through “terrifying muteness,” through the “thousand darknesses of deathbringing talk,” before emerging again, altered but unlost.
Neither Celan nor Lazer inherits their lineage whole. Celan does not receive German as a language of love; Lazer does not receive Judaism as a tradition of faith. Instead, both dwell in a state of flickering negation—where what remains has survived only by passing through rupture. Their inheritances are not seamless transmissions, but haunted continuities. Celan’s language is “reachable, near, and unlost amid the losses,” but only because it has gone through silence. Lazer’s theology, likewise, survives only through a particular kind of skepticism—a double-negative relation to divine presence.
Together, they suggest a different model of survival: not the restoration of what was, but the rewriting of relation through absence. Just as the Israelites must search for water after Miriam’s death, just as Lazer’s belief is shaped by divine hesitation, Celan’s poetry arises in the space where language breaks. It does not speak for the dead—it speaks after them, and sometimes to them. Lazer in turn, shows us a relationship to g-d which exists in the space between—POOF—neither wholly denier, nor fully affirmed, but pulsing in and out of reach.
Footnotes;
[1] Carson, Autobiography of Red, 93
[2] Carson, Autobiography, 5
[3] Carson, Autobiography, 15
[4] Carson, Autobiography, 16
[5] Plato, Phaedreus, 237a
[6] Plato, Phaedrus, 238c
[7] Plato, Phaedrus, 238c
[8] Plato, Phaedrus, 241e
[9] Plato, Phaedrus, 242c
[10] Plato, Phaedrus, 242d
[11] Plato, Phaedrus, 242e-243b
[12] P.Oxy. XXIX 2506. Commentary on Lyric Poems, trans Bassi, in Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus' Palinode, 57
[13] Carson, Autobiography, 94
[14] Carson, Autobiography, 94
[15] Caron, Autobiography, 94
[16] Sefaria Tanakh Online, Numbers 20:1
[17] Sefaria Tanakh Online, Numbers 20:4
[18] Sefaria Tanakh Online, Number 20:6
[19] Sefaria Tanakh Online, Numbers 20:12
[20] Sefaria Tanakh Online, Numbers 20:26
[21] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 28
[22] Sefaria Online, Exodus 15:20-21
[23] Celan, quoted and trans. by Caron, Economy of the Unlost, 29
