Jon Orsi. Joby

Let me just say that I haven't really been given much confidence in my namesake -Jonathan- Plotz suggests me and David (my middle name) go off together into the biblical "broke back mountain" and fondle each other.   Then we don't really much of  me (Jonathan) since. But now, my other 'familial namesake' that is, the name by which my family refers to me -Joby-  has come up aaaannnd...what's the deal here dad?

The book of Job is drenched in the awful. It is full of the human condition of emptiness.
But as we uncovered, awful means full of awe. And, at the moment of complete emptiness is often the moment where we begin to be refilled, fulfilled.

This completes the proverbial "It's always darkest before the dawn"

But it has far wider breadth and depth than a proverb "our grandparents wont stop saying"

To tie this back to my revisited and revived literary obsession: Beckett.
The book of Job clearly is inspiration for nearly all of his work. I have spent hours exploring and probing this central and reoccurring theme in every work from Beckett I have read, and that is the simple, "Come and Go" or "To and Fro"
This seemingly colloquial literary dyad, is perhaps the most distilled euphemism for all of life.
 To come and go, and all things in between.

and sure enough, Book Three of  Job. God And Satan. (again the absolution of life in duality)

2: And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Now this minimalism, when all of existence reaches its Nadir  is the -almost unreachable- moment of life that Artists like Beckett are obsessed with. and at what point can the human condition be stripped away of all that comprise it? From this point of zero( "unimaginable zero summer" as Eliot would have it) is there anything? can we go on from zero?
Beckett would go on.
Job went on.

And clearly is what the story of Job deals with, how low, how depleted can life really become. Where is  closest to absolute zero? and what comes next?

And it seems that for those who have gone on, they attain a pure moment. This...thing is unable to be placed into words, for it is the opposite of zero (infinity?). Despite its unnameable nature, it becomes Job.

Frye, in his closing passage from words with Power, discusses this moment of inversion from the point of zero to... understanding.
"When int infinitely remote creation is re-presented to him, he becomes a participant in it: that is, he becomes creative himself, as heaven and earth are made new for him. he is given no new discovery, but gains a deeper apprehension of what is already there. This deeper apprehension is not simply more wisdom, but an access of power."  312

or a little further on, the closing sentence (you'd expect it to be good wouldn't you?) of the book,
"After that, perhaps, the terrifying and welcome voice may begin, annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost." 313

Jon Orsi-Beckett, the Bible, and the Furnace

I decided that this year I would try and get ahead on my group project by actually doing something for it before it was about to be presented. So I started reading Frye’s chapter on “the Furnace” and it got me all hot and bothered.

The furnace, for all its fire and burning-is a pretty cool place when you get down to it. It deals with the side of humanity that plagues us all (yes all), all the interest people are down there anyway.  

What got me going though was a visit from an old friend- In a previous class I was exposed to Samuel Beckett. I became enthralled, read whatever material he wrote I could get my hands on, and then decided I couldn’t go on any longer, but I must go on. So I went on, this week, and started re-reading Beckett for a completely different class' project. After speaking with Dr. Sexson and his mention of Beckett as a very biblical influenced writer, I wanted to see how this played out.

Instantly I found a quote, and what a perfect quote for this class, from Samuel Beckett
“Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so naturally I use it”

Frye, in “Words with Power” discusses what he refers to as Demonic and Titanic powers. The Demonic dealing with that which is “evil” but the Titanic, an equal yet almost parallel force, “takes us into the lower depths of the imagery of descent and return…and brings us down to the origins of human wisdom and power.”

With Beckett the discern between demonic and titanic may be unidentifiable, yet throughout his most “demonic” or what we would presume to be “evil” characters there is a “[return] to the origins of human wisdom and power”

(Beckett), in his ceaseless effort to deplete or empty the character, reader, soul, of everything, reduces all existence into its most fundamental forms. Fundamental in the sense as it is                (de)composed of fundament (shit), and then it is the fundamental form of humanity showing through. Granted they show like the exposed rib cage of humanity, with the decomposed flesh rotting away, it is from that decomposition, that compost that fertilizes future beauty.

From his radio play “All that Fall” we get biblical support for this theory, a few lines into the play the character Mrs. Rooney cites the title inspiring passage: “The lord holdeth up all that fall and raisthe up all those that be bowed down” derived from Psalm 145, this may give hope, or shed a the faintest light onto the impenetrable gloom* that occupies much of Beckett’s writing

(to note the gloom is very penetrable--its quite funny)  

In further agreement with Frye’s view of “the furnace” when he says in Words With Power, “…there is no reason for making such a contrast between the daimon of Socrates and a Christian guardian angle, or between what Wordsworth felt when he spoke of “huge and mighty forms” in nature and what a Greek would have thought of Dionysus or Artemis.” Page276.

…as I said in further agreement with that ^

Beckett (or his unnamable narrator), in “The Unnamable”  states “…Malone revolves, a stranger for ever to my infirmities, one who is not as I can never not be. I am motionless in vain, he is the god. And the other? I have assigned him eyes that implore me, offerings for me, need of succor. He does not look at me, does not he know of me, wants for nothing. I alone am man and all the rest divine.” (294  The Three Novels)

As odd as this may seem to express or understand: characters in a novel can serve to be our daimons or guardian angles. What I mean by this must be taken with the understanding of Frye’s earlier comment.
If we are to view these things (daimons or demons, what have you) as our guides up or down the spiritual ladder, literary characters can take the place of these demon figures. The bible clearly is an example of this, because the all the characters and happenings are literary. Their role as spiritual guiders are widely recognized and accepted, but do we not often find ourselves moved spriturally from other texts?  Many may dismiss these secular texts as un-sacred because they do not fit in any religious cannon, but if they move us, connect to us, does that not make them sacred? To us at least?

Anyway, what maybe even harder to express or understand is: That Beckett  works through all his misery and distain for the world, have become for me, sort of spiritual texts, because they have moved me and it has moved me positively. This concept of the dark and disdainful as positive figures may have more formidable roots than my own view, Frye later cites Nietzsche as believing, "that the perpetually dying Dionysus was a life affirming figure"
The Demonic characters such as Malone, may be demonic in “nature” but they are, as Frye describes “Titanic” in their effect. Yes, they have led me down to the depths of humanity, but it came to, as Frye describes, a depth of humanity that became a level of” wisdom and power”.

So I’m happy to be in the furnace, its just getting me warmed up.