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