The Language of Angels: Sacred Signification and the Crisis of TruthRebecca R. Fiske

"Raphel mai amecche zabi almi," comincio a gridar la fiera bocca, cui non si convenia piu dolci salmi. E 'l duca mio ver' lui: "Anima sciocca,b tienti col corno, e con quel ti disfoga quand' ira o altra passion ti tocca! Cercati al collo, e troverai la soga che 'l tien legato, o anima confusa, e vedi lui che 'l gran petto ti doga." Poi disse a me: "Elli stessi s'accusa; questi e Nembrotto per lo cui mal coto pur un linguaggio nel mondo non s'usa. Lascianlo stare e non parliamo a voto; che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio come 'l suo ad altrui, ch'a nulla e noto."

"Raphel mai amecche zabi almi," - Sweeter psalms would not fit it - and then my guide Addressed him: "Soul, in your stupidity Keep to your horn, and when you have the need Use that to vent your rage or other passion; Search at your neck the strap where it is tied, And try to see it, O spirit in confusion, Aslant your own great chest." Having said that, He told me, "This is Nimrod: his accusation He himself makes; for through his evil thought There is no common language the world can use:

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Leave him alone then, rather than speak for naught - For every language is to him as his Is to all others: no one fathoms it" (Dante 269).

"Raphel mai amecche zabi almi" (Dante 269).

Nimrod, poor brute, is to blame: there is no doubt. Dante has captured him here, in the central pit of Hell, where Coctus freezes. We must have a look at the giant who is morestone than man, who dared to brick some bricks, fire them ina fire, and build a city and a tower with its head in the heavens. What does he say? What do his words signify? No oneknows his tongue, but Dante claims it is the one tongue of our ancestors before YHWH’sjealous justice confounded language and scattered us. Nimrodcalls outin the original, and we are in the presence of the language of our lost ancestors, perhaps. "Raphel mai amecche zabi almi" touches something of the nothing in us. How can we forget Nimrod, utterly alone with his wicked thought and hissecret words? His sentence seems to mean everything and nothing, seems "soundless in the silent magic of things...onthe threshold between finite and infinite language" (Benjamin xxiii). Before YHWH made Nimrod babble, and long, long before Dante imprisonedhim, he was a "mighty man," the son of Cush, who was the sonof Ham,the littlest and the most despised son of Noah. Indeed, because ofHam's sin (which was to violate the tent of Noah, to see hisfather

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naked and unconscious and to announce that breach publicly) his linewas cursed. Noah damned his progeny to be the servants of servants,transferring trauma intergenerationally. Still, Nimrod ruledMesopotamia and began to build a sacred mountain, a ziggurratu, out ofbrick-stone and raw-bitumen so that his people and their works wouldendure, so that they would "make a name" and not be scattered acrossthe earth. Nimrod's tower reached higher than any other had,higher,perhaps, than any deluge could swallow, any master could destroy, sohigh that YHWH felt invasion was at hand, thought that thesepeople hadto be stopped before they once again breached an important barrier.

Come-now! Let us build ourselves a city anda tower, its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth! But YHWH came down to look over the city andthe tower that the humans were building. YHWH said: Here, (they are) one people with one language for them all, and this is merely the first of their doings- now there will be no barrier for them in allthat they scheme to do! Come-now! Let us go down and there let us baffle their

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language, so that no man will understand the language of his neighbor. So YHWH scattered them from there over the face of the earth, and they had to stop building the city. Therefore its name was called Bavel/Babble, for there YHWH baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there, YHWH scattered them over theface of all the earth (Genesis 11:4-9).

Before this baffling, the whole earth had been "of one lip, one language,and one set-of words" (Genesis 11:1). Virgil's disgust at the giant'sunfathomable words and his declaration that Nimrod's evil thoughtdestroyed our common language suggests the poet's desire forpurelanguage, for the original where "language and revelation are one withoutany tension," and where meaning no longer "plunges from abyss to abyssuntil it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths" (Benjamin 82).It also suggests that such a desire can never be fulfilled, that the greatmotif of integrating many tongues into one true language throughtranslation is flawed. "Raphel mai amecche zabi almi" means nothing toanyone, like the blast of a horn, the jabber of madness, theshock oftrauma, the drive toward death, the lost object, the forgotten memory.Nimrod's language signifies nothingness. It is untranslatable,

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inaccessible, closed. Is it also the language of human origin, the true,first language? Indeed, with in the context of this story, Nimrod spoke the purelanguage of the first people - of his father, Cush, and Cush's father,Ham, and Ham's father, Noah. All of these patriarchs knew what we cannever know. Genesis indicates that we have forgotten the oldlanguageall together; we have lost it in our confusion, in our open mouths andin our many tongues. We have become scattered across the earth,separated into nations, baffled by enmity. Our identities have becomedependent on difference. Nimrod's crime cost us dearly, but the priceYHWH exacted recalls earlier sins as well. Indeed, the tower's breachof the heavens and YHWH's response ( to fragment and to confuse Hispeople, to shatter and shroud meaning) creates a crisis of truth,forces us to know and not to know an impossible aspect of history. Thisstory of poor Nimrod transmits a sense of lost wholeness, theziggurratu unfinished, the original language baffled, the mighty man'speople scattered. Though Dante offers an image of the giant captured,he can not repair the damage this giant seems to have caused. Like onewho performs a ceremonial, Dante could only repeat the experience offragmentation and loss. Each time we think of imprisoned, melancholic

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Nimrod, each time we hear his meaningless language, we know what we cannever know, and we recognize that, somehow, this giant is a marker ofwhere we have been, and should not have been, a marker of forbiddenseeing, a marker of what we have forgotten. Oddly, then, Dante hasmanaged to dig the mighty man out of his own rubble, to preserve him inhis own destruction, to collect him, to display him, to archive him forour use. "Here, readers, is what is forbidden. Here, readers, is whatis outside of our awareness. Here, readers, is what may not be spoken,what we have forgotten," says the poet Dante. Is it, then, impossible to remember? Is there some way topenetrate thepast, to interpret the giant's words, to know what Nimrod knew beforehis tower was destroyed, his language baffled, his people scattered,his image reproduced, buried in stone? What is the origin of"Raphelmai amecche zabi alma?" Like a scar can we finger it? Like aconstellation can we trace it? Like a dream can we interpretit? Aspoets, as crafters of meaning, Dante and Virgil detest the giant'sgarble, all discord and denial, all asymbolia and depression. Still, isthere some way to understand Nimrod? His sentence is the only thingthat remains pure, fixed, unchanged regardless of time or place,regardless of translation, in all of Dante's Inferno. It is,in a

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sense, language crystallized, without fixed meanings, signifiers withoutsignifieds, if you will. Nimrod’s strange words carry withthem a promise. Perhaps, if we can interpret his language, if wecan listen to the impossible, to the crisis of his trauma ( indeed,of the imagined trauma of our own lost language), "Raphel mai amecchezabi alma" will escape being "the exercise of animpossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadnessand anartificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful backgroundthat is not accessible to any signifier" (Kristeva 44). Surely, Nimrod's past is lost, torn from some fantasy backcloth ofdestruction, but what backcloth? He is, after all, a part ofourhistory, within our awareness. His human trauma is the causeof ourlinguistic trauma, or so the story tells us. The story of the Tower of Babel is one of our most disturbing andpowerful cultural markers. Just as the Oedipus myth lays bare repressedwishes of parricide and incest, the story of the Tower of Babel stripsthe veil from language and reveals repressed wishes. In the narrative we learn that there was a time when speech and being were one, whenlanguage had no material exteriority but was "purely inward,autoaffecting thought" (Derrida 241). The origin spoke, disseminatingitself into beings. Further, we learn that this originary language was

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in itself, before the possibility of any distinction betweenoriginaland translation. We also learn that we have been denied access to thattime. We have lost something and its shadow fell upon us. Our mothertongue is withered at the root. Our cultural memory has forgottenitself and somehow survived to mourn.

...traumatic recall remains insistent and unchanged to the precise extent that it has never, from the beginning, been fully integrated into understanding. The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge - that cannot, as George Bataille says, become a matter of "intelligence" - and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time. Not having been fully integrated as it occurred,the event cannot become, as Janet says, a "narrative memory" that is integrated into a complete story of the past. The history that a flashback tells - as psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology equally suggest - is, therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in

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the present, in which its precise images andenactments are not fully understood. In its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the veryincomprehensibility of its occurrence(Caruth 153).

To integrate "the truth of an event and the truth of itsIncomprehensibility," both for the sake of testimony and forthe sake ofcure, seems to require speaking the unspeakable to another who is able tobear it. Further, the very act of bearing witness appears traumaticbecause it is the process of taking within the self something foreignwithout attempting a translation. In his1990 address to the Western NewEngland Institute for Psychoanalysis, Claude Lanzmann tried to explainthe sacrilege of placing another's trauma into one's conscious narrative."It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms - Why havethe Jews been killed? - for the question to reveal right away itsobscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project ofunderstanding." The only way to integrate trauma is to present it,split, quivering, and nameless to the inner world of anotherhuman beingwho will accept without understanding, without making it mean anything.One must say to another, "I experienced more than I can bear." The other

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must respond by taking that unbearable experience and bearing it blindly.In this way, the trauma is carried up and out of the survivor, wrapped inlanguage. If no one fathoms "Raphel mai amecche zabi almi,” perhaps it is because Dante has presented us with just such a truth. The moment we read the word Babel (and we even try speaking the soundBabel) we are forced to open our mouths, spread our lips, move ourtongues. "Very quickly: at the very moment when pronouncing "Babel" wesense the impossibility of deciding whether this name belongs, properlyand simply, to one tongue" (Derrida 253). We are forced to experienceour loss of wholeness, bodily, with our physicality. It is not only theidea of the diacritical nature of signifiers, the system ofdifferences, the endless chain, which causes us to mourn this splitfrom ourselves. Perhaps this loss is before and outside of the realm ofsignifiers. Perhaps it is not. What we can say is that Nimrod is themissing piece of some forgotten picture, and there is a chance that hisintonations succeed in inflecting what we can not know otherwise.

Listen again for a few moments to depressivespeech, repetitive, monotonous, or empty of meaning,inaudible even for the speaker before he or she sinks into mutism. You will note that, with melancholy persons,meaning

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appears to be arbitrary, or else it is elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but seems secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from thehead and body of the person who is speaking...Meaning, however, is arbitrary; linguistics asserts it for all verbal signs and for all discourse...Signs are arbitrary because language starts with a negation (Verneinung) of loss, along with the depression occasioned by mourning. "I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother," is what the speaking being seems to be saying. "But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent tolose her I have not lost her (that is the negation), I can recover her in language

(Kristeva 43).

For Kristeva, then, Nimrod's sentence would be an impossibledeclaration,an "I have and I am my mother-object. I am lost. " It is empty of meaningbecause it refuses the exterior, refuses the reality principle, refusesthe flow of time. Nimrod's language refuses to be nourished or to grow. Itspeaks one-lip, to itself, in the present, without hope. It has, in asense, departed from itself. Neither symbolic nor semiotic,it is dead

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language. If we follow the logic of the arbitrary nature of Kristeva'sspeaking subject, Nimrod says to no one "I have lost my mother-object, andher loss is against my will. I can never recover. I do not consent to loseher." He can never unfold himself. He can never gesture toward the other.He is arrested, held in some moment, alone and without potential space. Still, we are here, bearing witness. How does one listen to such athing? Nimrod suffers repeatedly from YHWH's wrath even as he standsoutside of the actual experience. We can never understand him and hecan never understand us, but somehow, together, we recognizethat theunspeakable has happened. Could it be that "Raphel mai amecche zabialmi" is the language of trauma?

...trauma is not experienced as a mere repression or defense, but as a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the firstmoment. The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of the sight.The traumatic re experiencing of the event thus carries with it what Dori Laub calls the "collapse of witnessing," the impossibility of knowing that first constituted it. And bycarrying that

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impossibility of knowing out of the empirical event itself, trauma opens up and challenges us toa new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility (Caruth 10).

The call to be witness to impossibility is also the signal that there issomething outside of our awareness which survives. This Something speaks asort of bellow, a noise, a syllabification, a horror. It is irrepressible,undissociable; it carries the sounds of the unthought and the unknown andthe very much present. Although we can't remember, we can't forget.Something real is here. Something remains present.

Daniel L. Schacter, a distinguished memory researcher andauthor ofSearching for Memory, tells a powerful story about one woman's struggleto remain present, to be, in the face of trauma. Jadzia Strykowskasurvived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and never spoke of herexperience until the late 1970's when a group of Nazis triedto marchin Skokie, Illinois. Only then, perhaps because of the threatlooming, she told how she had smuggled her family pictures into thecamp in a small celluloid tube which she hid in her rectum. "My solace

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were my pictures. I used to unroll them and look at them andsay, 'Mygoodness, I am not from stone. I am from people. I am from afamily.'"Mrs. Strykowska's great courage allowed her to hold her pastsafe,inside her. She remembered in silence, in secret, in her inward parts.As she tells us this story, what can we really know of her loss? Whatcan we really know of her family, of her people? In fact, her gift tous may be beyond linguistic knowing. There are no words, none, that canrecover her lost objects, her lost people, her lost places. There is noveil heavy enough to shroud these dead. How can she consent to suchloss? What sort of language would have that kind of power? Still, whatshe tells us is that in the moment of the unspeakable she was able tobe the mother of her mother, the terrain of her people. In that way herbody became her shelter. She could have an inward and an outward, apast and a future. Her present being could survive within the celluloidtube. Through her telling, the brutal fact of Bergen-Belsen becomesblank nothing, and it is real.

The blank nothing created by trauma interrupts the fecund exploration of unconscious processes; it momentarily stops the cycle of condensation

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and dissemination that is intrinsic to an individual's unconscious elaboration of personal idiom. Indeed it provides an altogether different separatesense, the sense of one's development inside a structure imposed on the self rather than derived from it (Bollas 114).

The very existence of a present that cannot be imagined, of a realitythat imposes itself directly, is so disturbing precisely because itdestroys the structure which allows humans to come into being as speakingsubjects. It shatters meaning's frame, rips apart its canvas. The mythicfigure, Nimrod, and the real human being, Jadzia Strykowska came face to face with unimaginable threat, with unbearable loss, with unnamable power. Both struggled to find a language to remember: "My goodness, I am not from stone. I am from people. I am from a family" (Strykowska 204). The voice of traumatic power cracks the skull, tearsopen the protective covering, breaks into the domicile, invades theborders. It is foreign and its being in the world collapses meaning evenas it declares itself present. A breakdown such as this, caused by theshock and tremor of an overpowering present, forces those who survive tore configure being. Somehow, the silenced, baffled, terrified speakingsubject must differentiate between self and not self, between subject andobject, between inward and outward. It must partake in a newsystem of

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differences: it must respeak its self-presence within a new structure. Of course, this notion that some aspect of language, of the humansubject, could survive unspeakable trauma, intact, hidden from view,monadic, like Jadiza Strykowska's celluloid tube and Nimrod's "Raphel mai amecche zabi almi" is not without its problems. When they who are conquered, scattered, and silenced,survive, into what vessel do they pour themselves? What porches ofwhat people's ears will welcome them? How can trauma be spoken? Howcan we, who can listen, hear them? Human trauma will not be denied, and it will not be named. Still, in the face of it, we must remain, and we mustnever forget. How can we believe in anything? Howcan we survive trauma without turning our backs on our own power,however weak? The truth of trauma can never be told. To place a traumatic experienceinto a narrative structure, by very definition, is to have turned one'sback on trauma; to have denied its power; to have archived it. Perhaps,then, the act of telling is a sort of conquest. While it mayseem obvious, to have survived trauma is not the same as to have died. "When the disaster comes upon us, it doesnot come," Blanchot reminds us. Trauma sidesteps the unfoldingsentence, skips the full-stop. Further, it is not the same as havingexperienced the death of others. The dead live in our memory. Theyhaunt us, sing to us, dance across our eyelids. We tell their stories

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again and again. They are ours. But trauma takes it rightful place, atthe core of all things, as subject, and forgets us even as it laysclaim to all that is, if you will. Trauma is the failure of thefacilitating environment. Trauma empties us, objectifies us,and it maybe that through the experience of emptiness, through the awareness ofhaving been emptied, we can find refuge.

To understand this it is necessary to think not of trauma but of nothing happening when something might profitably have happened. It is easier for a patient to remember trauma than to remember nothing happening when it might have. At the time the patient did not know what might have happened, and so could not experience anything except to note that something might have been...There can be a positive element in all this, an element that is not a defense. It can be said that only out of non-existence can existence start. It is surprising how early (even before birth, certainly before the birth process) awareness or a premature ego can be mobilized. But the individual cannot develop from an ego root if this is divorced from psycho-somatic experience and from primary narcissism (Winnicott 94-5).

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Winnicott's assertion that the ego is rooted in the pre-symbolic, that theability to experience emptiness is "a prerequisite for eagerness to gatherin" and that the "basis of all learning (as well as of eating) isemptiness" offers a bit of hope. He suggests that when linguistic meaningfails us, when we have been cast out of our subject positions, butsurvive, as in the case of trauma, there is a place to go. We have knownand we have forgotten the taproot of our selves. Might some survivors havethe ability to return to primary emptiness, to look back atthe maternalterrain out of which they grew and to fashion out of that lost unity a newpast, a new present, a new future? Is such a thing possible?Can theintrusive power of the original, unmitigated horror be swallowed up by themotility of a pre-linguistic state? Could traumatic memories be rendered, assimilated,softened, by the return to non-existence and the experience of emptiness?

Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language...In the case of complete recovery the person does not suffer anymore from the reappearance of traumatic memories in the form of flashbacks, behavioral reenactments, and so on. Instead the story can be told. The person can look

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back on what has happened; he has given it aplace in his life history, his autobiography, and thereby in the whole of his personality (Caruth 176).

This hope of a structure buried deep with in the human psyche, understoodthrough the experience of inwardness and outwardness, expressed throughthe semiotic-symbolic nature of language is all that we have, really. Inthe face of trauma, perhaps the silent self survives, hiddenfrom view,emptied, the servant of servants.

In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable (Benjamin 331).

But the ability, perhaps the duty, to resist this inclination tospeechlessness, to re-speak one's being, to re-fashion one'sautobiography, to re-configure oneself in time and place, tore-takeownership, comes at a great price. The authority of presenceis dangerous,surely. Noah's sons who went out of the Ark were Shem, Ham and Yefet. Now Ham is the father of Canaan. These three were Noah's sons, and from thesewere scattered abroad all the earth-folk.

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Now Noah was the first man of the soil; he planted a vineyard. When he drank from the wine, he became drunkand exposed himself in the middle of his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Yefet took a cloak, they put it on the shoulders of the two of them, And walked backward, to cover their father'snakedness. - Their faces were turned backward; their father's nakedness they did not see.

Now when Noah awoke from his wine, it becameknown (to him) what his littlest son had done to him. He said: Damned be Canaan, Servant of servants may he be to his brothers! And he said: Blessed be YHWH, God of Shem, but may Canaan be servant to them! May God extend/ yaft Yefet, Let him dwell in the tents of Shem, But may Canaan be servant to them! (Genesis 9:18-27).

The grandfather of Nimrod sinned threefold. First, he saw the vulnerabilityof his naked, sleeping father in the tent. Second, he carried the memory

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of that forbidden seeing out of the tent. Third, he told histwo brothers.Ham spoke a memory, bringing the past into the present, putting the futurein danger. Noah knew of the breach, somehow, knew that Ham was in theplace of his unawareness, that he stole a glance, and that he recorded it.Ham's knowledge, then, was outside of Noah's. In a way, Ham entered andexited the house of dream. The littlest (but likely eldest) son knew whatthe father could not know. The memory was the memory of whatmust be, andcould not be, forgotten. But it was also the seductive announcement thatthere was something outside of the father's awareness. Still, what was the danger of such a seduction? Perhaps it lies in thefuture rather than the past: what is the danger of the declaration"Noah, our father, is naked and unconscious inside his unguarded tent,"and why was it essential to conjugate the experience from the presentinto the past, using the subjunctive? What wish was exposed?

One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually...Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well

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as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each oneof the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength (Freud 500).

In Freud's story of the time before recorded history, the primal brothersmurdered and devoured their father whom they both hated, forbeing such anobstacle to their craving for power and sexual desire, and loved, forbeing the prototype of power and sexual desire. Later, the totem mealbecame a repetition and a commemoration of this deed; the totem became thesubstitute for the father, and the managing of the ritualistic meal becamea way to contain the violence of such ambivalence toward theprimalfather. Further, once the actual father was dead, the brothers could allowthe affection they felt toward him to emerge, and they couldfeel remorseand then guilt. The dead father became more powerful than the livingfather had been: through "deferred obedience" the sons came to prohibitthe very acts which the living father's presence had once prevented. Outof the filial sense of guilt sprang the two repressed wishesof theOedipus complex, patricide and incest. The original trauma transformed

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into repetition and commemoration and further into prohibition and law.They killed and devoured their father, ritualized that killing anddevouring, and made laws which reinstated the laws of the dead father. Inthis way the authority of the primal father was transmitted to the sons,and bits of the center, the loin of that power, rested in their fullbellies, again and again. What sort of power was this? In a sense it was the power ofrepresentation: the totem was a father-surrogate, a re-creation. Thetotem took the place of the father, marking both his absenceand hispresence. The pure animals could be slaughtered and eaten repeatedly,and the moment of having and being the primal father could blur intothe representation of having and being. Such a blurring forgets theoriginal trauma in its attempt at reparation. The original trauma mustbe the moment of recognition that the father is gone, that having andbeing are at odds with each other, that the father, once murdered anddevoured, is no more. The power and sexual desire he had as a whole,living man must have been greater than that transmitted through eachindividual son's portion.The brothers, piecemeal, now becomethefathers, but they must also know the danger inherent in being. Theymust be the ones at the center, the ones in authority, the ones to be

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hated and loved, murdered and devoured. Something is wrong: something is very wrong. Nothing can change thefragmentation of the recognition that this sort of authoritycomes at aprice. It is one of the horrors of such a trauma that what was done cannever be undone; what is lost is lost forever. The representation isnot that which it represents. The totem is not the father. The primalbrothers of Freud were far greater than the Nimrod of Dante or the Ham ofMoses. Their united violence succeeded, "one day." They moved forward. Their lips parted, and their tongues tasted the actual blood and the flesh of their father. They came into being , out of this primal horde, out of this pre-history, out of thispresent with no past, out of this forgotten guilt - marked. Here, inthis place, something was forgotten. Certainly, something must stand in for the empty place of the devouredfather. In this great psycho-archeology, this "reconstruction of themoment when the human animal became human," this image, Freud gives usblood and earth: he gives us our own ruins. He gives us the borderlandbetween the mental and the physical. Indeed, he gives us thephylogenetics of YHWH, from the nourishing mother to the devouredfather, to the ritualized totem, to the great rushing spiritof G-d.We must taste our loss. Just as his hero Heinrich Schliemannoffers usthe dead place of Virgil's Troy, where some of us can imagine that we

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know the nothing of the past, when "Euryalus rolls in death;the bloodruns o'er/His beauteous limbs, and on his shoulders sinks/ The faintneck: as a bright flower, by the plough/ Shorn through, droops dying,or poppies weary-necked,/ By a chance shower o'er-weighted bow theirhead," and just as Everett Fox offers us the dead place of Nimrod's"ubiquitous ziggurratu now unearthed by archeologists," Freud offeredus the dead place of the Judeo-Christian psyche, where someof uscould imagine that we know the nothing of our violent, pre-historicselves, our infancy. Still, Ham, Shem and Yefet are hardly our primal brothers, Noah hardlyour father of pre-history; their deeds were far too civilized, theirYHWH far too present. "The elevation of the father who had once beenmurdered into a god from whom the clan claimed descent was afar moreserious attempt at atonement than had been the ancient covenant withthe totem" (Freud 505). Poor Ham opened his mouth and declared, notdevoured, his sleeping father. Perhaps we must look past these three brothers to an earlier clan to understand the forgotten guilt. Perhaps, in fact, it is neither Ham nor Nimrod we should mark with the blame, but another. While Nimrod's words are empty ofmeaning, though Dante allows us to imagine we may read and speak theirsounds knowing the giant is safely trapped in stone, Ham's silenced

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declaration growls in the belly of forgetting, and we have only a momentto remember a lost savor.

Noah built a slaughter-site to YHWH. He took from all the pure animals and from all the pure fowl and offered up offerings upon the altar. Now YHWH smelled the soothing savor and YHWH said in his heart: I will never curse the soil again on humankind's account, since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth; I will never again strike down all living things, as I have done; (never) again, all the days of the earth, shall sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night ever cease! (Genesis 8:20-22)

Noah's YHWH lingers over the sweet smells of the slaughteredofferings.Even as He comes to terms with the notion that human hearts are evil fromtheir very youth, and that His great Deluge could not wash away what was,YHWH marks His place. He stands still, looks back with a secret regret,looks forward with a secret promise. What was should not have been; whatis shall always be. Indeed, before the Deluge, before YHWH presented His covenant andinstituted the law against murder and cannibalism, Noah, theson of

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Lamech and the eldest brother of many now forgotten, walked with YHWH,found grace in His eyes, listened to His murderous plans: "And G-d saidunto Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me; for the earth isfilled with wrongdoing through them; here, I am about to bring ruinupon them, along with the earth" (Gen. 6:13). YHWH's plot was tocleanse the earth. As He looked back at what He had created,He wasfilled with regret. He planned to undo His earlier creations, to murderthe old fathers, to cover everything with water until every livingsubstance was destroyed. Ham, Shem, Yefet, Noah, and YHWH bandedtogether, gathered their women and some animals into an ark,drown theold fathers, and sailed into the future as the new fathers. Of coursethis statement presupposes YHWH to be both the first-father,the fatherof pre-history, the G-d, and the murderer of His people, including allof Noah's brothers. This presentation of YHWH's regret, His rage andsorrow at having made human beings who were corrupt and violent, Hiswish to repent, His use of Noah as an ideal, a "perfect man", Hisplacement of this clan in an ark which "floated on the face of thewaters" and His covering over and blotting out of "all that were onfirm ground" suggests that the flood was a temporal delay which tried

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to carry one clan up and out of the very evil which constituted it. Forforty days, YHWH covered over all that He made, hiding, forgetting,denying, murdering. He swallowed all "that had the breath ofthe rushof life in their nostrils" (Genesis7:22). Impossibly, YHWH devoured Hisown image, somehow became unconscious. He destroyed beneath thesurface, plunged into the past tense. Above, Noah and his clan remainedsafe, outside of YHWH's forced forgetting, sheltered by the ark,waiting as YHWH forgot Himself. Shem and Yefet's ceremonial covering over of their fatheris a bitcomical, almost a parody of YHWH'S. Further, Noah's naked drunken sleeprecalls YHWH'S forty day Deluge. Like the water, the tent covered thatwhich could not be known, that which was outside of the father'sawareness and must be hidden, that which must not have been and is.Just as the entire clan did while in the ark, Shem and Yefetwould notlook at that which should never have been seen, as they backed towardthat very thing in order to cover it, knowing what they could not know.Still, such an act has a curious effect because it commemorates themoment of forced forgetting. It is a glorious, a powerful denial. Inother words, the act of backward covering marks both the breach and thelimit. It is thetic, to recall Kristeva. It is dialectical thinking; it

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"bears its end in itself and unfolds it," to recall Benjamin. It movesthe present into the past using the power of the subjunctive: what is,should not have been, and what should not have been, having now beenhidden, was not. It is a public announcement of a private wish. It isat the brink, exposing dream elements in waking. It is a new law madeby new law-makers. "Do not look, and forget that this covered thing,this naked unconscious father, has been seen. Only we have the rightto know what should not be known. As our father sleeps, covered by ourcover, unaware of our actions, we will guard him." It is a gatheringtogether and a housing of the body of the father. It is the declarationof ownership of both the covering (the garment, the new tent) and thecovered (the unconscious father, the forgotten memory.) It is thecreation of an historical moment, archived. Shem and Japheth re-tent Noah and become their sleeping father'sguardians . They know what they should not know - their father is notin authority - even as they take full advantage of that knowledge byestablishing their own authority in the place of his absence. What havethey done? Why is their act blessed while Ham's act is cursed? Why willtheir future, their sons, be the masters while Ham's future,Canaan, bethe slave? All of Ham's movement was forward: all of his brothers'

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movements were backward. One sees, while the others do not; oneremembers, while the others forget; one exposes, while the otherscover; one shall be, while the others shall not have been. It is simpleenough to say that Ham shamed his father by seeing, remembering,exposing, and being inside/outside Noah's shelter. Still, itis notquite so simple to say that Shem and Yefet honored their father by notseeing, forgetting, covering and being outside/inside Noah'sshelter.

The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying that it forgets it (Derrida 56).

It is not often that one looks to Jacques Derrida for clarity, butsomehow he has managed to speak plainly here. The name arkheholds twoideas: the commencement and the commandment, the place (arkheion) wherethe father (archon) makes and issues the law. Noah's tent, as viewedfrom the outside, is the archive. His sons may watch it, maywalkaround it, may wonder and wait by its opening. They may imagine their

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father inside even. And it does not matter, really, what theactualfather does or thinks as long as the sons stay in their place: outside.The sons keep watch over the father within; they archive him. They readhim, interpret him. In this way the structure remains intact. Themystery is contained. The father, dead or alive, asleep or awake isunder a sort of house arrest, and this archival violence allows thesons the privilege of consignation. As Derrida puts it, "consignationaims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in whichall the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In anarchive there should not be any absolute dissociation, anyheterogeneity or secret which would separate, or partition, in anabsolute manner." Shem and Yefet are, then, not simply the guardians oftheir father; they are his rivals. The law of the father is nothing unless it is declared. Noah mustcommand. He must speak. He must exercise his authority publicly. Hemust emerge from his tent. If he hesitates, if he lingers over thepleasures of an inner world for too long, he risks being forgotten oreven invaded. "There is no political power without control of thearchive, if not of memory" Derrida reminds us. But it is also at thatvery moment, when Noah emerges so that he may do the work ofthe

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father, that the arkheion (the tent) and the archon (Noah) separate,leaving both vulnerable. Who is inside his tent, waiting for his return? Is the warm, silent mother sitting, plaiting her hair, alone? Does she sing somelongforgotten song? Does she rock some hidden infant? What are the smells,the treasures, the secret power of the place of the father? Or, is thetent empty now? Noah walks outside, stops, and glances back,remembering. He measures the distance from his tent to himself, one,two, three paces. He is lost, unhoused, outside of himself. Whatevermystery he has emerged out of is now only a secret memory, and thepresent Being of the arkheion is outside of his awareness. Indeed, inthat moment of looking back, Noah acknowledges the breach, recognizesthat he can not be both the archive and the archon. Yet, he must speak;he must say "I am the law-giver." This giving comes at a price, ofcourse. As Noah stands outside of his tent, he knows that heis facingthe archive of himself: empty, alone. The father can not andmustarchive himself. Only the archive of the archon knows in theoriginal:warm, silent, alone in the empty tent, not there at all, really,sheltered, forgotten. What sort of knowing could this be? The archive shelters the Thingitself, the original, and it can only do that by trickery, by ruse: the

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commencement and the commandment must seem to be one. How odd, Shem andJapheth seemed to re-tent Noah, to make themselves the guardians oftheir father's unconsciousness. Noah, the father, resides within histent. If the tent is the residence of the leader, who commands, and ifit is within the tent that the laws he makes are both kept andinterpreted, Ham knew the origin. To know the sleeping subject of the law, is to enter the archive of thearchon and to endure the moment Jacques Derrida describes as"thecoming of the mid-day ghost...when the origin speaks by itself. Thearche appears in the nude, without archive. It presents itself andcomments on itself by itself. Stones talk! In the present...withouteven the memory of a translation." Zizek says that it is our duty asto endure the arche, to listen to the "discourse of the analyst," towave the torn backcloth of the flag, to be the terrain of our people,the mother of our mother, to inscribe "Raphel mai amecche zabi almi" in our inward parts, to remember the unspeakable. Still, thequestion remains: what do we human beings have within us, inthe present, out of which we may be, even in theface of trauma?

Who were we, before that priestly Creation that was actually our Fall from divinity to division and splintering? Who were we when we were our original selves? What were our

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faces before the world was made? What was our power of being, our condition of consciousness, our relation to life? (Bloom 237)

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans Harry Zohn. NewYork: Schocken Books, 1969

------Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.New York: Shocken Books, 1978

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of Disaster, Trans. Ann Smock. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995

Bloom, Harold. Omens of the Millennium, New York: Riverhead Books, 1996

------The Breaking of the Vessels, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982

------"The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem," New York: The City College Papers, No. 20

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Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987

Caruth, Cathy ed. Trauma: Exploration in Memory and History, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995

------Unclaimed Experience, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever, Trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997

------A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991

Five Books of Moses, Trans Everett Fox, New York: Schocken Books, 1996

Freud, Sigmund, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1989

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Trans Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989

------Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982

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Winnicott, D.W. The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press 1965

------Psychoanalytic Explorations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989

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