Wafer

Hey, so Mark, what’s this say here
about body wafers in
the back of the copy I
gave you of Moshe Idel’s
Kabbalah? What? Oh — no, not
“body wafer,” I — it says
“holy water” — I wrote down
what some preacher was preaching
I happened to overhear.
It sounds like you made it up.
He’s the one who was saying
it but he didn’t know what
he was saying. Sounds to me
like he knew exactly what 
he was saying. Remember
somewhere in there Idel quotes
a passage from somewhere where
the letters of Torah are 
all imprinted on the air?
Or in the free-floating soul,
whatever that means, soul means,
disembodied but drawn to
wherever we bodies are?
Vaguely. But I didn’t get
if that was while we’re alive.
I didn’t get that whole book.
Me either. But certain parts 
made perfect sense even though
they’re so surprising. Such as?
Where Rabbi Eleazer
takes each of the four letters
of the Tetragrammaton.
In Hebrew it’s called ha-shem
ha-meforesh, which means the 
explicit name. I love that.
I knew you would. He puts each
of the four letters with each
letter of the aleph-bet,
then every possible
combination of Hebrew
vowels with each pair of
letters. That’s thirty-six times
twenty-two times four. Times three,
since two of the letters of
the Tetragrammaton are
the same. The same letter but
when it’s repeated it’s its
own thing, not the same thing twice.
OK, so say you have a
total of three thousand one
hundred sixty-eight results.
Each sound gets pronounced over
every limb of the body.
Obviously that takes time.
Well, yes and no. That’s just it. 
It’s instantaneous if
you see it or hear it from
outside everything you
can get yourself outside of.
Including you, you yourself?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
Submit to totality
and you control it all too.
Ev-ry-thing. E-ve-ry-thing. 
It’s written and imagined.
You can’t omit anything.
Everything’s accounted for,
opaque, completely inked in,
utterly balanced and free.
Blanked, available, and free.
You said free twice already.
Said you already said free.

Mark Dow | Note
Contents | Mudlark No. 59 (2015)