Edmond Jabès: The Desert

"The word of our origin is a word of the desert, desert of our words," wrote Reb Aslan.

"There is no place for the man whose steps head toward his place of birth;

"as if being born meant only walking toward your birth.

"My future, my origin," he said.

"There is no possible return if you have gone deep into the desert. Come from elsewhere, the elsewhere is your twin horizon.

"Sand, the asking. Sand, the reply. Our desert has no limits," wrote Reb Semama.

He held a bit of sand in each hand: "On the one hand, questions, on the other, answers. Same weight of dust," he also said.

To create means to make the future the past of all your actions.

With exemplary regularity the Jew chooses to set out for the desert, to go toward a renewed word that has become his origin.

"In creating, you create the origin that swallows you," wrote Reb Sanua.

"The origin is an abyss." Reb Behit.

"If God spoke in the desert it was to deprive His word of roots, so that the creature should be His privileged bond. We shall make our souls into a hidden oasis," said Reb Abravanel.

"And of His written word?" asked his disciple, "what shall we make of that?"

"Of his fiery vocables we shall make a book of inconsumable fire," replied Ren Abravanel.

But Reb Hassoud, whose bold statements and commentaries were most often badly received by the interpreters, spoke up:

"A wandering word is the word of God. It has for echo the word of a wandering people. No oasis for it, no shadow, no peace. Only the immense, thirsty desert, only the book of this thirst, the devastating fire of this fire reducing all books to ashes at the threshold of the obsessive, illegible Book bequeathed us."

"What have we done other than forever call ourselves into question by examining everything down to the buzzing fly? Here is our humble merit and the source of our despair," wrote Reb Feroush.

"At which moment of painful impotence must we impose on the book an end to our reading?

"I close my eyes. I refuse to go on.

"Let the book come finally free of our chains," he had noted.

Translated from the French by Rosemarie Waldrop