This is brilliant.
The more i read about Bialik the more i realize how much Chassidus permeates his work. And would you believe that the Rebbe's library actually has the original texts [archives are in my backyard...] His collection of essays is titled "Revealment and Concealment" and all of his poetry bears the motive of light reflected in exile, darkness, illumination... This is going to be utterly amazing... I can bring it all together.... major intellectual synthesis has got be one of the most pleasurable feelings in life, when you can unify all the mental data and form one cohesive thought, almost a single life message...

"For it is clear that language with all its associations does not introduce us at all into the inner area, the essence of things, but that, on contrary, lanugage itself stands as a barrier before them. On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly. "There is no speech and there are no words," but only a perpetual search, an eternal "what?" frozen on man's lips. In turth, there is no place even for this "what?", implying as it does the hope of a reply. Rather there is "nothingness"; man's lips are closed. If, nevertheless, man does achieve speech and with it contentment, it is only because of the extent of his fear at remaining alone for one moment with that dark void, face-to-face with the nothingness, with no barrier between them. "For man shall not look on me and live," says the void, and every speech, every pulsation of speech, partakes of the nature of concealment of nothingness, a husk enclosing within itself a dark seed of the eternal engima. No word contains the complete dissolution of any question. What does it contain? The question's concealment. It makes no difference what the particular word is- you can exchange it with another- just as long as it contains the power momentarily to serve as concealment and barrier.

Dumb music and symbolic mathematics- two hostile kin at two parallel extremes- attest unanimously that the word is not necessarily what it seems, that it is nothing but a manifestation of the void. Or rather, just as physical bodies become sensible to the eye and determinate because they serve as barriers before light in space, so the word's existence takes place by virtue of the process by which it closes up the small aperture of the void- constructing a barrier to prevent the void's darkness from welling up and overflowing its bounds...."

i love that. the language is so beautiful... and its translated. don't worry none of my 2 1/2 readers has to get it. or my thesis for that matter.... but while i'm talking to myself i might as well add, it's going to be so interesting... yeats into his kabbalistic terminology and endless quests for truth, and bialik writing, apparently unknowingly, in the same vein and intellectual scope as the Chassidus [i'm not comparing the Rashab to Bialik but i can't help but wonder if the two ever met]... what was their truths? what did they seek to illuminate? what divine space did they search for? and why is identity and language so intrinsic to their quests? perchance, as one novice literary critic postulates, all they ever sought was the One Word...to find that one single pattern of speech , the entry portal of the Infinite source of Creation. ..


and guys- i'll take some fresh sun from Italy as a gift. preferably bottled and from the sea-side.