Woman, an Umbilical Unbiblical Genesis

Woman, an Umbilical Unbiblical Genesis Randy Dible, Stony Brook University 1. Umbilicus In the second chapter of Sexes and Genealogies, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother," Luce Irigaray establishes psychoanalytic etiology in the tragedy of an original matricide, deepening the familiar Oedipus complex and reestablishing the constitutional order, whose foundation lies in our common genesis. Anne O'Byrne calls Luce Irigaray's method presented in this chapter an "umbilical psychoanalysis," (Carnal Hermeneutics, 188). Of course, the human creative condition allows for creation of all kinds, not limited to procreation, and the question of the value of all human creation is open to multiple evaluative interpretations. Yet it is an ancient and established fact of the human condition that only half of us can give natural birth to other human bodies in their fullness, leaving the other half seemingly constitutionally deficient in this generative function, mourning obliquely and in secret, and institutionally compensating. This narrative is much simpler than the Oedipus complex. In this chapter, Irigaray interprets the Greek tragedy of the murder of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, fulfilling the function of the myth that Freud analyses in Totem and Taboo. The contortion of our constitution in the maternal order at the foundations of institutions is more than psychological, it is metaphysical. The fact of our common genesis in woman is physical. The metaphysical problem is called phallogocentrism. In this paper I want to proceed with the critique of phallogocentrism in the way Irigaray suggests at the conclusion of this chapter, according to the fascinating redirection from the phallus that she here establishes. Just as in this chapter the order of the penis in all its power is discovered to be instituted at the site of the not only far greater power but the only real cosmic power of the human being--the umbilical site; now a wound, once a physical connection--I would like to recognize this true power behind that influential myth of the book of Genesis. My teacher Anne O'Byrne has recently developed an "umbilical hermeneutics," and her chapter of this title (in the 2015 anthology Carnal Hermeneutics) owes much of its inspiration to Irigaray's chapter of Sexes and Genealogies. Therefore I shall take my cues from Irigaray's chapter, and initiate a Biblical hermeneutics that will be in its negative aspect a critique of Eidetic Man, and in its far more developed positivity a recognition of the depth-dimension of life through the lens of Eve. "Body Against Body" ends with the conjecture that if women were to participate in the Eucharist they would wonder why this male ritual uses as its magic words, "This is my blood," and the men would start to wonder as well. The ritual would lose its symbolic power and the allegiances of faith would unravel. What's even worse for the institution, the original intuition would guide us back to the original, umbilical relation--the real Ariadne's thread--which would reestablish the primordial power of woman on the symbolic register, but also the concrete register of physical genesis. Such an upheaval, such a profound revelation would confound the very foundation of society. I want to suggest that such tremendous power will inevitably come and give us the institutional revolution we seek, so long as we continue to conjure the primordial power. Once the more primordial tradition is reestablished we will be realigned with nature and the cosmos, and the bodily world of the sensible will be revealed to us in its cosmic, heavenly reality. Physical reality will then be re-enchanted and recognized in its profundity, in its depth-dimension of eternity, and in love. In this spirit of newfound faith, my work today will be to present an umbilical paradigm based on the topological figure of the umbilical point--the omphalos--it's extension as the spiritual umbilical cord, which connects all life together and connects all life to the cosmos. Drawn from the mathesis universalis, this cord is the Pythagorean monochord,

which moves with the spheres and emanates their music as the harmony of life. In this aspect, the umbilical hermeneutics I'm using is part of another project, which this Biblical revelation will become a part of. In today's work what I'm proposing is replacing the structures of phallogocentrism with omphalogocentrism, seeing umbels in all things. Each life is experiencing a merocosmic part of its holocosmic sphere. The idea that each is a world axis at the center of the sphere is correct, but the idea that that axis is a magic wand is not correct. The world-axis is as alive as it is connected to the cosmos. The tree of life connects the living Earth to the living atmosphere. The roots reflect the foliage, and the tree itself is the tree of a living total cosmos. Adam means earth, and Eve means life. To understand the microcosmic genesis of life--the only real magic--we must see through the trickery of symbols. We must use a vision of the All, of the multi-sphere model of the cosmos in its macroscopic aspect. To render it meaningful, we will use the pivot of abstraction, the mathematical point of difference, but conceive of it as the abstraction of concretion, just as we understand the abstraction of genesis and conception as creation in the largest sense of the word: poiesis. The poetry of creation is the music of the spheres, turning round their pivots of sacred geometrical relations. The relations of the spheres of multiple wholes complete the fragmentary nature of experience and physical reality in a super-symmetry of dimensions in the dimensionless Sphere of the All. The Absolute Infinite which is the ultimate reality indicated by the profundity of the deeps does not need any totalities, and is even independent of the principle of self-reference that opens the eternal region of penultimate reality between the Infinitesimal and the Sphere of the All. Penultimate reality is itself the paradigm of all umbilical relations of life, and can be visualized by understanding selfreference, the principle of Life itself, as itself the paradigm of Being for all beings. The beyond of being, ultimate reality, is the surplus of meaning--Love as the pure objectivity of all things in their fullness--and it fills all things in their axiological aspect--thus it is called by the Gnostics the fullness, the divine Pleroma, in their multi-sphere systems. The Biblical tradition loses these ultimate and perennial symbols in specific, phallogocentric ways. By addressing this archetypal problem of symbolic closure, a symbolic solution calls for a uniquely unbiblical hermeneutics. This will be the following umbilical, omphallogocentric re-reading, centered as it will be, on the umbilical point and the umbilical cord of all life. So much for the center, as for the circumference, the circumference will be understood along with this understanding of what it is to be a center, a contraction, in a rethinking of the circle. To illustrate the circle I have in mind I will follow my teacher Peter Manchester's interpretation of Heraclitus' cryptic fragment 103 about the circle. Many interpreters of Heraclitus read this fragment in a tautological way, as if if the deeper meaning of the circle were only the ouroboros, but Peter Manchester includes the consideration of Heraclitus's employment of syntax in the service of expression, and this transforms the understanding of the spheres. Heraclitus writes: For together: origin and boundary at the periphery of a circle (The Syntax of Time, pp. 149). Manchester's reading regards this as the noetic circle of Plotinus, described as "a circle fitting itself round its center, the first expansion after the center, an unextended extension" (Ennead IV 4, 16), the soul's self-moving contemplation of Nous. Against the tautological interpretation, ending where it started, Manchester writes, "the origin of a circle is its center, and the limit is its radial constraint, it's compass setting... Heraclitus' text comes near to saying the 'periphery of a circle' is what an origin and a radial constraint 'agree upon'," (Manchester, 149). The circle of self-reference, in Manchester's reading of Heraclitus' fragment, is a fragment of the life of the soul, under the umbrella of the Alls. In other words, the closure of each difference is simultaneously a part of a circumferential unity and a product of a common origin. Every point is

an umbilical point, a point on a sphere. A point is defined, in this noetic interpretation, by its radius and circumference. It's radius is its magnitude, and it's circumference is its form. In this way all things are umbilical points, connected to all things. The radius is its radiation from the origin obscured by the light, it's hidden origin, whose own cosmic position is indicated by the observer's own sight. The circumference is its position in the vault of the firmament, it's sidereal position in its constellation in its matrix. In this esoteric way, everything is understood as interdependent and a product of the ever-present cosmological singularity. This is the esoteric background of what I'm calling omphallogocentrism. The exoteric version of the umbilical point is much easier to understand! In 2015 Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor published an anthology called Carnal Hermeneutics, and one of the chapters was called "Umbilicus: Toward a Hermeneutics of Generational Difference," by my teacher Anne O'Byrne. Three years earlier a new structure emerged on our campus, a sculpture called The Umbilical Torus, a cast-iron mathematical sculpture, complete with its equation etched in the title. This monolith lies between the math department and the physics department, just outside the philosophy department. I knew that the contemplative speculation it offered was an umbilical inspiration for me, so when Anne's work "Umbilicus" appeared, it was easy to understand that she had thought about this structure. An umbilical torus is a torus with a twist, just as a Möbius strip is a loop with a twist, a strange loop. I wondered what would happen if I went through it, was it a portal? Probably not, but the figure of the umbilical "strange loop" haunted me. I knew from some basic topological studies that the human body is a torus. Then it hit me; in the umbilical connection to the placenta and to the womb and to our mothers we connected to the ancestral tree of life, the genealogical tree that is ultimately of all life, and this mystery is tied up in the flesh of the umbilical knot. Untying the knot of the belly button and reimagining the umbilical cord presents the physical reality of the species, that we are not unlike a species of mushroom throughout a forest that is one large organism, connected physically through the earth, sharing a collective unconscious and a spiritual analog to this psychological reality. The umbilical torus and the torus of the human body are topologically similar, outside of human time. Thus, each lifetime of each generation is one solid continuity of a manifold of space and time, twisting once for each birth, but never being cut off from the origin of cosmological singularity, just as all its experiences are connected within its fold. 2. An Unbiblical Genesis In what follows I will focus on the more difficult of two umbilical symbols. The more difficult (ergo ergonomic: from ergon, the labor outside the garden) point is the relation of Eve to "the deep" of Genesis 1, requiring exegetical work. The other, minor point concerns the Hebrew "tsela," of Genesis 2, usually meaning rib or side. Let me get the minor, eisegetical point across first. I propose that it is unnecessary to jump to etymological constructions connecting the "tsela" to "sidus," by way of "aster" or "stella," because the semantics of rib and side give the figure of a shell fragment, just what the meaning of "sidus" gives in the plural figure of a constellation or fragment of the celestial vault. The other instances of "tsela" in the Old Testament give us architectural terms about tabernacle chambers, rafters, and sides of an altar. If we think of Adam in the Hebrew root as a being of the earth, the microcosmic aspect of the heavenly body, it is possible to see the first two humans as side-by-side emanations of the same light. If every man and woman is a star, the roundness of the arc of at least two can certainly be propagated to fulfill the sphere by multiplication. I won't belabor this speculative point.

In Greek lore, Zeus sent two eagles across the world in opposite directions and they met at the center, the navel of the world. The sacred places are marked by stones on the earth, for instance the one at Delphi, where humans can communicate with the gods. In this function as an axis mundi, my account of the drama surrounding the Tree of Life will unfold. The point on the sphere of the earth where the tree of life sprouts, where the sacral spring flows is an umbilical point whose surrounding curvature is equal in all directions, in line with the topological definition. The sphere of the world whose center lies in Eden is well-rounded and equable, like the well-rounded sphere of truth in Parmenides. The point itself, like one's own birth, lies hidden by the elemental sedimentation of constitution, a creation that can only be given mythical account. Like the river flowing out of Eden, the umbilical cord connects the body through its tube to the body of the mother, the condition of its possibility of birth. The mother is a real individual, an other organism, but her symbolic function as the matrice poetique of birth represents the fullness from which the new being emerges as a novum organicum, something new under the sun. Like the hidden source of a spring, the elements shared through the chord have their origin in the inner workings of the mother. The hidden surplus lies in the depth dimension of all things, in their connection to the compossible totalities of the All. Like the omphalos stone set upon the earth at Delphi, the separation of organisms is only an artifact of human time and place. Observing one of these stones at the sacred sites has the effect of making one feel like a god, like Zeus, comprehending the earth in its roundness, and seeing its totality in its part, as a hologram. In his 1926 Holism and Evolution, J. C. Smuts, the founder of holism, writes "we can believe in Genesis, which by its very nature is epigenesis" (7). The play on the idea of genesis and the book of Genesis in this presentation comes from this holism. As a hermeneutics, the question of the meaning of life is framed in umbilical hermeneutics by the body in its network of dynamic, passionate human bodies separated by veils of flesh and generational ages, worlds of human productivity. The model for umbilical hermeneutics is the Hesychast practice of Eastern Orthodoxy, a set of somatic disciplines and mystical prayers. A fourteenth century sect of monks of Mount Athos used this technique of meditation to unite the soul with the light of Christ. Aristotelian scholastic clergyman Barlaam of Calabria accused them of heresy, calling them navel gazers--omphaloskopoi--based on his belief that worldly wisdom was necessary to understand the divine life, and any claim to a vision of God is impossible, least of all for a monk. The future of academic navel-gazing after the Enlightenment was forever stigmatized, and hermeneutics was free to be naturalized and philosophy unbiblicized, for better and worse. Barlaam repeated Aristotle's rejection of the old philosophy of the Sphere (rejecting Pythagoras, Parmenides, and the barbarian astrological shamanic practices), which would have included the practices of the cults of Eros and Persephone. In his 2003 book Reality, Peter Kingsley describes the cult of the Daughters of the Sun in Anatolia and southern Italy around the time of Parmenides, and even suggests compelling evidence that Parmenides himself was part of a lineage of priests called Iatromantis. The guiding principle of their practice is stillness, hesychia. In stillness, silence, and darkness, these early umbilical hermeneuts moved-by-notmoving beyond thought to the experience of reality. I would like to propose that what silence, stillness, and darkness as experiential magnitudes present through their so-called negativity is the truth and ultimate reality of profundity, the surplus of meaning. These negative phenomena may not be things themselves, but their existence is real, and the experience of their reality is presented in relief against all sensation and intellection. This profundity of the unmarked state is the place where phenomena enter into

each other through what Merleau-Ponty calls reversibility, in their depth dimension. When the reality of profundity is experienced, which is to say, when it is not unconsciousness, death, impossibility, or other forms of non-being, but instead is faced fully in life and consciousness, the difference between emptiness and fullness becomes meaningless because the very profundity is experienced as the surplus of meaning which in its overflowing fills the forms of life that differentiate themselves in all the genesis of individualization. As the condition of the possibility of meaning, the fullness of profundity should be recognized as such in the mythopoetic matrix of the book of Genesis. 3. The Depth of Genesis Adam means Man. Eve means Life. What is often forgotten in the exegeses of the so-called Adamic myth is that Eve means Life. The Christian appropriation of the Gnostic allegories forget about the primary significance of Eve. Eve, in some versions of the myth, is Sophia-Prunikos, the transmundane mother. This connection is important, but the first step in my umbilical reading of the myth lies in the difference between Eve and the Mother of it All. For this, the original Hebrew is instructive. In Building a New World, a chapter by Elizabeth Lee invokes the theology of Catherine Keller's 2003 book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. Keller finds a fecund semantic force in an word overlooked in traditional interpretations of Genesis 1: Tehom. Often translated the deeps or the sea, Keller notes that the word in Hebrew is feminine and the author of the verse leaves out an article, indicating that it is a proper name, a goddess. In her feminist theology, Keller connects this neglected Hebrew goddess principle to the earlier Goddess of Sumerian and Babylonian astrological religion Tiamat, the chaos-mother of the deeps, the Mother of it All. By understanding the umbilical relation in its exoteric aspect as the extension represented in the umbilical cord, but also in its esoteric aspect as the noetic circle of Plotinus and the mathematical umbilical point of the sphere in sacred geometry and developmental biology, we can use the principle of Eve as Life and the axiom of Tehom, mother of Eve, as Love to understand all things as participating in a genesis from cosmological singularity, represented by the myth, and as connected together as a cosmos in its unfolded fullness. We can only represent the "high-inflationary-period" of cosmological expansion in myth, like the Tibetian "densely-packed region," since it came before the anthropocene and it wouldn't otherwise make sense to even give it an account. The hermeneutics of Genesis can in this way give us access to the truth of the Biblical book that has been obscured by the traditional worldview of Christianity, and proceed for exegetical expansion to other symbolic systems. Under the umbrella of the umbilical, a new horizon is opened for hermeneutics.