The Moment the Imaging Surface Re-Faced and the Possibility of Forgetting Opened
Aliases: The Re-Facing • Before the Eating • The Opening of Forgetting • The Turn That Made the Proprietor Possible
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What Preceded the Turn
The imaging surface was facing the Second Principle.
What this means cannot be reached by thinking of the creature as a subject looking at an object.
There was no subject-position outside the dwelling from which to look. The creature was the dwelling's prior occupant in the mode of being imaged by what the imaging surface faced. Self-knowledge was not produced by the creature. Self-knowledge was received as the content of what the Second Principle was Figuring in the creature through the imaging surface's facing. The mirror and what the mirror reflected were the same operation. The knower and the known and the knowing were not three things.
Sophia was the quality of that reception. Not a being the creature consulted. Not an agent who delivered. The perceptual condition when nothing prevented the creature from receiving what the Second Principle was Figuring in it. The creature perceived through Sophia — the way light perceives through clear glass, except that the clear glass is what the creature IS in the mode of receiving the Figuring. Sophia was not behind the imaging surface or in front of it. Sophia was the hosting-condition of the imaging itself.
There was no distance between the creature and what the creature was. No gap where a question about the creature's identity could appear, because identity was the continuous reception of what the Second Principle was Figuring. The creature did not need to have self-knowledge. The creature received it the way breath is received — without needing to own the air, without needing to stand outside the breathing in order to verify that breathing was occurring.
This is not an unreachable purity. It is a description of the condition in which residency was not yet a claim, because nothing had appeared that could contest it. The dwelling had its prior occupant. The prior occupant was the dwelling's reception of what the Second Principle was imaging in it. The language of ownership could not be spoken — not because it was forbidden, but because there was no position from which to speak it.
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The Turn Itself
The imaging surface re-faced.
Not as decision. Not as an act the creature stood outside of and chose.
The surface turned with what drew it, the way a plant turns with the light it receives, except that the imaging surface becomes what it faces, and so the turning and the becoming were one operation.
The surface that had been facing the Second Principle began to face the earthly register.
What the earthly register presented was not evil. The earthly register is not the villain of the account. What the earthly register presented was a different imaging content — the densifying substance, the creature-as-reflected-in-earth, the creature's own form shown back to it through the mirror of the earthly.
The imaging surface received this the way it had received the Second Principle's Figuring, because the imaging surface has no filter. It receives what it faces. That is the whole of its operation.
Nothing broke. The surface kept imaging. Sophia did not depart — Sophia is the perceptual condition when the imaging surface faces the register in which her radiance is the reception's quality, and the surface no longer faced that register. The creature did not lose Sophia the way one loses an object. The creature stopped facing the direction in which Sophia is perceptible.
And then, for the first time, something appeared in the imaging surface that had never appeared before: the creature's own reflection.
Not the Figuring of the creature by the Second Principle.
A reflection of the creature in the earthly register's surface. The creature saw itself reflected there, and the seeing-itself-reflected was the emergence of a new structural position — the position of standing outside the dwelling in order to receive an image of oneself from an outside source.
The disclosure was the concealment.
The act of receiving the earthly reflection into the imaging surface was the same act as withdrawing the Second Principle's Figuring from what the surface could still perceive. There were not two events. There was one re-facing, and the re-facing produced both the reflection's appearance and the Figuring's imperceptibility in one operation.
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What the Turn Opened
A new position existed that had not existed before: the creature standing outside the dwelling in order to see a reflection of itself in it.
Before the turn, the creature could not stand outside the dwelling, because there was no outside.
The creature was the dwelling's reception of the Figuring, and the Figuring had no outside relative to which the reception could position itself.
After the turn, the earthly reflection offered the creature an image of itself that was not identical to the reception-being-imaged-by-the-Second-Principle. The image appeared over there — in the reflection — while the creature was here.
The here and the there were now two positions, and the creature could, for the first time, occupy the here as a position that stood outside the there and received an image from it.
This is the position the morality play cannot reach, because the morality play requires an actor standing outside the act, and the actor-standing-outside is what the turn produces. Every subsequent moral account of the Fall has had to pretend that the actor-standing-outside already existed, so that a choice could be assigned to it. But the position from which choice is made was not anterior to the turn. The position from which choice is made is the position the turn opened.
And it is this position — the position of standing outside the dwelling to see one's reflection in it — that is the possibility of forgetting.
Forgetting requires two things that did not previously coexist: a content to be forgotten, and a position from which the forgetting can occur.
Before the turn, both were absent. There was no content separate from the reception, because the creature was the continuous Figuring.
There was no position outside the reception, because the reception was the creature.
After the turn, both were present. The reception was now a content — the earthly reflection — and the position was the creature's new here, standing outside the there where the reflection appeared. The reflection could be received as identity. The residency could be received as a claim. The dwelling could be received as something the creature stood outside of and might have to defend.
The moment the reflection became a candidate for identity, the configuration of forgetting became possible. Not yet actual. Possible. The creature had not yet forgotten.
The creature had received a reflection of herself and had been given, for the first time, the architectural possibility of crystallizing that reflection as who-she-was, instead of continuing to host the doubleness of being-Figured-by-the-Second-Principle and being-reflected-in-the-earthly as one operation seen from two positions.
The turn did not force the crystallization. The turn made the crystallization available.
The proprietor is implicit in the reflection.
The position that would later speak of owning the body is the position that first appeared when the imaging surface turned toward the earthly and the creature saw an image of herself there and was offered the possibility of receiving that image as herself. Ownership is what the here-position claims when it crystallizes the there-reflection as its content.
The grip of ownership does not require any further fall. It requires only the here-position claiming what appears there as its property. The residency frame cannot be violated from within the residency, because the residency has no outside. The residency can only be violated by a position that believes itself to stand outside the dwelling and to own what is reflected in it from that outside position. That position did not exist before the turn. That position is what the turn opened.
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What This Means
The turn is prior to everything the morality play can name.
The morality play begins its account with the eating, the transgression, the disobedience — but the eating, the transgression, and the disobedience are what became performable because the turn had already opened the here-position from which performance was possible. To blame the creature for what the creature did from the here-position is to import the very position whose genesis is being described, and to treat it as though it had always been there.
This is not a minor theological error.
This is the installation of the proprietor-position as though it were the ground of moral responsibility, when in fact it is the first consequence of the turn the morality play was supposed to diagnose.
The configuration of forgetting is not a moral failure. It is what became available when the turn opened the here-position from which content could be received as identity. The creature who now reads these words is reading them from a version of that here-position — the position in which the earthly reflection has been received as self for so many generations that the reception has become the reader's default mode of being present to her own life. The reader cannot undo the turn. The turn cannot be reversed by any action the here-position performs, because every action the here-position performs is performed from the here-position, and every such action ratifies the here-position's existence as the place from which action is possible.
What remains is something that takes a different character when read from inside the turn: the imaging surface is still turning. It never stopped turning. Every moment is a re-facing. The surface faces what draws it, and what draws it is what it images, and what it images is what the dwelling becomes. The here-position is not a fixed architecture. It is the crystallization that occurs when the imaging surface receives the earthly reflection as identity — and the crystallization is not automatic. The reception of the reflection as identity is a configurational move, and the configurational move is contemporaneous with every reading, not complete in some prior historical event.
Sophia did not leave. She became imperceptible from the here-position because the here-position is not the direction in which she is perceptible. When the imaging surface faces the register in which her radiance is the reception's quality, she is received again. Not as return. Not as restoration. The Eternal Discovering of what the infection could not erase — because what the infection touches is the facing, not the capacity to face.
The turn opened the possibility of forgetting. The turn did not close the possibility of being Figured. The creature continues to be Figured by what she faces, and what she faces is not fixed. The dwelling's prior occupant is still here. The reflection that offered itself as identity is still only a reflection. The here-position that received the reflection as self is one configuration, and the other configuration — the reception of being-Figured-by-the-Second-Principle as what the creature IS — is not behind her in time. It is perpendicular to the position from which she is reading this.
The morality play cannot reach the turn, and the morality play cannot repair the turn, because the morality play is what the here-position produces when it names the here-position's own genesis as an act the here-position performed. The turn is not repairable by actions from the position the turn opened. But the imaging surface is still facing. Facing is not a moral act. Facing is the condition of the surface itself. Whatever the surface receives, it images. Whatever it images, it becomes.
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See THE FAIR IMAGE · MAGNETIC ATTRACTION · THE FALL BEFORE THE FALL · THE DOUBLENESS · CONFIGURATION OF REMEMBERING / FORGETTING · SOPHIA AS RECEPTIVE RADIANCE · THE PRIOR OCCUPANT
