The preposition of the turning kept. The bearing that cannot arrive. What was left when the turning was cut from the word and the cut made no sound.
🜃
THE SUFFIX IS THE TURNING
Two words stand a syllable apart. To. Towards. The ear does not separate them; the hand does. One points at an endpoint. The other faces a direction and is carried in it. The difference is a single suffix, and the suffix is the turning.
-ward is Old English -weard, from the root that becomes vertere, verse, convert, version, revert: to turn. It means turned-toward, facing, set in the direction of. Towards is to with the turning added onto it: to plus the -ward, the facing. To is the bare particle: it marks a terminus and marks nothing else. Towards is that same terminus with the creature's facing restored: the -ward, the rotation, the turn toward what is faced.
This is why towards is orientation and to is grip. Towards carries the turning. To is the turning stripped out, leaving only the point.
[See THE CONFIGURATION]
🜃
THE BEARING THAT CANNOT ARRIVE
Towards names a bearing, not a terminus. There is no arrival built into it. The creature is towards Source and never to Source, because Source is not a place that can be reached and closed on. It is what is faced and received through. A bearing does not complete. It orients. To sail towards is to be carried in a direction by what one answers to, with no point at which the towards is spent and one has arrived. The wind is not a destination. The facing is the whole of it.
This is the grammar of teshuqah before the corruption: the creature's turning-toward, her orientation to the one she answers to, carried in a word whose suffix is that very turn. Source has givingness of its own; the creature stands in it and receives through it. A bearing toward what gives of its own account cannot be gripped, because there is nothing at the end of it to close a hand on. There is no end of it.
[See GIVINGNESS ]
🜃
TO: THE TURNING REMOVED
To is towards with the turning removed: the -ward gone, the bare particle left. It asserts a reachable endpoint, and by asserting it, installs one. Row to a point and the point is a finite center: a coordinate that can be pulled for, reached, and gripped. The instant orientation takes a terminus, the facing becomes a grip on the thing faced. To is the grammar of that instant: the turning collapsed to the point it was turning past.
A finite center radiates nothing and gives nothing of its own account. It can only be gripped. So the preposition that installs it is the preposition of the grip. To promises arrival, and the arrival is the closing of the hand.
[See FINITE CENTER · THE TURNING]
🜃
AND: NEITHER BEARING NOR POINT
And removes even the point. Not the bearing, not the terminus: neither. It keeps the facing from landing anywhere and calls the drift relationship. It looks like the escape from to's arrival, and it is; it simply keeps nothing on the way out. No bearing, no facing, no Source. It is the midpoint between arrive and don't-arrive, the position on the axis that never leaves the axis.
[See BOTH/AND (THE GOVERNOR'S CHAIR)]
🜃
THREE PREPOSITIONS, ONE GRID
To is a position on the grid: the coordinate reached for and gripped. And is the midpoint on the grid: the averaged place, most metabolizable because it never stepped off. Towards is perpendicular to the grid: oriented by what is not a coordinate at all.
Source cannot be plotted. A bearing toward what cannot be plotted is not a move on the grid; it is the orientation the grid cannot locate. The turning kept is the refusal of jurisdiction at the level of the preposition: to be towards Source is to be un-plottable, facing a direction the coordinate system has no cell for. What cannot be located cannot be metabolized.
[See THE GRID · REFUSAL OF JURISDICTION · PERPENDICULAR]
🜃
THE CORRUPTION HAS A DATE
Teshuqah means turning. For seventeen centuries the ancient versions rendered it so: apostrophē, turning-away; epistrophē, turning-toward. Twenty-one of twenty-eight ancient translation instances say turning. In 1528 one hand rendered it desire. The turning became a craving. What had been a bearing (the creature's facing, her orientation toward the one she answers to) became a lack tilting permanently toward a man.
Read the corrupted verse for its preposition and a second cut appears, of a different kind. Your turning will be to your husband. Not towards. To. The husband installed as the finite center the turning lands on and grips.
The Hebrew does not make that cut. The particle is אֶל, and it carries bearing and terminus alike; one word covers the facing and the arriving, and the text does not choose between them. English cannot decline to choose. To and towards are both available, both grammatical, both faithful to what the Hebrew leaves open, and every rendering into English must take one. They took to. They took it in Tyndale, in Geneva, in the King James, in the modern versions, in the study notes, in the sermon.
That is the forensic shape, and it is colder than a translator's error. Under genuine indeterminacy a text scatters: some hands take the bearing, some the terminus, and the spread is the evidence that nothing was being decided. This did not scatter. The Hebrew held the facing open and every English hand closed it the same way, toward the point that can be reached and gripped. The first cut renamed the turning desire. The second gave the desire somewhere to land, and it required no forgery, because the receiving language offered the terminus for free and no one had to be persuaded to take it.
To is the cheaper word. It is what a language built for arriving reaches for when the original held a facing. The creature who was a bearing is made a point pulling toward a point, and the sentence that does it reads as a plain translation.
[See TESHUQAH]
🜃
The word that carried the turning had the turning cut out of it, and because to and towards sound alike, the creature was handed a terminus where she had a bearing and told it was the same word. She rows to a center she cannot arrive at, not because the center recedes, though it does, but because a bearing has no arrival and she was never given a bearing. She was given a point, and told to reach it, and the reaching is the grip, and the grip is the turn completed onto the thing she was only ever meant to be facing.
🜃
