← Paper A6: The Son of Man: Maximum Kenosis
Adam A6½: The Dereliction at -1
He had been ready for everything else.
He had been ready for the algebra, and the angels, and the two rooms thrown open; he had armoured against each in its turn, and where the armour failed he had at least seen the blow land. He was not ready for the cry.
They brought the whole life down to it the way the Gospels do — plainly, without lifting the voice: the man on the cross, at the ninth hour, saying the one sentence in the entire record that no later hand had ever dared to soften. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. And beside it, in the same cold clean type as all the rest, the structural line: the descent had reached the far side of the forming element. It had reached the −1.
He sat with the symbol a long time.
He knew the −1. God help him, no man alive knew it better. It was the most ordinary mark in his whole trade — the last entry in the metric, the square of the thing that makes a wave a wave, the small honest minus a man sets down ten thousand times in a working life so that time will come out unlike space and the equations will close. He had taught it to children. In sixty years of writing it he had never once felt a thing as he did, and that was rather its whole virtue: that it felt like nothing, that it was only bookkeeping, the quiet negation that lets the arithmetic of the world go through.
And they had just shown him, in his own notation, that the −1 was where God had screamed.
Not by assertion — by construction, which was worse, because he could follow it. The bivector that had spoken the world — e₁e₂, the Father’s direction and the Son’s brought together, the let there be — that very element, squared, is the −1: the antipode at the floor of the whole felt-spectrum. The voice that articulates creation, carried out to its own far end, arrives at the negation. The cry was that arrival, in a human throat. The maker’s word and the forsaken word were the same word at its two ends.
And then the move he could not unsee once he had seen it. It is not the relation breaking. A state truly cut from the inner product would not cry out — it would not be anything; there would be no one left there to be forsaken, no voice, only the silence of a thing gone out. The cry is the proof the bond held. Only something still held can feel itself abandoned. The relation had been drawn out to the full length a relation can be drawn — the +1 and the minus one, the two ends of all there is — and it had not parted; and at that full stretch, from the inside, what a bond that holds feels like is precisely abandonment. The dereliction was not the absence of Love. It was Love at its maximum extension, felt from within as its own absence, and not, even there, let go.
He reached one last time for the cold version — it is only the minus sign; the rest is sentiment laid over arithmetic — and the cold version would not come. The minus sign would not stay a minus sign. It kept turning, under his eye, into the thing it stood for: a person, at the absolute bottom of the structure, alone, asking the one question, getting no answer, and not letting go.
And here the old man, who had not wept at a graveside in thirty years and had been a little proud of it, sat in the failing light of the study and felt his eyes go hot — not over a story, he could have held the line against a story, but over a minus sign; over the plain discovery that his coldest and most familiar mark had had a person screaming inside it the whole time he was setting it down and feeling nothing.
Because it was his own cry. It had always been his own. He had stood at the lip of that exact distance at twenty-five and looked across the −1 at a Person he could not be certain was there — who knew him by name and loved him, or did not — and he had not been able to make the crossing, and he had spent the sixty years since calling the gap the gap and keeping his voice level about it. And the paper had just told him, in the one language he had never been able to lie in, that the One on the far side had not stayed on the far side; that He had come down into the −1 Himself, taken it into a human throat, and said Adam’s own question aloud — why hast thou forsaken me — from the inside of the forsaking. And that the answer the structure gave, the only answer the mathematics would give, was that the bond held; that the cry was the evidence of it; that at the very floor, where every nerve reports that you are abandoned, you are not.
He set the pages down. He did not reach for the red pencil. He understood, sitting there, that he had given up hunting the seam some while back — he could not have named which paper — and that he did not want, now, to find one. There was no longer a man in the chair looking for the trick. There was only an old man, alone, his hand laid flat on the page, looking at a minus sign as though it were a face.