Before God, we are always in the wrong, so Kierkegaard's Jutland pastor. Am I in the wrong before W.? Undoubtedly. But is he in the wrong before me? W. is responsible for me in some sense, he knows that. Terribly responsible. I am in some sense his own creation; I am the result of something that went wrong with him.
Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the former – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say?
Of course I can speak, W. says, and I speak all too much; but perhaps, at another level, I cannot be said to speak, or my speech is infested with a shapelessness and formlessness that hollows out its significance. It's as though I've worn out speech in advance, W. says. As though I've said and written everything there was to say, and carry on regardless.
But why is it his fault?, W. wonders. What have I got to do with him? But perhaps, like the Rabbi who raised a golem from the mud, he conjured me up from his own sense of failure. Perhaps I am only the way W. is in the wrong, its incessant, unliving embodiment.
Lars Iyer's Blog 