“Not disconnected by virtue of difference, nor connected by virtue of sameness, but connected by virtue of differences.”

The golem is a mythical being from Judaic folklore that has the form of a human, but is made of clay. This idea is simple, yet provocative: even though the form of the clay golem manifests differently across it (an arm over here, a leg over there), when you look deeper, when you look INTO it, you see a recursive reality – the same molecule, repeating throughout the structure. It is just more of the same, all over. 

“More the same all over” has been a mantra for me since James casually mentioned it; after many months of not seeing each other due to lockdowns, he saw me practicing and made the enigmatic compliment that I “look more of the same all over”. He was referring to the fact that parts of the body had begun to seem less differentiated.

It is a consequence of an ever-expanding mapping of the geography of the limbs and joints – refining an understanding of each locale, learning the local language and then learning to translate between languages. 

This is a case of the Goethian Unity, in which multiplicity arises from unity. If you look for the the true form of the Golem by eliminating the differences across the various manifestations, to find the “least common denominator”, you will find only… clay. The approach of eliminating differences across the variety to find the form eliminates the differentiation itself, which is necessary to take into account to really understand the phenomenon. 

I may be a sack of differentiated organs, but those organs are the same thing, manifested differently, just like the Golem. Realizing they are not disconnected by virtue of difference, nor connected by virtue of sameness, but that they are connected by virtue of their differences.

This begins to represent a form of self-knowledge – to know my body beyond anatomy and physiology, and into form and function (arguably, the domain of semiotics). I wouldn’t have guessed that a practice would take me in the direction of self-knowledge, and yet, I find that the only self-knowledge I have is acquired through practice. The rest is… fodder to sustain me long enough to keep growing.

(In more modern / non-Biblical tradition, Golem is a literary motif. As the critic Adam Kirsch put it, “The golem story addresses our post-Holocaust fear of insecurity, our Zionist admiration of and guilt about strength, and our 21st-century obsession with technology and the ways it can go awry.” 

But strip it of the meanings it has acquired over the years, and reduced to its simple origins, the first manifestation of the concept… it points to a cross-cultural ontological concept: the shapeless mass, the unfinished matter. And shapeless mass is homogenous in nature. The golem is an unformed and amorphous thing, the material and just the material. True reductionism achieved.)