Die Schere ##14-16: Notes on your notes on my notes The links Abdalbarr points out between DIE SCHERE #16 and the two previous aphorisms make sense to me, as do much of Gary's and Roberto's contributions. However, I hesitate to call those links "clear" in the sense that the text is unequivocal enough to compel every reader to accept them. In the course of these three texts EJ shifts his metaphors so rapidly and radically that interpretations that might satisfy the requirements of "intersubjektive Überprüfbarkeit" become difficult. But it is precisely those requirements which have to guide anyone who dares to write a commentary that might be of use to readers perplexed by an esoteric text like this one. I believe it helps towards a better understanding to realize that EJ is deliberately esoteric at this point. He is addressing ultimate mysteries of existence which can only be hinted at but not expounded. So he talks to the initiated only who have a premonition of those mysteries. Inititated you are indeed if you know and have accepted hints at the nature of those mysteries EJ gave in other works of his. A really cogent commentary ought to link all such cross-references because they would elucidate each other. Such a commentary, as Gary suggests, would perhaps indeed deserve to be published in a more permanent form than as a series of e-mails. However, in notes like the ones I have attempted to write you have to be more modest partly because we do not have an electronic concordance of EJ's works. So I try to avoid the pitfalls of offering such readings that might be plausible to myself but that I feel unable to convince others of by pointing at the text. Much of what Abdalbarr, Gary and Roberto wrote I can accept in private as intriguing and also enriching my understanding of the text. But in public, when posting my notes, I strive to treat EJ as an author whose attitude to the reader is radically different from, say, that boundless "anything goes" liberality of a Documenta artist who tells you that his exhibit has precisely that meaning which you or anybody else put into it. On the contrary, interpreters of the texts of the Master of Wilflingen rather ought to heed the ironic caveat of the Master of Weimar: Im Auslegen seid frisch und munter! /Legt Ihr's nicht aus, so legt was unter.
Günter Rebing PS: I shall fall silent for a couple of weeks. Not because I have deserted the Good Cause but because summer is here and I will be on the road somewhere in Europe where there is no Internet access.
