Life-and-Destruction                                                            Page 32

Into this "darkness" comes a "burning" "after image", perhaps from the same

source that burns vision clear in "The Maker”.

Then came the after-image

burning behind the eye,

single and perilous

but more than memory.

Both the "after-image" and the "shadow" could be compared to a "trace". Both

are there as "more than memory" of things known and burning or simply

present somewhere "behind the eyes". Single-sight is "perilous", it sees what is

there, as in an after-image or shadow, full of light and strangely dark, neither

entirely present nor absent:

A trace is neither properly present nor absent - it is, in some sense, at

the same time present and absent....The unending play of presence and

absence in the trace "carries in itself the problems of the letter and the

spirit, of body and soul...." The nonexclusive texture of the trace

overturns the dualism and subverts the oppositions in which the notion

of the subject traditionally has been inscribed. "It blurs the simplicity of

the line dividing inside from outside .. .prohibits (prevents and renders

illegitimate) the procedure of exclusion." ...The trace is always

inextricably related to co-relative traces and inevitably entangled in

temporal becoming.   Unmasterable by the logic of identity and

noncontradiction, the trace can be represented by a cross that marks the

place where identity and difference, as well as presence and absence,

repeatedly intersect.   Always in transition and constantly in the

"middest", the trace is irrepressibly liminal and ever erring.³⁵

The entanglement of "temporal becoming" , "constantly in the "middest"' and

"irrepressibly liminal" allows the acceptance of oneness with the shadow to

embrace both darkness and the Sun at the same time:

Now I accept you shadow,

I change you; we are one.

I must enclose a darkness

since I contain the Sun.

³⁵ Mark C- Taylor, Erring p. 138.