Poet­ry

Noth­ing Is for Everyone

  • Review
By – September 9, 2024

In Jew­ish mys­ti­cism, the sefirot are the ten attrib­ut­es of God. Keter, or crown,” which is at the top­most part of the dia­gram, rep­re­sents the deity. Many schol­ars also refer to it as ayin, or noth­ing­ness” — a holy state, because God can nev­er be known. In fact, all names for God are inad­e­quate except for ein sof, which means with­out end.” This idea of noth­ing­ness is key to Eden Pearlstein’s new book of poet­ry, Noth­ing Is for Every­one.

We catch the first glimpse of ayin in the poem Eight Days After Eternity”:

wel­come to the

gar­den of paradox 


the tun­nel 

at the end


of the light

trust your­self 


you are an 

ances­tor

In this poem, Pearl­stein sug­gests that we are all descen­dants of a gar­den of para­dox.” Unlike the Gar­den of Eden, the gar­den of para­dox is a dif­fer­ent world. It’s our orig­i­nal holy place, our noth­ing­ness, and also our final destination. 

The notion that God is unknow­able comes up fre­quent­ly in Pearlstein’s col­lec­tion. His lan­guage often reads like a Zen koan, which is appro­pri­ate, giv­en his sub­ject mat­ter. The main point of a koan is to see one’s true nature, using words that may at first seem puz­zling to describe a sim­ple idea. The koan is suc­cess­ful when it achieves a lev­el of trans­paren­cy. The poem What Phi­los­o­phy Feels Like” does just that:

All stars sing the 

Secret name in silence while we

Read our­selves to sleep

As we go through our lives, we can try to know God, but that is about all we can do. The jour­ney is a ran­dom one, which is part of the beau­ty of being alive.

Pearl­stein reg­u­lar­ly refers to the Zohar, the key text of Jew­ish mys­ti­cism. The work is a midrash, filled with sto­ries that are both chal­leng­ing and poet­ic. They are often rife with para­dox, to make sure we grasp the lim­its of ratio­nal dis­course — and lan­guage itself. Pearl­stein refers to such lim­its in sev­er­al of his poems. In Stick Fig­ures of Speech,” he sug­gests that we mold lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate our feel­ings by using clich­es. The poem begins, This whole thing rubs me the wrong way/They’re just stroking your ego.”

At its best, Pearlstein’s poet­ry achieves the irony and beau­ty of the Zohar. In the poem Jun­gian Slips,” he tells us, the text/​strikes back/​to interpret/​the read­er.” Read­ers will feel the sub­tle, sur­pris­ing strike of Pearlstein’s words.

Stew­art Flor­sheim’s poet­ry has been wide­ly pub­lished in mag­a­zines and antholo­gies. He was the edi­tor of Ghosts of the Holo­caust, an anthol­o­gy of poet­ry by chil­dren of Holo­caust sur­vivors (Wayne State Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1989). He wrote the poet­ry chap­book, The Girl Eat­ing Oys­ters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stew­art won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His col­lec­tion, A Split Sec­ond of Light, was pub­lished by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Hon­or­able Men­tion in the San Fran­cis­co Book Fes­ti­val, hon­or­ing the best books pub­lished in the Spring of 2011. Stew­art’s new col­lec­tion, Amus­ing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.

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