The tenth plague, the eagle, and the rock

Another way of saying the tenth plague founded the Jewish people is that the tenth plague founded monotheism; or, that the tenth plague is an allegory for the foundations of monotheism in much the way the story of the Black Plague is an allegory of capitalism emerging for itself by strangling the slumbering figure of medieval feudalism in its bedclothes. After violently suppressing the baroque polytheism of traditional Egyptian religion, Aton monotheism was itself violently suppressed. The unavoidable mutuality of life, of all lives, respirant and inert, necessitates that we are, together, forever engaged in the negotiation of what constitutes the domain of what is permissible, of socially acceptable pleasures and the means of their satisfaction. The concept of God is one way of conceiving a mutually acceptable end to our desires, the ultimate form of their satisfaction, the form through which all desires will be sated. Still, if for we sorry creatures, satisfaction is something can never be attained–indeed, if the impossibility of satisfaction is the condition that sustains those of us cursed with desire, those who necessarily consign themselves to a world that is soaked in pain, is our dissatisfaction with the stories not part of the design? It this not why we seek, but also why we rest? Is this not the lesson in the rock? What little scholars have been able to discern about the historical suppression of the Sun God and his preservation among the Hebrews who fled from Egypt to Canaan invites us to consider the relationship between the eagle and the rock, between all that is solid and that refuses to give, and all of those things that will not yield. Of pleasure, happiness, and the desire to remain still. “The eagle that has his young look into the sun and requires that they should not be dazzled by its light is behaving, then, like a descendent of the sun, submitting his children to the ancestral trial. And when Schreber lays claim to being able to being able to look into the sun unpunished and without being dazzled he has retrieved the mythological expression for his filial relationship to the sun as a symbol of the father.” Schreber knew these things; Schreber tried to tell us. God the father, God the son, God the holy spirit: three and one and one and three. All is ephemeral but ephemerality takes different guises. All endings are beginnings. All beginnings are endings, but nothing ever really ends. People once killed each other over these things. People are still killing each other over these things. On the Mississippi, the eagles are dying of lead poisoning. In Palestine, in Lebanon, in Syria, much the same might be said.