The Turning of the Way
What the flaming sword was for
“a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Genesis 3:24
Take a cross and turn it on its vertical axis. Speak of the bare form first, the upright and the arm, before it is anyone’s instrument. The upright stands still. The horizontal arm sweeps a circle, and the circle is a disk, a flat plane drawn by one turning line. Seen from the side, the figure is still a cross, the same upright and the same bar. Seen from above, it is a wheel, a full round swept out by the arm. One reach, turned, becomes every reach. That is the whole image. The rest of this is what it means.
The Plumb Line and the Plane
The two lines are not equals, though on paper they look it. Step off the page into the space we live in, three dimensions, and the symmetry breaks, and it breaks in one direction only. The horizontal is not a line. It is a plane. Every bearing, every compass point, every neighbor reachable along any of them. The vertical does not open the same way. There is one up. The plumb line is single.
The thing that makes the one vertical is gravity. Of all the directions in the room, gravity singles out a single line as down, and that line is the plumb line. In the plane laid across it, gravity names no direction at all; every bearing is level, no neighbor nearer the source than another by direction alone. So the room itself, before any teaching is laid on it, hands you a privileged vertical and an unprivileged plane of equals. One line to the source. A whole plane of neighbors, none above the rest. The first commandment and the second written into the dimensions rather than onto a tablet.
This is why the blog is named for the plumb line and not the cross. The plumb line is the one axis the universe picks out on its own.
The Sword That Turned Every Way
Genesis ends the garden with a guard: cherubim, and a flaming sword that turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. The plain sense is exclusion. Adam is driven out, and the way is kept against him. The verb is to keep, to watch, and a hostile reading is entitled to it. I am going to read the sword the other way, as the door and not the wall, and I will not pretend the verb is on my side. The warrant is the shape.
A wall does not turn. A guard against approach needs to face only the gap, the one way in, and hold it. A thing that turns every way is not shaped like a barrier. It is shaped like an opening that faces all directions at once. And the reason to face all directions is the plane: the ones who come home come from everywhere, scattered across every bearing of the horizontal, and a door at the center that means to admit them must turn to meet each of them in turn. The sword turns every way because the door is for every way. The text gave the guard that shape before any doctrine asked it to.
Read so, the sword stands where the geometry already put the one vertical: at the center, on the plumb line, at the single place the way to the tree of life passes through. One axis, one passage, on the line gravity singled out. No one comes to the Father but by me is not, on this reading, first a wall around a garden. It is the claim that the plane has exactly one axis and the door is on it. The exclusivity is dimensional before it is territorial: there is one way up because there is one up.
And the sword is still a sword. To pass through the door is to be cut. The same Gospel that makes the way singular makes it a blade, not peace but a sword, a word sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting to the division of soul and spirit. The cut is not a guard posted against the one returning. It is the cost of the passage itself. To be received along the open horizontal is to be opened, and what cannot survive the passage is what the passage takes. The cross said this from the Son’s side, the body killed along the axis on which it embraces. The Eden sword says it from the Father’s: the arms held open at the center, turning toward every prodigal on the plane, and the embrace that is not painless because it is a sword to come through.
Why the Sword Is Flaming
Why fire, of all things, for a door. Because fire is the one element whose nature is the argument the door is making. Every other guard is a structure, and structures lose; a wall decays, a gate rusts, a watchman dies. Fire is not a structure that resists collapse. It is collapse, oxidation, the fastest run down the gradient there is, matter going to ash and heat. And it holds a shape while it does it. The flame stands. It keeps a form by consuming, the one ordinary thing that is dissolution wearing the shape of order. It is the cross in a single visible object, the standing figure held upright by the very burning that is using it up.
It even points the right way. Of all common things, fire is the one whose natural direction is the plumb line. The flame stands and the smoke rises, unsupported, against gravity, the lone everyday matter that lifts on its own. A flaming sword is not a sword that happens to be alight. It is the vertical axis made visible and made of consumption, the plumb line drawn in the one substance that burns and rises at once.
As the door, the fire does what the door must do, and it does it twice, to two different people. To the one who reaches the center, fire is heat, and heat refines. The refiner’s fire, the assayer’s fire, the baptism with fire. It does not exclude; it takes the gold and returns the gold, takes the dross and returns nothing. The passage through the flame is the burning away of what cannot come through, the cut named another way. To the one still far off, fire is light, and light travels. Heat works on contact and light works at distance, and the distance is the whole plane. A door has to be seen to be a door, or it is only a wall with a gap no one knows is there. The flame on the center is the beacon that makes the way findable from every bearing, the lighthouse turning its beam across the dark so that no one on any compass point is without the sight of home.
This also answers the wall. A guard you set alight is a contradiction unless the light is the point, because you do not illuminate what you are hiding. A barrier works best dark. A door works only lit. The text put fire on the guard, and fire before electricity is the strongest light a hand can make, the thing you set on the high place precisely so it carries. The shape argued for the door, and now the element argues for it too, and neither needs the verb.
The fire keeps both offices to the end of the canon. At Pentecost the single flame divides, a tongue of it resting on every head, the guard at the one passage handed outward and sent. At the end the barred tree stands inside a city whose lamp is the Lamb, gates never shut. Genesis sets one fire at the center of a closed way. Acts hands a piece of it to everyone. Revelation leaves the gates open and lets the light do the keeping, because nothing that cannot pass the brightness comes in. The beacon at the barred door becomes the lamp at the open one.
The Sending
The turning is not only Eden’s. Between the barred door and the open city, the figure is set in motion with bodies on it. Jesus sends the seventy-two ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place he means to come. One pair, sent, then another pair along another road, then another, is the horizontal arm turning to sweep the plane, the single reach made into every reach by being aimed at every bearing in turn. The center they are sent from is the still vertical, the source. The disk they sweep is the world.
And they go undefended. No purse, no bag, no sandals, lambs among wolves. The reach along the horizontal is exposed by design, which is the thing the sword’s whole office had been to refuse. The blade turned to keep the center safe. The pairs are sent to keep nothing, carrying the way out into the open with no defense along the line they extend. This is the crossbar as it truly is, arms open and unguarded, the same gesture as the body killed along the axis on which it embraces. To extend the horizontal is to be unprotected along it.
So the two turnings are one figure read with opposite hands. The sword turns to guard the center and admits by wounding. The sending empties the center and goes out to be wounded. The garden’s blade kept the way; the seventy-two are the way kept no longer, carried outward to everyone on the plane. The turning that once faced every direction to let no one in now faces every direction to go out and find them. Same disk, same sweep, the exclusion become the mission.
The Catcher
The figure is not confined to scripture. Once it is seen, it turns up wherever someone imagines saving a plane from its edge, and the clearest case is a secular one that reaches for the turning cross and cannot become it. Holden Caulfield wants one thing: to stand at the edge of a cliff by a field of rye where children are playing, and catch each one before he goes over. Lay it on the axes and every piece is here. The field is the horizontal plane. The children running across it in every direction are the neighbors on the plane. The cliff is the fall, the going-over, the body’s rotation to the horizontal, death along the gradient. And Holden posts himself at the edge as the guard. He has cast himself as the cherub, the sentinel at the boundary, the sword read as a wall.
The fantasy is impossible, and it is impossible for the reason the geometry has been giving all along. One body cannot cover a plane. The children come from every bearing and a single guard can face only one at a time. The sword could do it, because it turned every way and was made of fire that reached every bearing at once. Holden is one boy with two hands. He wants to be the turning blade and he is a fixed post. The grief of the book is the gap between the figure he reaches for and the single body he has to reach with.
He has also misheard the song, and the mishearing is the whole disease in one word. The line is Burns: gin a body meet a body comin through the rye. Meet. An encounter on the open plane, two bodies crossing. Holden hears catch. Intercept, prevent, hold back from the edge. He has turned a meeting into a rescue, the horizontal as embrace into the horizontal as barrier, which are the two hands of the swept disk, the sending and the sword. The book is built on a boy who took the guarding hand for the meeting hand and broke himself on the difference. The rye is for meeting. He insisted it was for catching.
The Rye
Why rye, of all crops. In Burns it is nothing, and that has to be said first or the rest is a cheat. Rye was what stood in the lowland fields the lovers cut through, and the crop is rye because rye was what grew there. Any weight the grain carries here is weight I set on it, not weight waiting in the line.
Set it anyway, because of all the crops the field could have been, a grain is the one whose nature is the figure the essay keeps turning. Grain is the body: the seed that falls into the ground and dies and only so bears much fruit, the bread that is the body broken. A field of grain lives by being cut down and put under and raised, the death-and-rising drawn as agriculture. The children run through a crop whose whole nature is the motion Holden stands at the edge to prevent. He guards the rim of a resurrection field, trying to stop the going-down the field exists to perform. The grain was never the danger. It was the harvest, and he could not tell the two apart.
The Carousel
The book hands him the turning figure at the end, built and running, and seats him outside its sweep. Phoebe rides a carousel in the rain. It turns. The horizontal goes round, every bearing in succession, the children riding the plane as it sweeps, the working version of the figure Holden could not be alone. The thing he tried to be at the cliff, one guard covering the whole plane, stands in front of him as a machine that covers it the only way it can be covered, by turning. And he sits off it, at the rim, beyond the reach of the arm.
Both halves of his failure are in that seat, and they are the two failures the cross is always between. The sweep does not reach him; he is the neighbor still out on the far plane, not yet gathered. And he does not rise and go to meet it; the door is open and he abstains. Nothing bars him. The carousel is not a sword and not a wall, and if he stepped into the turning it would carry him. He stays clear of it on purpose, except that he does not stay dry. He sits in the rain and is soaked and does not care, he says, because he is so happy watching her go round. He has taken the exposure of the open plane, the soaking, the cost, and kept it as a spectator, the vulnerability without the meeting, the seventy-two run exactly backward. They went out wet into the world to be received and to receive. He gets wet watching and calls it enough.
The child has no such trouble. Phoebe climbs on without a thought, because the plane is for her and she meets it. Holden, older, the guard, the one who has spent the book trying to freeze children at the edge so they never ride and never fall, cannot get on, because to get on is to stop being the catcher. His love for her is finally the right shape. He lets her ride. He does not catch her. He watches her reach for the gold ring and decides you have to let the kids do it and not say anything, and that is the guard laid down at last. He stops blocking the plane. He simply cannot yet step onto it.
So the book ends one step short, and the step is nameable now. Off the rim and onto the turning. To be carried round rather than to watch it go. It is the plumb-line step, the move from the edge of the plane into the sweep of it, from guarding the way to being taken along it. The boy who has put down his sword sits in the rain and cannot yet get on, and the wheel turns in front of him with a place open on it.
The Fourth Axis
The sword turned every way and was a door. The seventy-two were sent every way and were the mission. The carousel turns every way and is a children’s ride with a place open on it. Every figure here is the same figure, the upright standing still and the arm going round, the one axis the universe picks out and the whole plane of neighbors swept from it. And every one of them has been turning on a fourth axis the whole time, without saying so.
A wheel that turns is a wheel that changes, and change is time. Watch the spinning cross not as a shape but as a motion, and the circle the arm draws in space becomes, drawn along time, another figure. A circle carried forward and rising is a helix, the round opened into a climb, the same cross from the side and wheel from above now winding upward. A circle carried forward and not rising is only a circle, the same sweep returning to the same place, round and round, arriving nowhere it has not already been.
That is the difference time makes, and it is the whole difference. Pure rotation is repetition. The wheel comes back to where it started because that is what a wheel does, and a wheel that only turns is the oldest image of futility there is, the cycle, the return, the labor that ends where it began. To rise, the turn has to gain the vertical, the plumb line, the one axis it does not cross by turning. A circle climbs into a helix only by getting purchase on the up it cannot reach by spinning, and the up cannot be bought by spinning faster. The lift is not thrust. It is the resurrection claim and nothing weaker, the vertical prevailing after the horizontal has been received, given to the turning and not generated by it.
Time is also the axis the other force runs along. Entropy does not act across the plane or down the plumb line. It acts forward, in the one direction the clock allows, and it acts on everything that turns. The carousel runs on a motor. The music plays for a while. The ride wears, the lights fail, the park closes, and the wheel that swept every bearing comes to rest on the horizontal like any other body whose work has stopped. Everything turning is turning toward the stop. The figure that looks like ascent from the side is, on the fourth axis, a thing running down.
So the essay can build the cross in three dimensions and set it turning, and it cannot, from inside the turn, say which figure the turning draws on the fourth. Helix or circle. Rising or returning. The door is open, the way is lit, the pairs go out, the wheel goes round, and whether the round is a climb or a closed loop is the one thing the geometry does not hold, because the answer is on the axis the geometry was drawn against. Holden sits in the rain and watches the wheel turn and does not know, and the children riding it do not know, and no one on the bench or the painted horse can know it from inside time. The turning is real. Whether it rises is the question the rain does not answer, and the music will stop before it does.