When Jesus is called 'the image of the living God' - isn't this a sign that he, too, was an icon? And when God made the first human beings in his own image, was it the first icons he had made?
I remember well the wet marks made by kisses on a framed picture of Mary in the church in Stockport, and the icon of Jesus that used to stand in the corner of our living room with a vigil candle burning in front of it. Then, too, there were images of the saints all around us, cut out from calenders and then mounted on wood.
We used to talk, my landlord and I, about icons, about the Incarnation. Christ, he said, was perfectly divine; he was perfectly human. Christ was the God-man, my landlord said, joining image and prototype. St John of Damascus argued that something similar counted for the icon: like Christ, it was also a hypostasis; it too let God dwell in matter.
I learnt that according to the dictates of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in which the bitter struggle between the iconoclasts and iconodules was resolved, to venerate the icon of Jesus, Mary or the Saints is to venerate its prototype; the mundane touches the divine.
This is why we should be censed along with the painted icons in a service, I learnt, and he remembered a priest who would wave incense out of doors, censing the whole of nature, as if it, too were an image of God.
An image of God? And of whom, then, was I an image, who was outside the charmed circle of believers?
I fell into that house after a long period of hardship, and lived there safe in the network that reached from there to the corners of the world. Many guests came; many tenants lived alongside me in the rooms of the house. Never was I tempted to convert; I knew nothing of churches, of Christianity, but I enjoyed it that the house was somehow set back from the world; it did not belong to the last decade of the second millenium.
Above all, I had time to seep back to the space that should surround work. No more madness, no more penury; in the stillness of a room at the back of the house, I set up my computer. A whole year had passed since I'd begun my studies, and what had I written? It took another full year for me to find my way to the beginning. And in the meantime? I wandered out on the streets, from cafes to bookshops. Days passed without marker.
I read Lossky's classic account of Orthodox theology. The mundane is touched by the divine; matter becomes a cradle for spirit. But what if the mundane itself were divided? What if it could be said the mundane became a cradle for itself, or touched itself? What if I myself turned around a point that remained mysterious to me?
In my imagination, an icon was bound to no prototype; or rather, it spoke only of itself, of a kind of doubling of itself, by which it was set apart from the ordinary world, even as it showed how that world, too, might be set apart from itself. Then it was as though the icon was a way to unhinge the world, to break apart that vast and secret labour that allowed it to make sense.
A way of breaking oneself apart too - or rather, that part of what I was that was set against the other for whom wandering was possible, and whose descent into the streets could be followed by a period of work in his room. How to live from the time between when the world became a threshold and wandering without term? How to know the world as icon, and to cense it by writing?
To write - but that was impossible. I lost myself on other paths; I wrote, I published, and found myself in another city. The question that had died away returned: how to let the mundane be touched by its double? How to write of the wanderer, or let him type within my typing fingers? How to double in writing the opposite of hypostasis - that undoing which lets the world wander from itself?
The icon is the double of the Incarnation. But now now to think the disincarnation, the fleeing of matter from form, but by way of form? How to let the world let slip itself within itself, for the detour within the same to escape the same?
Questions without answer, and ones it has taken a long time to form. And yet I must also say they asked themselves in me - asked and thereby demanded formulation, searching for themselves by way of writing. As though to write was to come into contact with what wrote against me, or that the intention to write was met by the intention of writing.
What did it want? To be born, to be written. What did it ask for? To determined in matter, the questioning that was without form. To come to presence, that which was without presence.
Tonight, the summer spreads before me. Should I work? Should I find a new project? Or is there a way of writing to be found by writing, to let writing turn on itself and to look back at me through eyes that are something like mine?
I saw you, writing. No: you saw you in myself. Saw and said: I will rejoin myself by this seeing. Writing said, I will return to myself, and through you, hinge, point of articulation. For where you are the world is broken.