"The Blackness of the Day": Job's Regressive Paradise as Creation Unmade

Abstract

Early in his book Tears and Saints , E. M. Cioran (1995: 17-18) describes the “original forgotten vision” which individuals pursue as they age. Cioran argues that God is everyone’s initial memory, and he asks, “Are they haunted by dateless memories which evoke the immediate proximity of God in paradise? Could they be hiding in the depths of their memory the figure of Divinity?” The entrapment individuals feel, being subject to temporality, inevitably awakens an awareness or a foreboding of the otherworldly, the eternal. Cioran is fascinated – and maddened – by saints, for they alone are able to successfully enter “dateless memories,” indeed the very presence of God, although what they aim for is not completely grasped. Increasing age is not the only thing that propels individuals to retrogressively pursue their first memory of God, if indeed this is true; suffering also has the power to drive one toward one’s original memory, God (hence why many of the saints, particularly in their youth, inflict suffering upon themselves in pursuit of mystical rapture). Such is the case in the book of Job; readers are introduced to Job, a man who is “blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job, 1, 1). Nevertheless, God agrees twice to allow Job to suffer in response to Satan’s requests. As calamity sets upon him over the course of two separate days, Job’s mind turns not to nostalgia but instead to God himself; Job pursues God in an attempt to place his suffering in a suitable and sufficient framework for understanding. Job also pursues God in an attempt to investigate this perceived change in God, who now seems not beneficent but malevolent. While Job chooses to pursue God through the despair caused by his [Job’s] undeserved suffering, readers should be uneasy with Satan’s return into God’s court,