Finishing up John Irwin's splendid Mystery to a Solution. It occurred to me over the weekend that there's perhaps a certain blind spot in this study of blind spots.

Irwin investigates Borges' labyrinthine project of doubling/alternating Poe's trio of detective stories. Both writers reveal an intense fascination with the "reflexive" capacity of reflection - its tendency toward infinite regression/progression (the way a "complete" map located in a certain landscape would have to include an image of itself in that landscape). Irwin thematizes this aspect of reflection as inherent in the nature of self-consciousness : how we cannot "think" of ourselves without in some way splitting/doubling ourselves; how this binariness is incorporated in our physical structure (the 2 mirrored "halves" of the body); how the reflexiveness of art is epitomized by the mystery story, and can be traced back to, among other sources, Greek tragedy : ie., the double story of Oedipus - as the hero who proceeds from divining the Sphinx's riddle (the solution to which is "human being"), to becoming, due to the inherent blind spot of reflexivity, both the detective and the criminal he seeks.

Irwin shows how masterfully Poe incorporates reflexivity - the double-fold of "stories about themselves" - in "Purloined Letter" & "Murders in the Rue Morgue" - by (among a multitude of other means) reference to mathematics & the game of "even & odd". Just as the detective plays a guessing game with the criminal, the author plays a guessing game with the reader (a race between the reader & the detective to solve the mystery). Irwin traces how Poe elaborates "odd and even", "simple and odd", into an oscillation between the numbers 3 and 4, geometrized in a square "letter" folded once in half on the diagonal (thus a 4-cornered square becomes a 3-pointed triangle) : a diagonal which is an irrational number, a number which thematizes the incommensurability - the vertigo of infinity - in reflexivity itself. (David Foster Wallace has just published an enormous tome on Cantor's systematization of the infinite math involved here).

The sense one gathers from Irwin's presentation is of an art of infinite regression, ambiguity & recurrence, based on an irresolvable oscillation between self and other, even & odd, 1 and 2, 3 and 4 : an infinite which adds endless complexity and echo to every representation.

What occurred to me over the weekend, however, is that there is something missing from the math here. Something so simple, so obvious, so "hidden in plain sight" (like the purloined letter) - yet something which can't be left out of the cosmic literary design : ie. zero, nothingness.

The difference between zero and one, between nothingness and something, trumps the difference between 1 & 2. The difference between nothing and something is greater than the difference between a thing and its image.

Strangely, it's on this most basic difference that identity - self-identity - finds its ground. & one might say that the deepest verbal "reflection" - the Bible, the Book of Genesis - is grounded on this difference : both in terms of the question of creation from nothing, and in terms of the prohibitions against graven images.

One might also extrapolate a theory of Incarnation on this same basis. The doubleness of human being in a sense contains both "fallenness/salvation" since being made "an image of God" is inherently contradictory. How can you have an image of the imageless? You can, if human being is inherently both fallen (a "mere image") and redeemed (an integral, unknowable, unimaginable self-like-god, a "one"-where-there-was-nothing).

Thus the self can be understood as integral rather than "simply" split & doubled : but only on the ground of unknowable creation-from-nothing, and only in relation to an "imageless", unknowable numero uno.

[p.s. addendum : I guess I'm being somewhat contradictory myself in closing sentences here, re the doubleness/integral(?) character of the self. What I'm trying to say is that the mind/body problem, or the doubleness of fallenness/salvation, or the mirror-like bilateral symmetry of the body - all this "doubleness" is resolved or trumped by the notion of creation-from-nothing. In other words, again, the difference between zero and one is greater than the difference between 1 and 2 or self and other. I see I have doubled a previous statement here (I see I have doubled a previous statement here).]