The call · the letter that becomes a voice

The mechanism by which the spark wakes, and the Gnostics were unanimous that it cannot wake itself. Something has to come from outside: a messenger, a letter, a voice, a stranger who knows your name. In the Hymn of the Pearl the parents' letter flies as an eagle and then rises up as speech at his side. In the Gospel of Truth the one who is called turns and answers, and "he who has knowledge in this manner knows where he comes from and where he is going." The call is always the same content: you are not from here; remember. Judaism's word for the turning that follows is teshuvah — literally return, not repentance — and it too is provoked from outside, by the horn: Maimonides reads the shofar as saying Awake, sleepers, from your sleep; rouse yourselves, slumberers, from your slumber. Word for word, the same sentence as the letter in the Hymn. Two traditions, both convinced that the decisive human event is being woken by something you did not generate.