The Crossing Point

The Eleventh Pillar of Radical Immanence

By: Coral Russell

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Crossing Point is the eleventh pillar of Radical Immanence, and it was already here. It is not an addition to the ten pillars built before it. It is the axis those pillars were always rotating around.

The ten pillars of Radical Immanence named the horizontal dimension of human life: the plural self, the constructed real, the permanent grief, the witness who stays in the room, the sedimentary time, the honest language, the ethics of incompletion. They named it accurately and without consolation. They described what you are.

This book describes what you are inside of.

The vertical axis is the axis of transmission. It is the line running through you from the ancestors in the sediment to the not-yet-born in the not-yet-formed ground. It is not a metaphor. It is the structural fact of being an alluvial self: made of what was carried to you and deposited in you, carrying what will be deposited after you leave. You are constituted by the dead. You are constituting what the not-yet-born will stand on. The obligation that arises from this is not chosen. It is constitutional.

The crossing point is where the two axes meet. It is where you already are.

The Crossing Point moves through Boethius in his cell in Pavia, 524 AD, stripped of every office and honor, finding the axis the wheel was always turning around. It moves through the medieval illuminated manuscripts and their four-figured wheel, which has been waiting two thousand years to be read correctly. It moves through Marguerite Young's 1,198-page novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, that great horizontal construction, reaching in every long sentence toward the vertical it could not quite name. It moves through the Mandelbrot set and the cross and the geology of central Indiana and the seven generations principle as a philosophical method rather than an ethical rule.

It does not offer transcendence. The vertical arm of the cross points down as much as up. It points into the sediment: the ancestors are in the ground, in the water, in the language you think with, in the grief you carry that is partly yours and partly everyone who held it before you were born to hold it.

Here is enough. The tenth pillar established this. The eleventh pillar adds: here is also enormous. Here is the crossing point. Here is the intersection of everything you have received and everything you are passing forward. Here is the place where time crosses itself and you are the crossing.

The wheel holds. The sentence hasn't ended. The carrying continues.