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“To traverse the whole, to touch the depth of being, is to awaken the ambiguity coiled inside.”
—Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings
It is Tuesday. Three o'clock. I enter the waiting room. He is there, a tightly poised readiness, alert, eager, hungry, vigilant, tense. He bolts out of the chair and follows me with a stretching, arching stride into the office. He sits across from me, not on the couch but in the chair just across from me, right across from me. Right there, he sits and he looks, waiting. His face fades from focus. He is all eyes: blank round brown liquid saucers, searching, expectant, scanning orbs of divination. Deep, unfathomable, enigmatic, veiled yet fixed, with never a blink, his eyes are eclipsed in a look that penetrates as it signifies a silent cry.
This penetration, however, is not toward some hidden depth or eidetic essence. It subsumes the look in a trace that is not representable, that does not present itself, that is the pure passing of alterity. This visage and this look that beckons is not some “alter ego” or other self, is not some assumable figure within the