Welcome to "Quicksilver: a Daf Yomi commendiary" by kaspit.

(Daf: bShab 16) Wisdom of the material world. Sages account for our natural affect/ion for glass, metal and clay (? earthenware). Earthenware is porous, receptive in its depth, but broken the depths are released. Raw purity and violability. Glass can be broken and re-formed, it liberally reveals its depths, granting us in-sight through transparency. Recycling glass does not make us vulnerable [check]. Metal can be pierced and torn, yet resmelted and refashioned. But recycling comes at a cost, susceptible to impurities, traces, secondhand pollution [check]. Holy-Name reveals certain metals: the iron of age, gold and copper, tin and lead, silver and. No need to smelt quicksilver, slipping through fingers and our categories. Where do I belong?

Introductory Musings

Daf yomi commendiary.¹ Sk/etched by kaspit² as a running commentary on the daf yomi. Daf yomi is the "daily page" of the Babylonian Talmud read by many Jews in synch with a 7+ year cycle. This reading is arguably a "spiritual exercise" and, for some of us, the reading may be somewhat off-schedule and out-of-synch. (At least the daf is always of some yom or another).

In this commendiary, kaspit is trying vainly to bring the text into the material. Reading Talmud between the Greek and the Roman, the philosophical and the material, between their Hermes and Mercurius. Reading the Talmud between the Scylla and Charybdis, between a rock and a hard place. If the rock is the material world, stones flung at the god of commerce, Then a harder place may be found in a textual whirlpool, in a sea of Talmud, in the quicksand³ of prior claims and stories. So let’s be slipping into the quicksand, let its traces be slipping through our fingers, grab a handful of quicksilver and “come all the way in… the bottom knows the current better than your feet can.” [~ M. Piercy] Let the comments commence!

Quicksilver.
A living marvel, an action hero, protagonist, indeed antagonist when out of place. [M. Douglas] Healing properties? Good as gold, or at least as silver, or perhaps more susceptible to impurities because liquid, like water. Silver water, silverfish, hydrargyrum. D/b/a mercury (h1g1). Mercurial, toxic speech, poison. Do not incinerate: flesh and organs are vulnerable to trace amounts of quicksilver, hg. So always again we ought to divine and interpret the traces, as when quicksilver slips through our flesh and texts, and we have to chase after both the Mercury and the Hermes. Yes, it’s an endless hermeneutical Job to fall into both the textual and the toxicological depths. (A hermercurial critique.)

Hermes, a wing-footed, mad-hatted herald, a cunning and clever sort, who also happens to be the god of Commerce and of Science. Yes, and he’s leading us all the way down to Hades. Thus the Greeks.

Roman musings: Mercury, god of merchandising

The sages know Mercurius, the Roman God of wayfarers, merchants, commerce, mercantilism, free trade zones and Capitalism. (Hg’s grandfather worked as a peddler along the coast. Remember hats for sale? But money/kesef [Ag] kept slipping through his fingers.) [Per I.G. of EJ]: the sages “apparently considered [Mercurius] almost synonymous with idolatry.”
The Romans rocked but also got a bad rap.

When the sages fulminate about Mercury, might their texts⁴ be tackling bigger targets?

• Mercurial commerce invites lex talionis: “He that throws a stone at a Mercurius is to be stone, because this is how it is worshipped.” (mSanh 7:6)
• Does mercurial capitalism originate in a trinitarianism, like the trilithon (3 stones erected for Mercurius). (Cp. F. Nietzsche, genealogy of morals. M Weber, the protestant work ethic.)
• Mercuriosity also threatens to subvert a pedagogy of the oppressed. Do not teach the wicked. “As one who throws a stone at Mercurius is guilty of idolatry, so one who teaches a wicked pupil is guilty of idolatry.” (tAZ 6[7]:18) Just as in commerce one ought not make stone and silver the ideal/idol, so in education one ought not fashion the material without the moral.

Discussion welcome...