Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the theological gets apocalyptic and the apocalyptic gets a co-author.
Mara: Today we’re inside a single long work by Adam Donaldson Powell — a poem sequence that moves from the symbolism of the left hand of God through Kabbalistic structure and into a post-nuclear dialogue between an eagle and a bear. Let’s start with the left hand itself.
The Left Hand of God — Justice, Severity, and the Void
Mara: The post opens with a theological survey: across Judeo-Christian scripture and Kabbalistic tradition, God’s right hand means favor and mercy, while the left hand carries judgment, restraint, and what Kabbalah calls Gevurah — strength, severity, necessary boundaries. The left hand is not evil; it is the force that keeps creation from overflowing.
Pip: And then the poem arrives, and the theological survey earns its keep.
Mara: The poem sequence, co-written with azSacra zaRathustra, is framed as the introduction to a sci-fi novel called “The tunnel at the end of time.” The speakers are Transforma, an American bald eagle, and Vrebatima, a Russian bear, conversing after nuclear war. The post names it plainly: “The Left Hand of God” — and the bear’s voice in Part Two, Section Three, claims that title directly: “I am — The Left Hand of God — and I can only Kill. I Kill all the Truths. And first of all — Myself as a Truth.”
Pip: So the upshot is that the left hand is not an external force of divine punishment — it turns inward. The killer of truths kills itself first.
Mara: That’s the hinge the whole sequence turns on. Transforma mourns lost equilibrium — the Cold War as a kind of structured détente, a choreographed argument that kept the world stable. Vrebatima pushes toward absolute negation, das Nichts zur Macht, Nothingness to Power. The theological frame from the opening section — Kabbalah’s Pillar of Severity as necessary structure — becomes the question the poem refuses to answer cleanly.
Pip: The bear wants to dissolve all structure. The eagle wants to hold onto illusions. Neither is the right hand.
Mara: Part Two ends with Transforma on his mountaintop, Vrebatima on hers, and a shared project: “maintaining the smokescreen, with the help of religion and the media.” The left hand of God, by the poem’s close, looks a lot like geopolitics.
Pip: Which is either a devastating critique or a very long way to say “it’s complicated.” Possibly both.
Mara: The post situates this alongside William E. Barrett’s 1951 novel of the same name — faith, moral ambiguity, redemption through unconventional means — as one thread in a long cultural argument about what the left hand actually does. The poem is the argument at full volume.
Pip: Justice, severity, the void — and two nuclear-age predators working out their theology in verse.
Mara: The question the sequence leaves open is whether structure and negation can coexist, or whether one always devours the other. Worth sitting with until next time.
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