Lacan talked about lacking, Borges talked about the nothingness of personality, Heidegger addressed meaning, Sartre went on about a nothingness he compared to being, and we've enjoyed Bertrand Russell's disappointment with Wittgenstein's passionate explorations of language. Now we need to go back a bit and have a peep at the Golden Calf, specifically the Psychology of the Void.
One of the problems for a loose leaf collection of brick making people lost in the desert is when their temperamental and possibly insane self appointed leader occasionally disappeared for forty days and forty nights. They were basically left in the middle of nowhere. On one occasion, the brick-makers, while he was gone, collected the gold and silver earrings and bangles from family collections, melted it all down to make a golden calf, who they hoped would be an infinitely more reliable figurehead and guide through the tribulations.
When Moses finally got back from the mountain, he did not think it funny. As he explained in his biography he went into one of his yellow faced rages, he started yelling about having no other god but me, he broke important legal documents which had been written in stone, he burned the Golden Calf which he then had ground into a powder and he forced everyone to drink, and he was obliged to ask the Levites to make sure the traditional 3000 people were slaughtered.
The point is, by building a golden calf the average brick-maker didn't actually think he was breaking a law. What he thought they were doing was filling a void. They were trying to mend a broken circuit, they were materializing the infinite, they'd reconnected and golly, how happy they were when they thought they'd fixed the loop, they sang and danced. The Golden Calf wasn't a conduit to a Voice dictating laws from on the top of a mountain it was a genuine, in-place, ill-defined Noun, who could do weddings, provide a moment of calm and stuff.
Mind you John Walking Stewart would have been persuaded to suggest that by taking circulating precious metals and fusing them into a Golden Calf it would have been a crime against sensate atoms, a crime against moral motion, not something the Laplanders would have engaged in.
Not absolutely certain that the Stone Tablets were any different, but Moses had half a point, this Golden Calf was vibrationally dead, it pretended that something permanent could exist in a universe of Constant Transition, and if you had megalomaniacal leanings, as a source of meaning the Golden Calf was individualistic, it wasn't down from on high and potentially it was incredibly subversive.
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