The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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are not of the world, just as I am not of the world (17:11–14).
Having kept the “word” and in the “name” been kept, the disciples are verified as new creatures. They possess the new life of Jesus along with the “joy” that comes with it.
But this circling voice of Jesus, his reflective prayer culminating in its “world” chant, reminds us of John’s voice at the opening of the book. Jesus is given a greater range of tone, and after leaving this soliloquy John rides his narrative arrow, but he has appropriated Jesus’ voice. The poet has taken into himself the life of his subject, breathed in the voice of power.
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John makes our dependence on voice increasingly evident as his book progresses. The sheer quantity of Jesus’ words, repeating and swirling around us, increases toward the climax of the book; the Word (in the beginning) becomes words even as words become the Word (in the end on the cross). John bets the world on the word. “I have been saving up my hope in language,” concludes the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez at the end of his life, “in a spoken name, a written name.” Like the Spanish poet, John has done the same, creating in language the figure of Jesus who creates the world by naming anew. With Jiménez, John could truly say that he has “given a name to everything.”
The voice that names enables us to imagine the world differently. It confers or withdraws status. The humble are elevated; the exalted are humbled. Those formerly without power are given power, and vice versa. It is the giving or taking away of a blessing, which in the Jewish scriptures granted life itself. The blessing conferred by naming had uncanny, powerful magic. One could die without it. With it we are made new. Re-imagining the woman taken in adultery as “human” instead of “criminal,” we have become new people.
But the power of naming is two-edged. Accepting Jesus’ new vocabulary, which he intends to be our only vocabulary because it is the only truth, it becomes possible to name those who do not hear Jesus’ voice the “damned.” Once we internalize this category and place those people in it, we can legitimately act against them. For they are not human, being criminals, which excuses even murder. The power to name is the power to remake the world in your own image for good or evil.
John is drawn to Jesus because Jesus possesses this imaginative power of naming, the power to define what is. Jesus knows that whoever has the power to name the world has the power to change it. This is so because, as William Blake says, “Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has.”
John’s book is an extended naming of a re-imagined world, a new vision. As a writer, John taps into this power to draw new lines and make a new world. And he is supremely conscious of this project, as he boldly parallels the beginning of the world itself—“And God said, let there be, . . .”—in the beginning of his book. A book celebrating the voice as John invokes the muse of God’s voice in his opening hymn, lets the voice of Jesus ring, and sounds his own. This is the line of power, a voice stream flowing from the primordial source directly into John. Like Emily Dickinson, he inherits the faith of his hero, which is also the writer’s: “A word that breathes distinctly / Has not the power to die.”
Wind
A wind of breath carries the voice. We can only “speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen” (3:11) by shaping the breath stream, which emanates from the literal and figurative depths of our being, into the sounds of words. Moving across the fields, words leave them “wind-addled and wind-sprung,” as Charles Wright says in his poem, “Night Journal.” A word pronounced is the public manifestation of a wind that swirls within us.
As the word spoken in the beginning resulted in the world, so the word carried on the breath stream creates new worlds. The spoken word is nothing less than the wind of creation, which poets have known from the beginning. Reminding us of this at the end of his book, John presents a striking act of Jesus. Appearing to the disciples after his resurrection, Jesus “breathed on them” (20:22). Power and intimacy combine in this moving gesture. It is the supreme expression of his presence both in the here & now and in the future, an affirmation that his creative spirit will remain with them after his departure, sustaining within them the new world he has made.
We detect here a whiff of the ancient Greek belief, rooted in an oral culture, that breath is all. It is consciousness, perception, and emotion. Breath constitutes the continuity of life itself. Seat of all the senses, the lungs, as the Canadian poet and Classicist, Anne Carson observes, are “organs of mind.” We are connected not only to one another but to the world by breath. A poet of our own day in a culture of the written word still feels this intensely: “Windblown we come, and windblown we go away,” the poet Charles Wright says, “All that we look on is windfall. / All we remember is wind.”
As breath asserts the continuous, it also erases discontinuities. Thomas’ thrusting hand and Jesus’ breath stream of words flowing into the ear of Thomas cross the boundary of flesh and self. Familiar outlines are erased in order that new outlines can be drawn in the imagination. The voice wind crosses all boundaries. “Breath is everywhere,” as Anne Carson reminds us, “There are no edges.”
In a pivotal passage, as Jesus attempts to make clear to Nicodemus the boundary between flesh and spirit, he evokes the wind. Choosing a stunning metaphor, Jesus says: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell from where it comes, and to where it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (3:8; NRS translation). Which Nicodemus hears as “The wind blows where it chooses, . . . so is every one that is born of the wind.” A natural interpretation, of course, because Nicodemus knows that in Greek the word for “wind” and “spirit” is the same (pneuma). He takes literally what Jesus intends figuratively. Later, Lazarus’ sister Mary will take figuratively what Jesus intends literally (11:24–25).
Like the wind, language slips and slides. It’s as if Nicodemus here assumes the role of the “keeper of sheep,” the speaker in a poem of Fernando Pessoa and the name that Jesus takes for himself later in John’s book. When a stranger maintains that the wind speaks of “memories and yearnings / And things that never were,” the keeper of sheep contradicts him, saying “You’ve never listened to the wind. / The wind speaks only of the wind. / What you heard it say was a lie, / And that lie is part of you.” The wind has no outline except what we give it. What Jesus draws is not what Nicodemus draws. A beautiful and moving image, the wind is also wonderfully and critically ambiguous.
Jesus’ words, therefore, undercut the very point he is making with Nicodemus. The image that Jesus employs at this crucial juncture in establishing the boundary between flesh and spirit is at the same time an image of boundary crossing. The categories of flesh and spirit dissolve.
The power of the wind asserts continuity, a world without edges, while Jesus ostensibly insists on discontinuity. These are no more firm categories here than they are at the end in the upper room with the disciples, where Jesus breathes on them in spirit and in flesh, and where Thomas violates the spiritual and material boundaries by a thrust of his hand. Nicodemus is perplexed (3:9) only because he sees continuity in the wind where Jesus sees outline.
Nicodemus
Nicodemus wrestles with John for his book and receives a name. Neither a believer like John, nor a teacher like Jesus, he is the questioner.
Once brought on stage, we are powerless to dislodge him from our imagination. A problem John shares. After introducing Nicodemus early in the book, John must bring him back in the middle and again at the end. Nicodemus is the man on the periphery who will not go away. He is both a central and marginal figure. Ultimately, he takes control of John’s book, for we find ourselves, despite the writer’s efforts, reading it through the lens of Nicodemus’ questioning character. And to paraphrase Jesus, the central shall be marginal, and the marginal shall be central.
We are what we love. Character is defined by desire, and Nicodemus’ desire is not for belief but knowledge. Yet desire alone is not sufficient. “The self forms at the edge of desire,” as Anne Carson puts it. Desire saturates character, but the true self cannot precipitate without risk. Nicodemus risks his position in search of knowledge.