The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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rather than belief, Nicodemus is content to visit Jesus’ house of language and learn, but not to move in because it is ultimately too confining. The one Word by which “all things were made” and “without him was not any thing made that was made” (1:3) is profoundly and disturbingly exclusionary. No spiders or Visigoths need apply.
Nicodemus’ questions lodge in our mind for the remainder of the book. Their bringing language into account, riding the edge of figurative and literal, categorical and ironical, ultimately results in their going unanswered. That is, we find ourselves viewing all that John presents subsequent to this scene through Nicodemus’ eyes. His blurring the edges with irony that Jesus picks up and adopts, his silence as the categories dissolve, not light versus darkness but light and absence-of-light, finally prevails in this pivotal scene that forms the climax to the first part of John’s book.
Nicodemus, in short, consistent with his desire to know and his disinterested character, obliquely revises Jesus’ language and with it John’s book. Fittingly, in a scene that forms the climax to the last part of his book (19:38–42), before the resurrection and reunion, John brings Nicodemus and Jesus together again. And true to character, the ambiguous Nicodemus’ very presence questions the language of John’s book. If as the disciples say, they “believe,” why aren’t they present? So he continues to haunt us as we last see Nicodemus, now by daylight, bent in silence wrapping the dead body of Jesus.
The Nicodemus Letters to John
a Fictive Interlude
First
You ask me to confirm your account. You ask me as if records could be true. I answer let both the lettered and unlettered have his voice. In the main you’ve followed my relation of that night, though I note you’ve left out the moon and the locusts, as well as my disinterested . . . but you know this. I’ll not niggle over small omissions and additions. Foremost is that you let his voice sound, and I make allowance knowing how you loved him and how he took your head in his hands.
Our Vocalisimus he was. If as legend has it we Jews found the stops, and the Greeks the vowels, then he invented the word. Without breath, as they say, the letter is dead. So why are you still obsessed with belief and water? This is a dry land but we’re deluged, God knows, with belief. The very word swims before my eyes.
Let him speak in your text, yes, where words rise against words. The language streaming from his mouth carried us like leaves—leaping, plunging, erratic—remember? Let him say all the letters out loud. I can only be grateful for what you’ve resurrected of that cataract. You give us his riddling. And you let us be swept into his maelstroms of monologue. Manic interpreter, frothing talker, he had to be, like our old inspired prophet-poets, of God.
Second
How explain his effrontery? You ask as if I knew. He’d offer clear, cold water and just as we drank, shatter the vessel of interpretation. He reveled in pushing figures of speech off the precipice.
I’m still puzzled by his taunting us like some Dionysiac to cannibalism, offering his breadflesh and wineblood. I found myself at times uneasy, as you know, passing in deja vu from the white room to the red, seated with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover before the served body, as in Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film. Then, just as we reached to partake of understanding, his figures swerved, and we stumbled.
And the opposite. Bending the literal into figure. Outrageously inviting Thomas to try on his body like a bloody glove. As if that could prove anything. Belief suddenly become as pointless as unbelief. He delighted in making us uncomfortable in our own language. And in our bodies, as if we needed new ones, morphing letter into figure like some mathematics of the spirit. Lazarus sleeps.
Then bending down beyond his bright and dark sayings, finger to the ground. In that tense moment we looked at each other empty. I still remember the paralyzing clarity of his act. Now I know what it must have been to see Ezekiel in the tree. The teacher simply bent down before that poor woman and inscribed on the ground. The hostile mob surrounding, struck dumb as a tree. Who could interpret. Who dared? The talker of all time silent.
Writing or drawing we didn’t know. Was he inscribing a sign or simply a glyph in the ground to make of that mark his point, nothing more? I remember thinking “he’s stalling for time.” But what a spell when we saw in the dust that speaking picture. . . . The look in your eyes, who could forget, said we’ll never know keener sounds than on that day under a metal sun.
Third
Having been drawn again to your account, as if by a whirlpool, I remain grateful for your fleshing his speaking in letters on the page. As always we’ll disagree about signs. But I respect your honest admission of selection and understand your wine-to-blood arrangement in a frame of light. More important, you get the glint and grit of the sand in his voice.
A voice so insistent in the dark I have to close your book to sleep. Awake, I return to my texts, and they suggest other texts, and they in turn gesture beyond the desert where a raven marks the edge of many circles. I can’t escape that son-of-man’s voice. Explain. How in his brief time on earth had he come to shepherd such a flock of words?
Age can resent this, but instead I was exhilarated, as you know, going out of my way for his way of speaking. Taking words in his teeth, confronting and evading at will, just as he moved deliberately from place to place like a guerilla. Immortal magnet? Jack, joke, sly son?
The man’s mouth could taste its own fate. His unnerving certainty, his radiance like the firefly’s—uncanny, as if the circumference were within. Exuberance of youth? Maybe arrogance and recklessness come with the conviction of immortality. I only know that the circumference still expands going forward to eternity.
All these years John, and you’ve called me reprobate on occasion, but in this we’re one: being close to him, the spray of his voice in our face, we were most alive.
Light
Light is time thinking about itself.
—Octavio Paz
Light walks the earth wanting to be courted like a lover. He does not oppose darkness because darkness has no real existence. For light, who has come into our world to be desired, darkness is not even a question. Light being wholly light cannot conceive it. Light is not opposition but attraction; he draws all to himself. Those who reject the lover, however, give darkness existence because their state of rejection is called darkness. The body of light knows only radiance. His name is Jesus.
John has fallen in love. And he writes a book about this being, whom he quotes more than once declaring: “I am the light of the world” (1:8; 9:5). In gesture and word, Jesus is for John incandescent. We can easily imagine him saying of Jesus, as Guy Davenport remarks about a character in one of his stories, “He eats light and his droppings are copper.” John’s dream of sharing light with Jesus at the table is fulfilled. And in an epilogue to his book he projects himself into a most moving scene of breakfast on the beach: Peter and Jesus breaking light together at daybreak. By an act of adoration John partakes of this light, feeding on the nourishing light, just as John the Baptist became by his love “a burning and a shining light” (5:35).
From the beginning, as John makes clear, light is life that gives life. Light is not a moral category but the substance of life itself. When the “Word was made flesh,” light became a body. And in the Word “was life, and the life was the light of men” (1:4). This answers the main question of our age, posed succinctly by the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz, “Where is the light of a god propped against nothing?” And it is John’s fervent desire that those who witness this light walking the earth might like John himself fall in love with Jesus, which is to “believe” (1:7), and thereby share in the fullness of life that radiates from Jesus.
John’s yearning here extends throughout his book. He savors light in his prologue, repeating the word in an incantation, “and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in darkness” (1:4–5). Jesus echoes this in his own incantation at the end of the colloquy with Nicodemus (3:19–21) and later as the knowledge of Jesus’ imminent,