The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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I labored in solitude to give this lyrical foray life. And for his patient reading after the book was finished, I am in Andy’s debt as well, his considering my words carefully and inspiring me not to waiver in developing fully the Nicodemus chapter and in joining whole-heartedly Jesus’ fraught father-son dance. A dance we both know well. Beyond his continual spiritual aid, I also thank him from the bottom of my heart for his unstinting physical effort in championing my slim book. For without such sacrifice it would not have found its publisher.
And a wonderful privilege it is to have this opportunity after so many years to acknowledge my continuing intellectual and spiritual debt to Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. I owe her many revelations, not the least being Tristram Shandy, which introduced me to the “True Shandeism” that “opens the heart and lungs.” A spirit, I trust, informing my own book. In the classroom her presence alone was a revelation. From her purposeful entrance, each measured step resounding with the conviction of John Milton, to her deliberate commandeering of the lectern and weighing of each word to us undergraduates with the seriousness of Ezekiel, I was granted a vision of the mind burning with a hard gemlike flame. For her passion and example I am exceedingly grateful.
And I thank Rebecca Mebert for her enthusiastic response to my writings over the years. Her encouragement has meant more than she will ever know. I also want to convey my thanks to Emily Nguyen for her attentive reading and generosity.
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I’m grateful to the following magazines where my poems included in this book first appeared, though in different versions:
“Letters of Nicodemus (I).” Mars Hill Review (No. 19).
“The Nicodemus Glyph.” New River: Journal of Digital Writing and Art (Fall 2006). Online: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/herrstrom/nicodemusintroduction.html
In the deepest convictions reaching into the very depths of our being, we deserve to live forever. We experience our transitoriness and mortality as an act of violence perpetrated against us.
— Czeslaw Milosz
I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul.
— Miguel de Unamuno
We are narcissists, we want to live forever.
— Jacob Landau
Hands
John wants to feel a hand brush his cheek, a hand lie on his forehead. He wants to be lifted up in the strong hand of Jesus. “The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand” (John 3:35). Jesus’ words are John’s words uttered from the depths of his being. We hear in them the universal human desire for comfort and security. John would give himself wholly into Jesus’ hands, having never lost the child’s desire to place a small hand in the father’s.
But the yearning for Jesus, a hero with power and wisdom beyond ours who will keep us in his hand is more than this. It is the aching desire for more life, the fullness of life, real life itself (10:28–29). Proffering immortality, the hand is a refuge for eternity (13:3).
Though master of the symbolic, John never lets go the physical hand. Its symbolic palm offers comfort and, as it did for Ezra, interpreter and scribe like the writer John himself, wisdom (Ezra 7:21). Yet its physical backside threatens—the hand raised throughout John’s book until it finally strikes Jesus (19:3).
Alone among the writers of Jesus’ life, John insists on hands becoming the object of our attention. The last glimpse we get of a favorite character, Peter, is Jesus’ prediction that old and dependent, he will “stretch forth” his hands (21:18). As John’s book ends, we’re left with the image of hands stretched out in need.
This simple, physical gesture crystallizes the desire that drives John’s book and its strangeness. We come to share his idiosyncratic gaze, and in it we find the writer John. “In the beginning was the Word,” but it becomes truth only in the flesh and ultimately in the art of John’s words. The details that he singles out take on a strangeness; by his power as a writer, they become new.
Art and life, John knows, dwell in the particulars of experience: the severed “right ear” of Malchus (18:10); the charcoal fire in the courtyard (18:18) and on the beach (21:9). Or when Jesus insists on washing the disciples’ feet, Peter blurts out like a child: “not my feet only, but also my hands” (13:9). These details arrest us in John’s book because of their very singularity. An eagle soaring in lyrical heights, John does not miss the smallest movement far below of a hand.
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Jesus stoops down, as a hostile crowd becomes eerily silent, stretches out his hand and with his finger writes on the ground. At Jesus’ invitation Thomas stretches out his hand, while the disciples look on dumbly, and puts his finger into the bloody hole in Jesus’ hand.
These marks in dust and blood are John’s most singular. They go beyond language in a book babbling with talk and argument and interpretation, and pass into the realm of pure presence. No appeal here to anything greater or higher than the gesture itself. It does not require elaboration or explanation. For it is its own authority, and we can only witness.
With the woman taken in adultery, Jesus refuses a test; in the exchange with Thomas, Jesus accepts a test. In the former scene, refusal is rooted in faith, a complete and unfounded act of compassion. While in the latter, acceptance is rooted in doubt. Neither love nor faith can be established by tests; they can only be revealed in acts of compassion and commitment.
Simple acts of extending the hand, but both are outrageous. They are silent, for one thing, their power derived not from the word but from the infinite space before and after. They threaten to be more powerful than the book which contains them. Mere gestures, both acts shake the walls of John’s book and like Jesus walk right through without opening the door.
For another and more unnerving reason, they are intractable. Both the hand of Jesus in the story of the woman taken and of the man, Thomas, are as difficult to expel from our experience as grit in the eye. Two different but complementary perspectives: the one threatening public order, the body politic; and the other threatening private order, the body itself.
The Trembling Woman
In contrast to the encounter with Thomas, where we look on with a combination of horror and fascination, we are drawn unreservedly into the scene with the unfortunate woman caught “in the very act.” Almost too easily. We are awed by the courage of Jesus and moved by the compassion and sheer power of his gesture.
At the same time, as easily as we inhabit the scene, we are struck by its strangeness. Jesus the talker asked directly to speak and refusing to answer. Meeting act with act, he initiates us in a ritual event. And John intensifies this by depicting Jesus stooping down and rising up twice, and the hostile crowd at the end leaving “one by one” in the most orderly fashion, from the eldest to the youngest (8:9). All playing out in the teeth of violence.
Here is the hostility and self-righteousness of a lynch mob combined with the rightness of the Law carried out by duly constituted judges. And into this charged atmosphere falls the radical gesture. Silence against clamor, as private ritual confronts public order. Individual authority challenges social authority. Outrageous. For in contemporary terms this would be like discovering that a neighbor is a drug dealer, and when we want to run him out of town, Jesus asks us, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” (8:7).
The magnitude of the gesture is unavoidable. In this simple act of forgiveness Jesus holds a knife to the throat of the body politic. We are shaken and exhilarated not only by this challenge to the order of society but by the spectacle of the word “law,” imbued with a long tradition of common-sense meaning, utterly emptied by a single gesture. The thing named “law” now unnamed.
Jesus’ finger writing on the ground, William Blake the English poet and painter was correct in supposing, dares to erase the finger of God inscribing the Law on the tablet. No wonder Blake imagines that the “trembling Woman” can hear Jesus breathing