Читать книгу The Book of Unknowing - David S. Herrstrom - Страница 15

“Mary,” Jesus says, and she turns and says “Rabboni,” which as John explains means “Master” (20:16). Until he utters her name, Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. It is not the sight of Jesus, but the sound of his voice that identifies him. A recognition scene so delicious (nothing like it until Shakespeare) that the hairs lift on the back of my neck.

John isolates and orchestrates the tender drama beautifully. He has the men leave Mary who then converses with angels in the place where Jesus was buried, which sets up her mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Mary is distraught, imagining angels who perhaps can offer hope in the face of despair (their highest function), and thus doesn’t recognize Jesus whom she has known for years.

The climax in Jesus’ speaking her name carries great power. We know the immediate recognition that comes with the sound of a person’s voice, the tone more powerful than the sight when, for example, we’re so surprised at the presence before our very eyes of a person we did not expect to see that we don’t see them but instantly know them by their voice.

From the outset of his book John makes this signature power of the voice clear. John the Baptist “stands and hears” Jesus, not seeing him so much as “rejoicing” in his voice (3:29). The emphasis is on Jesus speaking and his audience hearing, not on their visually recognizing him. His essential being is in his voice.

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We are our voice. More than our physical features or characteristic gestures we are most essentially individuals in our voice—sighs, words, laughter—our self made public. The voice carries the inside over to the outside. It is the revelation of the inner body. Conversely, moving from flesh to voice is to push more deeply into the body, probe further, approach the life itself. For the power of the speaking voice is in its embodiment of life.

The grand opening of John’s book is a hymn to this power. “In the beginning was the Speaking, and the Speaking was with God, and the Speaking was God.” John’s logos, commonly translated “Word,” is not the word on the page but the word spoken. This is the source of power throughout John’s book.

Now hear this voice, John’s hymn of invocation to the word uttered, the origin of what is:

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him;

and outside him was not any thing made that was made.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shines in darkness;

and the darkness comprehended it not (1:1–5).

The spectacular conceit of a poet: the whole world created from the word. And who is not moved by John’s grand speaking in this cosmic opening. We are mesmerized by his repetition of the “Word” and stirred by his exalted correspondences: word = life, word = light. The word so potent it baffles the dark. John announces the light/darkness theme in a sublimely sweeping way, at the same time his voice carries something of a syllogistic tone. We see him making mythic philosophy and philosophic myth, no mean feat. Then rather abruptly: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (1:6).

What a contrast to the cosmic opening—this single declarative. The rhythmic waves of John’s voice crash on the shore and run all the way up the beach of our world, the last bit of foam falling, finally spent at the feet of this man (and us).

The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light,

that all men through him might believe.

He was not that Light,

but was sent to bear witness of that Light (1:7–8)

The disclaimer is perfect. The logician’s voice resumes—O that syllogistic rag. John’s eating his cosmic cake and having it too. You can tell, John’s a debater. “That was the true Light, which lights every man that comes into the world” (1:9).

Back to the chant on “light,” we’re completely taken by John’s ability to be lyrical and ratiocinative at the same time.

He was in the world,

and the world was made by him,

and the world knew him not (1:10).

Entranced by repetition, John loves the emotional build of this chant. Rooted in the formal rhythm of ritual, it is intensified by John’s limiting himself in vocabulary. His characteristic style, taken from and given to Jesus, isolates a word and then names it out loud, varying the context but pronouncing it again and again. He’s obsessed with certain words (not unlike most poets) as if they’re talismans possessing magical power.

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As the essence of life itself, the voice has magical power against death. It is the “loud voice” (11:43) of Jesus, not his touch or gesture, that brings Lazarus back from the dead. John heightens the dramatic effect of this act of speech by having Jesus pause, just before calling out to Lazarus, and interrupt the proceedings to direct words to his Father (11:41–42). John is well aware of his artful move, establishing permission for the use of dramatic technique by pointing out Jesus’ own admission that he himself used the scene to achieve a specific effect (11:42). Add suspense to magic, and the word, which we remember exists from the beginning of time, takes on immense power for life. The word is merely uttered and nature responds.

Power to triumph over death is in this voice alone. It is not in the seeing with one’s own eyes or in the doing, but in the hearing that truth is apprehended. Jesus asserts that in the voice the future collapses into the present. The ear is the arena of an eternal present tense, where voices of the past and future are one in the present, and hence “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live” (5:25). No action is necessary. The voice is all.

Naming in itself has an uncanny power. Lazarus comes forth at the loud utterance of his name; Mary comes into awareness at the calm enunciation of hers.

We are drawn by the one who names. Because naming out loud invokes the essential interior life, our real being is awakened. The flip side of this drawing out, however, is its pressing down. This explains why Jesus is fond of “sheep” as a metaphor for his followers, who respond when he calls them by “name” (10:3) just as sheep know the shepherd’s voice. The one who names has the power. The one who names determines how we speak about the world and thus what has value and what does not, in short, reality itself.

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Jesus’ dramatic pause to speak to his Father before raising Lazarus reveals what we’ve known all along, that Jesus hears voices in his head continually. Like his disciples, he too is a listener. He responds to the Father who speaks to him. At one point the people also hear this voice, interpreting it as either “thunder” or an angel’s voice (12:29). Apparently a different angel than the one Mary conversed with.

The voice in Jesus’ head becomes audible to those who accept his new vocabulary. As he states unequivocally to Pilate, “Every one that is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37). Hearing this voice of his “truth” is to embrace a new vision of real life, which values things differently—the law (woman taken in adultery), as well as social (Samaritan woman) and gender divisions (Mary boldly anointing Jesus with perfume), the political order itself.

John gives us many of the voices that Jesus hears. They are various, lucid simplicity as well as sublime nonsense, at times teasing or sermonizing, abrupt or tender, but always arresting.

Jesus often begins in the most disarmingly simple way: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (15:1), for example, then shifts to the preacher’s voice. Jesus launches into a repetitious (with his numbing chant on “father”), less than joyous sermon, which irony we smile at because he’s just said he won’t be talking much any more (14:30). As his monologue spirals heavenward it becomes increasingly convoluted:

I am the vine, you are the branches: He that abides in me, and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit; so shall you be my disciples (15:5–8).

At the same time, its centrifugal force whirls him away from the incipient parable into another analogy. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you: continue you in my love. If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love; just as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That you love one another, as I have loved you” (15:9–12). What a contrast in context to the earlier admonition to “love one another” (13:34). Here it’s a belaboring, almost hectoring atmosphere. Jesus’ primer-like, patronizing method of proceeding exacerbates this. In the earlier context the admonition flows naturally from the warmth of his speech.

As a result, Jesus’ conclusion here that he speaks so their “joy might be full,” sounds somewhat hollow. Perhaps Jesus is getting impatient as his determination to give himself up to martyrdom becomes certain. He has, after all, just displayed a rather frayed frame of mind in losing patience with Philip (14:9).

Yet responding directly to the continual voice in his head, Jesus “lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee’” (17:1). Its energy in check, he modulates his voice into exquisite tenderness.

This direct address of his Father is also intended to be overheard by the disciples. With this comes a shift to a more subdued tone, a mix of humility and tenderness.

And now, O Father, . . . I have manifested your name unto the men which you gave me out of the world: yours they were, and you gave them me; and they have kept your word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever you have given me are of you. For I have given unto them the words which you gave me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from you, and they have believed that you did send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for those who you have given me; for they are yours. . . . (17:5–9)

John has his readers listen along with the disciples to Jesus’ comforting supplication with its lulling, cycling rhythms and repeated words on their behalf that they might have “joy fulfilled” and, building to a climax, truth and finally glory.

The disciples must have thrilled to hear Jesus’ supplication, an incantation in their honor wishing for them the radiance of Jesus himself (and John’s readers wishing right along with them). Undoubtedly they failed as usual to understand what Jesus was saying, but they certainly understood the import of Jesus’ gesture of speech on their behalf. They know a wish fulfillment when they hear one.

And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to you. Holy Father, keep through your own name those whom you have given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in your name: those that you gave me I have kept, and none of them is lost. . . . And now come I to you; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word; and the world has hated them, because they 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.”