The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. Driven by curiosity, he seeks Jesus out, away from the crowd and hangers-on, away from the support of his own tribe. The questioner stands outside any vocabulary that purports to define the world in total.

      While Jesus desires to die, and John desires to live, Nicodemus alone desires to know. He goes out of his way to meet with Jesus. In their colloquy by night (3:1–21), however, he stands apart as the questioner. Likewise, as challenger, he stands outside the temple coterie (7:45–52) just as he does Jesus’ circle, not fully leader of the Jews and not a follower of Jesus. Yet his questions to Jesus early on haunt the rest of John’s book and make Nicodemus a central figure. We are not surprised, then, when he shows up after Jesus’ death to honor him with a gift of spices (19:38–42).

      Call him Nicodemus the uncertain, disinterested, always engaging and disengaging; oscillating between the center and the circumference, between Jesus and those who write Jesus off, his brothers, friends, ex-followers, enemies, even baffled strangers like Pilate who encounter him purely by chance. Nicodemus savors uncertainty. He lingers in the twilight where no categories are firm, no vocabulary final, reminding us of Bulkington in Melville’s Moby-Dick, who inspires the observing narrator and shipmate to assert that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.” Like Bulkington, Nicodemus is the secret member of the crew.

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      From Nicodemus’ position on the periphery, when the Jews are shouting Jesus down in the temple, he brings them up short with a single question: “Does our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he does?” (7:51) I want to cheer. What a dramatic reappearance of Nicodemus in the middle of John’s book, bursting on the scene again at this point of tense interaction and sharp interpretative interchange.

      Nicodemus comes back into the story with a reaction that we didn’t get when we first met him questioning Jesus. There the conversation ended with his long, almost suspended silence. We wanted more. What was Nicodemus thinking as Jesus’ words echoed in the night air? (I’ve “discovered” three letters from Nicodemus to John that perhaps answer this question, which inventions follow this chapter, a “Fictive Interlude.”) Here, as a result, Nicodemus’ reaction to the crowd feels like a resolved chord. He was the cool questioner, withholding judgment, insisting like a skeptic on results, actions. He didn’t buy Jesus’ story, but has clearly hung around, observing him closely, and now on his behalf asks for fair play, though keeping his distance.

      In the scene that follows in the same temple, however, Nicodemus chooses silence. When Jesus and Nicodemus and the Jews reconvene early the next morning СКАЧАТЬ