The Book of Unknowing
A Poet’s Response to the Gospel of John
David Herrstrom
The Book of Unknowing
A Poet’s Response to the Gospel of John
Copyright © 2012 David Herrstrom. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-188-1
EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-604-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorized King James Version. New York: Oxford U.P., Copyright © Used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Illustration permissions:
William Blake, 1757–1827
Repository title: Jerusalem, Plate 78, “Jerusalem, C 4 . . . .”
Collective title: Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Bentley Copy E
1804 to 1820
Relief etching printed in orange with pen and black ink and watercolor
Sheet: 13 1/2 x 10 3/8 inches (34.3 x 26.4 cm)
Plate: 8 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches (21 x 16.2 cm)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
B1992.8.1(78)
Leonard Baskin: Man with Rooster. 1994. © The Estate of Leonard Baskin; Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.
Jacob Landau: Eagles. 1961. Woodcut (392 x 302 centimeters). The Jacob Landau Institute. Art © Jacob Landau Institute/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Takako Araki: Ceramic Bible. 1981. © Fukuko Kohda.
for Constance Joy Harmon Herrstrom who accepts the premise and rejects the promise
and
the Rev. David J. Harmon (1944–2001)who accepts the promise and rejects the premise
To Nicodemus
Nico the scholar loved the night
its small hours moving across his forehead like the bowing of a cello.
Some nights, bent over ancient texts,
Nico felt a stone in his right hand
and in his left its heft,
knew his mind to be a leaf in a wind.
He sat inside and outside himself like laughter.
He kept a lump of amber on his desk, wanting the moon within reach.
(Nico, great insomniac
let me walk with you for I too
am kept awake by curiosity.)
Interpreter Nico loved the rich inexhaustible ink of night.
Beforehand
We’ve just finished eating dinner, and my father reads our daily chapter from the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word.” His voice gives the King James English a burr inherited from the “old country,” the Sweden of his youth. It seems as if every word is given its own knurl, the rough pattern of ridges that he puts on the knobs of the machine tools he spends his days making. Each word is accorded reverence and love. And at nine years old I knew this was how God himself pronounced them.
Compelled by some inchoate need as an adult to reacquaint myself, I revisited The Gospel According to John and gave a brief lecture for my colleagues where I was teaching English at the time. My talk wrestled with the beautiful shape and impossible demands of John’s Gospel. Circling it, awed and intimidated by his power, I finally saw an opening and got a hold. At last, I thought I had come to terms with his book. But like William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it was too closely woven into the fabric of my life to let me rest.
So an encounter some thirty years later at the invitation of my brother-in-law, a minister, took me down, and I became obsessed with the book, reading and rereading. Nicodemus came by night in a dream. John sat beside me, conversing writer-to-writer in my daydreams. I avoided my colleagues at lunch, sneaking away to jot notes on the continual flow of my reader-reading thought.
•
My first encounter with John’s book as an adult was epitomized by the familiar medieval image of John the Apostle as an eagle, majestically soaring above us, distant, beautiful, essential. The eagle was the emblem of my awe. But my later encounter, which resulted in the present essay, is captured by the image of John as the rooster that haunts Peter.
As a boy I loved this engaging and intimidating scene of Peter’s denial. I identified with Peter, knowing in my heart of hearts that I too would have failed under the same circumstances. Still John loves him, treating him with a tenderness that even a boy could understand; and still Jesus loves him. Unspeakably comforting to a skinny kid filled with self doubt. And as an adult, encountering this scene almost thirty years ago and again recently, I still love Peter. But now I also love the interplay of John and Jesus, Peter and the girl and the soldiers around the fire, and the cock who crows. This time around it’s clear to me that John the writer, like the rooster in the scene, hovers just outside the action and, as the light of understanding dawns, sings for all he’s worth.
But we don’t have to choose between the eagle and the rooster. In John’s pushing the envelope of hope, he soars with the eagle; in testing the limits of the body, he crows with the cock. Swept away by a sublime life, lifted on currents of ineffable ecstasy, he views his hero from the heights like an eagle.
At the same time, he must contemplate the life. Eye witness or not, he observes Jesus closely in order to write his book. It is necessary to select and arrange events, include and cut speeches, comment on his hero’s words and actions. In short, telling the story of Jesus, as writer rather than follower, requires the distance that irony provides. In the close-up of wonder, every detail glows with equal importance. But to see clearly, the writer also needs perspective, the panning-shot of judgment that irony allows. Without it books cannot be made out of lives. So John’s Gospel, like the rooster’s song within it commenting on Peter’s actions, includes an ironic perspective.
Throughout his book, then, John the follower and biographer of Jesus maintains a double vision. As a follower he desires to be Jesus; as a writer he seeks the distance that allows him to size Jesus up. His encounter with Jesus demands that he live in the center and observe from the periphery. Likewise, he invites us to give ourselves to certainty and embrace uncertainty, a recipe for the melancholy shared by all artists. On the title page to the triumphant last chapter of his epic poem Jerusalem, Blake portrayed just this conflicted, powerful creator-genius John, aptly drawing his head as both an eagle’s and a rooster’s. Here is the perfect emblem of John who is both the ecstatic follower and ironic writer.
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Whether you come to John’s Gospel believing or suspending disbelief, his book has the power to transport. Whatever