are anticipating the meaning we
will find, the truth promised us
at the end of the process. We are
waiting for the glorious
appearing of some word of truth
that will lighten our darkness
and illumine our understanding.
This is so whether you are reading
the Upanishads or the instruction book for a new appliance.
But often that
longing is disappointed, as full understand
ing does
not dawn, as full recognition is delayed because either
we cannot quite work out the
cipher, or the language is open to
many meanings, and we do not know
where the truth lies. Text is
cipher, and the promised Parousia of meaning always eludes us,
makes us wait and wait.
Why does writing
delay and defer and obstruct meaning?
Jacques Derrida addresses these issues in a number of works
including Of Grammatology. I want
to focus, though, on his essay
"Plato's Pharmacy" (in the collection Dissemination),
where he
deconstructs Plato's argument in
his Phaedrus dialogue. There
Plato, speaking through his ventriloquist dummy Socrates,
tells a
tale of the origin of writing. Here, in brief, it is.
Once upon a
time, says Socrates, the messenger god Thoth
came before the throne of his
master Amon, king of gods and mortals. Thoth has a breakthrough, a great invention, to announce.
But perhaps learning a lesson from the terrible fate of Prometheus, he decides
to check with the boss before going public with
it.
His invention is
writing. He says it will function as a
pharmakon, a medicine, to make
up for the infirm memory of human
beings. If they write down what is
important, they will not need
to worry: should they later forget it, they can look it
up.
But Amon is not so sure it is a good idea. This drug, this
pharmakon, of writing, he
replies, is not so much a medicine as
it is a poison. It will but
further erode the power of memory.
People will take less care to remember precisely because
they
know they can always look up where they wrote it.
Worse yet,
writing will steal the words from the author,
wrest them from his control. A
speaker may make himself understood, since he can repeat,
rephrase, reinforce a point with a
gesture or an inflection. A written
transcription allows for none
of these. Thus if I read a
transcript of a speech I was not present to hear, I stand a much
greater chance of misunderstanding
it.
The speaker is
the father of the word, and the spoken word
is like the elder son in the
Parable of the Prodigal: it stays
close to home and obeys its
father's behests, working under his
watchful eye. The written word, the
written text, on the other
hand, is like the younger son who
strays far from home, escaping
the supervision of his father, that
is, of its writer. With writing,
there is more of a danger that meaning will get lost, will
be harder to find, will be
deferred. One may take longer finding
the center of the maze. Worse yet,
one may never get there and
instead imagine that some
cul-de-sac is the center! Derrida says
that Plato is perfectly correct
about writing. What Plato failed
to realize, though, was that speech
is no better! The same
ambiguity he feared in writing
already exists in speech, since it
is inherent in language as such.
The kind of
comparison Plato makes between writing and
speech would really only make sense if he were instead
comparing language on the one hand, whether written or spoken, and
telepathy on the other. Only immediate,
unmediated, awareness of
the speaker's intent without the obscuring medium of language
could prevent misunderstanding--or could it?
Do I even understand what I am saying? Really? Freud would
have little difficulty in showing
that I am at best a poor listener
to my own internal speech, to the clues of my subconscious.
The problem with
language is that it is a forest path with
many winding branches, and it is
easy to get lost. Thus the ciphers and
puzzles of every written text, even those that on the
surface seem easier to understand
than the Book of Revelation.
Language leadeth astray. At least
it leads us a merry chase, the
meaning an ever-receding will-o'-the-wisp.
Derrida noted
that Plato had to employ writing even to make
his complaint against it. And that
even his apparently clear
polemic against it is inevitably
vitiated by the very ambiguity
he seeks to exorcize. The best
proof of his complaint is the
drift of meaning in his own essay,
the fact, for instance, that
the very same word pharmakon can mean both "poison" and
"remedy."
A related word, pharmakos, can mean either "poisoner"
or
"scapegoat." And Derrida
says Plato is making a scapegoat of
writing, making it bear the curse
of the ambiguity of language so
that you will banish writing and
then go on blithely relying on
spoken language, forgetting that it
is heir to the same infirmities.
Certainly he
does not mean to admit this, but the words he
uses speak for themselves. They are
there to be read and for us
to decipher, whatever he may have
meant by them. The text speaks
for itself. No authority, not even the author, can be
allowed to
control the meaning of the text. Such is the nature of
a text.
I am startled to
find some of the very same moves being
made in the text of the Apocalypse.
John, like Plato, means to
denigrate writing--even though to
do it he must write! He means
to exalt speech, the living Word of
God who appears at the climax
to banish the forces of textual chaos.
Then I saw heaven
opened, and behold! a white horse! He who
sat
upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness
he
judges and makes war... and he has a name inscribed which
no
one knows but himself... and the name by which he is
called is the Word
of God... From his mouth issues a sharp
sword
with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them
with
a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury
of
the wrath of God the Almighty (19:11-15).
When the Living Word appears at the finale, it is as if he
has
come as the spoken word incarnate
to banish the evil of written
textuality
itself. He appears in order to defeat and bring to an
end the very Book in which he appears!
John pretends that
his Apocalypse is simply a transcription
of what certain heavenly voices said
to him, or what he saw with
his own eyes. In other words, his
text, he wants us to believe,
is the thinnest of tissues. His
unveiling (which is what "revelation"
means) is itself a veil, but a transparent one--he says, or
rather writes.
But he gives
away the game with all his literary allusions
to Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah.
It is obvious his text is a
composite literary hash heavily
dependent on earlier prophetic
books, and by no means simply a
showing forth of "heaven and its
wonders and hell." It is a
written text from first to last. Even
if it is based on dreams or
hallucinations he actually experienced,
they have arisen from his subconscious clothed in the
rags of remembered scripture texts.
It is the
living, i.e., the spoken word that appears to wreak judgment, and yet his
designation as the Word is
"inscribed." Inscription
is inescapable as the linguistic matrix
from which speech proceeds, the
matrix of meaning from which it
emerges.
In the first
three chapters he has the Son of God dictate
letters to the churches of Asia
Minor, and he pretends merely to
take dictation. Yet even this
spoken word, if such it be, is
beset with ambiguity. Each letter
ends with the appeal, "Let him
who has an ear hear what the Spirit
says to the churches." They
end just like the equivocal
parables of Jesus. In other words,
they are ciphers essentially no
different from the apocalyptic
symbols later in the book. Are
spoken words of God so clear?
Remember the equivocal utterances of the oracle of Delphi!
At the very end
of the book he warns in the sternest terms
that no reader must venture to
produce his own expurgated or
interpolated edition of the Apocalypse:
I warn everyone
who hears the words of the prophecy of this
book:
if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues
described
in this book, and if anyone takes away from the
words
of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his
share
in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are
described in this book. (22:18-19)
This is what regularly happened to these books of
visions--take a
look at Mark 13 and see what has
been made of it in Luke 21 and
Matthew 24! This is what John wanted to avoid. Don't take
any
thing away from the book!
John knows that
once he sets his pen aside and sends copies
of the book to the seven churches
of Asia Minor he cannot control
what will be made of it. He cannot
be sure what people will take
him to have meant. If only he might
have seen what Hal Lindsey
and Charles Manson have made of it!
He intends that
the prophetic word, frozen for transit into
written text, will upon arrival
melt again into living speech,
since it is to be read aloud (cf. "the one who hears the prophecy
of this book"), but he cannot
even be sure people will not
rewrite it in the meantime. So he
strives to forestall the inevitable by means of this warning.
Hands off, or it's the burning
lake for you! He fears the latent potency of the pharmakon, the
potent drug of writing, of textuality, of language.
And, again like Plato, he cannot decide whether the pharma
kon is a
poison or a remedy! Strikingly, the very thing he warns
the would-be bowdlerizer not to do
in chapter 22 he himself had
done in chapter 10: "And when
the seven thunders had sounded, I
was about to write, but I heard a
voice from heaven saying, 'Seal
up what the seven thunders have
said, and do not write it down'."
In other words,
he thought better of a particular prophecy
and struck it out of the final
copy. That's textuality for you!
John had become a hostile reader of his own text and
censored it.
What is a poison in chapter 22 had previously been a remedy,
fixing the text in chapter
10.
John expects the
Parousia of the Word of God to happen
soon. But for now he must
grudgingly rely upon codes, as in chapter 13
when he "tells" or thinks he tells the identity of the
Great Beast with the cipher 666.
Again, if he had only suspected
the mischief this piece of text would cause!
There have been
a thousand guesses as to who was intended
by that particular cipher. And yet
we need not look beyond the
number itself. The written numeral
666 is not a reference to the
Antichrist; by definition it is the Antichrist! If the
Christ is
the living word, that is, the spoken word, then
the Antichrist is
the opposite of the spoken word, namely the written sign
per se.
So then, John
grudgingly admits he is, we are, dependent on
written signs now, but soon, he
promises, true meaning will no
more be impeded, detoured, delayed,
re-routed by textuality.
The New Jerusalem will descend and there will be no temple
in it,
as there was in the earthly Jerusalem.
And why not? Because the
old temple was a token, a reminder,
of God's presence in his
absence. But at the end of the world, the end of the word, there
will be no need for reminders: God will simply be there, his
Presence immediately dwelling amid human
beings. Hence no temple. And
hence, also, no writing. It
is in this same context that John
drives out of the New Jerusalem a
ragged crew of undesirables
including the pharmakoi.
"Outside are the dogs and pharmakoi and
fornicators and murderers and
idolaters, and everyone who loves
deeds of falsehood" (22:15).
Who are the
pharmakoi? Virtually without exception, Bible
translations render the word
"sorcerers," but, remember, it also
means "poisoners"
and "scapegoats." (No doubt the word has all
these meanings because in ancient
cities when plague broke out,
they would seize the local apothecary, already a
dubious character who sold medicines, magic
potions, and poisons, like
the druggist in Romeo and Juliet,
and drive him from the town,
blaming him for the sickness and hoping thus to dispel
it. "Now let's see you poison our wells!")
And remember
Plato's Phaedrus with its
Egyptian myth of the
origin of writing. It is Thoth who invents writing. Thoth
is a
sorcerer and the dispenser of the
medicine or poison of writing,
a pharmakos
in both senses. Just as Plato would have
banished
the poets from his ideal Republic,
John is driving the dangerous
magic of writing from the New Jerusalem as one
drives a pharmakos or scapegoat from the city. He
might have sent speech packing,
too, since the two are accomplices in mischief.
But he is right:
as long as God is not fully Present, any
sacred writing or speech about God
is but a token both of God's
presence and of his absence. It is present,
such as it is, but it
is not God. It holds the place of
the absent God. The Bible is a
book mark, a book that is a mark, a
sign for God, not the real
thing.
Thus the written
text of the Bible and the mute charade of
speaking of the unspeakable God are
medicine: they are a fix to
get the reader by without the
Living Water of the divine Presence. And
yet that medicine is in the same moment a poison, the
poison of idolatry. John drives the pharmakoi from the heavenly
city arm in arm with the idolaters.
The poison of the Bible's
language is that it tempts the
reader to make the stammering
speech about God into God. The
word "God" on the biblical page is the God
that comes to be worshipped.
The text which
pretends to reveal, whether that of the
Revelation of Saint John or any other,
is itself a veil. It is
like the veil that hung before the
Holy of Holies in Herod's
Temple: it hides
the fact that the Inner Sanctum is an empty
chamber. The curtain allows the
illusion that some Transcendental
Signified awaits within. But in fact the veil itself is all
that occupies the Holy of Holies.
The text itself is the only
thing revealed. It is a fabulous
vista painted on a veil, not a
transparent veil through which one sees a distant
panorama.