Giving Up the Ghost

I.

Let me be completely clear. No, really, I want to make myself clear. I want to be transparent with you. As transparent as a ghost, actually, one who can pass easily through all that which divides us, all those walls and thresholds, without losing anything of himself. I want to be this ghost that passes back and forth between author and reader, between original and translation, that lives in the flesh of each, of self and other, and makes finally possible their adequation. But I can't be this ghost, this ghost that is locked, encrypted, within language. And who is dead anyway. Why did I ever want to be this dead thing? I guess I cannot be completely clear with you, nor do I really want to be. But we could make something, you and I, in all our difference. We could "construct a comparable," a world in which we could mutually (if not perfectly) co-dwell. We could share a horizon for a while, like in those Corona commercials. I would flick a lime wedge with my finger and you would hear it plop into the ocean, and we'd know that we'd shared something, which, for all of its elusiveness and vitality, for all its endlessness, is worth a lot more than that damn ghost ever was. How could we share if we were exactly the same? That's the ghost's dream, not mine. He still haunts me though, haunts this Corona horizon of ours. This beach might be a burial ground, in the end. When we leave we'll take him with us, even though we don't see him. He might have been what we shared all along. A secret, one which we keep but can't know. But that was him, alright, haunting up the place. We'll ferry him to the next place we say with words, like pallbearers of a closed, Times New Roman casket. He was a good man, they'll say at the funeral, and died tragically. Killed, really, at Babel, when the tower fell. Why is it that towers are always falling? Now he's just a ghost, something I could never be, not until I'm dead myself. But I have put so much of myself in this new horizon, the one that we share, the one with the Coronas, that I am not sure I could ever die, so long as people are reading my words. I won't be a ghost anyway, I'll be a different kind of dead, or not dead at all. It doesn't seem so great anymore, to be that ghost.


II.


Pentecost strikes me as one of the moments in scripture so overdetermined, so symbolically freighted that it threatens to unhinge itself from the canon. Marc, your theological interpretation of this moment in Acts (that's where I find it anyway) is very much illuminating; an articulation of the multiplicity of voices within the church, a plurality treated as gift rather than as fracture. If I may play it fast and loose for a moment, I see some extra-ecclesiastical postmodern commentary running through this episode. Actually, more than postmodern commentary, it seems a comment on postmodernity.

To suddenly hear the primordially familiar--one's birth language--coming from the mouth of the other. This would be shocking. Implicit here is a refiguration of authenticity, dislodged from its dogmatic filliation to the idea of origin. Authenticity's source is found sub contrario, flowing upstream, so to speak, from the other to the self. In this way, It appears to me that the Pentecost episode in Acts narrates the "construction of the comparable," as Ricoeur terms it, an intersubjective space wherein the self and the other may participate in some experience of mutuality. Over and against Ricoeur's "third text," the ghastly absolute text which perfectly indexes the self and other--what Benjamin calls the messianic horizon of translation--this intersubjective space is a fourth text. [To numerate: not the text of the self (1), the other (2), the divine/ghost (3), but a 4th.] The fourth text is imperfect, immanent, concrete and collaborative. In this privileged-if-not-sacred space, the self and the other may experience the epiphany of corroboration, that is, the recognition of the self in the other, the closure of what had previously been perceived as an infinite distance separating the two. As the Pentecost illustrates, this closure occurs in language. To invoke Ricoeur again, the self and other mutually indwell what he elsewhere terms the "world of the text," which could also be termed the world of translation. Here the self and other are witness to a shared truth, or perhaps a truth shared in pieces, one among many. Authenticity is, then, not so much linked to the content but to the mode of that truth's disclosure, i.e., translation; the construction of the "comparable" and intersubjective fourth text, whereupon we may project our ownmost possibilities.

So, to just lay it on you, I think that Pentecost documents the new filiation of authenticity to translation, a moment which is concomitant with 1) the interment of what Ricoeur termed the absolute "third text," and 2) the invention of a "fourth text." This fourth text, an intersubjective space of mutual discovery, is what we call literature. The annulment of the absolute text did not yield silence but rather a proliferation of tongues; of truths. Literature does not precede translation, but, as Acts suggests, miraculously proceeds from it. It is in literature, in this infinite elegy for the absolute, where we find each other, and thus also our authentic selves.

Zach

PS
Please excuse these free associative wanderings.

Pentecost

Here's a translation of Acts 2:1-13 and (not that anyone has to agree with them, but hopefully they will be helpful) a few words from Richard Pervo's new Hermeneia commentary:

On the day of Pentecost the entire group was together. A sudden noise from above, like the roar of a strong rushing wind, filled the house in which they were sitting. Phenomena resembling jagged fiery tongues appeared. One of these settled upon each person. All were filled with Holy Spirit and, all, directed by the Spirit to give utterance, began to speak in foreign tongues.

Among the residents of Jerusalem were devout persons from every country under the sun. In response to the noise a crowd flocked together, for each and every one of them heard these people speaking in their native languages. In absolute bewilderment they exclaimed: "Aren't all these people who are speaking Galileans?" How can it be that each of us is hearing our own language? There are Parthinans, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, [__], Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Egypt, residents of Cyrenean Libya, visiting Roman citizens, Jews by birth and Jews by choice, Cretans and Arabs. Yet we are hearing these Galileans glorifying God in our own languages! Al were bewildered and perplexed, constantly asking one another, "What is going on?" Although there were some who made fun of the whole business by announcing, "They're full of cheap wine."

Pentecost may be the most exciting and least comprehensible episode in Acts. The story collapses at the slightest breeze. It begins with a group gathered in a house, perhaps for a devotion... These (12? 120?) persons experience a complicated epiphany that issues in inspired speech, possibly glossolalia (vv 1-4). Somehow this noise within a house becomes loud enough to attract a crowd evidently composed entirely of non-native residents who somehow pervieve that the speakers are from Galilee, although they hear neither ecstatic speech nor Palestinian Aramaic (which may have betrayed a Galilean origin to the experienced ear), but, to their utter amazement, a religious message in their respective native tongues (5-12). In a logical narrative, each would have heard (a group?) speaking Latin, Egyptian, or the like, leading to a conversation in which on e participant says to another, "Do you know what language that is?" It's Phrygian." To which another replies, "Oh no. that's the indigenous language of rural Cyrene," and so forth. The narrative telescopes such conversation, reporting that all spoke these words in unison, somehow grasping the precise distribution of the ethnic origins among them. Some could not determine what all this meant, but others were clear: "they're drunk" (v. 13). That charge would fit glossolalia, and Peter assumes that it is the opinion held by the entire audience (vv. 14-15). Most amazingly - and quite revelatory from the narrative perspective - nothing specific is said about the content of the message they heard.

This is a confusion worthy of babel. A redactional solution almost leaps from the page: Luke had a story about ecstatic speech that he transformed, either out of distaste for glossolia or to expound universalism, or both, into a linguistic miracle focusing on what was heard. This remedy recognizes the presence of conflicting elements and posits a likely source, but it is more of a description of the problem than an unraveling of it.