by Jerome du Bois
. . . I do not believe that J's interests were either theological or political. They were what we would now call imaginative or literary, and concerned the elite image of the individual life . . . " -- Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
Everybody counts or nobody counts. -- Hieronymus Bosch, LA Police / Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote.
The retrospective "founding document" of three religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- is The Book of J, written (probably) by a woman circa 900 BCE, and demonstrably not for religious reasons; she was telling glorious stories. You can believe I relish the ironies here. I highly reccommend the Harold Bloom / David Rosenberg book. Here's Bloom's description of the creation story:
. . . Yahweh molds the clay, not as the potter does, but in the manner of a child making mud pies, freestyle with his own hands. J does not tell us whether Yahweh blows his breath through his own nostrils, or by his own mouth, into the newly formed mouth of the moistened red clay creature, but either way the image is powerfully grotesque. Perhaps even more original, and more ironic, is the uniqueness of the creation of woman, since there is absolutely no other story of the forming of a human female in all of the surviving literature of the ancient Near East. That J gives six times the space to the woman's creation as to the man's may well reflect J's gender, but that I will discuss in other contexts. Page 28.
The part I've emphasized speaks of a powerful repression that spans centuries. But here in this note I would like to focus on Bloom's motivation for "recovering" J, so let's begin with his words:
To read the Book of J, we need to begin by scrubbing away the varnish that keeps us from seeing that the Redactor and previous revisionists could not obliterate the original work of the J writer. That varnish is called by many names: belief, scholarship, history, literary criticism, what have you. If these names move or describe you, why read the Book of J at all? Why read the Iliad, or the Commedia, or Macbeth, or Paradise Lost? The difference is that those works have not been revised into creeds and churches, with a palimpsestic overlay of orthodox texts obscuring what was there to be revised. Recovering J will not throw new light on Torah or on the Hebrew Bible or on the Bible of Christianity. I do not think that appreciating J will help us love God or arrive at the spiritual or historical truth of whatever Bible. I want the varnish off because it conceals a writer of the eminence of Shakespeare or Dante, and such a writer is worth more than many creeds, many churches, many scholarly certainties. Pages 47-48.
Amen. That's my template: the invidual human voice, respected for what it is, raised without interference or distortion by those who think they know better. A voice judged by its peers. Sounds familiar. Sounds like the blogosphere.
No varnish. My only agenda on this blog is respect for individual human beings, and respect for those who respect individual human beings. For any social or political or religious structure I ask, What is the ontological status of each one among them? We are born on earth. Before any social, religious, or political overlays, demands, or tugs-of-war, we must cope with being individual citizens of the planet, facing both nature and the future, two mysterious giants. If you belong to a religion or ideology or belief which subordinates individuality, then you suborn individuality, and you become both my adversary and my target.
We choose our battles. Here's one of mine: preserve the sovereign person.