The Land of Unlikeness

I hope to answer some of the questions in the comments about exactly how we should understand Word as Virus (I’m not terribly interested in what Burrough actually meant by it, though he did explicitly state that written language came first. Derrida too, right Janet?), but I’m going to start from a faraway place, Ignatius of Antioch, taken from Rowan Williams’ great book, The Wound of Knowledge:

‘My labor pains have begun’ (Romans VI). So Ignatius advances to the torture and humiliation of his death in the confidence that there in the arena his true life, his humanity, his reality, begin. The truth has appeared in human flesh and suffered human death and thereby created afresh for all humanity the possibility of ‘truth in its flesh and its death, of a real and stable (’incorruptible,’ in Ignatius’s languge) life constituted by what the world seees as meaningless–silence, failure, death.”

What does Jesus do? He takes death into his flesh like a cancer and defeats it by dying, by dying as only God can die. As only one who was chosen before the foundations of the world can do. Ignatius and Barth agree here, that Christ is elected from the beginning to take on death at the hands of his own creatures, to deliver all of humanity from the episode in which death has the final word. God’s love knows no limit, and neither does His pain. We should all read the new book out on Mother Theresa which details the depth of her own dark night, which she is very specific about, and which lasted more or less her entire adult life. She died in it as well.

Harry is also chosen, of course. There is a prophecy concerning him, that he must be the one to defeat the dark lord–Voldemort, he who is a flight from death (if we translate literally from the French). I think we could also translate it “theft of death.” So Harry, by dying, defeats the one who is afraid to die. Harry’s capacity to love is explicitly linked several times with his ability to overcome the fear of death. In fact, Harry seems, from the first book ready and willing to rush in headlong to death. I would even say he has a death wish early on. What he cannot come to grips with is that he must let his friends die as well, and even worse, die for him. This a nice turn, for although Harry is the one who must die for others, his struggle is really ours, the Christian struggle, to accept the fact that someone died for us, simply, to accept love. And this is where life drops out for us, because all we know of life is the neverending judicial mess of justifying our own refusal. It is much easier to be unloved, because we can use this injustice to rail away at the world around us. We can use it get out of bed in the morning and snuggle into beer at night. To be loved leaves one, frankly, with nothing to do. It’s quite boring. (People sometimes ask what the next taboo will be if the 19th c. had sex and the 20th had death. I vote for boredom).

I thought Lana’s definitions of virus were quite interesting, so I quote from her comment: Viral meaning contagious and constantly mutating? Yes, this is the way that language is perpetually unhinged, ruled by chance, which is the law of life that has conquered death. Viral meaning an endless possibility for re-writing using the same letters put in different sequences? Yes, this is the way that the Word is limited, by a historical life and death, and by a particular amount of phonemes human equipment can conjur. Viral meaning that the biological mechanisms of the host–our cells and everything that makes us ourselves–are invaded because they’re essential to the reproduction and proliferation of the word? Yes, this is what Eckhart means by giving birth to Christ, having a virgin heart to birth a pure savior.

While Burroughs perhaps looked with suspicion on this viral word–I think he always valued his art more than his words–for us this Verbum-Virus is an anti-cancer, an alien agent infiltrating a body of death. It achieves new birth when we let ourselves by inspired to create a new body in which this true drama (this lucky lie!) hits the body of language with seismic force, knocking the dictionaries clean off their shelves. This is what Rowling has done–and she was inspired, just read about how she got the plot for all seven books in an instant, on a train. She let herself be infiltered by this alien truth, this truth of God’s which no man can know, and no man can attain, except that he make himself a virgin heart to birth a virgin boy.

I want to go through the Potter books one by one, so stay tuned for a look at alchemy and the rock of life.