Postliteracy and political renewal

Thoughts on John Miedema's The Divine Mind

This guest essay by Bryce Tolpen, author of Political Devotions, tracks his interactions with my just-released book, The Divine Mind. Enjoy! — John

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“I am Merrick,” John Miedema’s new book starts, “a humble monk from the Pious Order of Wujec.” I want to be Merrick—well, part of me did and maybe still does.

My Merrickmaina started with my visit, at age 25, to the British Museum’s illuminated manuscripts collection. I couldn’t get over how these writers and artists, many of them monks, had copied out and illustrated what others had first written long before. Such creativity shorn of originality. Such anonymity!

Merrick writes, and he doesn’t seem to get published. His legacy, he tells us, is his persistence—”the scratch of quills in the cold scriptorium, the faint smell of lamp oil, and the dark ink stains on my frock.” The sound, smell, and sight of a writing practice.

Ink doesn’t always make it to paper, much less to the publishers, in The Divine Mind. In the book’s aphoristic, interrelated and sensuous set of character sketches, a god or a monk may dip their fingers in a bowl of ink to trace on rocks the movement of stars. As I would tell my composition students, writing isn’t only a way of communicating. Writing is also a way of thinking, and sometimes it becomes a way of knowing.

For some gods in The Divine Mind, writing—and reading, too—are also ways of becoming. And without giving away too much, Merrick may have crossed a threshold: “A monk with ink-stained fingers may have stepped where only gods have gone.”

Seventeen years ago, not long after my midlife crisis had ended, I wrote a long blog post about why, despite a happy marriage and a distaste for spare furnishings, I wanted to become a monk. My crisis had relieved me of my evangelical faith’s more brittle certainties, and I had fallen in love with the writings of the Christian mystics. And I remembered the monks of the illuminated pages.

Surely, I thought, now that my intimacy with God seemed to be draining away with my crisis’s anguish, a monastery could help. What I needed, in part, was Merrick’s persistence. And I wanted somehow to get to the bottom of those texts.

Wujec would have been as good as anyplace. Wujec’s fellowship is void of brittle doctrines, the ones as a young adult I would mouth or even observe to support my false self. Actually, Wujec has no doctrine but “void and ink.” Void and ink were the oil and vinegar of my crisis’s salad days. Void was the curious, ineffable presence in my emptiness that I had finally agreed to face. Ink was my attempt to capture this void, to copy it out.

But one can’t capture void. One can describe it and foster it—or, better put, foster one’s new life centered in this void. So each night during my crisis, I ate the scripture’s and the mystics’ words quickly because this dressing separates quickly. I journaled my way into writing a book of short devotions that I would use to remind myself of the mystics’ lessons.

The gods in The Divine Mind sometimes face a choice between something like void and ink. Each winter during the celebration of Namen, after a journey “to the innermost point of the vortex,” they meet Tali, who is “not a god, but a doorway”:

She is the threshold between dissolution and return. Those who enter may spiral inward towards silence, or outward toward renewed entanglement with the world.

This choice pervades The Divine Mind, and neither choice is inherently better than the other. But each of the ten goddesses and gods who live in the Divine Mind leans one way or the other. Walla Immen, for instance, “believes in the many, the mess, and the market. He has no interest in inner silence.” He’s pretty much an ink guy. He smells of old ink, too, though probably because of his past relationship with Yolansteppen, the god of writing. They were an odd couple:

Yolansteppen, ever the cloaked flame of mystery, surprised herself by loving someone so — tangible.

The book’s most compelling characters—ones like Yolansteppen and even Merrick the monk—seem to move, easily or uneasily, between dissolution and return. Yolansteppen, who has no fixed form and whom Merrick seems to revere above the other gods, is the apotheosis of this movement. She is both void and ink. How to venerate her? “She is not here to be followed,” Merrick tells us. “She is here to be reread.”

Copying out text and rereading text are, figuratively speaking, two ways of eating text. In his book Slow Reading, John alludes to biblical passages in which Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and John of Patmos eat words or books. He expounds:

Eating a book symbolizes a deep and personal internalization of an idea, an intimate act with transformative power. Unlike our modern consumption of information, slow reading is a journey that fundamentally changes us.¹

I never made it to a monastery. Instead, not long after the Dissipation (the name I gave to my months leading out of my identity crisis, my months among and between crisis and no crisis), I changed careers. I left off pastoring and became an English teacher. I taught my students to read slowly, to read like a writer, to read between the lines. I was surprised to find that my best lessons on reading and writing came from the void.

A mutual online friend introduced John and me in 2009, around the time I was writing that monastic-themed post on my longstanding blog, Slow Reads. At the time, John was blogging at Slow Reading, and that year he was getting his book by that name published at Litwin Books.

Both of our blogs focused a lot on the art of reading and on others’ writing. Slow Reading (the blog), like John’s present Substack, published (among many other things) terse and insightful—and insightfully personal—book reviews. Slow Reads, like my present Substack, mulled over others’ writings in an excessive practice of block quotes, and it lingered over those writings in an excessive number of footnotes.

There’s something violent about the image of eating books—of eating others’ words. In slow reading, do we, in some way, eat our authors’ brains or tongues? I’m having a difficult time digesting a story I read recently about a brave Comanche hunter. He sacrificed his life to protect his comrades when they came upon a larger party of Algonquian Sauk Indians. The Sauk ate the hunter’s heart. The eating was an “honorific act,” historian Frederic W. Gleach explains. The Sauk “hoped to acquire his greatness for themselves by eating his heart, the locus of the manitu essence responsible for that greatness.”²

In eating others’ words, we transform not just ourselves. In a way, we also transform the tradition in which the words were first written. The words, and the tradition the words belong to, become less literal, less like the result of what high-school teacher Kelly Gallagher calls a “first-draft reading.”³

In eating the words of our literary, religious, or political traditions, the tough and rigid parts of a tradition’s dogma, if any, are transformed. They become for us something like the tradition’s threshold guardian, someone like Tali, “not a god, but a doorway.” Tali helps us start our hero’s journey that will transform us and, in some small but important way, the traditions we practice. The traditions slowly become life for another generation.

The Divine Mind doesn’t put much stock in any tradition’s dogma. At one point, Yolansteppen disguises herself as a novice but fails Wujec’s novitiate. The book dedicates less than three pages to the order but over forty to the gods. These gods, in all of their reverent, fun-loving, and disparate glory, represent for me the words eaten, the words made flesh.

This notion of eating books seems most evident in oral cultures. Many of these cultures don’t fit the civilized world’s doctrine of progress, of moving ineluctably from orality to writing. Instead, many oral cultures are, in Leo Alting von Geusau’s term, postliterate.⁴ They once had books, but they ate them.

Sociologist James C. Scott relates the accounts of three Southeast Asian peoples who, in seeking freedom from a civilized state, ate their books to survive. The Akha people relate that they became so famished during their flight to freedom that they ate their books of buffalo-hide. That’s how they lost their ability to write. The Wa, in a similar circumstance, ate the oxhide on which they had written their script.⁵ Finally, the Hmong, in their flight from the Han, mistakenly put their texts in a stew and ate them.⁶ The forces of civilization caused these hill peoples to eat their own written words, to lose their literacy.

Writing is not only a way of communicating, of thinking and of knowing. Writing can also become a means of control, and our earliest written artifacts performed that purpose. Scott points out that writing “seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature, mythology, praise hymns . . .”⁷ The earliest state subjects knew that paperwork—”lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders”—was behind the state’s coercive taxing and conscripting machinery.⁸ No wonder people who ran for the hills ate their books.

The hill people’s accounts of postliteracy come off a bit like “the dog ate my homework.” And, indeed, Scott thinks civilizations’ shaming of illiteracy may have contributed to these accounts. But I think the accounts also acknowledge the transforming power of texts. The accounts become the hill people’s tacit claims of not having done away with the texts so much as of having fulfilled them.

Wujec, too, though focused on “void and ink,” doesn’t question the transforming power of its sacred texts. But the order resists the urge to fix the texts’ meanings. The texts themselves are copies of lost originals, much as the digitized and updated text of The Divine Mind itself required John to destroy the last bound original printed years ago. And when “the Ink-Stained Rebellion” tries to codify and standardize Wujec’s sacred texts, the treatises they wrote in support of these efforts are “politely shelved.”

Even the shelves, though, can be a redemptive space. Merrick, after all, signs the book’s opening “Merrick of Alcove.”

As a citizen and as an English teacher, I can hardly recommend losing literacy. But like the Akha, Wa and Hmong—and like those facing the Ink-Stained Rebellion—we face political forces, often forces we have internalized ourselves, that demand conformity to stale and merely literal readings of texts. Our best means of escape is to become, in a spiritual and political sense, postliterate. We must eat what we read.

1. John Miedema, Slow Reading (Litwin Books, 2014), Kindle loc. 168.

2. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures, 1st Bison books print (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 49.

3. Kelly Gallagher, Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 (Stenhouse Publishers, 2004), 57.

4. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (Yale University Press, 2009), 220.

5. Scott, 221-22.

6. Scott, 223.

7. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (Yale University Press, 2017), 141.

8. Scott, 139-40.