The readable city and the rhetoric of excess: a reading of the Song of Songs

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2003 by C.C. Pecknold

ORIGEN GUIDED CHRISTIAN DISCIPLES to first read Proverbs, then Ecclesiastes, and then the Song of Songs. For Origen and other ancient thinkers, these texts corresponded to ethics, which purifies, physics, which sends us beyond the sensory, and theology, "which leads us to union with God." Song of Songs, in other words, was literally the "holy of holies" in the reader's guide to spiritual progress. What I hope to receive from such ancient thinkers is a certain ethic of reading, and a belief that these texts can transform a person. For them, particular texts functioned in a particular way, and the "disciples" (obedient listeners and learners) would read these texts understanding that the transformative potential of such reading was great. In the case of the Song of Songs, the potential is particularly intense, leading us to union with God, who is the impossible object, but whose presence can be read through these signs.

I am aware that this is a text which is "external" to each of us, whether it "belongs" to our tradition or the tradition of the other. We are not voyeurs, however. This is a generative text, which generates even our belonging within and beyond its borders. The majority of my comments, then, are oriented around the categories of generativity, those categories that find me in this text, and have the potential to release new life. Three categories emerge out of my reading of this text, each of which I think are significant (meaningful) for all of us.

1. Spatiality

The spaces of this text can be explored, doors can be opened ("Listen! My beloved is knocking" 5.2). The contrast between two particular kinds of space interest me. There are the garden spaces and the city spaces. Both are spaces which depend upon human cultivation, both show signs of manipulation and enjoyment. Yet one roars with administrations (David, Solomon), and swords, and the sentinels who go about the city in order to protect the space of the masses, while the other seems to be a place of flowing streams, filled with the choicest fruits, and a fountain of "living water" at the center (4.15). Perhaps the garden spaces are contained inside the city spaces, perhaps they are outside, beyond the city gates. Either way these are spaces which relate, both in their contrast to each other, and to the way they are embedded in the lovers' search for the other. The space of the city and the space of the garden both locate the giving and receiving of love.

But the city is terribly complex. On the one hand, it is a place of danger, and warfare as well as other "administrations." On the other, it is, like the space of the garden, filled with the "beautiful." And yet, the beauty of this city space is a strategic beauty, wherein the nighttime, sentinels find me, they beat me, they wound me (5.7). There is violence here, and it should not be ignored because the space is beautiful. At night especially, it is as if the space of the city has been replaced, it has become like the space of Gethsemane or Golgotha or Jerusalem or whatever name we might give to the location of suffering for love's sake. In the daytime she rises, she goes about the city, in the streets and squares, to seek him whom her soul loves, and despite her seeking, she finds him not (3.2). And it is only when the sentinels have found her in the daylight that she finds her love and she holds him and will not let him go (3.4). The insecure space of the city is both about seeking and being found, but it is a destabilizing space. The way that the day turns to night, is the way the city of light, in which she is found, turns into the city of night, where she does not find love at all but is beaten and wounded by these sentinels who guard the spaces, the streets and the squares, those ordinary places that confine her search for love.

How are we to read the city then? The city of chapter three is different from the city of chapter five. The city of the night is not the city of the day. The city of darkness and the city of light, therefore, are like two cities, one of which is lost and the other is found. These are the two cities that can only be "sensed" throughout the Song: a Song of lightness and darkness (1.3-6), of waking and sleeping (8.5), of opening and closing (5.2-6), of finding and losing (6.1), of Word and Silence (5.6). Perhaps these two cities are generative of the gardens, and yet these are spaces which are secret to the city, spaces which are habitable when the city is not ("O you who dwell in the gardens," 8.13). These garden spaces are a secret dwelling where love can actually be awakened and can generate new life (8.5). But the movement of love in the Song is a movement from city to garden and from garden to city. The spaces themselves are important because they are the stage. But the floodlights are on the movement of lo ve through these spaces. This movement through space shows that love has a power that is capable of subverting the violence of strategic, political structures, and will constantly find those secret spaces that are hospitable to love's purposes.