Ecclesiastes as Witness: A Personal Essay

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Ostriker, Alicia

"I set my heart," he announces. "I said in my heart." "I saw." "I returned and saw." "I returned and saw under the sun." We are listening to a man talking to himself. We are listening to the way a mind skids and loops, when it has the privilege and leisure to do so. We are watching the little electric charges travel the neural traintracks in their compulsive little circles. This is what Buddhists call the monkey mind. What we hear it doing when we are trying to be tranquil. The Buddha when he sat under the banyan tree, another son of privilege, probably heard something similar for the first couple of his seven years.

The Witness wants us to know that he is not merely theorizing, he is an empiricist. His claims are nailed down by "I." Yet we also recognize that his "I" is a fiction, a thought-experiment. Conceivably, Qoheleth's earliest readers knew this, at least half-consciously, as well as we do. Speaking "in the name of" a revered antecedent is, in rabbinic writings, a conventional way of doing homage to a teacher, or perhaps a way of saying that one is inhabited by the thought ofthat teacher. From here it is but a short hop to the recognition that "I" is at all times a fiction, a trouble-making construction we are all afflicted with. Every mystical tradition on earth tells us the same thing. Christianity, Sufism, the Upanishads, Buddhism. Buddha's first Noble Truth is that life is suffering, and his second is that suffering is due to attachment-including our attachment to an idea of ourselves. Exactly. Kabala, too, posits the human self as a complicated structure of ten sefirot-or, alternatively, as ayin, nothingness.11 Getting past the "I" is of course easier said than done, and Qoheleth doesn't do it either, except in brief flashes, like the rest of us. He is not theorizing the entrapment of ego, he is embodying it.

What is the function here of the occasional intermittent lines that sound so conventionally rocklike in Qoheleth's stream of consciousness, the prudent ones that could have been lifted out of the book of normal and plodding Proverbs? Whole stretches of the text of Ecclesiastes give advice. "When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it... Better not to vow than vow and not pay" (5:4-5). "The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit" (7:8). "Wisdom strengthens the wise man more than ten rulers of the city" (7:19). "He who digs a pit will fall into it" (10:8). "Do not curse the king, even in your thought; do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, and a bird in flight may tell the thing" (10:20). According to some readers, these sayings reinforce Qoheleth's essential piety and propriety. According to others, they are targets for his irony to shoot at. For yet others, they are editorial additions.12 We might also see them simply as part of the dreary and necessary mental baggage that turns up in the mind that is attempting to look at itself. "I" is a great king, a seeker after wisdom, an adventurer, a compost heap.