Here are two modern poems that, I think, point out some of the history
of reading.  Loosely, the first poem is spoken by a medieval manuscript
about its "readers," the scribes whose job it is to "read" the ms. by
copying and maintaining the text.  How is the text about reading?  Isn't
the text talking about the reader's culture in conflict with the text's?
 
The text here is not a christian one but apparently a heathen text: "if I
never belonged among them, they could never deny my place."
 
 
            The Scribes
 
 
I never warmed to them.
If they were excellent they were petulant
and jaggy as the holly tree
they rendered down for ink.
And if I never belonged among them,
they could never deny me my place.
 
In the hush of the scriptorium
a black pearl kept gathering in them
like the old dry glut inside their quills.
In the margin of texts of praise
they scratched and clawed.
They snarled if the day was dark
or too much chalk had made the vellum bland
or too little left it oily.
 
Under the rumps of lettering
they herded myopic angers.
Resentment seeded in the uncurling
fernheads of their capitals.
 
Now and again I started up
miles away and saw in my absence
the sloped cursive of each back and felt them
perfect themselves against me page by page.
 
Let them remember this not inconsiderable
contribution to their jealous art.
 
 
                      [111]
 
 
 
 
 
 
                Holly
 
 
It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly
 
the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags
 
and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries
 
but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed lilce smashed bottle-glass.
 
Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,
 
and I almost forget what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.
 
I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,
 
a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall
cutting as holly and ice.
 
 
                [115]
 
Building on the earlier poem's mention of holly as a source for black ink
in the copying of mss., this poem addresses the cultural conflict created
by the domestication of reading in the medieval age.  The poem asks a
question like: "What has been gained by reading?"  In much of my research
reading is routinely positioned as a contact zone where conflicts ongoing
in cultural affairs are mediated.  Does saying so abuse or mistake the
phrase, contact zone?
 
I have been thinking of these poems in relation to the book by Umberto Eco
and the subsequent film, _The Name of the Rose_, where among other elements
the move made in Western reading, from the monastary (tired, sp?) to the
university, is presented.  Interestingly, in the film corpses stack up, and
the argument can be made that they all are Others to the humanist heritage
portrayed in the film.  Like Socrates, many of the victims in the book and
film die of dyspepsia.
 
JMCF
 
 
Seamus Heaney.  _Station Island_  New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                     [115]
 
 
 
           In Illo Tempore
 
 
  The big missal splayed
  and dangled silky ribbons
  of emerald and purple and watery white.
 
  Intransitively we would assist,
  confess, receive. The verbs
  assumed us. We adored.
 
  And we lifted our eyes to the nouns.
  Altar stone was dawn and monstrance noon,
  the word rubric itself a bloodshot sunset.
 
  Now I live by a famous strand
  where seabirds cry in the small hours
  like incredible souls
 
  and even the range wall of the promenade
  that I press down on for conviction
  hardly tempts me to credit it.
 
                [118]