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5. Embodying the Text: Boisterous Tears and Privileged Readings Stud!; then, 0 man, to knonl Christ: get to know your Saviour. His body, hanging on the cross, is a book, open for your perusal. The words of this book are Christ's actions, as well as his sufferings and passion, for evenrthing that he did senres for our instruction. His wounds are the letters or characters, the five chief wounds being the five vo\vels and the others the consonants of your book. Learn how to read the lamentations-and alas! too, the reproaches, outrages, insults and humiliations which are written therein. The monk of Farne The medieval practice of imitating Christ, as chapter I made clear, was not confined to the reenactment and self-infliction of his suffering. Imitatio Christi began in the semiotic pilgrimage of the memon and the imagination through the signs of narrative and pictorial representation to the stirring of the mystic's affections and meditation. Imitating Christ was conceived of as a kind of reading and remembrance. Whether one embarked on an actual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, heard a sermon on Christ's Passion, viewed a retable or cycle play about the Crucifixion, or read a devotional treatise, one engaged in a reading of the signs, a "follo~ving of the signposts," as Geoffrey de Vinsauf phrased it, along the "sure path" of meditation to the bodj7 of Christ itself. It is at the site of Christ's body that the central act of reading takes place. In fact, as the above quotation from the Monk of Farne suggests, the bod11 of Christ was constructed as an open book within which the mvstic must learn to read the Passion of Christ. His body is the torn and bleeding parchment, his wounds the vowels and consonants composing the u~ords of the corporeal text. The instruction of his body exists in anagrarnic form. Words emerge from wounds only if the mvstic is able to piece together the eviscerated vokvels and consonants into the morphemes and syntax of 168 Chapter 5 Christ's Passion. Without the conventional medieval configurations of the book that enable reading, including margins, rubrication, and glosses, the text of Christ's body is a cryptogram requiring the mystic's decoding. The body of Christ offers itself as a fantastic spectacle to the mystic's desire, but it does not surrender its meaning so easily. It demands a different kind of reading than was available to the literate medieval reader. The Monk of Farne drams upon the angel's advice to John in Apoc. 1o:9-10 to render this new reading: "eat this book which in your mouth and understanding shall be sweet, but which shallmake your belly bitter."' Like receiving the eucharist, ingesting the book of Christ is an act of remembrance.2 The bitterness of the readingleating is directly proportional to the increased kno~vledge gained from it. Sorro\v attends the knowledge produced by this reading, causing the reader to be seized with compassion for the crucified Christ. At the same time, as we saw in chapter I, such a reading "fills up in his [the reader's] flesh the sufferings which are wanting ."3 The reader's desire makes possible this sorrowful, suffering reading by creating the place for the transference of Christ's pain. Reading proceeds from the place of rupture-Christ's wounded body-to the mystic's flesh, and it is replicated in reading the mystic text. h new desire guides and directs the mystic text, a desire to impress itself on the hearts of its readers, thereby completing the trajectory of mystical contemplation: from inscription on Christ's body to reading of the kvounds to inscription on the mystic's body to inscription in the mystic text, and finall~7, in the readers' hearts. Readers of Margery Kempe's book, then, must search for the rupture which enables reading and rapture at the same time. A triple reading occurs in and around the mystic text. In addition to the reader's reading of the book, there is the continual presence of the mystic's Passion lection, her reading of Christ's body and displacement of that reading on her o\trn body. Thus when the medieval or twentiethcentunr reader endeavors to read, she is confronted not only with the materiality of the book, but with the bodilv codices inscribed in it. In turn, the reader must bring her okvn body to Gar on this...

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