Pure

PURE numbers in mathematics are those which can be spoken of without reference to physical units, otherwise known as ‘dimensionless quantities’. Alcohol by Volume (ABV) is, for example, a pure number, expressed as a percentage which represents the ratio of ethanol (measured in ml) within a total volume of liquid (also measured in ml). In this case the units cancel eachother out, and there you have it: pure alcohol – 100% ABV – a pure number.

For c20th French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras, writing means solitude, and solitude means alcohol: “it means whiskey.” In her book Writing, Duras suggests that had she not been a writer she would have become an “incurable alcoholic.” At times, during her long – years long – bouts of drinking, it seemed she could perhaps function as both… but no, “no one has ever written in two voices. One can sing in two voices, and make music, and play tennis; but write? No, never.” Paradoxically, this might be what is pure in both writing and alcoholism, the solitude of which each are cause and effect.

To be pure is to be sober: to be ‘free from admixture or adulteration’, ‘free from contamination or physical impurity’; or otherwise ‘free from moral corruption’ (OED). In her book Practicalities Duras writes that: “When a woman drinks, it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. [...] It's a slur on the divine in our nature.”¹ Purity and Impurity are categories ‘distributed’ like all others, which is to say unevenly.

The Proto-Indo-European root *pewH- from which the Latin pūrus is derived gives a sense of ‘cleansing’, or ‘purification’. The divine phrase ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ gives us the formula: sacrality means purity, and to be pure is to be clean. Physically, morally, symbolically, sexually. The alcohol in the hand-gel grants absolution. Baptismal. Pure, upon its arrival into English during the c13th, displaces the Old English hlūtor – which also contains this pure/clean relation – a term present (in the form ‘hluttrum’) in abbot Ælfric of Eynsham’s c9th Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church:

Se Hælend ða het þa ðenig-men afyllan six stænene fatu mid hluttrum wætere, and he mid his bletsunge þæt wæter to æðelum wine awende.²

Perhaps sobriety is less important than it seems? The ritual act of drinking Christ’s blood – the eucharistic, sacramental wine – is one of salvation, cleansing, purification. Foucault, in his Lectures on the Will to Know, writes that to wash oneself – as a blood-soaked Achilles might after battle – is today viewed as a ‘ritual act intended to remove a stain’: of dust or blood, of a battle or murder. However – as he argues against this interpretation – in the Homeric period through which the tradition was recorded, to ‘ablute’ (to ‘wash’) was simply to pass from ‘daily’ to ‘ritualistic’ activity: the “rite of ablution looks just as much towards what will take place as towards what has just taken place”.

Ablution may occur after a battle, yes, but it always occurs before the ‘moment of sacrifice’, the ‘descent to Hades’, or the acceptance of a stranger into the home.³ Impurity and purity were not distributed (or arbitrated) in accordance with activities held on either side of this boundary – even murderers, such as Theoclymenus, can be welcomed if they wash! – but instead by observance of the threshold itself. As Julia Kristeva writes (in 1996), after British anthropologist Mary Douglas: the ‘first rule’ of the impure is ‘that which does not respect boundaries’. For the Homeric world, purity is ritualistic rather than an inherent moral status of an action or person, and these rituals seek to keep heterogeneous regions of existence separate from one another (i.e. that of the Earth, and that of the Gods).

But the Christian sacraments – and their antecedents in Ancient Greece – represent a reversal of this logic, or rather its institutionalisation through the church. During the c7th–6th BC, Foucault writes, movements such as Orphism sought to codify (through, for example, the transformation of ‘family cults’ into ‘city religions’) the observance of rituals of purification as ‘a religious quality of the individual’, allowing for an integration of such ‘qualities’ into a legal system of the State: “Pure and impure [would] now be distributed by the State, or at any rate, be based on State regulation.”

In this way concepts of ‘innocence’ and ‘criminality’ become bound up with discourses of the ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ (as well as the ‘true’ and the ‘false’). Once a “juridical definition of the individual” has been established through the institutions of the church and the city, questions of who has committed a crime (of murder, of blasphemy, etc), to what extent and which end, become increasingly important for the body politic as a whole. Purification is no longer a ritual which establishes a transition or separation between states of being, but rather a specific rite which brings back together or ‘rectifies’ what defilement (the crime) had forced to separate.⁴ Boundaries are redrawn in the image of a unitary state, itself a model of purity which must be continually maintained. The possibility of isolation or exclusion – from the community, the city, the state – on this basis (of impurity)⁵ emerges as one constitutive factor in the Western formation of the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ as such.

What it means to be pure has, therefore, changed over time. Pure is not, as Duras writes in her essay The Pure Number, itself “the ‘purest’ of all words…” although it is – in this account at least – “a word of solitude” in the deepest possible sense.⁶ Elsewhere Duras adds, in Writing, that the “great readings of my life, the ones for me alone, are things written by men.” What does it take to read a woman’s work? To hear her speak across the centuries as might Jules Michlet or Stendhal?

Julian of Norwich was a c14th ‘anchoress’, someone who pledged an ascetic, solitary existence for the purpose of intense prayer, and whose consecration into the role best-resembled a funeral rite. The work for which she is best known, based on visions experienced during her hermetic worship—Revelations of Divine Love—is the earliest surviving example of a book written in the English language known to have been produced by a woman. The role of the ‘anchorite’ or ‘anchoress’ was an early form of Christian monasticism, and exemplifies the manner in which the Christian faith repurposed concepts of purity from ancient times. In the introduction to her 1901 re-edition of Julian’s Revelations, Grace Warrack notes that:

“...in the Mediæval story, the highest Mystical Vision, the sight of the Holy Grail, comes only to him that is pure from self, and looks on the bleeding wound that sin has left in man, and is compassionate, and gives himself to service and healing.—Can ye drink of the Cup I drank of?—Love's Cup that is Death and Life.”

‘Pure from self’ is a revealing turn of phrase. One which makes plain the manner in which purity – and therefore ‘innocence’ or ‘truth’ – has turned further inward, enclosing both itself and the individuals who aspire toward such supposed virtues. Not only is ‘sin’ now an innate quality for the whole of ‘mankind’, which must be absolved by its acceptance of Christ and his sacrifice (the boundary of the ‘social’), but the mechanisms through which such absolution takes place assumes an increasingly ‘solitary’ character (the boundary of the ‘individual’). As anthropologist Joseph Hewlett-Hall notes (after Daniel Weiss & Holger Zellentin), the development of a Christian society in Europe, particularly after the first millennium, fostered the belief that “...impurity is not brought about by the actions of one’s body, but by the actions of one’s mind”. Best then to do away with the question of the self altogether, of the body—“lusts of the flesh” as is written in the Ormulum—to remain ‘anchored’ and inactive… as the model of Julian the ‘anchoress’ shows! A “pure and clean heart” is all that is required.

What emerges then—through the Reformation, the Puritans(!!) and the increasing so-called ‘secularisation’ of Western societies—is a ‘ritual-avoidance-of-ritual’, particularly those associated with cleansing, cleaning, purification, water, etc. Even acts as hallowed as the sacrament are consigned to history, evidence of ‘magical’ thinking with no basis in the ‘natural world’ which itself reveals all that is needed of God’s plan on Earth. Purity, still far from free of its moralistic character, is now at liberty to be re-discovered in nature, in gender, in ‘race’, in psychology, in genetics, in number. A boundary erected at each revelation.

Purity is itself a poison. 100% of anything is poison. Its history is that of both essentialism and dismemberment, of individualism, of the disenchantment of our world, of the politics of death. Duras writes, in remembrance of WWII, that in Germany “this word should be publicly burned, assassinated. [...] And this would still not be enough. Perhaps we will never know what would have been enough for this German past to stop evolving in our lives.” Yes, purity—indeed, the word pure—should be given exactly what it wants, it should be left quite alone.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

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Footnotes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/13/alcoholic-female-women-writers-marguerite-duras-jean-rhys ↩

2. Jesus then bade the serving men fill six stone vessels with pure water, and he with his blessing turned the water to noble wine. ↩

3. “Far from delimiting a site, an already fully constituted core of defilement, in order to isolate it, we should say rather that rites of ablution mark the discontinuities of a complex, heterogeneous socio-religious space and time; and that there is defilement when two heterogeneous regions are voluntarily or involuntarily brought into contact with each other.” ↩

4. “...this is no longer the purification that separates and isolates the heterogeneous regions of existence and in relation to which defilement is always possible. It is a matter of a purification which erases a prior defilement identified with the crime itself and makes it possible to bring back together what defilement had forced to separate.” (Foucault, Will to Know, p.178) ↩

5. Itself a concept which is barely articulated ↩

6. Duras, Writing, p.101 ↩