John Donne, godly inscription, and permanency of self in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

I argue that throughout his career but especially during his sickness of 1623, Donne fears self annihilation in death. Examining critical views on Donne's concept of death and the self, I identify this as a fear of a temporal blackout of the self between the body's death and the final Resurrection. Donne believes that the self is the result of the combination of the body and the soul, and although the soul can survive the body's dissolution, the self cannot. In order to counter this fear of the self's temporal disappearance, Donne seeks to inscribe himself in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions , assuming the posture of an anatomist to distance himself from his physical body to capture the observations of his body in a text using a corporeal register. Donne preserves this textual encoding of himself by addressing God as the main audience for the Devotions : when God reads the text, the content of the text (Donne's self) becomes archived in the eternally stable mind of God. Ultimately, Donne's authorship of the Devotions is his imitation of God's own activity. Donne sees God's nature, his ‘core self’, as a system of eternally preserved propositions, and God's activity in creation is an act of copious literary expression using an alphabet of physical things that are used not for their own endurance qua physical entities but for their ability to figurative reveal God's self, which stands beyond and above them. Donne imitates this nature and activity in his act of writing the Devotions .