Hanoi, a Girl on a Motorbike, Poetry and/or Sentience, a Bridge

It’s getting late. At the moment I’m walking on a red bridge with a group of other researchers, looking for our hotel. Under-lit by spotlights, the trees above us turn into their shadows, their shadows turn into the sky. We continue walking. Down below, a cast of branches dip into the water. There, the city lights at midnight blend together into one light, pressed beneath the surface, strangely glowing. I wonder where I am.

“It feels like Christmas,” says Thai, one of the other researchers.  “It’s sooooo romantic.” He takes his camera out and snaps a picture. A young couple, maybe  in their twenties, maybe not, stand with their arms around each other, making out beneath a street light on the corner of an empty intersection. A dark cat crosses quickly in the distance, disappears. It starts to rain again, but no one seems to care; it feels like Christmas. Compared to the places where we're from (Thailand, Laos, the Philippines) its cold here. The mist plays tricks with the light, acts like snow. Also, Hanoi, the city where we’ve been staying for the last few days, brought here by our respective countries to present our work at the Southeast Asian Regional Fulbright conference, is a city surprisingly in love. 

In Thailand couples keep a certain distance, at least in public, but today I saw at least three weddings, new brides with big white dresses dragged behind them through the rain water. Smiling on steps and under fountains and in the shadows of looming European archways, they posed beside their husbands, black hair put up with pins and crowned by pink and yellow flowers. Later, beside the lake, I watched the young couples of the city arrive in pairs to sit on the many benches which look out across the water. Usually, the men were smoking cigarettes and their breath, visible in the cool air, mixed evenly with the smoke and mist of a city perpetually about to rain. Now, with night already fallen, every street lamp wears a halo, a yellow ring which dissipates in fog and haze. The researcher beside me takes my arm and leans into my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my neck. She leads me down the road.

For the most part, the last two days have been spent attending presentations, meeting other Fulbrights, and pretending to be professional, pretending to fit in. I wear a suit. I dry my hair in the mornings with a blow dryer, wear cologne. As best I can I try to act composed, intelligent, interested. I am not succeeding.

“What do you do in Thailand?” another researcher asks me.

“I’m a poet,” I say.

“I wasn’t aware that one could be that,” he says.

“Lucky me,” I say, shrugging.

As one of only a handful of artists blessed enough to be given the time and money needed to work creatively on that which I imagine we’d each be working anyway, without time and money, I’m out of place. There’s my friend Thai who’s translating the Ramakien, Thailand’s great epic poem, into English, a girl studying traditional dance and song who sings her ass off, strums a moon lute, a  sculptress from the Philippines, myself. Mostly, though, the people here are economists, biologists, chemists, ecologists, architects, historians, urban planners. Arguably their work is infinitely more applicable, more directly of and for the place in which they operate, of greater benefit, more helpful. It would be hard to argue this, I think, and so I don’t. Me, I’m working on a book of poems about a boy with a cat inside his chest who finds a dead man asleep beneath a tree of light in which there’s vultures. I’m working with a cartoonist I met in Bangkok, so at least there’s that, but for the most part my work is small and alienating. I sit in a coffee shop all day. I write till five or so, work out, eat dinner, and edit what I’ve written at my kitchen table while listening to music. I read for a while, watch TV. I sleep. In Hanoi, listening to the other researchers, I feel a pang of guilt, a little voice which asks me what it is exactly that I do.

The great anxiety of the artist, or at least one of the many great anxieties of most artists, is the extent to which one’s work exists in actual relation to the world of things around it. This is important, I think, because creation so often happens in isolation, on one’s own terms, in a space set up apart. The trick, of course, is to complete the work and give it back, an offering, a gift. A poet’s work, however, lives primarily in journals read exclusively by poets whose work also lives primarily in journals read by poets. In many ways we inhabit an incredibly insular and self-affirming place, removed from the rest of the world not only by the severity of this insulation, but also by the nature of the art itself in the context of the culture as whole. Poetry is not music. Most certainly it is not popular music, which people listen to. You won’t find it at the movies or the book stands at the airport. It doesn’t live in a museum. People don’t hang poetry on walls. So what is it that we do? And why?

When I was teaching in Iowa, standing before a room of freshman students utterly uninterested in poetry, I would argue, first and foremost, that it is talk by which we are alive. For fodder, I’d give them Oppen:

“If it is that river, that meaningless river in which we are, it is nevertheless talk by which we are alive. If we want to continue to invent life for ourselves and for our children and our friends it might be worth one’s whole effort to find the alternative, some alternative, to this art.”

Here, the “meaningless river in which we are,”and to which poetry (as an act of clarity) is a necessary alternative, lives akin to what Oppen refers to earlier in the same letter as the “art of accident,” the music of un-intention.

At this point, the blankness of my student’s faces would almost always deepen. The idea that it might be abstractions like “language,” or “talk,” by which we live and not utilitarian commodities like food or shelter was usually lost on them. My concession, of course, to them and to myself, is that yes, food and shelter matter in a way that is real, immediate, and tangible. One cannot “live” without that which the body physically requires. Without these things we die, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to live and breathe and fuck and make more life and in the process of doing so it is nice to enjoy these things when possible, partially because it is in us to do so, but also because life matters and is important to us. It’s important that we enjoy and participate directly, even freely, in the lives we live.

If I’m lucky, a typical conversation might go something like this:

“We need food to live, not poetry.”

“But why is it you want to feed yourself?”

“Because otherwise I’d die.”

“What does it matter if you die?”

“Because I don’t want to, I want to live.”

“Why do you want to live?”

“Because my life’s important to me?”

“Why is your life important to you?

“I don’t know, it just is?”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

By this point, again, if I’m lucky, the students are onto me and can see ahead of them the kind of conversation into which I’m trying to gently push them. There is a narrative that exists for us, a story we each make up about our lives and the lives of others and the world in which we operate, a way of thinking and talking about experience—and what it may or may not mean to us—which occurs in the mouth and in the mind where that which finally matters begins to take its shape, articulate its name. Without this conversation we return to the narrative of nothing and accident, “the inhuman event of humans,” as Oppen calls it, “the meaningless river which flows with ourselves and with our talk.”

The second point I try to make is the extent to which our language is always under threat, always on the verge of being turned against itself. If it isn’t taken from us by the forces of politics and commerce, regurgitated back to us and put to uses which do not become us, that seek to define for us the words which point to and bring us into relation with the world we live in, it is being used, by us and toward others, without intention, by accident and habit, which diminishes the act itself, deprives language of its urgency, causes harm. The examples of this are everywhere and students are usually pretty good at identifying places where words no longer live up to their potential, weakened, as it were, by overuse and thereby limited in their capacity to hold together meaning and complexity. Love, for instance, is a concept students seem to care about, and it is promising to hear them think among themselves about the ways the culture puts the word the use. If it is true what Oppen says, if language is indeed the operation by which we live, create, and recover value, the speaker, then, what the world is for her, and thus what she is, diminishes in direct relation to her talk. With a word like love, the stakes are obvious and high. Without it, we’re fucked. Students get that. But it happens elsewhere also, at the level of our diction, our syntax, our grammar. And it is always happening.

The final point I make is the idea that poetry takes language, and the world it points to, seriously. As an art form focused on creation and recovery, its power and capacity exists in the extent to which it takes as intentional the act of paying attention, not only to oneself and others and to things, but to the many different ways of saying and defining those things, and to what happens to the experience of these objects, lives, and relationships when articulated in one manner or another. My first real teacher, the poet Joanna Klink, has this to say:

“In poems, I am trying to find my bearings through a world that at times feels remote and inchoate and struck blank with noise. I would like to place myself in a field of deep attention and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there."

And I believe her. And believing this has made a difference in my life.

In Hanoi, what is here for me, what exists around me at this specific moment at this specific time and place in the world, is the arm and body of another person, a stranger really, a girl I barely know. We’re walking through the night. What I do know is that a day ago we met in a museum in a country I never thought I’d see. We talked in the rain and danced. We stole a bottle of wine and slipped our bodies into a pool and laughed and argued and made plans. What I don’t know, at least not now, not at the moment, is that in just two days I’ll find myself on the back of a motorbike riding in the bright sun through the slow back-roads of northern Vietnam. I’ll have my arms around her waist and her hair will keep blowing back into my face and so I’ll put my face into the space between her shoulder and her neck. Every now and then she’ll scream and point to something far away. Mountains in the distance, grey forms, and the paddy fields that sprawl out green forever to our left. We’ll stop at a graveyard made of crumbled knee high walls and tiny chipped paint temples, also crumbled, large enough to harbor ghosts. She’ll stop the bike, get off. She’ll run with her arms up into the center of a group of cattle who eat dumbly at the grass between the gravestones. They’ll startle when she nears them, scatter, but they will not scatter far. 

My faith, then, at this moment with a girl I may never see again, and in others, is that poetry is the product of the specific, temporary field in which I am, of the attempt to struggle with and understand and with any luck make meaningful what is there. Arrived at through patience, isolation, and attention, poetry, at its best, is the use and effort of a language which brings us closer to that which is, to people and the spaces we erect between us, to objects, to ourselves. Thankfully, it is a giving place, one that teaches us see, to say. I believe in poems because I believe they bear within their strange complexities the capacity to return our words to us, our world. They makes us sentient, I remember someone saying in a letter once, and help us love. They demand we feel alive.

The Nomads, Pray / Tell (reading: Bangkok, Thailand)

The Aerial Bridge (a few stray thoughts, related & otherwise, on poetry, subjectivity, and prayer)

     On nights it's hard to sleep, I lie in bed and stare at Bangkok out my window. There are millions of little lights out there, low stars attached to the sides of buildings, speckling the distance. The closest and the brightest light is that of the peak of Wat Thammamongkhon, the tallest chedi in all of Thailand. Home to a single strand of hair belonging to the Buddha, its steeple, terraced and painted yellow, stands alone as the single near point on the horizon, its huge form under-lit by yellow spotlights strategically positioned, dotted by a single star, a beacon in a concrete sea. Eventually, sometime around 6:30, I can trust the sun to rise just slightly to the temple’s right, turn the east sky red and burn against its surface. On a good day, its being there reminds me where I am. Bangkok has been good to me. There’s something reassuring about the temple’s presence and vicinity. Like my work is more important than it is. Like everything will be ok. On other days, the temple sulks, mis-positioned and outnumbered. Surrounded by the city’s complicated matrix, dwarfed by the luminous modernity of skyscrapers, glass eyed condominiums. In the shadow of a culture forever moving forward, this specific place of worship and others like it seem tokens from a foregone era, antiquated and out of place. I have yet to go there. One of these days, I tell myself. I never do.     

     For the most part, I am not a religious person, not really. As a poet, I come close, believing as I’m prone to in the properties of words, the importance of the imagination. But back in America, on any given Sunday, say some frozen morning in November, I’m more likely sleeping in till noon or watching football than kneeling in a house of God. I haven’t stepped foot in a church for nearly a decade. This, of course, is fine. I’m not that sure that I belong. When asked if I believe in God, I hesitate. It depends on who is asking. These kinds of conversations usually and quickly turn to arguments. When I ask myself, however, the answer, always indeterminate, always abstract, rests somewhere short of yes, somewhere more than no. I doubt that either hardline atheists or Christians would consider this enough. To their credit, at times, I feel it might be better to commit. The middle ground, at least in matters of the absolute, seems easy, a position which posits nothing, asks nothing, and thereby offers little in return. Committal, though, at least initially, implies a certainty I’m certain that I lack. There’s a part of me that does, a part that doesn’t, and I’ve yet to fully bridge the space inside myself unnerved by contradictions. If there is a word which means our opposites are compliments, that says with certitude dichotomies connect instead of cancel, I haven’t found it yet. 

_________

 

     But I am a prayerful person, have been so secretly for years. Raised Catholic, albeit passively, the first time I really knelt down hard and prayed on my own I was thirteen. My family’s dog was dying. The night before we put her down, I stayed awake beside her on a pile of piss-soaked blankets making promises, asking God to make her better. He didn’t. With similar results a few years later, I prayed for my Grandfather. And two years after that, when my best friend’s mom was dying from her second and final bout with cancer, the Lord above did nothing yet again. 

     This, I think, is typical. For those of us inclined to do so, prayer, at least in the beginning, occurs primarily as a matter of petitioning, asking and not receiving, a specific need met with deafening, nonspecific silence. Admittedly, this is incredibly discouraging, especially when one is young and loss is suddenly, for the first time, real. At the time I’d likely have considered myself a Christian had my dog recovered, had my Grandfather miraculously gotten younger. But they didn’t and I don’t. What I can say, though, is that if this relationship appears to flow in only one direction, if the line from the human mouth to God’s ears seems as disconnected as it did to me back then, perhaps this is not so much a reason for absolute dismissal, but a comment on the limits of the imagination. For a mind which makes demands in terms which belong to it and it alone, there exists little room for an idea of God which spills beyond the edges of one’s own image. Somewhat selfishly, somewhat self-concerned, we assume that God is like us, speaks as we speak, listens in the precise and human way we hear. The image of the Father watching from the clouds, Jesus bleeding on the cross. These are the Gods that I grew up with up with. They have affected me and changed me, but they have rarely worked. 
     
     In grade school my parents sent me to a Bible camp. My friend Nick, sent by his mother who worried that her son spent too much time in his bedroom playing D&D, came with me. I’m not sure what either of our parents thought would come of it, if they understood exactly the kind of eccentric Christianity the camp adhered to, but the experience terrified me and I have not forgotten it. 

     One afternoon, the head priest sat us down on the front porch outside the dining hall, told us stories. He and his brother, orphans since birth, had lived out their early years in various foster homes across America. Molested, beaten, and raped, his childhood differed vastly from my own. At some point, locked in an upstairs bedroom, forced to shit and piss not five feet from the floor on which he slept and ate, Jesus Christ appeared to him, saved his soul, his sanity, his life. I remember the way his face turned grave in the bright sun as he spoke, the glaze in his eyes as he turned to each of us individually, staring through us at something out of focus far away.

     A day later, our counselors gathered us together, informed us we had a guest. A tall, thin man whose name I don’t remember, a preacher visiting from a distant congregation. 

     “Hello,” he said. “Who here has met the Holy Spirit?
     “Hello,” we said.

     A couple of the kids I didn’t care for raised their hands. I doubt, however, any of us at that age really understood what the Holy Spirit was, not then. What I did know about the Holy Spirit came from bible study and was strictly and problematically mathematical. The Doctrine of the Trinity demanded that which made no sense. Cut in three, God was also singular. Jesus was God (but also flesh), his father, the Lord, was God, and suspended in the space between them, a Spirit, a formless Ghost, also God. Every now and then this ghost would reach out with skinny, see-through fingertips, touch the spirits of the faithful.

     That afternoon the preacher led us down a gravel path to the small wooden, church where we held our daily services, a one room, white-washed building lined with windows set pleasantly in a field of knee-high summer grass, surrounded by a thicket. We formed a long and nervous line at the back of the church. From there, I watched my campmates file one by one, slowly down the center isle toward the preacher, gaunt and menacing before the altar, his tall form under-lit by candles. Shafts of sunlight slanted brightly through the upper windows, pushing through the cracks in the floorboards. A woman played a rickety piano in the corner. In turn, each child stood before him, terrified and wide eyed. When the preacher touched their foreheads with his palm, mumbled something indiscernible in Latin, my campmates, poor things, twitched suddenly and shook. They fell. With all the force and strange velocity of the Holy Ghost come down to meet them from the heavens, they lay crumbled and unconscious, the sun on their faces, their faces on the floor. Nick stood in line ahead of me, expressionless. When he began to walk the isle toward the preacher I promised God right then and there that I’d believe if Nick too did as all the others. They could be faking it, but not him. I held my breath until he started at the shoulders. He trembled quickly, fell. I let my breath back out and wondered what to do.

 

__________

 

     I can count on two hands the people with whom I’ll talk about religion. Most of them are poets. Those who aren’t tend to have spent their lives submerged in wilderness so long their hearts and eyes are open in a way that helps them listen. An indigenous body-builder who ran a sweat lodge on a farm outside of Iowa City. A biologist from central-west-Wisconsin. A girl I hoped to, but didn’t, marry. 

     For most secularists, faith is a sign of either weakness or insanity, and while I don’t agree, I don’t blame them either. The conversation’s been corrupted by extremities, and culture, enamored by the extent to which polemics stand apart and crash against each other, too often privileges that which entertains it. What passes for debate on the issue of the sacred is often relegated to a conversation about whether or not God “exists,” what the place of religion is in politics, in schools. Abortion. Granted, these issues are important, especially to those involved, but they are not the heart and soul of the matter. They are issues not of spirit, but of flesh. The complexities of belief are far too personal to be presented publicly as a list of strange demands or taught objectively as fact in the same manner as one would teach the tenets of biology, chemistry, and math. Faith is too necessarily subjective, a direct experience occurring, not in the classroom, but in the open field of one’s own heart and spirit. God is not reducible. In America, the religion to which we are publicly exposed supposes just the opposite. 

_________

 

     About a month ago, outside a bar in Thong Lo, I’m drinking with a friend, talking in the way that people do when the night is late and alcohol’s involved enough to keep them honest. We are fighting about religion, Christianity in particular, its problematic history and weight. 

      “I can’t forgive them,” my friend reiterates, “too much has happened.” 
      “I know,” I said, “I know.” 
      “And at some point I’ve got to draw the line,” he says. 

     A group of men come up behind us through the alley and we quiet for a moment as they stumble past. Streetlights drop small halos around their feet. A cockroach scuttles from a crack. 

      “But you’re also looking in a very specific place,” I say when the men are gone. “There are others.”
     “And you act like history never happened, like all people do is sit around and pray and help the homeless,” he says, “like religion doesn’t invite us to hate and kill each other.”

     I start to say something, stop. I’m flustered. The night’s too late, too hot. Mosquitos swarm my arms and face. My beer is warm. I’m uncertain how to speak. What I wish I could’ve thought and said is the degree to which I understand. I sympathize, and even to some extent, agree, but not totally, not in full. While religious thought does play host to radicals and cannot, in honest conscience, be separated totally from whatever bloodshed follows in its wake, the road to exploitation is paved by forces larger and more intricate than any singular force, even the force of God. Religion is not alone in its susceptibility to misinterpretation, to energies at work in the world around it. The cry of Science has similarly been employed to justify atrocities, oppressive modes of thought and methods of administering value. Thankfully, we hesitate to allow the the radicalization of Science to speak for Science as a whole, to allow its limits and misapplications to define for us the extent to which its useful when applied to places it belongs. With religion, we are less so.    

     What draws the pious toward radical and violent interpretations of their own beliefs is not a problem limited to religion, but a specific interpretation of a given narrative that is itself subject to the context in which it lives. Human beings are pushed to slaughter each other by a myriad of forces and numerous trajectories of thought, a confluence which includes religion but is not, in any way, limited to it. Let us remember the Crusades were also and originally a turf war, a fight for land and resources which only later took on religious significance. We are quick to blame religious fervor for giving terrorists the justification they need to place bombs in subways, crash planes through buildings, but are less inclined to turn the light of scrutiny upon ourselves. The flames of Islamic extremism are fanned in part by the actions of a country far away, a culture, secular in nature, whose appetite is endless, whose affluence is arguably offensive, and whose regard for cultures and systems of belief other than its own exist primarily in principle and principle alone. I wonder sometimes where the sense of entitlement upon which Americans subsist actually derives, what narratives we take for granted, what truths we hold to be self-evident that allow us to believe and act in the ways we do. I make no pretense to understand in full the energies at work in such matters, but I know that they are there. Religion, as much as anything, is subject to corruption. 

     And yet, at its best, I find within its contradictions a window of possibility, an open space in which to insert the world not merely as it is, but as it appears and is interpreted and experienced, a way of thinking which can perhaps provide a counter point to the forces of instrumental reason gone awry and return to us a sense of the intangible and the mysterious and the abstract, aspects of our experience and nature deserving of pensive thought, permanent contemplation.           

__________

 

     There were entire years I didn’t pray. For a long time the idea of God to me seemed antiquated, a product of a place and point in time no longer relevant, no longer true. Religion was an opiate, a delusion, a disease. In High School I wrote a paper called “Jesus Christ the Bastard Son of Nazareth” in which I argued that Faith was the antithesis of freedom, the Church, a place where anyone with half a backbone went to die. I read and re-read Bertrand Russell’s “Why I’m not a Christian,” listened to punk rock, carried “the Portable Nietzsche” in my back pack, and refused to be confirmed. There were more important things to do then waste my time “hankering after the past…fettering [my] free intelligence [to] the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.” 

     It was during these years, in the fervor of defining myself against the culture of Christianity which I inherited, in the absence of a sense of the sacred, that I became a poet. Through failure and error, I learned to love both language and the world to which it pointed. But I could never get it right. Every poem, I soon found out, begins exactly where it ends, in silence and anxiety. The questions which brought me to the page in the first place remained without resolve and I was left to try again. There, in the aftermath, in the space where words fell short, where the quiet echoed hard and hurt, I turned to utterance as though the act of the poem itself could save me. What mattered was not the poem so much, but the impulse and the decision to pursue the poetry as a course of action independent of its ends. I spoke for the sake of speaking and the world rose up for me from there. For a long time, no one listened and nothing came of it. Eventually, through poetry, I turned again to prayer. 

     But it wasn’t then, and it still isn’t, easy. As a writer, as a human being who at once does and does not believe in God, to reach for an interpretation of the world that allows for it to matter and make sense to me, I must do so suspending disbelief and reach beyond the means I have to know it. Thankfully, reality is a big word and the world is wide enough to house both the known and the unknown in all their various incarnations, the mystery in things and in our thinking of them through both subjective and objective avenues. In time, an open field of vast and numerous ideas appears and it is the job of the individual to cull the edges, sow the scattered seeds.  

_________

     “When I say God,” writes Andrew Grace, “I mean any way of navigating the radiant aftermath of loss. And what I mean by radiance is what the lake is doing, marbled by the moonlight and shaking like a lost man.” I like this statement very much for a variety of reasons. As a definition of that which typically eludes representation, it at once falls short and expands our expectations of how a definition is supposed to function. Instead of saying in no uncertain terms what God is and isn’t, limiting the object of inquiry to a specific form and function, Grace instead gives God a space in which to move about and breathe. “Any way of navigating” is generous, not vague. Furthermore, it rings with all the truth and validation of the experience of suffering, an involvement which makes us similar while setting us apart. For Grace, and for a lot of us, the existence of God is rooted in an understanding of loss which includes the possibility of recovery, a lake of light we imagine marbled at the other end of tragedy. 

     This, of course, is radically subjective, an interpretation of events occurring in the world of things. As an attempt to label and make sense of loss, Grace’s speaker projects himself into the landscape, across the water, the image of the lost and shaking man who believes so fully in the experience of his own real suffering he offers it a name. Unfortunately for Grace, subjectivity, as a means to truth, as a barometer of the real, is suspect. In a day and age dominated largely by positivistic realism, it is subject to the fashions of the times, a brand of objective scrutiny in whose shadow it is generally felt to pale: God does not exist and prayer is only so much speaking in the dark. So why, then, would a person pray and what is the role of faith in a world of raw material? Here’s Mislosz:

            On Prayer 

            You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
            All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
            And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
            Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
            Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
            That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
            Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
            Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
            Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
            Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
            And knows that if there is no other shore
            We will walk that aerial bridge all the same. 

     For Milosz, the question is not a matter of actuality, but consequence, of what the world turns into as a product of poetic/religious utterance. It matters little if God is real, or un-real. The poet’s scope is larger than semantics. Once prayed to, once spoken into being, the word ‘is’ expands to include its opposite in ‘isn’t’. Given this fluidity, definition is beside the point. In poetry and in prayer the terms of the debate are renegotiated and what constitutes the actual, what reality is and what reality is to us cannot be parted from experience, our limited, but human interpretations. The bridge of utterance, aerial in nature, there and not there, spans the empty space between what’s present and what’s absent, brings them into contact, a deep and immediate connection. 

     In this sense, what’s real includes what is imagined, experienced, and felt because these spaces interact with and affect the world of things. In poetry, the turn to metaphor is a way of reaching beyond the real to a place in the imagination in order to reinvigorate the real. I say this knowing that the experience of God is not real in the same way that the experience of a stone is real, or sunlight through the windshield of a car, or gravity, but neither does a stone exist in the same way that God does, and it is exactly this, these divergent means of being in the world, adjacent but not the same, that constitutes in my heart and mind not merely what is actual, but what’s important. I’m skeptical of positivism because I don’t discover in its assertions room for the words and ideas which matter most to me. Love, for instance. Altruism. Creativity. The Imagination. Faith. Or if they are there, they exist in such a limited capacity they are impossible to recognize. Placing the entirety of the subjective universe in the service of the verifiable, the positivistic worldview explains experience away with such mechanical precision that our lives as we have lived them exist as shadows, a dark spot cast by the light of the objective across body the actual, but not the actual itself. Certainly, I don’t find room for meaning as an act “of faith abounding in acts of words” in this interpretation, a creative movement of the imagination which exists in the same way that some would argue God does. At its best, I employ the term as a way to represent but not contain a specific, yet abstract experience of the unknowable at work in the world made tangible in things through creative interpretation. In this sense, the Creator is spoken into being and we, as instruments of talk, mirror and then become ourselves the creative force at work in the beginning of the Bible and in most creation myths. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t real in the way that forests and lakes are real, but we do it. And our doing it is real. And it asks a lot of of us, this doing—at times it asks too much, and we get it wrong—but we do it anyway and start again from the beginning, into and out of silence, knowing and re-knowing. We take the cold hard facts of the planet; we breathe some life into their forms. 

__________

     The Old Testament starts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,  and the Word was God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”           

     And a little later:“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” 

     As poet, I believe this.

     And as a person — 

__________

      These last five months in Bangkok, writing and reading poems and watching from the outside a world that in many ways makes little sense to me—though this is changing—I’ve come to appreciate religion not as a prescription or theoretic doctrine, but as a description of events in time, the experience of inner lives externalized through ritual and what the people living them believe in order to continue doing so. When I watch the men and women in my neighborhood put food and water in the Spirit Houses which rest in the corner of almost every yard in Thailand, burning incense every morning on the doorsteps of these small, sprite-sized temples meant to house the local ghosts displaced by human presence, I don’t see them as the simple and superstitious people I might have years ago. Rather they appear to me creative participants in a narrative which asks of them to live and act intentionally, even, as the case may be, when the act is aimed at that which isn’t there. In many ways, this is what we do with language. We make a narrative and settle upon a name in the hopes of knowing how to act in relationship to things. And although these names are never accurate, never truly the thing itself, we do it anyway, in good faith. It is increasingly hard for me to separate poetry from prayer because it is difficult to separate language from the imagination, thus speech itself, as a creative act, is also, to my mind, a religious one, a positioning of oneself in relationship to both what is and isn’t present in the world, a sense of the unknowable emanate in things and through them. “If you find you no longer believe,” writes W.S. Merwin, “enlarge the temple.” Or, if one prefers, Oppen: 

Psalm 

   In the small beauty of the forest 
   The wild deer bedding down -- 
   That they are there! 

                                   Their eyes 
   Effortless, the soft lips 
   Nuzzle and the alien small teeth 
   Tear at the grass 

                                   The roots of it 
   Dangle from their mouths 
   Scattering earth in the strange woods. 
   They who are there. 

                                    Their paths 
   Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them 
   Hang in the distances
   Of sun 

                                    The small nouns 
   Crying faith 
   In this in which the wild deer 
   Startle, and stare out.

  

     A highly secular poet, Oppen still sustains a sense of the sacred, of “faith / in this in which,” accessible and made possible through language, a world of nouns to which language is capable of pointing, even celebrating, despite its limitations, perhaps, even, precisely because of them. In this light, to talk with purpose is to imagine, create, and occupy a space which parallels the religious, borders it, and occasionally crosses over. That this is possible amazes me: that we are here.

          

Zach Borocas on Poetry and Spirit

“...[G-d] exists as a primary & governing presence or force whose intentions and methods are infinitely and permanently beyond our comprehension; [Spirit] is the sense of that force which we inherently possess (or inherently possess us), over which we each have expressive and little other control; one result of this expressive control is artistic…poetic practice.”

from "Suicide" by Edouard Leve

"When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss. I can see how drops of water could be torture. A burn on my tongue has a taste. My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead things are sad. A friend can let me down but not an enemy. I ask the price before I buy. I go nowhere with my eyes closed. When I was a child I had bad taste in music. Playing sports bores me after an hour. Laughing unarouses me. Often, I wish it were tomorrow. My memory is structured like a disco ball. I wonder if there are still parents around to threaten their children with a whipping. The voice, the lyrics, and the face of Daniel Darc made French rock listenable to me. The best conversations I ever had date from adolescence, with a friend at whose place we drank cocktails that we made by mixing up his mother’s liquor at random, we would talk until sunrise in the salon of that big house where Mallarmé had once been a guest, in the course of those nights, I delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain not one word, even though I came up with some of them doubled over in laughter, years later, this friend told his wife that he had left something in the house just as they were leaving to play tennis, he went down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had left there beforehand. I have memories of comets with powdery tails. I read the dictionary. I went into a glass labyrinth called the Palace of Mirrors. I wonder where the dreams go that I don’t remember. I do not know what to do with my hands when they have nothing to do. Even though it’s not for me, I turn around when someone whistles in the street. Dangerous animals do not scare me. I have seen lightning. I wish they had sleds for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any influence. I talk to my things when they’re sad. I do not know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against the alarm clock. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me."

                                                                                           —Translated from French by Lorin Stein

An Autumn of Black Carriages (some thoughts on Brock-Broido's "Periodic Table of Etheral Elements")

Recently, a friend of mine again pointed me to the work of Lucie Brock-Broido who I first read several years ago when she visited the University of Montana. My professor at the time, the poet Joanna Klink, sat us down with the Master Letters, a collection of poems derived from the trilogy of letters by Emily Dickinson recovered posthumously in a desk drawer and addressed to a receiver specified simply, eerily, as Master. Still in draft, the letters, in all likelihood, were directed to a God to whom they were never sent. Also, as of late, in secret and in solitude, I’ve found myself preoccupied with the promise and possibilities of prayer.

When I re-crossed the Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements a couple days ago, I was reminded the line dividing elegy from prayer is not necessarily discernible. As a form of faith, the assertion of loss changes the experience of suffering to the degree that the abstract is made tangible in language and can thereby be met and welcomed and let go in terms familiar to the afflicted.  Loss is subject to transformation. And I am grateful for this assertion. In “the extraordinary elegance / Of calcium and finery / And loss…” an important mooring between the world of things and the world surrounding things occurs, a tethering together of the living and the dead, the here and not here, the actual and after-actual. In this, the speaker creates a middle distance capable of holding together opposites, uncertainties. When an object leaves the world, becomes an abstract shadow of its former self, no longer real to any literal or tangible degree, the elegiac prayer preserves a sense of access to that which has departed.

But it is not a resurrection. Though the dead transfigure in language, though their light is kept alive in speech, the tricky breath of utterance, they are not returned to us through elegy, not completely. We must leave the safety of our own real lives, meet them in the middle space. Thus, elegy is violence and prayer a handing over of a portion of a life. The poem as sacrifice, a grey smoke rising, dark sky. We are speaking through a death mask.

Opposed to the typical elegy focused on the physical death of a lover, a family member, a friend, what strikes me most about this poem in particular is the nature of the object of the loss itself, its formlessness already given, its already absent character experienced as such, prior, even, to its vanishing. It is not an object which has vanished, for “even in life // You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form, // But a mind of // Rarer liquid element.” An element of ether, water, the heavens, air, both of the world and out of it, invisible, the object of loss is projected as a ghost, a subjective God known only in the imagination and accessible primarily through hypothetical meandering and metaphor. “If you had a psyche,” the speaker posits,

"...it was not known to me

If you had a figure, it would be heavy irony.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves

From sycamore trees,

Not scattering…”

Loss, here, is the loss of the unknown, the mysterious, the empty and the abstract, the invisible and the divine. The ethereal is posited as real, as once-present, as no longer inhabiting the space of things through which the speaker travels earthward through the aftermath, un-eased.  I enjoy this poem because it expands the notion of loss to include that which is and isn’t, deepening the horizon of the possible. For Brock-Broido’s speaker, experience is fullest precisely in the place where is is also empty. And to lose this, this specific way of seeing and believing in a world where the physical and the ethereal intermingle, where the actual and the imagined exchange identities, this is perhaps the greatest loss of all.

*Here is the poem in its entirety:

Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

I was not ready for your form to be cold

Ever. Even in life

You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,

But a mind of

Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me

You would take

Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only

Here, in the ordinary,

But there too, in the extraordinary elegance
Of calcium and finery

And loss. Keep me

Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive.

If you had a psyche it was not known to me.

If you had a figure it would be heavy irony.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves
From sycamore trees,

Not scattering. I was not ready for sure
Earthward and unease.

Goodbye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold
As God and the great

Glassed castle in which I’ve lived, simply
Now a house.

A girl ago, a childhood gone like a phial of ether
Thrown on fire—just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing
Off, it then is gone.

                                                   -Lucie Brock-Broido

In blue light, flitting