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.