Who would have thought my shriveled heart/
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone/
Quite underground; as flowers depart/
To see their mother-root when they have blown;/
Where they together/
All the hard weather/
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
-George Herbert
I don’t want you to think I am starting a trend here and turning this in to some sort of poetry blog, but I want to post one more that explains what I try and do in most all my poems, how sub-creating (as Tolkien would call it) points to the Creator, even when it seems to be doing something else. No more comments for this one, just a posthumous shout-out to Jack Lewis whose title I, well, jacked.
Having chosen not to take summer classes, along with the job market’s collective decision to, as yet, not take me, has given me sufficient free time and boredom to type another post- this the promised poem of the last post. While this particular promise is, doubtless, one no one would hold me to, nevertheless for want of anything else to write about, I’ll keep it. I seem to remember including in my previous post some ridiculous metaphor comparing the writing of poetry to walking about the house naked- either is acceptable enough in itself, so long as not put forward for public exhibition. Awkward metaphors aside, it does point to the embarrassment experienced by others when faced with poetry and why it has been forced into such a peripheral role. Mine tend to take the form of versified prose- neither rhyming nor scanning particularly well, almost a form of symbolic and extremely short story rather than “Poetry” writ large.
Anyway, this particular poem needs a bit of a disclaimer first and will be followed, as always, by some discussion of it. While a better poet perhaps would not need these after-thoughts to serve as a sort of support where the form did not quite attain to the meaning I proposed to set out and such discussion does indeed weaken, in some respects, the poem itself (in the sense that the poem itself is what the author meant, the meaning of a poem- or novel for that matter- is not a second thing exterior to the work, but intrinsic to it, the whole of the work is its meaning), I like to nevertheless because the subject of the poem, in this case especially as will be seen, is the end and not the poem itself. More on this later. I also want, at the outset to make an apology (in the old sense of the term) for the use of a “cuss” word- earmuffs please- “damn”, in this case. While I think passages such as James 3 on taming the tongue are much more concerned with what we say of our fellow image bearers- cursing them- than the use or disuse of certain culturally agreed upon “out” words- which I will call cussing and perhaps has more to do with the Puritans than the Bible- I realize that some folks may disagree with me. For this reason I try to restrain my use of them, both for fear of offending the “weaker brother” and because it usually signifies either a failure of language or tact. It is interesting, I think, that our “cuss words” come from a very limited range of categories: damnation (crap, I said it again), sexual, excremental, questions of ancestry (the “b” words), but I don’t really know why that is. Nevertheless, I do think it serves a purpose here. So there. Besides, it’s my blog and I’ll write what I dang well please. And so to the poem, complete with Latin title and Bonhoeffer epigraph…
Lancea Longini
“There are only two possible ways of encountering Jesus: one must die or one must put Jesus to death. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center
Cock-crow or morning trump awakens
whatever the means, the result is the same-
I roll out, automatic being, devoid of thought,
‘til shocking cold greets my feet, and reminds me
Why I hate this damned desert.
Welcome routine softens, redirects my hatred
boots and girdle, lorica and scabbard, separate;
allow me to step, to wake to new modes of being,
that whatever may be the work of death
that today must be done through me,
I have ceased responsibility.
I is swallowed by Empire.
Festal days here mean work;
Work, welcome respite from imbecile monotony,
of the endless procession of eventless days
in this provincial backwater.
Today a last, frenzied gasp of activity
before the slow, ceaseless silence,
the death that marks Saturn’s day.
A whole slate of executions is marked for today
(the locals seem fond enough of death, of spectacle
but stop on Saturdays, though the buzzards still feed)
I’m not sure of the names or numbers; I like it better that way.
A named man has existence, stands as fact,
draws me out of unnamed, Legion-state
into being, choice, judgment
no longer does Empire stand in my stead
I measure the merits of following duty and preserving my life,
and taking and punishing my fellow guilty man
(I’ve killed three named men in my life
I remember each face)
Being a centurion has its benefits,
I can usually avoid trials if I wish.
Today, I wish I had.
They bring into the praetorium a poor, thin local
the charge seems a bit absurd-
this man of clear eyes and a strong silence
is charged with claiming to be king,
King of the Jews
He is stripped and beaten and mocked
Silence
And then it happens; eye contact, a spear to my heart
It’s a look I’ve seen once before
So long age it seems, like a forgotten dream
or haunting nightmare – it came from Father.
In arrogant youth I slept with a whore,
then killed her husband when caught
I returned home shaken-
I desired a look of utter disgust from Father
Instead a haunting, withering love,
fully conscious of my betrayal, meeting me in my wrong
with love.
I rush out of the palace, but not before I hear
a name- Yeshua
Today will not be a good Friday.
I’m forced to walk this Yeshua up
to walk him up to the place of my skull and decide-
what an absurd figure he is:
carrying his cross
King of the Jews, with the weight of my government upon his shoulders
the battered face of love
haunting – I decide.
I must kill it, even if that means killing him
Or such a face will be the death of me.
10/23/08
After a long poem, prefaced with an overly long tangent on the propriety of cussin’, the last thing this post needs is a lengthy discussion of the poem. Oh well. First, a few explanatory notes, starting with the title. The Latin is not there to impress with my incredible ability to use google and Wikipedia, but to be evocative without spelling out clearly from the outset what is going on. Translated it means the spear (lancea) of Longinus, which unless you are up to date on your obscure, semi-fictional saints, will not mean much to you. The narrator is of course the centurion who, in Mark’s gospel and elsewhere exclaims at Christ’s death, “Surely this was the Son of God.” Church tradition holds that he later became a Christian and has come down to us a Saint Longinus (hence his somewhat dubious status, although he seems more legitimate than Saint Lazarus- not the brother of Mary and Martha, but the one from the parable whose wounds are licked by the dogs). What is important to the poem at hand is that all this occurs somewhere outside the bounds of the poem. Indeed, in a sense it is only once he becomes a Christian that he passes from being a nameless centurion into genuine existence and possesses a name- Longinus- all of which I associate with that enigmatic passage in Revelation about the members of the church at Pergamum receiving a white stone with their name on it, emblematic of their true identity, found in Christ. W.H. Auden has argued that proper names can mean nothing in poetry because one might just as easily replace one name with another. What he was getting at was that one cannot, by virtue of naming, call up that person into the poem as a sort of short cut; their presence must be intrinsic to the poem or else we create something analogous to an idol, a golden calf of our making that we then name- “Behold your god, O Israel”. Given this, I could not, simply by calling this man Yeshua make him the historical Jesus- he could be anyone and faith is required regardless, even if this man that we see suffering, being crucified is the man Jesus, we still need eyes to see that, “This man was the Son of God.” Since the name in itself cannot signify, instead I had to make possession of a name emblematic of authentic existence. No one else, not even the narrator, is named in the poem and as has been seen the narrator is in fact only named in so far as he relates to Christ (in his later canonization by some perhaps creative members of the Church). In His incarnation He escapes reduction to a theological abstraction that makes our system work (like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who has no need for Christ Incarnate), and demands both a response to Himself personally and if He is God, a consideration of how we treat His fellow image bearers. Thus, encounter with Jesus is a confrontation, requiring as Bonhoeffer said, we either be crucified with Him or nail Him up to be crucified; He does not bring peace, but a sword.
One might wonder why, at least on the basis of my last two poems, there are never any good Christians in my poetry (not that you probably spend much time wondering about my poetry, but they are conspicuously absent and I want to talk about why). Much of the reason lies in the explanation Lewis gave for never writing a counter book to the Screwtape Letters containing the correspondence of angels rather than demons- it would require a saint to write it. There is a more fundamental problem, I think, in the structure of drama itself. As I wrote last time (you can scroll, I’m not hyper-linking), comedy is the fundamental Christian form of drama because it mirrors the Christian eschaton, the consummation of marriage- between Christ and His Bride, the Church, and between Heaven and Earth as the New Jerusalem comes down. Comedy always ends shortly after the marriage, often with the trite assurance that “they lived happily ever after”; when the marriage occurs, the dramatic tension goes slack, the story is over. Any continuation of the story must reintroduce conflict to drive along the narrative. Because of this, the Christian life can never be dramatized in its completion; it must always be a movement towards, never, except at the end perhaps, an arrival at. The Gospel cannot be dramatized, only proclaimed. The indirect method, with God conspicuous in His absence, in the faults and accidental allusions of the characters is the only way forward. Irony, the sinner-character’s wild, lunging attacks easily parried and riposted by God, amounts to the implicit proclamation of something else, other- the Gospel. This is what the great Catholic author Flannery O’Connor was doing in her fiction as she explains her essay “The Fiction Writer & His Country”, “When you can assume that your audience shares the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that is does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” I hope better things for y’all that read me, but you never know.
Whew. Word tells me I clocked in at about 2,000 words on this one. I need to hide that word counter somehow, so that, in the future, instead of feeling discouragingly long-winded upon completing a post, I can be blissfully and ignorantly long-winded. Also in searching for this poem, I came across a note concerning it, written it seems when I was only begin to conceive it. The note recommends some sort of ironic play on the command to Peter, “Arise, kill, and eat,” lining out the structure of the centurion’s day with he becoming in the end a partaker in the Eucharist. Doubtless this would have made for a better poem, but it apparently slipped through the cracks. As it is doubtful I would have been up to implementing it, it seems better to let it float out there, an interesting idea that can be idealized for its not being executed.
Taking a page from my playbook of how not to launch a blog, I’m rebooting the Underground with some poetry. It is well known that lots of folks write poetry, don’t read anyone else’s poetry, and then occasionally publish their poems to the web, in order that they might be ignored by a broader audience. Publishing poetry to one’s blog is much like walking around one’s house completely naked when no one else is around; if your friends find out, they make think it odd, but since it really doesn’t affect them (given that they neither read your poems nor peek through your blinds), they regard it merely as a forgivable, perhaps even endearing quirk. In keeping with this illustrious tradition then, I here publish two poems for you to disregard. Afterward I want to comment a bit about what is going on in them; if there is one thing that galvanizes an audience more than collectively ignoring a poem, its collectively ignoring commentary on poetry. My readership is soaring, I can feel it…
The Hippopotamus
It is as if in creating us God asked a question and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question. –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Strange, at the end of pilgrimage
When friends have failed,
Wife given bad advice,
houses collapsed, sons entombed,
daughters dead, and sheep stolen;
to be offered, tendered
as some way of explanation
when the answer is a question
and I am given the task of being
Both: answer and question
You seem satisfied, which is good-
you know, I almost envy you,
Tragedy is not without benefits.
It may sound romantic in verse
to lie among the lotus
I of iron limbs and bronze tubed bones,
I assure you: it is a stinking mire
the river rushes, but my feet remain
stuck here – a pilgrimage in place.
That is, in time I move
occasionally called up
as something counter, spare, original, strange
by Him- whose beauty is past change.
Praise Him.
I do, I try at least
But my vocation disheartens
Perhaps I should take out an ad,
begin looking for my replacement.
Wanted: One to prove
the inscrutability of God.
Apply within.
2/11/09
If you can but defer your excitement to rush on to another poem and will bear with me a bit, I want to talk a bit about what I tried to do here. If you’re one of those types that like to form your own opinions about these sort of things or frankly want to get as far away from the previous poem as possible, feel free to skip on down to the next section. (As an aside, it is fortunate in a way that this blog hasn’t really taken off yet. The plan is eventually to get James Earl Jones to do voiceovers for the audio version of all these posts on a podcast. If you were listening to that you would have to cover your ears and hum through this entire section to avoid the commentary. And no one really wants to do that.) Anyway, in case you missed it, this is told from the perspective of the behemoth (which seems decidedly hippopotamus-y to me) that God directs Job’s attention to at the end of the book (of Job- but hopefully you figured that out). Also, if you must continue thinking about the narrator as a hippopotamus, think about him more like a hippo you might find in Narnia rather than a hungry, hungry one that spends all its time trying to eat tiny white plastic balls; it is a rational and moral being. One more thing needs to be pointed out before continuing, the last few lines of the penultimate stanza are from a wonderful little poem by Hopkins called “Pied Beauty”, if they look out of place (you know by rhyming, being good lines of poetry, ect.) that’s why.
A couple things do need to be said, I think, about why this poem takes the form it does and why I felt it necessary to write it in this way (this will also help show what the next poem is trying for). The poem is not explicitly Christian, in fact the narrator has an ambiguous, sometimes subversive stance towards the faith. The key part is that he is wrong. He cannot, of course, leave his vocation because it is (take the leap with me here) the human condition. In Jesus Christ, God has declared His love and His decision to be for us. Whether in the alienated boredom of the hippo or the anguish of Job, the declaration of the beloved state is in the end the proof of God’s inscrutability. The narrator’s desire to know (anything, even the certainty of tragedy) is subverted by the necessity of his fundamental acceptance of the mystery- the declaration that God is Love in and through Christ. Far from rejecting his office or finding a replacement, the hippo embodies and invites others into the mystery found in the Gospel, to the praise of God. The previous sentence if taken out of context is of course silly in the extreme, but this is entirely appropriate to the colossal comedy of the Gospel. Comedy (in the old Shakespearian sense that the story ends in marriage) is the most appropriate way of dramatizing the Gospel. However, like many of Shakespeare’s later comedies (The Merchant of Venice, to take one example) a good deal of tragedy is mixed in- the Christian is not to be unrealistic or “pie-in-the-sky, we’ll all escape to Heaven by and by” about the tragedies that still are inflicted on the world on a daily basis, but they are not to despair. “Take heart, for I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
-Word tells me that I’ve now reached near a thousand words in this post, so I’ll defer my other poem to another, later post. Try to contain your excitement in the interim.
