Despair is prevalent in our world and squeezes the life out of many of us. Even worse, it has become a given, a condition all too many have accepted as a default state or a norm. And if it is, indeed, a norm, one that reveals something terrible about our form of life and its expectations. What can be done about it?
Christian Wiman counsels both to despair and not to despair. Wiman has what he calls “an intimate acquaintance” with despair and examines it and the possibilities it forecloses — and engenders — in his latest book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Against Despair. But this familiarity has little to do with the cancer that he was once told would kill him years ago. “I have been living with it — dying with it — for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me,” he writes (p. 8), dispelling easy assumptions that the prospect of death is its cause.
No, his acquaintance stems from being alive in a time in which “we as a species, as a communal soul, have withered, and that as a direct consequence the world around us is dying. The despair is too much to turn one’s attention to, so most of us turn away” (p. 143). It is so pervasive and powerful that for the most part we try to suppress it from consciousness. In doing so, however, we harm ourselves so much more powerfully than if we acknowledged and confronted it.
Some might feel, given such widespread despair, that writing poetry is a waste of time. “To write poetry after Auschwitz,” claimed Theodor Adorno, “is barbaric.” Is it not an indication of detachment from a suffering world? Or, even worse, a cavalier expression of nihilism? Throughout many of the book’s fifty entries, though, Wiman insists this detachment hypothesis isn’t necessarily the case. Art certainly can become that. One of the ways poetry characteristically fails is through the affectation of despair, by play-acting at gravity and struggle and presenting it as profundity. “‘Toy despairs’,” Wiman writes, “may be entertaining and even brilliant at times, but they cannot help” (p. 57).
The art that can help testifies to the surplus that bubbles over out of language and objects and subjectivity. It is part of that surplus. It exceeds the systems that claim to comprehend reality, showing there is more than these systems assure. We need such testaments to excess because the laws by which many of us live our lives deny anything that escapes capture by their logic and terms. Our ways through the world and its despair are restricted so long as our spirits are fed only with the artlessness of ideology, whatever it is.
Are poets the priests to which we must turn, then? Not quite. The language that apprehends the mystery of the world and of God’s strange presence within it is poetic, as the literal isn’t the only form or mode of truth. This is the mistake of both fundamentalists and reductionistic science. There are events, processes, and states that evade literal description and whose truth must therefore be formulated poetically. God acts upon us in ways we don’t understand and cannot capture in mechanical language, and so we apprehend and name its truth with poetry.
But not all poetry maintains the covenant between God and his creatures. Poetry is necessary, then, but not sufficient. It is both natural, and yet more than natural: “Poetry is where human language returns, resuscitates, protects, and extends its natural origins,” Wiman writes (p. 144).
This is at least part of the reason there is something of a tradition among literary critics over the last century and a half of demoting revealed religion and installing poetry in its office. Matthew Arnold, in “The Study of Poetry”, wrote that “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” Similarly, I. A. Richards asserted that poetry and fiction coordinate opposing human needs and in so doing, reconciles them. Thus his famous dictum, “Poetry is capable of saving us.” To this, T.S. Eliot retorted that this was “like saying that the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled.” Wiman here wants to say yes and no as it would be reductive and untrue to assert only one and not the other.
The problem with believing poetry will save us, of course, is that this reconciliation is only accomplished at the level of the imaginary; the problem of reality scarcely intrudes into this reconciling work. It’s worthwhile to imagine a world in which various problems are overcome, but it’s another to claim that imagining it this way satisfies the problems of the world we inhabit, the same world that stubbornly bites back at our efforts.
Richards’ thesis is fatally flawed by how he wants the substance of what he thinks religion provides but without any of its obligations. That thesis can’t be salvaged, but can be retooled and brought to fulfillment through crucifixion, as all things that would be true must. Fiction and other forms of art supply symbolic resolution of conflicts that we do not yet see accomplished here and now. They show us ourselves and the possibilities that are sometimes excluded by the ideology we live within. We need such art not only to endure, but to live. Even Adorno recognized truth in this, and his judgment about the barbarism of poetry is really about the status quo endorsement of spiritless aesthetic “products.”
The “poetry will save us” position wrongly assumes that religion is primarily about finding happiness and closure, that people seek after God in order to have explanations and stability. Wiman counters: “One doesn’t follow God in a hope of happiness but because one senses … a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant” (p. 5).
The faith that looks to poetry for salvation desires something good and necessary. The problem is that it stops short of a subject who can accomplish this. We do well to acknowledge this is a form of faith. We must not forget that faith isn’t the exclusive domain of the religious among us — not to hogtie anyone with cheap apologetics tricks, but to commend their desire and to even recognize how our desire can misdirect our faith. All human beings exercise faith, and it “is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to” (p, 15).
Poetry can engender the sort of faith that wants to bow and express gratitude through the intensity of its opening up of reality. But properly religious faith, however much it begins from an emotional collision with reality, principally comes through a reorientation. The soul recognizes it is not what it should be, that it must give an account of itself to Another beyond its despair.
Faith isn’t primarily, then, about comfort and stability, as Wiman has found it “to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to” (p. 15). Christian faith, most fundamentally, is a new relation of responsibility in which one is limitlessly called further and further into the life of God. Far from supplying a ready-at-hand answer or synoptic view of all of reality, faith should disabuse us of such a need:
Perhaps the very need to perceive some overarching meaning to one’s life is simply one more compulsion for control, and not a sign of spiritual health but of pathology, the same need to control that has decimated nature, volatilized every racial and gender relation, and locked God into holy books and human institutions. (p. 234)
This is how despair can actually open up new avenues, new possibilities: obstacles, upheavals, and tragedies “blow open the doors of deliberate ignorance behind which we were hiding,” he writes (p. 232), forcing us to choose between illusion and reality. It can be “a necessary prelude to a renewed awareness of God” (p. 57). God isn’t the cure to despair, as despair is at least sometimes the catalyst for change or even salvation. Despair isn’t only a bug: in the economy of grace, it’s something of a feature.
What the question of suffering and what it means for us comes down to is this: “What will be the object of your faith, and what will your act of faith look like?” (p. 267). Will we allow despair to disclose the truth of ourselves and of God, or will we cling to that which kills us? Will we insist we are not hungry, or will we acknowledge our hunger with all its ramifications, as frightening as this is? No one can decide that for us. We must decide if we will listen to the testimony bubbling up within the art that speaks to us and ask for bread. Because the Giver of that bread is always ready to share.
COMMENTS
3 responses to “Poetry and the Provocation of Faith”
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A beautiful reflection, thank you. I can’t wait to read this volume.
I’ve been reading the work of Irish poet David Whyte recently, and in his “Consolations,” he describes despair as a sort of temporary haven and a “seasonal state of repair.” I’ll be interested to compare and contrast that view with Wiman’s, which I’m sure is characteristically more austere, as you’ve indicated here. Whyte’s evocation of despair as a waveform that passes through the body in necessary time, but not something to be clung to, feels true to my own experience of it.
A wonderful piece, thanks. And Pierre, thanks for mentioning David White, whom I’d never heard of.
I understand Adorno’s objection, but I’ve never really agreed with it. As John 1:5 says, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
And in light of that, no pun intended, I love Wiman’s reflections on Kandinsky’s writings, and how he links Kandinsky’s implication that art may “liberate” God as well as the artist with Saint Teresa of Avila’s feeling “that God is on the journey too.”
Whatever she means exactly, I imagine God’s excitement as ‘He’ observes His creatures, made in His own creative image, creating in turn, and in so doing, as they bring something new into the world, exploring, discovering, extending His own knowledge as they extend theirs. As the artist working in an abstract mode stands before the empty canvas in expectation, so to speak, so does God, if this way of thinking is valid, joyously wait to see what new forms love will take.
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