Faith, Hope, & Doubt

Where have you been? / And what have you done? / I've been under the ground / Eating prayers from this old book I found / Under the ground / Saving it up / And spending it all / n moving pictures / Silent films / Moving pictures / Silent films (Tony Dekker (Great Lake Swimmers), “Moving Pictures Silent Films”)

But see, this logical God, I don't like him all that much. Even His voice, He's got this voice that I just can't, I don't know, I can't like. I can understand it, but I don't necessarily like it. He's out of my range. But that's no problem. Plenty of times I haven't liked Him. It's good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse. (Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin 50)

I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack. God's love is for me, both in a direct and inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not coward enough to whimper and moan on that account, but neither am I underhand enough to deny that faith is something far higher. I can very well carry on living in my manner, I am happy and satisfied, but my happiness is not that of faith and compared with that is indeed unhappy. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: “Prelude from the Heart” 63)

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Let this stand for the failed poems & the false prayers. 

What the blue behind the black, the flickering of lights, the unrecognized face in the mirror attempt to locate and dream, memory, imagination, and discourse fail to make whole is the age-old struggle between faith & hope & doubt & resignation.

Writing a poem is as much an act of faith as it is an act of will. The electronic posting of a poem, especially, is a pitiable type of prayer. To pray is to be hopeful. Yet the problem remains: prayers are never answered in predictable ways. Sometimes the voices remain silent; other voices respond with too much kindness; still others speak the words poets fear most, the truth about the lack. And the poet’s own voice always hints at its own phoniness.

What the poet pours over in books, scratches out in paper, taps out piano-like on keys is the connection that links what is already lost, is beginning to fade, or never materialized.

Poems pray to birds, speak to the dead & reinvent the voices of both.

I      In the swamp in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

What is this if it is not the sincerity of prayer?

Poems beg forgiveness, plead for help, praise, thank, and damn…all at one time.  And they nearly always fail. But in failing, poets breathe easier, hedging their bets against doubt, if only for the minutes & hours of invention, savoring a little death, in the hope of stealing a little extra time.

for it is not so much to know the self   

as to know it as it is known

   by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

A. R. Ammons, “Gravelly Run”

Hope & doubt settle near one another; happiness was not the only quality born a twin. One holds on as faithfully as it can, and the other does its best to settle for resignation. The product of this labor is art; the more faithful the more absurd, or so the Dane would have us believe.

What I’m wrestling with in writing this is what I already know before I finish the poem: it will never become what it was when it arrived as idea. The prayer will not find its answer. The voice will never match the hopefulness. Resignation is not faith, and doubt is not bread.

But we will not resign ourselves to anything but continuing to pray out lines, one failure at a time.

National Poetry Month: Entry #1: “drill imagination right through / necessity:”

The title of this post comes from a poem, “Play,” by A. R. Ammons, a poet I admire very much for his intensity and his playfulness. He is a poet for whom meaning is often at a hinge, the poetic word or phrase as a swinging gate.

In the case of the poem “Play” the swinging gate happens early in the poem (A. R. Ammons, “Play” Poetry #117, October 1970).
The poem begins:

Nothing is going to become of anyone
except death:
therefore: it’s okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &

ruin’s not
compromised by magnificence:

The opening two lines appear to be straightforward: no one here gets out alive. And yet, if one considers the temporary rather than the eternal, many things become of everyone—something is always about to happen. Though death is the last becoming, life is not simply death, it is living—always becoming. However, Ammons’ point is that since there is no hope of surviving becoming dead, one should decide to live. Not simply be alive, but “yearn / too high.” In other words: feel free to fail. But here is where the gate swings.

The grave, obviously death itself, “accommodates” high hopefulness (“swell”) but also “rambunctiousness” (perhaps living without fear of dying). What is more of a swelling of ego than pretending to be deathless? So, “swell” is the hinge here.

The line reads at least two ways: one with a pause after “swell” and one that runs immediately into “rambunctiousness.”

a) “the grave accommodates / swell” : the grave hosts body and spirit (all that is not material): desire, hope, etc. (Note: I am purposely avoiding the body/spirit, material/immaterial, life/after-life discussion in this post.Though within the totality of Ammons' work it can be had with vigor.)

b) “the grave accommodates / swell rambunctiousness” : what the grave comforts is that happiness the grave negates: being alive and ornery, seeking thrills.

And then a third reading appears when the “&” is followed: “& / ruin’s not / compromised by magnificence:”

Is death, then, “ruin” or is it “magnificence?” If death is “ruin” then a carefree approach to life is magnificence—it still can’t stop death. Or, if death is “magnificence” then ruin is fearing death and not living. Of course there are many other ways of reading these lines as well; however, no matter which way the gate swings the final point remains: don’t worry about the dying but both live & die magnificently.

All of this serves to prepare the reader for the rest of the poem—which I have not yet provided in full. However, we do still have those lines mentioned in the title of this post that we have been moving towards. In fact, the forward momentum of the poem leads to them.

Here is the rest of the poem:

that cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
pick a perch—
apple branch for example in
bloom—
tune up
and

drill imagination right through
necessity:
it’s all right:
it’s been taken care of:

is allowed, considering

Death, being the “cut-off point” not only between being and non-being, but also “ruin” and “magnificence” and perhaps passivity and activity, “liberates” humanity “to” not from “common disaster” (lack of material immortality). Humanity’s impermanence liberates—allows for the enjoyment of the temporary—the moment. From this point the poem suggests/reminds that location and perspective matter, urging: “pick a perch” and provides a specific perspective/location via a strong image: “apple branch […] in / bloom”.

Then, perched on branch—birdlike—“tune up”: sing. “Drill” (or drum, woodpecker-like) from the chosen point of view, though temporarily, “imagination right through / necessity". This image, auditory, visual, and yet still somewhat abstracted, suggests multiple, simultaneous bits of understanding. To “drill imagination” is to enter “necessity” by bisecting it, going all the way through, making a worm-hole through…dying, is it? Isn’t it? Imagination, instead of being wasted on mortality, should be used to cut through it, to make it transparent—at least in that one focused spot, that temporary location, perspective from which one still lives, somehow above death--still making noise.

There are also other obvious interpretations of this phrasing: for example, imagination is integral in overcoming necessity, all necessities. In fact, the rest of the poem encourages and explains this, assuring: “it’s all right” to imagine you are still alive, can sing, can climb to some higher place to view the world. Necessity (dying) has been “taken care of”; “yearning” “is allowed, considering” that this is the only internal agency against becoming dead.

And the imaginary gate swings back to the beginning of the poem: “it’s okay,” the “grave accommodates” that “swell” imagination causes.