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.)
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:
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.
