Monthly Archives: July 2009

We are only as strong as the circumstances that require our strength.

#1113, c. 1867

There is strength in proving that it can be borne
Although it tear —
What are the sinews of such cordage for
Except to bear
The ship might be of satin had it not too fight —
To walk on seas requires cedar Feet

Emily says that it is even a virtue to be broken by the things that are too much for our strength. We have to find that outer boundary of our tolerance for pain in order to know our true capacity for anything, whether pain or . . . something else. Building? Caring? Nurturing? Living. She asks why did we receive any of our gifts if not to have them threatened. You can’t know the value of something until you have to fight to keep it. The pressure to defend what you love shows you the depth and the quality of your love.

How many marriages have failed because one or both people involved found it not worth fighting to keep? That is the saddest moment of all, when one lets go of the other. This act announces: My love was present for you before this test. Now it has dissolved because I do not cherish this love enough to bear the passage through this difficulty. The cords that bind are not outside but within. In this dissolution, the urge to avoid the test or the pain of being tested, exposes the weaknesses of those inner bonds.

When one turns away from a test, it is because the prize on the other end is not worth it. Or not visible. Maybe one does not believe in one’s own strength to pass the test. The prospect of breaking while being tested is too terrifying. Sometimes we’d rather do without whatever might (or might not) be on the other side of the test.

Emily says: No, we are given all these treasures specifically to be tested. No one ever gets to enjoy a smooth ride on a ship of satin without some fight or some conflict. If you want a life free of conflict, you’ll bob along in a paper dinghy. No one will see you or bother you. Possessing a grand ship (grand spirit or grand vision) guarantees that you will encounter resistance, and you will have to demonstrate your strength to yourself. To grasp the value of what you possess.

The last line, “To walk on seas requires cedar Feet” points to Christ walking on water. None of us can do this. None of us has feet made of porous, floaty wood. We don’t have His magical powers. Our feet are made of clay. I hear Emily’s point as, “None of us are getting out of this alive.” No one will get out of any situation by sprouting miraculous cedar feet. We will have to proceed through each test in our path, each test that living on this plain earth gives. We have no other choice but to place our strength against others to see where we are in the continuum. Not only to see what strength we possess, but also to see who may be strong enough to bear the pain of being human along side us. These tests show us who can stick with us through the worst, as well as the best.

This is how you learn if your ship is seaworthy.

Here is the poem that jumped out after the last one. They speak to each other.

#569, c. 1862

I reckon — when I count at all —
First — Poets — Then the Sun —
Then Summer — Then the Heaven of God —
And then — the list is done —

But, looking back — the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole —
The Others look a needless Show —
So I write — Poets — All —

Their Summer — lasts a Solid Year —
They can afford a Sun
The East — would deem extravagant —
And if the Further Heaven —

Be Beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them —
It is too difficult a Grace —
To justify the Dream —

I love that: “Poets — All —” From your lips, Emily, to God’s ears.

That is the poet’s job, right? To compress the totality of some lengthy event or experience into a few dense words. So that we get all of it without labor or ratiocination. Leave it to the prose-writers like me, the mules of the wordy set, plodding that slow, linear, obvious, over-explained way up the hill. Not for the poets. Their poems arrive inside us with the same effortless effect as we would receive God’s grace. You don’t have to agree to anything for the poem, or earn it. The poem simply IS. All. At once.

Quantum physics has not yet been able to explain how one electron can be in two places at the same time. And no one has been able to explain exactly how Emily’s poems work. We can talk around them, close to them. But get to them? Not yet.

Emily herself has the same hesitation. The last lines make me pause, too. “It is too difficult a Grace — /To justify the Dream —” Sounds as though she sees the poem falling short. What begins as a brave shout of honor to the poets, ends with a slight diffidence. A pulling back. The true full grace lies beyond even her magnificent powers. Only a poet could see this trap. To be satisfied with your own poem is to fail.

Been thinking and talking about grace lately. My book group came to my house last night to discuss Wise Blood. Now, as for Flannery O’Connor, there is another tough nut. Her preoccupation with grace preoccupied us last night. What is grace? someone in our group kept asking. It’s a good question because it takes so may forms. Like Emily’s “Beauty”, it cannot be sought. It only abides. You may dimly apprehend it, if you’re lucky and sensitive. It may arrive in your life but if you look for it, you’ve lost it. Like love, if you try to explain it, that’s when it slips through your fingers.

In Flannery’s view, grace is the moment, that may occur more than once in a person’s life but more often it happens at the moment of death, when you experience a sense of being loved by God, even though you know you don’t deserve it. Grace is the knowledge that, even at your worst, your most vile, disgusting, inhumane, petty, greedy, nasty, foul, ugly state . . . God still wants you. Even when you smell like last week’s garbage, even when you don’t want you, God still wants you.

Here’s the question I always wanted to ask Flannery (and Emily): What if you don’t want God? I know what they would say. Not sure what I would say.

Write a poem and hope for the best. It’s all a crap shoot, anyway.

I don’t feel like talking about Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, but it seems He is on Emily’s mind. Here we go:

#567, c. 1862

He gave away his Life —
To Us — Gigantic Sum —
A trifle — in his own esteem —
But magnified — by Fame —

Until it burst the Hearts
That fancied they could hold —
When swift it slipped its limit —
And on the Heavens — unrolled —

‘Tis Ours — to wince — and weep —
And wonder — and decay
By Blossoms gradual process —
He chose — Maturity —

And quickening — as we sowed —
Just obviated Bud —
And when We turned to note the Growth —
Broke — perfect — from the Pod —

I’m going to treat the Christ story as just that, a story. Not to diminish it—you know me, I live and die by the story. It’s important to establish that the Judeo-Christian mythology has guided the development of western civilization so deeply and thoroughly that even the most devout atheist among us cannot extirpate this religiosity from her thinking. Our brains are saturated with this story such that it goes below conscious thinking. We can’t discern its influence any more than the fish can discern the water it swims in.

Emily is getting at this idea when she writes “magnified — by Fame”. What a funny word to use with reference to Christ’s crucifixion, as if he were a rock star, which of course he is. But what did Emily know of fame or rock stars? I think she was zeroing in on the point that all of us—whether human or blossom—live, decay and die. The difference in the Christ story is that his death is a story that people read and know about. The elevation of his death into a mediated event, an observed death, is the thing that makes Him into a character in a story, not a man.

Of course, the most crucial part of the story is that his death is a conscious one. An intentional embrace of the darkest mystery. This is his “Maturity”. Those of us who are not characters in a story, cloaked in fame, we are the wondering weepers, perplexed by death. So we tell ourselves a story about a man who conquered death by giving away his life willingly, with full awareness and trust in the God who made him.

I keep tripping over her inclusion of the word “Fame”. It sticks out as an awfully worldly concern. The word points to her understanding that his death is only meaningful—only what we say it is—if the world knows about it. Only if the death becomes famous, does it take on the force and meaning that we claim it possesses inherently. Really his death ought not to be be anymore meaningful than the decay of the flower. Unless someone witnesses the death and—here is the most important part—records the death, it effectively has no more significance than any other death.

There must be a scribe present to make Christ’s death the sacrifice that it is. Without the intelligent, crafty, and imaginative mind of the viewer (no the Writer!) as a witness to the death, there is no meaning. No gift. No emotional charge to flood our hearts, change our lives. “And on the Heavens — unrolled —”

It wasn’t God that gave Christ (or any of us) eternal life. It was the poet who wrote about him.

Without the witness to tell the story, there is no spiritual pay-off for us, no promise of new life. Nothing to prompt us to continue looking for new growth, that perfect bud that emerges or reemerges from the cave, from the pod, whatever.

Anyway people always want to give Christ the credit for the magic show. Emily quite rightly gives kudos to the writers. As we will see in tomorrow’s poem, which lies on the facing page from this one. I can’t resist a hop across the crevice. Check in later.