Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

I began this very essay between two and four one morning when “my thoughts were all a case of knives,” to quote the great seventeenth-century poet and priest George Herbert.

I told her to hold that image in her head and ask God to preserve it for her. I suggested she let the force of her longing and the fact of God’s love coalesce into a form as intact and atomic as matter itself, to attend to memory with the painstaking attentiveness of the poet, the abraded patience of the saint, the visionary innocence of the child whose unwilled wonder erases any distinction between her days and her dreams.

What exactly does that mean: to pray? And is it something one ought to be teaching a child to do? And if we assume for a moment that it is indeed an essential thing to “learn,” then what exactly ought one to pray for? A parking space? To be cured of some dread disease? For the emotional and spiritual well-being of a beloved child? To be a unicorn? For one night of untroubled sleep?

People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal sorrow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.

“A Prayer That Will Be Answered.” Lord let me suffer much and then die Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not even fear Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before Let the grass stay green so that the frogs can hide in it so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love Make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee’s head tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak This is an uncanny poem.

“Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not,” wrote George Herbert at the end of one of his own greatest poems (“Affliction (I)”). “We pray God to be free of God,” says the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

“If you want me again,” writes Walt Whitman near the end of “Song of Myself,” “look for me under your boot-soles,”

Ah my dear angry Lord, Since thou dost love, yet strike; Cast down, yet help afford; Sure I will do the like. I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve: And all my sour-sweet days I will lament, and love. George Herbert

What might it mean to pray an honest prayer? Maybe it means, like Meister Eckhart, praying to be free of the need for prayer. Maybe it means praying to be fit for, worthy of, capable of living up to, the only reality that we know, which is this physical world around us, the severest of whose terms is death. Maybe it means resisting this constriction with the little ripple of spirit that cries otherwise, as all art, even the most apparently despairing, ultimately does. And maybe, just maybe, it even means praying for a parking spot in the faith that there is no permutation of reality too minute or trivial for God to be altogether absent from it.

Spiritual innocence is not beyond knowledge but inclusive of it, just as it is of joy and love, despair and doubt.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God,” says Simone Weil.)

To ripen into childhood, as Bruno Schulz puts it.

Every person has to earn the clarity of common sense, and every path to that one clearing is difficult, circuitous, and utterly, painfully individual.

I believe that the question of faith—which is ultimately separable from the question of “religion”—is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.

As for myself, I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that—and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure—I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as Saint Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand.

At its outset, all art is sacred, and its sole concern is the supernatural. This means that it is concerned with life—not with the visible but the invisible. Why is life sacred? Because we experience it within ourselves as something we have neither posited nor willed, as something that passes through us without ourselves as its cause—we can only be and do anything whatsoever because we are carried by it. This passivity of life to itself is our pathetic subjectivity—this is the invisible, abstract content of eternal art and painting.

According to Nina Kandinsky, her husband would create special colors for some paintings, colors that had never before existed, which he would then throw away once the painting was completed so that the color could never be replicated. He didn’t do this to create something original to him. He did it to honor, to participate in, the eternally dynamic nature of reality. “The world sounds,” Kandinsky wrote. “It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit.” The most obvious way of reading this thought is that matter is pregnant with spirit. Reality is always in excess of perception, and any work (or life) that does not acknowledge this excess (and this splendid ignorance) is not only missing much of reality, but is itself unreal in the worst sense.

But there’s another implication, which is not necessarily mutually exclusive. Kandinsky’s image could suggest a sort of claustrophobic finitude: Instead of spirit animating and brimming from matter, what if, sometimes, it is trapped within it? Many writers have written about the liberating experience of great art, but what if we are not the only ones being freed? “The feeling remains,” wrote Teresa of Ávila, “that God is on the journey too.”

One cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man

Here it is enough to mention that Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as a thoroughly incarnate medium, of speech as rhythm and expressive gesture, and hence of spoken words and phrases as active sensuous presences afoot in the material landscape (rather than as ideal forms that represent, but are not a part of, the sensuous world)—goes a long way toward helping us understand the primacy of language and word magic in native rituals of transformation, metamorphosis, and healing. Only if words are felt, bodily presences, like echoes or waterfalls, can we understand the power of spoken language to influence, alter, and transform the perceptual world. As this is expressed in a Modoc song: I the song I walk here David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

One grows so tired, in American public life, of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge. One wants a teller in a time like this.

The smallness of Clifton’s poems does make, in total, a large statement. Which is: I have been almost crushed by this culture’s gargantuanism and idolatry of power. I will not play your game (even the rigorous lowercase contributes to this1). I will not swagger. I will not pretend to know more than I do. Or less.

It was, for a while, a perfect evening.

(“That’s my grandma!” a little girl cried out of the large audience when her grandma took the stage, to which Clifton said, “Now that’s the best introduction one could ever get.”)

drunk with years of drinking, drunk in that way that is no longer fleeing despair but deeply, fatally committed to it—

“I have a capacity for love without / forgiveness,” writes the contemporary African American poet Terrance Hayes, seeking to make sense of his relationship to Wallace Stevens, whose racism was at times explicit. Listen closely to Clifton’s poems and you might begin to hear something similar, a capacity to make rage an embrace. It’s a kind of prophetic intimacy she manages, a fusion of utterance and action. She includes you, no matter who you are.

WON’T YOU CELEBRATE WITH ME won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

With his keg chest and stub legs, his hunter’s nose and soulful eyes, he looks like a black Lab crammed into the body of a beagle.

John Keats once said that no tenet of philosophy is ever really accepted in us until it is proved on our pulses.

To speak extreme grief, as Rowan Williams has so eloquently expressed,1 is to mark it as a thing that can be spoken of. It is to bring the abyss into the realm of consciousness; perhaps not into the realm of meaning, which would be to deform and falsely diminish it. But into the realm of time, which implies, if nothing else, the possibility of change.

Just because a work is creative doesn’t mean it’s pacific. It might be creating—that is, illuminating—a hellscape you have long avoided, and now need to make your way through.

By “against” in the subtitle of this book I don’t mean to imply a “position.” I’m not against despair in the way that I’m against, say, Donald Trump. In fact I’m sometimes very much in favor of despair when it’s a realistic appraisal of odious circumstance—like Donald Trump.

Conversion, like creation, is ongoing.

My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.

this is not a poem about the reality of love, divinity, or poetry, but about the love, divinity, and poetry of reality.

The loneliness no human love can ever quite answer.

Some people can think their way to theories in which contingency and certainty are compatible terms (modern physicists, for example); a rarer few—mystics and artists, mostly—can on occasion actually feel it. (“Time violence rends the soul,” says Weil, “by the rent eternity enters.”) But in both instances the insight is partial and fugitive, disabling as well as enabling, because the flash of insight reveals a vastness no human insight will ever reach, and painful precisely because of how intimate that distance suddenly seemed. That intimate distance is God, in whom we move and live and have our being. Until we don’t. We’re all hunger artists of one sort or another, eating ourselves (our “selves”) inward, trying to slake a hunger we usually can’t even—or perhaps just won’t dare to—name.

According to Simone Weil, it is the self that separates us from God, and which we therefore must try to annihilate. We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say “I.” That is what we have to give to God—in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish—only the destruction of the “I.” Gravity and Grace There is a real truth here, but it is in a strange way distorted by the very clarity and austerity with which it is presented. Christianity teaches that we are to put others first, are to efface ourselves and our own needs. But to efface is not to erase, not completely; complete kenosis is possible only for God. In the end it’s never quite clear to me what Weil means by the “self” unless it’s simply every single thing that makes us human—or perhaps more accurately, every single thing that makes us individually human.

What it means is that reality is catalyzed by engagement, not detachment.

The word “God” becomes necessary where there is an intense feeling of presence and oneness in opposites, an awe that cannot let go of contradictory elements, of an otherness in which I am more truly “I.” Robert Duncan, Collected Essays and Other Prose

there is nowhere to stand in order to be outside of what you are examining, for the object of observation is changed by the act of observation.

Nietzsche’s famous “There are no facts, only interpretations,”

Oskar Fischinger once wrote to John Cage that “everything in the world has a spirit that is released by its sound.” For Bronk, thinghood has such a spirit. This is why all of

his poems have, in effect, one sound. It’s like the frequency of Being.

A poem that’s reducible to a message is not a good poem. A poem you can paraphrase in prose is not a good poem. I feel absurd saying such banalities, but much

You only love when you love in vain. Try another radio probe when ten have failed, take two hundred rabbits when a hundred have died: only this is science. You ask the secret. It has just one name: again. In the end a dog carries in his jaws his image in the water, people rivet the new moon, I love you. Like caryatids our lifted arms hold up time’s granite load and defeated we shall always win. Miroslav Holub, “Ode to Joy,” tr. by Ian Milner

You only love / when you love in vain. I am drawn, like any “common reader,” to poems that reach for succinct and universalizing statements like this. “Hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has / vanished” (Marianne Moore). “The end of art is peace” (Heaney). “We are what we are only in our last bastions” (me).