CHRISTIAN WIMAN
IT WAS A FLASH OF AUDACIOUS CLEVERNESS WHEN THE architects of Christianity fired the aristocratic godheads of the Greeks and Romans and made their own hero into a shoeless peasant who suffers a humiliation and defeat that then becomes an exaltation and triumph. In a world where the majority of us are targets of the scurviest forms of power, this sentimental way of seeing has some pretty lustrous appeal.
In the West, Christ remains irresistible to the sick and low and peripheral. Nietzsche might have loathed the Christian worldview because he considered it a cop-out for failures, but he stopped short of seeing that we are all of us failures, kings and knaves alike, in that we all succumb to the double-kick of disease and death. Christ calls to the infirm because his risen body is a victory over his broken body, while Roethke calls spirituality “the rambling lies invented for the sick.”
The trick in producing a spiritual memoir spurred by disease is circumventing the fact that you have become a cliché: of course you discovered or rediscovered your god during a grievous bout with cancer—doesn’t everyone? In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, poet Christian Wiman shows how that circumvention happens: by way of wounded bafflement before the divine, the eschewing of populist piety, and a recognition of the umbilical that attaches poetry to prayer.
Every genuine poet is a believer because every genuine poet stretches for the sublime and knows that belief must be lyrical and never literal. What one beholds in religious poets such as Herbert, Donne, and Hopkins is equal to what one beholds in a secular poet such as Whitman: the ecstatic uncoiling of language in assertion of the passionate, in transference of the seemingly ineffable. For Wordsworth, the divine was assimilated through that human propensity for passion. For Cardinal Newman and his Oxford Movement, poetry became the necessary outgrowth of faith, of religious verity, and Matthew Arnold said that the term “God” is “a term of poetry.”
In verse and prose alike, Christian Wiman harnesses a profound and probing spiritual sensibility. He is the much-lauded author of three books of poetry and also a collection of critical and personal essays, two sections of which have been smuggled into My Bright Abyss to new effect. For the past decade he has been at the wheel of Poetry magazine, since 1912 the premier American outfit for poems (and which, by dint of some abracadabra that renewed faith in magic, received a $200 million endowment from philanthropist Ruth Lily in 2003, suggesting—“proving” is a touch too strong—that poetry isn’t the cadaver American culture wants it to be). Wiman revamped the magazine’s aesthetic and more than doubled its circulation, all while composing his own necessary verse and being racked by an unholy, incurable bone cancer.
His collection Every Riven Thing contains an urgency of vision and an ecumenical reach rare among poets of his generation; his lines are often a blend of the concretion of William Carlos Williams and the spiritual, cerebral sweep of Geoffrey Hill. A stanza in “Not Altogether Gone” reads: “When there is nothing left to curse / you can curse nothing / but when there is nothing left to love / the heart eats inward and inward its own need / for release.” Love, too, is a landscape central to Wiman’s vision; in Every Riven Thing and My Bright Abyss especially, he restores to love’s transcendence its rightful integrity, its open-armed mystery.
Poetry, Wiman writes in this memoir, is “that brief marriage of word and world.” His own world was ravaged by the cancer that brought him to the hellmouth, and this book chronicles his hard clawing through tremendous anguish and the morasses of faith. There’s a devastating passage in which Wiman describes himself fetal on the sofa at dawn, his varicose bones causing a “lightning strike of absolute feeling and absolute oblivion” as he prays not to his truant God but to the pain itself: savage, omnipotent pain. You won’t find Wiman’s brand of Christianity in the polished Sunday pews. Rather, his faith acknowledges and then approaches the mystical, the abject void of being, the terrible and terror-making quiet of God. In the poem “One Time,” in Every Riven Thing, Wiman writes: “I do not know how to come closer to God / except by standing where a world is ending / for one man.”
Wiman’s faith threatens to warp and make meaningless the very definition of faith: “Trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author’s personal faith is not actively at risk.” The complex immensity of Donne’s Holy Sonnets derives from just that: fury at God for his inability to feel God, and the reality that Donne is always just moments away from giving up the struggle. Hopkins’s verse is equally immense but with an altogether different aim: warding off the doctrinal despair that threatens to damn him, and the making of God manifest in rhythm as Wordsworth made God manifest in nature. Wiman’s spiritual memoir seeks a similar understanding, a similar reckoning, born of both upheaval and melancholy. My Bright Abyss is built of prose so lovely and true you want to roll it around in your mouth and then speak it to strangers on the street:
We crave radical ruptures when we have allowed the nerves of our inner lives to go numb. But after those ruptures—the excitement or the tragedy, the pleasure or the pain—the mind returns to what it was, the soul quicksilvers off from the pierce of experience, and the kingdom of boredom, which could be the kingdom of God, begins the clock-tick toward its next collapse.
Here, too, is a welcome abundance of the thinkers and bards who have informed Wiman’s wide view: Patrick Kavanagh, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Herbert, Hopkins, and Geoffrey Hill. Wiman’s own verse, peppered throughout, augments the lyrical potency of this dire rumination: “My God my bright abyss / into which all my longing will not go / once more I come to the edge of all I know / and believing nothing believe in this.”
Raised in a sandstorming West Texas town that seems at the very skirt of civilization, Wiman was exposed to the intense rhythms and pitch of the Baptist Church. He never met a professed unbeliever until he reached college in Virginia, where he embarked upon his own thinking species of unbelief. His full-circle spiritual odyssey recounted in My Bright Abyss is not a simple recrudescence, not a matter of simply picking up his faith where he left it, because “if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.”
What Wiman strives for in this book is a new way of believing, a dismantling of the ancient paradigms and rubric that deceive us, all those unholdable terms such as eternity and omniscient. (One poem in Every Riven Thing begins, “Lord is not a word.”) He strives also for a dismissing of our infantile human projections of the divine, after Feuerbach, who, in his 1841 treatise The Essence of Christianity, argues that our gods are mere projections of human longing and fear, just as in the ninth century BC Hindus realized their deities were man-made symbols of psychological powers. Unlike many artists and intellectuals, Wiman fears no incompatibility between the movements of mind and the surging of spirit.
My Bright Abyss is segmented into eleven chapters, each one consisting of short portions separated by asterisks, ruminant paragraphs with the impacted density of prose poems. Wiman is less concerned with telling a story than uncovering a condition, so the effect is quite like the Gospels: one may dip or plunge in anywhere for hints of wisdom, for beauty, for sustenance. Writing about Browning’s poem “Childe Roland,” Wiman offers this prescription for dying: “To fling yourself into failure; to soar into the sadness by which you’ve lived; to die with neither defiance nor submission, but in some higher fusion of the two; to walk lost at the last into the arms of emptiness, crying the miracles of God.” Wiman might have neglected to credit Geoffrey Hill with those final words—in his poem “Genesis,” Hill writes: “Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God”—but one suspects it’s an appropriation Hill would applaud.
Wiman’s sentences fall asleep only when he chooses to recline into sentiments no better than dogma: “God’s love creates and sustains human love,” or “God is constant.” Hopkins’s line “Christ plays in ten thousand places” means something; Kavanagh’s line “God’s truth is life,” which Wiman takes for the title of a chapter, means nothing—it’s merely a shadow of meaning, a dogma costumed as revelation. Wiman’s difficult faith can also have him sounding somewhat flip: one evening he and his wife “wondered whether people who do not have the love of God in them . . . whether such people could fully feel human love,” when, for many, the absence of imaginary divine love bolsters the worth of actual human love: he has it backward. And that “wondered” is a ruse: if you have to wonder about such a thing you already have your answer.
An intellectual wary of intellectualism, Wiman doesn’t acknowledge the grip of illness on the mind. Our most entrenched pieties get their mitts on us in childhood or illness, precisely when we are most in need of explanations and least equipped with the rational equipment to reject them. It’s telling that Wiman didn’t seek Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, or Zeus when his cancer came: he limped to Christ, the very figure of his place and time: his culture, his country, his circumstance. The “modern” of his subtitle suggests that belief or spirituality can willy-nilly mean anything you want it to mean. Many Americans are “modern” in their spiritual beliefs, assenting to newfangled versions of a tradition and myth they can’t be bothered to investigate.
It might be the apex of egoism to believe that a deity has a personal interest in your mammalian body and how it does or does not function, and you’d have to be suffering from stage-four narcissism to consider your death an affront to the firmament and not just to your family, but without this religious breed of self-involvement we wouldn’t have the art most central to our survival—Leonardo, Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Haydn: you can make your own list. (D. H. Lawrence: “One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.”) Wiman is most at home when writing on art and poetry, when unpacking lines by Stevens and Rilke and Frost. “People who think poetry has no power,” he writes, “have a very limited conception of what power means.” If literature is preparation for living it is also, more important, equipment for dying. When the drape of darkness threatens to cover you, literature is the one religion worth having.
My Bright Abyss is ultimately not about the power of piety but the power of poetry, since our only means of apprehending the divine are poetic means, which is precisely how Shelley and company made religion of their art (and why a priggish Christian such as Eliot was contemptuous of it). Ortega y Gasset in Man and Crisis writes of “the sincere and naked depths” of an individual’s “own personal self. There he must go back to make contact with himself.” One of the many strengths of Wiman’s rumination is its own soft-spoken sincerity, its dignified lack of bathos, its Hopkinsian earnestness devoid of the shifty proselytizing and reductiveness that mars many a spiritual memoir. There’s a gut-punching section written to his twin daughters that begins: “My loves, I will be with you, even when I am not with you.”
In descending through those naked depths and attempting to make crucial contact with himself, Wiman refuses easeful conclusions, he celebrates the verse and the two-faced joy at the hub of our lives—Nietzsche’s tragic joy—and in doing so he has written what will be for many a life-changing book. The Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, in Tragedy and Philosophy, pens a line both beautiful and true, a line of finality, and one that should be emblazoned on every blackboard and pulpit—and in every hospital—across this land: “After the retreat from poetry comes the retreat from prose, and finally the retreat into darkness.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review, SUMMER 2013