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182 pages, Hardcover
First published April 2, 2013
I think that there is no light in the worldSo Wiman's faith-claims got my back up a little; I felt as if I were being told what to believe.
but the world
And I think there is light
It hardly matters whether or not one "agrees" with any of this. The words have an authenticity and authority beyond mere intellectual assertion: they burn with the brave and uncompromising life -- and death -- that lie behind them.By the end, after I more generously gave myself over to the writing, I couldn't help but be appreciative and moved by Wiman's words. I have typed this long quote for my own keeping, as it must be one of the best descriptions of religion I have ever read:
... when I hear people say that they have no religious impulse whatsoever, or when I hear believers, or would-be believers, express a sadness and frustration that they have never been absolutely overpowered by God. I always want to respond: Really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond your self, some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you? Never? Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent. It is a means of preserving and honoring something that, ultimately, transcends the elements of whatever specific religion you practice.
Always that little caveat, that little appeal to relevance: And the time of death is every moment. Let me tell you, it is qualitatively different when death leans over to sniff you, when massive unmetaphorical pain goes crawling through your bones, when fear – goddamn fear, you can't get rid of it – ices your spine.
A poem, if it's a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it's a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive... thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
There are lives that experience seems to stream clearly through, rather than getting slowed and clogged up in the drift waste of ego or stagnating in little inlets of despair, envy, rage. It has to do with seizing and releasing as a single gesture. It has to do with standing in relation to life and death as those late Bontecou mobiles do, owning an emptiness that, because you have claimed it, has become a source of light, wearing your wound that, like a ramshackle house on some high, exposed hill, sings with the hard wind that is steadily destroying it.