At the end of his poem “Introduction,” Franz Wright writes: “And I have heard God’s silence like the sun / and sought to change // Now / I’m just going to listen to the silence / till the Silence.” In these lines, Wright gestures toward a key difficulty of the Christian life; namely, that the God to whom the Christian prays remains silent.
Decades before Wright’s poem, Simone Weil rendered this problem concisely. “We have to be in a desert,” she wrote. “For he whom we must love is absent.”
What does it mean, then, to live in this desert of desertion? And what in particular does it mean for poetry — tasked as it is with speaking both to and about a seemingly-absent, silent God?
These questions run like a subterranean river through Christian Wiman’s Survival is a Style, the poet’s first new collection of poems in six years. In “Good Lord the Light,” Wiman welcomes “misery” and says “goodbye [to] belief” as he observes “the light / cutting across the lake / so long gone / to ice—” The poem ends:
There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimson
no one needs see
to see.
Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.
Besides the obvious observation that the intervening years haven’t dulled Wiman’s sharp musical ear, these lines find the poet grappling with Weil’s problem of divine absence. What, the poem asks, is the relationship between what we see and what we don’t — or, rather, what we can’t?
The second and third lines quoted above echo a moment in the New Testament that brings these questions into focus. In the Book of Acts, Paul argues with the philosophers of Athens, claiming that their altar “to the unkown god” is dedicated, in fact, to the Christian God — who, according to Paul, “is actually not far from each of us, for ‘in him we live and move and have our being …’”
Here, Paul uses not only the existing Athenian religion in his argument but the existing poetry, as well: the line “in him we live and move and have our being” is lifted from Epimenides, a poet Paul’s audience would have known.
When Wiman quotes this line two centuries later, he imports these contrasting historical layers, which form an “under” below his words in which the Christian and pre-Christian histories “still move, breathe, / and have their being.”
Below, too, the literal surface of this frozen lake, Wiman’s speaker knows that the “quick coals and crimson” of the living fish still exist — though he can’t see them. But the ending of the poem wavers in its certainty of an existential “under”; the final lines abandon both “knowledge” and any sense of a “beyond” — and find, instead, the speaker wandering his “own soul” not like a winter but rather to be one, as if it this were the goal of any life of faith.
If clean, divisible clarity is what you’re after, then Survival is a Style will — intentionally — disappoint. Although Wiman laments, in one poem, that his life is like a library that houses “theology where poetry should be,” this worry appears, in the main, misplaced. Throughout the book, Wiman resists the urge either to explain or proselytize and, instead, follows his poems to their aesthetic conclusions.
Nowhere is this delicate interplay between thought and feeling better managed than in “Whatever the Birds Were,” which reads, in full:
Like a spirited theological colloquy between two people
whose faith has failed,
two trees, alders, thrashed drastic in the gust
that subsided so suddenly it seemed each had inhaled, and stilled.
Whatever the birds were that flitted back and forth between them then,
they made a silver-seeming noise.
Although this poem depicts literally nothing more than birds flying between two trees after a strong wind, the opening simile colors the entire poem. With the smirk of a poet housed in a divinity school’s faculty (which he is), Wiman paints a scene in the opening couplet of what he calls elsewhere “reality without reverence” — and in so doing shows us the danger (if not the impossibility) of a purely intellectual faith.
But the poem refuses to stand in judgment. After the thick consonance (“thrashed drastic”) of the wind and after, too, the parade of soft s’s that still the scene, the poem stays firmly within the physical landscape, refusing to reach for clarity or definition — refusing, indeed, even to name the birds.
And what of the “silver-seeming noise”? This image — which mirrors Franz Wright’s hearing of “God’s silence like the sun” — offers a synesthetic paradox. Whatever this noise is, it passes between not only the trees but also the “two people / whose faith had failed.” And though our senses fail to capture it, we intuit its music as the echo of that faith that, perhaps, hasn’t failed after all.
The movement displayed in this poem — from an overly-intellectual theology to an incarnational poetics — is typical of Survival is a Style. In this vein, much of the book finds Wiman alternating between solemn meditations on suffering and playful similes that delight in language’s possibilities.
The similes we find in one poem — “Watermelon Heaven,” which offers a scene from a circus—will serve as metonymic for the entire collection. Here we find “lobsters on plates / like little Brutalist buildings / made of rage”; “Iced oysters like tiny dirty nebulae”; and, to pick only one more example, “a red bouncy castle [that] bounces manically / like a house fire // seen through pain pills…”
These similes suggest — in both their imaginative magnitude and quicksilver music — a joy at the sheer fact of language. I say “joy” purposefully, as it’s an emotion to which Wiman has been particularly wedded over the years. As he wrote in the introduction to his anthology Joy: 100 Poems, “Joy is the only inoculation against the despair to which every sane person is prone.”
In Wiman’s poetics, joy embraces the fullness of suffering while refusing to give it the final word. This principle guides much of “The Parable of Perfect Silence,” a long poem that occupies the book’s entire third section and serves as an elegy for his father as well as a meditation on both his childhood poverty and his relationship with God.
“The Parable of Perfect Silence” functions almost like a classical fugue, in which seemingly-disparate motifs appear in the different stanzas (which function as discrete sections) then disappear, only to reappear pages later. Near the end of the poem, Wiman addresses this mode directly:
Flashes and fragments, flashes and fragments,
these images are not facets of some unknowable whole
but entire existences in themselves, like worlds
that under God’s gaze shear and shear and, impossibly, are:
untouching, entangled, sustained, free.
It’s difficult to read the word “fragment” without calling to mind Eliot’s famous line from “The Waste Land”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” But Wiman’s fragments are different. Though there are certainly “ruins” in this poem, he feels no need to make these fragments cohere into “some unknowable whole.” Instead, he allows his memories simply to exist alongside each other and — under “God’s gaze” — to be, paradoxically, both “entangled” and “free.”
Two sections earlier, Wiman depicts a dream in which he receives the Eucharist:
Remember, he said, memory is a poor man’s prison.
Make to have and to love one live infinitive,
then blessed my brow with the sign of the cross.
I woke without a chance to ask the obvious:
But what if all our songs are songs of loss?
These lines are sublime in both their music and their concise rendering of the problem of suffering. But how to answer this devasting question?
Unsurprisingly, Wiman takes the only available route: he doesn’t — or rather, he doesn’t answer it immediately. However, by way of closure, perhaps we can understand “Epilogue” — the book’s last poem — as a kind of answer. The poem ends:
I speak a word I have not spoken
and by that word am broken open,
a cry entirely other entirely mine.
*
In league with the stones of the field,
I am by being healed.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better summation of the reality to which Christian theology strives to point. In the final couplet, Wiman alludes to the Book of Job, an archetypal Biblical story of suffering. In the penultimate line, he quotes Job’s friend Eliphaz the Temanite, who urges Job not to give up on life. “As for me,” Eliphaz says, “I would seek God, / and to God I would commit my cause.”
Eliphaz goes on to offer a series of promises about God’s faithfulness: “For he wounds, but he binds up… At destruction and famine you shall laugh…
For you shall be in league with the stones of the field,
and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.
You shall know that your tent is safe,
you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing.
In these final lines of Survival is a Style, Wiman refuses despair — though, like Job, he has many reasons to embrace it. Nor is the hope he chooses naïve; rather, like joy (which both leads to and grows from this kind of hope), it’s a hope that affirms the reality of suffering.
And by “I am by being healed” he doesn’t mean “I am being healed”; instead, Wiman trusts in a vision of “being” — in a theology of being — that, despite all of his “songs of loss,” allows him to believe what Eliphaz the Temanite promises: that, if he “seek[s] God,” his tent will be safe; that, in the end, he will inspect his fold “and miss nothing.”
[Published on February 4, 2020 by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 95 pages, $24.00 hardcover]