Zero Bone It is difficult to categorize. It is part autobiographical sketch, part philosophical and theological reflection, and of course poetry. Most of the poems and prose in these 50 “Works Against Despair” are contemporary, and many of the poems are by Wiman himself. Whatever the genre or origin, all revolve around the question of faith, which can only be gained by both the suspension of disbelief and the suspension of belief itself. Skepticism and religious verbosity both seem to be enemies of faith and even allies of despair. Wiman calls instead to appreciate beauty, for, he writes, “beauty stimulates an instinct for an order beyond the order it realises.” Atheism and theism are often hollow intellectual exercises, and theology is almost always the same, but poetry is not.
Of course, doubts that the intellect is not the path to God have a long history, most notably in 14th century English mystical writings. Cloud of ignorancewarns, “By love you can reach God, you can grasp him, but never by thought.” But here Wyman seems to be pushing poetry to the service of faith, to hearing the Word in the everyday. Reflecting on Carol Ann Duffy’s remarkable poem “Prayer,” he suggests that “the Word may come from the leaves of a tree, or from a rudimentary piano lesson, or from a radio forecast of ships.” Faith comes first from hearing, “literally, from the air, from the sound.” That is how poetry works on the listener, and why Wyman rightly says, “If you treat poetry like prose, you’re searching for meaning. But just as the word of God reaches you through everyday events, the meaning of poetry can only come to you through sound.
The book is open to the reader from anywhere, so there is no point in searching for threads of argument. It would be too difficult to make an argument, but Wiman admits that he (like the “general reader”) is drawn to “poetry that aims at concise, universal statements.” The problem with such statements is that “life is often hostile to them.” We may seek the solace of universal truths, but “there is a profound contradiction between the need to speak of ultimate things and the fact that those things are exempt from words.” Again, poetry comes into play. Poetry is a good place for “words that give presence to the unspoken.” This is clearly on the religious border. Poetry “can direct and enable the appropriate terror we feel when approaching the absolute (including, if necessary, the absolute truth of contingency), and it can direct and enable its disappearance.”
So there is a kind of faith here that is intense but “tentative and fleeting.” This poetic faith is “a matter of nerve and instinct,” in contrast to religious faith, which may “emerge” from the nerves but “requires a conscious leap.” Poetic faith accepts the reality and pain of this world, while religious faith seeks “more of a world than our wounds have given us.” Too much of it, Wiman seems to suggest.
Wiman’s “faith” is sometimes poetic, sometimes religious, and elusive. There’s nothing original in suggesting that doubt sometimes challenges those with faith, but Wiman is looking for something different: faith one day, doubt the next, not faith. and Doubt is at the same time. Doubt is essential to Wiman’s faith, but wait! “If we turn doubt into idolatry, we become so used to and complacent with God’s absence and distance that we end up negatively perceiving ourselves through our ignorance,” he warns. If doubt is where you are headed, perhaps you should resist it. Why can’t we just let the world be the world? Why must we speak of incarnation and resurrection? He then answers his own question: there is more to the world than meets the eye. “We know in our bones that this is true and divine,” Wiman writes. But “we know in our bones that we can never deny it.” know This is the truth, and the absence is also sacred. His discussion of the work of William Bronk is particularly sharp here, playing with nuances of denial and agnosticism: “Not this, not this, not this,” he says again and again, but in the silences between, this It begins to shine.’ The religious mystic’s dark night of the soul hinges on the same fruitful contradiction.
