New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  At the same time, the important role in the struggle for peace and justice currently being played by certain branches of the church, whether Catholic or Protestant, and the accompanying movement away from stuffy respectability of social atmosphere, helped to dispel that sense of embarrassment and uncongeniality which previously had been one of the impediments standing between me and the experience of a fellowship of belief.

  I have been engaging, then, during the last few years, in my own version of the Pascalian wager, and finding that an avowal of Christian faith is not incompatible with my aesthetic nor with my political stance, since as an artist I was already in the service of the transcendent, and since Christian ethics (however betrayed in past and present history) uphold the same values I seek in a politics of racial and economic justice and nonviolence. How does the wager interact with my creative work? There the question remains: does a position of even moderate orthodoxy threaten an artist’s exploratory aesthetic freedom and “Negative Capability”? So far, from inside the creative work process, I have not found that it does; whether it will seem so for those who read the poems I write it is not possible for me to say. The public of a poet such as Margaret Avison, whose content and allusions are frequently unequivocally Christian, is certainly smaller than it would be if that were not the case. But a self-respecting poet does not court the audience but does what must be done to serve the art; so that is not a matter of concern. I have never felt that my political commitments were in themselves detrimental to my work, even though the challenge of incorporating politics in poems is one I have taken up with varying success—some good poems and some bad ones, no doubt, resulting. I have worked with and in behalf of many organizations which seek to promote justice and prevent war, and have even voted in state and national elections when there was at least a Lesser Evil to vote for, but I have never joined a party, nor even the Socialist or Peace and Freedom parties. And I believe this freedom from “party line” has helped me serve my poetic vocation in some work that is both engaged and has artistic integrity. By the same token, I see nothing inherently detrimental to my poetry in the fact that I participate in the Eucharist or that I read Julian of Norwich, Bonhoeffer, or Thomas Merton without skepticism. I am ecumenical to a degree no doubt scandalous to the more orthodox. Whether in St. Merri in Paris, a Presbyterian church in Palo Alto, or Anglican churches in London or Boston, if I discover spiritual fellowship and an active commitment to my political values I take it where I find it—and if liturgy and music are of a high order, so much the better (though if forced to choose between liturgical beauty and a manifest social conscience my loyalty would be to the latter—works over faith).

  Drawn both by its rich traditions and by its present-day radical element (e.g., the Catholic Worker movement, the Bishops and Archbishops who have taken a radical stand against paying War Taxes, production of nuclear weapons, and support by our government of oppressive regimes in Latin America and elsewhere) to the (Roman) Catholic church, but resistant to its pyramidal authoritarian structure and rigid dogma, I have liked such individual Episcopal churches as combine a strong social awareness with decent music and some liturgical grace. These, however, are hard to find; more often there is either a style of “smells and bells” I can’t help finding “camp” in its selfconsciousness—where (Roman) Catholic ritual is self-confident—or an evangelical tone that too often is excessively banal in language. The fundamentalist denominations are wholly alien to me even when they are not politically reactionary.

  I perceive an element of vulgarity in my own “shopping around” for the right place of worship, which I regret; and I also perceive the danger of a personal ecumenical freedom degenerating into mere chronic fence-sitting. But I also see that one of the poet’s tasks is, always, to maintain the delicate equilibrium which must exist between Negative Capability and passion, or creative energy. George MacDonald said that “When the desire after system or order degenerates from a need into a … ruling idea, it closes … like an unyielding skin over my mind, to the death of all development from impulse and aspiration.” Martin Buber said, “To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover.” I cannot simply enter a ready-made structure; I have to find components and construct my own. The Protestant conscience and the spiritual power of Catholic rituals (which are sacramental art—I would refer the reader to David Jones’ essay, “Art and Sacrament,” in Epoch and Artist) both tug at me. And it is not to become, in a way foreign to my life’s entire pattern, an “insider” of some cosy institution, that I seek a way to worship in communion. No doubt my sense of felicity at St. Merri in Paris was not unconnected with the fact that the Sunday mid-morning Mass there is part of a special ministry to the floating population of students, tourists, artists, street people which throngs the neighborhood. Though I own a house and have steady work, I am by nature, heritage, and as an artist, forever a stranger and pilgrim.

  To return to the question of what utility, if any, my experience may have for others, which I began by saying was unanswerable except by others: if indeed there’s a message here, it is perhaps that articulated in a dream-based poem I wrote in the 1960s, “The Novices.” In this poem a man and a boy go into the forest to perform what they feel, without understanding it, is a duty; they are to tug out of the earth a great iron chain which is attached at the other end to an oak tree. But while they are attempting to do this the tutelary spirit of the place, the Wood Demon, appears, and tells them they need not perform this strenuous task: his purpose in summoning them was partially a test of responsiveness to a call (there are Biblical parallels here if one cares to find them) and even more importantly,

  … that they might look about them

  and see intricate branch and bark,

  stars of moss and the old scars

  left by dead men’s saws,

  and not ask what that chain was.

  To leave the open fields

  and enter the forest,

  that was the rite.

  Knowing there was mystery, they could go.

  Go back now! And he receded

  among the multitude of forms,

  the twists and shadows they saw now, listening

  to the hum of the world’s wood.

  This acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, “God and the imagination are one,” I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.

  Response to a questionnaire from Religion & Intellectual Life, Vol. 1, #4. Summer 1984.

  Work That Enfaiths

  (1990)

  WHAT A FRAUD I feel, sitting down to write about faith that works! What a fraud I shall feel when I am actually giving this paper to a gathering of people who, I know in advance, will each of them have a degree of faith not only far beyond my own but perhaps beyond anything I shall ever attain, or possess, or—since those verbs both seem ill-chosen—shall ever be blessed with! I know such faith only at second or third hand: that’s to say, I have just enough faith to believe it exists. To imagine it. And to feel a kind of pity for people who can’t imagine it at all, who don’t believe it exists, who diminish its possibility in their minds by calling it self-delusion or superstition. Belief is something else. I can say the creed without perjury. But faith…. When my mother tried a few times to tell me about the faith she did in
deed possess, she sought the right words in vain, although she was an articulate woman; and if she conveyed something of her experience to me so convincingly, it was more by her tone of voice than by the words she found. A singer (she was Welsh), she loved Handel’s Messiah aria, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and despised any performance of it which, though technically excellent, failed to give the emphasis of conviction to that word, “know”: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Such passionate knowledge, recurrent, intermittent, or in some cases even sustained, is what I know I don’t have. “Flickering Mind”* confesses the fact:

  Lord, not you,

  it is I who am absent.

  At first

  belief was a joy I kept in secret,

  stealing alone

  into sacred places;

  a quick glance, and away—and back,

  circling.

  I have long since uttered your name

  but now

  I elude your presence.

  I stop

  to think about you, and my mind

  at once

  like a minnow darts away,

  darts

  into the shadows, into gleams that fret

  unceasing over

  the river’s purling and passing.

  Not for one second

  will my self hold still, but wanders

  anywhere,

  everywhere it can turn. Not you,

  it is I am absent.

  You are the stream, the fish, the light,

  the pulsing shadow,

  you the unchanging presence, in whom all

  moves and changes.

  How can I focus my flickering, perceive

  at the fountain’s heart

  the sapphire I know is there?

  But if I feel fraudulent, why have I agreed to participte in this event? To talk about “faith that works?”

  Well, because I’m a poet, and I do have faith in what Keats called the truth of the imagination; and because, when I’m following the road of imagination ( following a leading, as the Quakers say), both in the decisions of a day and in the word-by-word, line-by-line decisions of a poem in the making. I’ve come to see certain analogies, and also some interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith.

  The analogies are recognizable if one thinks of the necessary combination in any artist of discipline and inspiration, work and luck, technique and talent, or craft and genius. Every work of art is an “act of faith” in the vernacular sense of being a venture into the unknown. The artist must dive into waters whose depths are unplumbed, and trust that he or she will neither be swallowed up nor come crashing against a cement surface four foot down, but will rise and be buoyed upon them. Every work of art, even if long premeditated, enters a stage of improvisation as soon as the artist moves from thinking about it to beginning to form its concrete reality. That step, from entertaining a project for a poem or other work of art, to actually painting, composing, dancing, writing it, resembles moving from intellectual assent to opening the acts of daily life to permeation by religious faith. I know the first from experience; I know the second only from a distance, but my experience enables me to imagine it, and to see that such permeation is “faith that works.”

  The interaction I perceive between the journey of art and the journey of faith necessitates my speaking rather personally. As I became, a few years ago, more and more occupied with questions of belief, I began to embark on what I’ll call “do-it yourself theology.” Sometimes I was merely trying to clarify my mind and note down my conclusions-in-process by means of the totally undistinguished prose of journal entries. Sometimes, however, it was in poems that the process took place, and most notably in the first such poem I wrote, a longish piece called Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus (“doubting Thomas”). The poem began as an experiment in structure. I had attended a choral recital for which the choir director had put together parts of Masses from many periods—medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, and modern, not in chronological order. The program had a striking unity, nevertheless. It was obviously the traditional liturgical framework that not only enabled such a variety of styles to avoid clashing, but provided a cohesive overall effect, so that the concert was itself a work, a composed entity. And I thought to myself that it might be possible to adapt this framework, which had served such a diversity of musicians, to the creation of a poem. At the time—and even when, a couple of years later, I actually undertook this experiment—I still considered myself an agnostic. I thought of the poem as “an agnostic Mass” (using the word Mass merely as a formal description, as one might in saying of a Baroque composer, “He wrote over thirty Masses”), basing each part on what seemed its primal character: the Kyrie a cry for mercy, the Gloria a praise-song, the Credo an individual assertion, and so on: each a personal, secular meditation. But a few months later, when I had arrived at the Agnus Dei, I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem—that long swim through waters of unknown depth—had been also a conversion process, if you will.

  Another instance of the interaction of artistic labor and incipient faith—shall I say, of the workings of the Holy Spirit, or is that too presumptuous?—concerns the way in which, writing a libretto about El Salvador for a composer who’d been commissioned to write an oratorio, I dwelt longer on the work and words of Archbishop Oscar Romero than I might have done otherwise, with my tendency to rush ahead too swiftly from one experience to another. Since I intended to quote directly from Romero, the thought of him remained constantly present to me and became a factor in my growing ability to stop making such a fuss, inside my mind, about various points of doubt. (If a Romero— or a Dorothy Day, an Anthony Bloom, a Raymond Hunthausen, a Jean Sulivan, or a Thomas Merton— or a Pascal, for that matter!—could believe, who was I to squirm and fret, as if I required more refined mental nourishment than theirs?)

  As to my more substantial stumbling block, the suffering of the innocent and the consequent question of God’s nonintervention, which troubled me less in relation to individual instances than in regard to the global panorama of oppression and violence, it was through poetry—through images given me by creative imagination while pondering this matter—that I worked through to a theological explanation which satisfied me. God’s nature, as Love, demands a freely given requital from that part of the creation which particularly embodies Consciousness: the Human. God therefore gives to human beings the power to utter yes or no—to perceive the whole range of dualities without which there could be no freedom. An imposed requital of love would be a contradiction in terms. Invisible wings are given to us too, by which, if we would dare to acknowledge and use them, we might transcend the dualities of time and matter—might be upheld to walk on water. Instead, we humans persistently say no, and persistently experience our wings only as a dragging weight on our backs. And so God remains nailed to the Cross—for the very nature of God as Love would be violated by taking back the gift of choice which is our very nature. It’s an idea, or theory, undoubtedly familiar to many of you through works of religious philosophy; but for me it was original, not only because I hadn’t come across such expositions of it but also because the concrete images which emerged in the process of writing convinced me at a more intimate level of understanding than abstract argument would have done. The poem I called “Standoff’* articulates this idea.

  Assail God’s hearing with gull-screech knifeblades.

  Cozen the saints to plead our cause, claiming

  grace abounding.

  God crucified on the resolve not to displume

  our unused wings

  hears: nailed palms

  cannot beat off the flames of insistent sound,

  strident or plaintive,

  nor reach to annul freedom—

  nor would God renege.

  Our shoulders ache. The abyss

  gapes at us. />
  When shall we

  dare to fly?

  In a somewhat earlier, related poem called “The Task”* I had pictured God as a weaver sitting at his loom in a vast wilderness, solitary as a bear in the Alaskan tundra, listening to the cries of anguish far off, audible above the clack of the loom because all else is so quiet—and hastening his task; for the cloth must be woven before the “terrible beseeching” can cease. A friend’s description of the heavenly but awesome quiet of the wilderness near Mount Denali was one source for this poem. Another source was what Julian of Norwich tells us she learned in one of her “showings”: that there is a divine plan, both temporal and transcendent, which will account for the unchecked miseries of the world, a plan which our finite minds are incapable of grasping. God informs her, you remember, to trust this, and tells her that “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The time is not yet ripe for us to comprehend this mystery, she is told. But meanwhile all manner of thing is not well, and “The Task” images the toil of a lonely God.