In 1975, Anne Sexton published her last volume of poetry before her suicide, An Awful Rowing Toward God. Fascinated at that time with the ruby darkness of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, I went out immediately and bought Sexton’s book. I had written in 1973 my own book of religious verse, Conversations With a Lapsed Atheist, and I knew I was working in forbidden territory. Could such a well-established poet, such as Anne Sexton, get away with a book of poems, here in the latter fourth of the twentieth century, that had the word “God” in its title? Would not the New York Review of Books or the New York Times Literary Supplement go for the throat?
In my world back then — the world of musty library stacks and late night discussions of the symbolism of Joyce, the world of college English professors, Episcopalians and Unitarians — God was an embarrassment from the past, and discussion of spiritual matters was considered passe, as dated as horse and buggy. You just were not cool if you weren’t sceptically modern and “scientific.” After all, Nietzsche had declared God dead back in the 19th century, and the existentialists, reacting to the horrors of World War II, had discovered that everything was absurd, without any meaning until you got around to inventing it. If you were Catholic, you were lapsed; if you were Protestant, you were agnostic; if you were Jewish you’d moved over to a guru or a bit of Zen Buddhism, a la Allen Ginsberg. Eastern religions could pass; they were exotic and those people were primitive anyway. They had not “advanced” far enough to lose contact with certain mythic, psychic truths.
My first professor job was in a small college in west Texas. Many of the professors there went to church, but they always seemed to do it for the same reasons they went to football games: to make a good impression on the dean of the college, so as to guarantee advancement and tenure. In the offices at the university the tone of the conversation moved between two poles: an attempt at the light atheistical gaiety of the Enlightenment, and a certain existential gloom and blackness when considering the sad state of education.
How can you understand humankind if you lobotomize out the spiritual? In poetry, we thus get all the skimpy, stripped down poems that are today the dominant fad where the poets tell us about their disappointing love affairs.
Many of the professors I knew in west Texas had come out of small rural communities. They were the first generation of college students in the family, and had done heavy time as children in the closed rooms of often racist and certainly hypocritical small town churches. Throwing off the church of their fathers played a major part in rejecting small town values. Accepting the more urbane and secular values of the city was for them a tremendous experience of liberation, something they never tired of discussing over a once forbidden glass of beer. One can understand where such folk are coming from. What is hard to understand, however, is the hostility these same folk sometimes direct at those whose path is different. The critics crowed on and on about Sexton’s An Awful Rowing Toward God. How dare she! How dare she run up to the priests on the street and talk metaphysics. I heard one of them told her that God was her typewriter.
Let me make it clear right now that I am not arguing for a return to the father religions. No, I have not converted to the party of Jerry Falwell’s moral majority. Too much has happened for any sort of simple return. If you doubt that, consider what happened to the theologian Harvey Cox at Harvard. About ten years ago, he found himself teaching a class which had a curious imbalance of females to males. Every time he would say “he” for God, the feminists in the class would let out a loud, combined hiss. Feminism in our time has struck a blow against traditional Christianity as severe, if not more severe, than the blow struck in 1859 by Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Some of the more liberal churches are beginning to accept women ministers, but I don’t think you will hear God referred to as “she” from many pulpits.
Christianity is not only a male-oriented faith; it is a faith which has made serious compromises with political empires, beginning with the Romans, in order to achieve its present wide influence. Association with the swords of power has meant the wide diffusion of the faith to large parts of the globe, as has also happened with Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism through association with political power blocks. In the process, however, Christianity has become, often, as arrogant and jingoistic as the various political nationalities it has traveled with, so that even today a Western “white” consciousness still prevails. All them savages still remain out there in the third world — all them Indians with their superstitions needing to be “civilized” by conversion to Christianity.
Few Americans have had the opportunity to study anthropology and become familiar with the complex and beautiful religious world of the Hopi or Navaho here in our own country, let alone the beliefs of the Eskimos in the Arctic or the Bushmen in Australia. Fewer still could bring themselves to admit that perhaps these faiths, more centered in place, might teach us things about the spirit that the “world” religions (what a complacently arrogant phrase) have lost because of their mobility.
How can we continue to have poetry without a sense of spirit? Here we live in a time of the breakdown of traditional values and the questioning of traditional religions, yet where are the poets writing of the ecstatic and seeking new visions, or reanimating, from new perspectives, old ones? Lawrence attempted a synthesis of woman-centered pagan orphic cults with male-centered Christianity in The Man Who Died, an audacious retelling of the resurrection where Christ gives up his celibacy and falls in love with a woman. Yeats in A Vision put together an original theory of history and psychology. Separating the poet from the spirit, such as we see in contemporary poetry, is about as ridiculous as separating the drummer from his passion. Poetry and spirituality, in thousands of forms, have always traveled together through time, place, and cultures. There are the ancient Vedic texts of India, there are the psalms of the Bible. There is Dante and Spenser and Kabir and Milton and the Gita, just to name a few. The poet Blake recognized this essential linkage and took issue with the French intellectuals of the revolutionary period. He sided with them in the overthrowing of the power of the priesthood and in the destruction of certain religious attitudes and institutions, but he rejected any purely mechanical view of reality: “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; / Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain! / You throw the sand against the wind, / And the wind blows it back again . . . The atoms of Democritus / And Newton’s particles of light / Are sands upon the Red Sea shore, / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.” Like other romantics, he saw the dangers of a world view without a sense of the divine: how a mechanical view of the universe reduces man to a mechanism — at best, a prosperous machine.
In our modern era, I detect two major trends resulting from the rejection of spirituality. First, one gets an obsession with exhaustion and alienation. The Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) is probably the most famous English language example of this trend. Not all writers beginning in this tradition have remained with it, however. The Italian playwright Pirandello turned in his later work to Jewish mysticism for his inspiration, although these works are relatively unknown. The second direction resulting from the exclusion of the spiritual has been the growing obsession in literature with the sociological or psychological. The result is a highly limited view of human nature, for how can one understand humankind if you lobotomize out the spiritual? In poetry we thus get all the skimpy, stripped down poems that are today the dominant fad where the poets tell us about their disappointing love affairs. An Indian scholar once remarked to me, “You American poets, your poems are so small because your subjects are so small. Can’t you write about anything besides your own unhappiness?”
One can indeed ask where is the politics in literature? Where is the history and the drama of great philosophical ideas? Where is the mythology, as well as where is god or the gods? There are exceptions, of course. Marge Piercy and Ricardo Sanchez explore politics. James Cody works with Celtic myth. Robert Peters explores American and German historical subjects, and Charles Olson and Ezra Pound certainly were poets of ideas. I am not out to banish entirely this tradition of self-analysis. The Socratic search for self-understanding is a viable poetic tradition. It so dominates and smothers out from the literary magazines other subjects, however, that I do yearn for at least a two-year moratorium.
I am not out to prescribe the spiritual paths poets might choose to follow. The teachings of the Jew who wrote nothing down, Jesus Christ, still have value. Buddhism has much to teach us about serenity in a world of strife and sorrow and Hinduism can teach us a great deal about the many faces of God in all manifestations. Both latter paths have valuable spiritual techniques, such as yoga and meditation, to share with those of us brought up in the West — techniques which can do more than a thousand volumes in providing actual spiritual experiences. Not to be overlooked by the hungry poet are the practices of spiritual masters such as Krishnamurti, Bubba Free John, and others. There are of course frauds in this area of life as there are in any area of life, and a wary and questioning eye must at least at first be maintained. A third area of spiritual investigation is our own Native American traditions and the practices of indigenous cultures of South and Central America. Maria Sabina of Mexico does poetic chants in her healing ceremonies. The mushroom she uses for her visions is the source from which LSD was first isolated in the 1950’s. Anne Waldman has used the chants of Sabina as a model for her own poetry.
Whatever path is followed, of course, depends on background. Those of us belonging to the post WW II generation have different attitudes toward spirituality than many born before the war. Many of us were brought up in totally secular surroundings, in the bland suburbs of large cities, and if we feel the need to reject anything it is not religion, but the lack of it. Religious interest since the 1960’s has heated up so that there are now faiths as various as Joseph’s coat of many colors. The west mall of the University of Texas is hot with the drama of conflicting faiths, as the Pentecostals, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, and the Society for Religious Toleration battle for the minds of incoming freshmen.
I am aware that our cultural values need to be fought on two fronts. Infinitely preferable to me, I freely admit, is the most decadent and hedonistic materialism, compared to the dark backwoods chauvinism of Pentecostal fundamentalism. I am also quite aware that “spiritual” subjects such as “reincarnation,” “auras,” and “chakras” quickly become pastimes for the bored and well-heeled. There is a whole crowd of traveling gurus who make a fancy living on the spiritual circuit, blowing into college town for weekend seminars on everything from vision quests to past life regression and speaking to all-white audiences. I don’t intend to forget Marx’s counsel that religion is the opiate of the masses and I hope I won’t let my interest in spirituality divorce me from caring for the oppressed and the poor. Yet, the rejection by the artist of destructive mind control cults, in whatever trappings and traditions they operate (Christian, Buddhist, Native American, etc.), need not mean a total rejection of the realm of the spirit, its language and truth. In fact, the poet better not leave this realm to the propagandists or money changers, for it is a powerful human instinct which demands attention and fulfillment.
Anne Sexton, thanks for bringing the word god back into the poetic vocabulary. You and others, like Robert Rothenberg with his anthology, Technicians of the Sacred, and Robert Bly, with his collection, News of the Universe, have helped make cracks in the old mechanistic cosmic egg. People are waking up and the spirit is being born again. Poets are hearing not only the whisperings of their unconscious but the voices of very real muses. I’m getting my book of religious poetry out of the back file. Where before the religious publishers found it too heretical and the secular literary publishers found it too religious, now it has a fighting chance.
This essay originally appeared in Cedar Rock (1121 Madeline, New Braunfels, Texas 78130) and is reprinted with kind permission.
— Ed.
a vision of the virgin at guadeloupe:
the virgin is no virgin. she has lain with the sufferings. she is Christ crucified by the pox of rubella. at the hour of delivery she always feels the life within her turn to an alien mask, a stone, burning stillborn. the virgin is no woman. her uterus has turned convex; it has sprouted a feathered cock, a coat of many colors, a spear to drive in the side of man, Christ crucified on the cross. the blood that arches, that sings in gurgles and dances in the dust — that blood from his side is enfolded on the wind and made into a womb, a portal for the race. and from that portal march black ants armed with the idiocy of soldiers . . . they encamp in her pubic hair, and, oh lovely virgin! she bends and blesses them with a kiss.
Chuck Taylor
