Cookie dough, severed limbs, and heaps of broken images

So, I suppose one knows the honeymoon is over by any number of signs, chief among them being (1) the Mrs will no longer sit through Mel Brooks movies with me, and (2) on a very rare occasion, she admits that she's too tired to make cookies. This seems like something not at all important, but, as a more than spoiled newly-wed husband, I'm not at all used to not eating cookies now am I?

The latter occurred last night. I despaired. I very nearly sulked. I think I went into another room and shut the door. Just before I resigned myself to going to bed with no cookies (an awful fate, I know) some lines came to my head though, I think from Dylan Thomas, about not going quietly into that dark night.... 30 minutes later, I was happily eating from a tube of cookie dough I picked up on a late night run to Kroger.

It got me thinking a bit about how poetry, in the midst of my very real and trying sorrow, gave me a bit of a hand out of the hole I was in. It can't really give one comfort in despair, for something transcending reality is needed to give solace for the trials of reality. No, it can't lift us out of despair, but it can give us a way to make some sort of sense of our situation, a framework whereby we connect the things we experience to something beyond our particular lives. Poetry is no comfort or solution, only a temporary stay against confusion (to augment a smarter man's thoughts). For the Christian, Jew, or Mohammedan, revealed truth offers permanent comfort in its assurance that, as Lady Julien puts it, all manner of thyng will be well (though each offers, of course, a different explanation of why). Poetry, on the other hand, fills a different niche for religious believers than scripture insofar as it offers us a way of reconciling the explanations of scripture with those things in the world that seem to deny all explanation.

Here's what I mean: Job needed comfort, and he found it not in God's explanation, but in God's assertion that he was, in fact, still God while Job was not. St John's apocalyptic vision gives an assurance to believers not insofar as it asserts the reason or explanation behind history (it doesn't explain any sort of Divine Harmony in history), but it comforts in its assurance that Christ the King will return to right all wrongs, reconcile history, and save his creation. In the midst of cosmic assurances and comforts, poetry gives us something useful still in its (temporal) explanation of reality's sad incongruities and its disturbing consistencies.

Examples are easy to come by, but I'm thinking in particular of a poem by Seamus Heaney in Electric Light, but I'm sure most of us have some other very particular poem that has come to mind during another particular circumstance. The poem tells of a boy arriving at his school in the wake of a bombing (presumably in Ireland). He looks about, and while despair my be on its way in later in the day, the prime emotion seems to be simply confusion. Slowly, the boy makes sense of what he sees; rather, an English monk from the seventh century makes sense of it for him as lines describing the bloodied hall of Heoret drift, unasked for, through his memory to give some framework of understanding to the things he sees. Poetry offers him some way to stay his confusion, some way to explain just what the hell happened and why the universe would be oriented in such a way that some fellow's arm ends up over the door. The poet gives a skeleton to his experiences. It's worth quoting, but I don't want to steal any of Mr Heaney's well earned intellectual property. The poem's called 'The Border Campaign,' and its well worth the read.

In fact, something about revealed truth demands the creation of art surely by nature of being a fixed truth revealed. My point isn't even going to be Incarnational here, nor am I going to say that all art is worship or anything else that translates into everything=holy=everything. The points a simpler one than that: the Christian scriptures (both testaments) and their derivatives (Koran, etc) all seem to indicate a certain moral economy. A straight-forward reading of the Psalms, Proverbs, Beatitudes, and most of the Koran, gives one a sense that a very sovereign God who loves the good and punishes the bad holds court in the universe and will makes sure everything goes the way it should. Then reality happens, and things don't seem to go that way: I run out of cookie dough; Children die; Grendal keeps coming back. Reality has a way of refuting revealed scripture.

Should this bother us? I'm not asking if it should makes us sad, but if it should really keep us up at night. Of course, the short answer is no. For three days, the Word himself was refuted and defeated by the facts of this world, and his mother wept as Rachel did for the loss of her child, but the Resurrection shows the undoing of all that seemed victorious in those moments on the cross. So our job here just to wait for however long three days might actually be, remembering the promised restoration at the end of it. But, truly, it does bother us. So we pick up pens and do our best to reconcile some sort of synthesis between the broken shards of reality around us and the ordered universe revealed to us.

Its not entirely uncommon to get a strange look when you tell folks you devoted four years and more money than its worth repeating solely to the study of tall-tales. Whats even stranger is the face they make when they find out that you've not even a Teaching Certificate at the end of it and, eh? you still read that stuff that was homework not too long ago even when no one makes you. I suppose it is strange, but so is our world, and while the Christian has the light of revealed truth to teach him of eternity and the comforts promised by God himself to make it on the road there (and real comforts they are indeed), life is strange enough that we still find ourselves asking "what the hell just happened" more often than we'd like.

And yes, the stay against confusion offered by poetry is in the end only momentary, but fragments shorn up against ruin are better than ruin, even if they only keep you standing up long enough to get home, staying confusion well enough to get the oven preheated, anyway.