The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here

Nurturers of the Real #7

This is the seventh and second-to-last part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Berry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, is Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?”

An astonishing photograph of the Chernobyl ruins, by Gerd Ludwig, originally at the top of a beautiful poem in Orion magazine, by Melanie Rae Thon.

Our religious life is still full of idolatry, and to get rid of it is a great moral task. Creativity is, by its very nature, opposed to idolatry, and therein lies its great significance.

—Nikolai Berdyaev, The Ethics of Creativity

It only took me seven years, but I’ve finally just now finished a poem about my oldest daughter, who was only one in the poem, and will one day have become old enough to become sunlit dust:

NIRVANA

Through the hospital window
	The cornflower-blue sky goes on and on,

The clay bricks of the next unit's wall
	Shining like marigolds in polygons of sun,

As the seabirds whirl around in the blue sky
	Like windblown pieces of trash. My little girl

Smiles inside, coughing in her cold room, 
	An oxygen tube keeping her tethered 

To the compassionate machine
	As a nurse in lavender places her body

On a blue plastic mat with toys, hoping she'll move around
	Which she does—she crawls around in circles, wheezing,

Then rests and makes the four-colored plastic xylophone
	Go clink
		
		—I think she's happy here.

This is not an “Orthodox” poem. There is nothing that would make it more Orthodox, without making it less of a poem, since Orthodoxy—insofar as it’s a religion like other religions—is the institutionalization of spiritual cliché, so that readymade language is there for you, whenever you need it (or when other people think you do).

—Which is a good thing, probably. Or at least inevitable. But it’s a different thing than the poetic endeavor, as poetry exists in another world beyond religion, or perhaps alongside religion, but in another way: This world—the world of clay bricks, sickness, and marigolds; the world of white trash, blue skies, and glass windows. Poetry—real poetry—is not escapist, but grows from the Earth like flowers, and like flowers, is already alive with the presence of the Holy One beyond all language, and regardless of sacramental action, which is why poems, like chains of sky-eating honeysuckle, have no trouble leaping over the chainlink fences of dogma, yanking their poets along with them.

The English poet, Philip Larkin, like many great poets after the Pied Piper of cultural disintegration liberated both the rats and Earth’s children from the citadels of the Christian mind, was not just irreligious, but antireligious. Nonetheless—or perhaps because of this—his poems, like that holy head-bashing ancient thug, Moses, in the cleft of the rock, could see the Holy One with their own eyes, though not from the front (no poem can see God from the front, least of all the poems that think they can):

THE OLD FOOLS

...Do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:
	Why aren’t they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavor
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here…

And I think also of the poet, A. R. Ammons, who like Larkin was irreligious, except insofar as poetry is its own universal religion, turning the vast satellite dish of the heart in the four directions of the green Earth, listening for the alien intelligence of God:

HYMN

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
           where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
 
And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
     coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces
 
You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside
 
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
    far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

To my ear, this poem takes the Earth more seriously than anything singable in church, or anything readable in a book about unseen warfare, and, at least as I see it—and I know I have a one-track mind—this is why it is correspondingly more alive, more expressive of the Living God who made the living Earth as his original poem (“In the beginning was the Word...”)

But to go into the unknown to grow poems like this from the desert of the real, is a life of exile and isolation, half self-imposed, half-unavoidable, exhilarating but not at all “fun,” a kind of half-savage, half-seraphic, self-sacrificial sickness: