Looking In the Distance. Richard Holloway
dryly observed that it was rating our conjectures highly to burn people alive for them. Another mordant observer of the excessive self-importance of religious systems was the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. I spent an afternoon with him in Jerusalem just before his death a few years ago. Amichai described himself as an atheist, but he was a wise and wonderfully tolerant observer of the religious madness of his own city of Jerusalem. He wrote a poem called ‘Jerusalem Ecology’, the first stanza of which I’d like to recite as a prophylactic against religious poisoning.
The air above Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
Like the air above industrial towns
it’s hard to breathe.4
Having paid close attention to that health warning, let me now settle into the chair and describe some of the things I see in the distance. I propose to thread onto a string of narrative some beads of quotation, mainly from poets, who best capture the essence of the human experience at those vulnerable moments when we are most open to the mystery of our own existence. The first one I call ‘looking into the abyss’.
Looking into the abyss
It’s three o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep, which is probably why I’m in that chair, not in bed. I’ve made a pot of dark roast coffee to clear my head and help me think, because I have been invaded by a terrible sense of ultimate meaninglessness. I have been engulfed by the void, made to look into the abyss of emptiness that life seems to be stretched upon. Everything I once thought to be steady and enduring has disappeared into the ceaseless flux of a universe without meaning. The mood is probably best expressed by Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’– dawn:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now . . .
What unnerves Larkin is not the thought of a wasted life, the quite natural remorse many of us appropriately feel as we look back on our lives:
–The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused –
No, what frightens him is extinction, complete nothingness, non-being. He is overcome by a sense of
. . . the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
hat slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will . . .5
As far as I am concerned, Larkin has captured the mood all right, but not exactly the object of the anxiety. My blues in the wee small hours are not caused by apprehension at the prospect of my own death and extinction, though I hope my number will not be called any time soon. No, my mood is more universal than that. It is a puzzled revulsion at the pointless plenitude of Being, and dismay at the way this planet has manufactured trillions of life forms only to cast them indifferently aside, like an out-of-control assembly line in an old Charlie Chaplin movie. My mood of nihilistic despair is amplified by the thought that most of these lives have known enormous pain and the human ones considerable sorrow, if only at the end when life itself slowly undermines them before withdrawing completely. The mood of early morning loss comes from a sense of bafflement at the massive indifference of the universe. We try to care about one another, but life itself, the life that impels its indifferent way through time and space, does not seem to care about anything; it simply is. Even that does not quite capture the mood, because to say that the life force that activates the universe ‘is’ gives it a sense of stability, when, in fact, we experience it as constant change; it is not so much Being, as Passing, as something endlessly in the process of becoming something else. There are times when the cosmic indifference of life is as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea at night with no one to know we have gone.
The strange thing is that this void, this Nothing or No one, gave us birth, and it is impossible not to be emotionally involved with a parent, however absent and indifferent. There’s a poem that captures this ambiguity better than the straightforward despair of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’. I am thinking of ‘Psalm’ by Paul Celan. Celan was a poet of the abyss, a victim of the brutal indifference of history. His parents were lost in the Nazi death camps and he himself, like other Holocaust survivors, committed suicide. He wrote a wrenching series of poems called Die Niemandsrose, ‘The No one’s Rose’. This is one of them:
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing–, the
no-one’s-rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.6
The thorn wound over which we sing is perplexity at our own being, which we cling to as the mysterious gift it is; but who is there to praise for the gift?
Sensing an absence
Who is there to praise for the gift of life? It is now six o’clock in the morning and the city is beginning to wake up. I brew more coffee and get back into the chair. The mood has changed. Celan has softened Larkin’s bleak nihilism and restored a sense of latency to the scene, a sense of something undisclosed, something absent that might once have been present. Wistfulness rather than despair is the mood now. I call this six-o’clock-in-the-morning mood ‘sensing an absence’. And it is God who is absent. The sense of the absence of God is strong in Europe at the moment. I am not talking on behalf of confident secularists for whom God has never been present. For them the universe has been thoroughly disenchanted, even disinfected, purged of any residue of that disturbing presence. And I am obviously not talking about confident believers for whom God is still on tap. No, I am talking about those who find themselves living in the No Man’s Land between the opposing forces of confident unbelief and confident belief. Those of us who are living Out There in the place where God is absent are deafened by the clash of claim and counter claim, as the rival explanations are fired over our heads. It is important to say that Out There is not a place of neutral agnosticism. It is a place of committed unknowing. Those of us in this place of unknowing believe that the war of opposing interpretations