One Screaming Weave

The fourth hottest day in recorded history was July 3, 2023, when the average global temperature reached 62.40 degrees Fahrenheit. The third hottest was July 4, 2023 (62.67 degrees). The second hottest was July 5, 2023 (62.70 degrees). One can likely guess what the hottest day in modern human history was. By the end of a sweltering four weeks, July 2023 earned the horrific distinction of being the warmest month ever measured, with 21 days being among the hottest on Earth since data reporting began. Myriad other calamities during that period were just as disturbing: the acrid air as millions of square acres of Canadian boreal forest burned, the tornados and derechos that ravaged the South and Midwest for months, the wildfires that cannibalized California, the flames of Maui that consumed paradise itself. The general mood remains palpably unsettling. Even those who have long denied the reality of climate change finally seem to notice that something is wrong, even if they blame it on a multitude of suspects other than fossil fuels.

What it felt like—what it feels like—is nothing less than the apocalypse. “It requires no great prophetic power to recognize that we as a species, as a communal soul, have withered, and that as a direct consequence the world around us is dying,” writes Christian Wiman, the greatest living devotional poet in the United States, in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). The collection blends memoir and theology, criticism and poetry into a self-Festschrift, a mystical commonplace book for Armageddon. “The despair is too much to turn one’s attention to, so most of us turn away,” Wiman argues, and indeed the liturgy of misfortune includes climate change and Covid, authoritarianism and inequity, technological alienation and war. That the world is ending has long been the trumpet call of various doom enthusiasts, and although the chiliasts of the Middle Ages and Reformation invoked unreliable scripture, we have satellites and ice cores that provide objective, irrefutable data.    

Despair (and its antidote) may be an evergreen topic from Job to Camus, but the operative sentiments during the current moment are gloom and hopelessness. Last May, Surgeon General of the United States Vivek Murthy released an advisory about Americans’ “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” citing an increase in depression across all segments of society. Any number of social, cultural, political, technological, and ecological reasons can be proffered for this seeming collective malaise—from the atomization of experience in the digital silos of social media to the rise in cult-like authoritarianism, from the ever-increasing disparities in wealth to the more than 1 million Americans who have died of Covid. Such a toll is as if the entire populations of San Diego or San Jose were obliterated. Given so much misery, the pandemic of despair is much easier to comprehend, yet contemporary society stumbles on in a spirit of hypernormalization.

All these potential explanations for the national emotional register are really just vestiges of a larger revelation: the world is ending. Disenchantment, I suppose, until humans face the awful grandeur of what they’ve wrought, a type of deicide in the individual soul “as God blinks out brain by brain like the 150 species of flora and fauna that go extinct every day as ecosystems implode,” Wiman writes. Modernity’s god, that optimistic faith in progress, is now deader than the old biblical God—though the latter has a tendency toward resurrection. As that melancholic Dane Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Christian Discourses (1848), “In the dreadful moment of decisiveness, when humanity speaking no turn is any longer possible, when there is everywhere only wretchedness wherever you turn and however you turn, there is still one more turn possible.” Wiman, a professor at Yale Divinity School and the former editor of Poetry, details that turn—or at least intimates the beautifully paradoxical possibilities of it—in Zero at the Bone.

The book only tangentially mentions climate change and the polycrisis the world now faces, but those realities are implicit in Wiman’s focus on death. In 2005, he was diagnosed with Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, a rare, painful blood cancer. His illness directly preceded his (re)conversion to Christianity, though as he writes, “I don’t relish and often don’t even recognize, ‘Christianity.’” Rather, he commits himself to the faith (and non-faith) that a penitent can see traces of in the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhardt and in the philosophers Simone Weil, Blaise Pascal, and that supposed atheist Friedrich Nietzsche. Few poets, much less essayists, have been so enraptured with the subject of living with death as has Wiman, who has stared into the abyss and been transformed—though, fortunately, not into the abyss itself.

The subtitle of Wiman’s book calls these fragments shored against despair, but that shouldn’t be read as being in opposition to, arguing against, or even curing despair but as interacting with or alongside it. This isn’t a self-help book or a moral palliative—though it often made me feel better. Nor is it some simplistic theodicy hoping to find the gold within the grit, the upside of cancer or climate change. For that matter, Zero at the Bone isn’t a plaintive shriek from the ashes of the heath whose author gnashes his teeth at the awful silence of God. Rather, it exists in that uncomfortable but undeniable certainty that creation is imbued with sublime pain and awful beauty.

Along with Kaveh Akbar and Mary Szybist, Wiman is among the inheritors of a devotional poetic tradition descended from John Donne and George Herbert to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson. These figures are similar only in their attempts not to circumscribe God but to gesture toward some kind of poetry beyond poetry, an intimation of the divine. Wiman is an ambivalently divinity-intoxicated thinker who, in books such as Once in the West (2014), Survival Is a Style (2020), and especially Every Riven Thing (2011), has crafted a voice deeply indebted to his predecessors yet recognizably his own. His is a faith of the cracks, of the broken places within the soul, where, as he writes in Every Riven Thing, he is “Incurable and unbelieving / in any truth but the truth of grieving.” The two adjectives that begin that line are so eccentric in their disjunction that their exact relationship remains ambiguous. His is an apophatic faith, a belief in the not-not-God, where “Lord is not a word. / Song is not a salve,” as Wiman intones in Every Riven Thing, genuflecting before the Agnostos Theos, the unknown God that ancient Greeks supposedly worshipped. In that shrine, the poet can still pray, must pray: “Lord, suffer me to sing / these wounds by which I am made / and marred, savor this creature / whose aloneness you ease and are.”

Wiman rejects cheap grace. In “Mild Dry Lines: An Exchange,” published in Poetry in 2020, he writes, “I fear by wholeness what you mean / is merely the will to leaven fate with will, / that constipated sorrow called good cheer.” Wiman is revolted by the quintessentially American faith of bootstrapping optimism and the power of positive thinking, preferring instead those who understand something of the dark night of the soul. “Darkness starts inside of things,” he writes in Hard Night (2005), “but keeps on going when the things are gone.” Lest I present Wiman as irredeemably gloomy, it must be emphasized that he’s often surprisingly funny, as indeed the greatest of holy fools must be. In “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs,” also published in Poetry, he mock bemoans how “All my friends are finding new beliefs. / This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees … Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. … Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, / high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt.” Turning to himself in another poem, Wiman admits that “I’ve had my fill of truth, too, come to think of it. / It’s all smeary in me, I’m like a waterlogged Bible.”

Raised by Baptists in the wind-cracked flatland of West Texas, Wiman abandoned the fundamentalism of his youth only to later rediscover a different type of faith, far quieter but no less ecstatic. As a poet of the numinous, he is as sparse as a Mark Rothko canvas, as stripped clean as a John Tavener composition—a poet for both the dark night of the soul and music at midnight. In Zero at the Bone, he synthesizes the two great genres of apologetics: the minister’s theodicy and the critic’s ars poetica, justifying the ways of God to human not just through poetry but by recourse to the reality of poetry. He understands verse as ineffable and inscrutable, a wild, rapturous thrumming just beyond the veil.

Wiman doesn’t exonerate God—what would that even mean?—or pretend that pain serves only to offer convenient moral lessons, a belittling of experience every bit as tacky as the “preachers and teachers and other professional talkers [who] treat poems like wisdom machines or shortcuts to a conclusion.” What he asks readers to do is partake in the sacrament of the sheer over-abundant, miraculous thisness of life while also feeling the sting of their wounds. “There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed,” Wiman writes, “and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe.” I’m not sure Wiman would describe this simultaneous awe at existence while acknowledging that ours is a world in which children die of cancer and refugee mothers smothered their crying babies to avoid capture by the Nazis as a paradox, but it’s also not unparadoxical.

Wiman’s theodicy doesn’t turn to logic but to something felt in the beat of words, in their relationships and interactions. He posits a theodicy of poetry and miraculously ends up converting both himself and his readers. The basis of his metaphysics, his theology, his ethics seems to be this: we’re not all equal in suffering, but we are in mortality. “What might it mean to pray an honest prayer,” he asks, adding, “maybe it means praying to be fit for, worthy of, capable of living up to, the only reality that we know which is this physical world around us, the severest of whose terms is death.” This is the sort of prayer that could unite the believer with the serious atheist, which is why it’s so sacred.

Strung between faith and doubt over an unknowable chasm, “desperate, with our own pains, to believe, / desperate, with our own pains, not to,” Zero at the Bone was written in a world where it’s both true that metastasizing cells kill people for no reason and where the sheer fact of Being itself warrants reverential trembling. “I believe the right response to reality is to bow down, and I believe the right response to reality is to scream,” Wiman writes. (As God tells the prophet in Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness.”) Because Wiman’s God is not the Nobodaddy whom William Blake mocked in a 1793 poem but rather the locus of Being, of Reality, of Existence, this is a theodicy that sees unity in despair and its antonym—indeed, where despair’s cure is in awe. Beyond language, God fuses himself and his opposite, reality and its contrary; he is both infinitely large and small, a combination of everything and nothing. “Home and homelessness, election and rejection, autonomy and determinism, humanity and divinity: it’s all one screaming weave,” Wiman writes.

That’s all well and good, but as Wiman admits, abstractions can be impossible within the concreteness of pain, grief, and mourning. Worse, they can be obscene. However, even an obscenity can be holy, for blessed is the God who transgresses. Wiman writes, “One can become so disenchanted, so adapted to … one’s immediate senses and experience that reality itself, which surely is stranger than our minds can circumscribe, becomes pinched, partial, even inert.” The philosopher and polymath Wilhelm Gottfried Leibnitz succinctly stated the fundamental question in his 17th-century Monadology when he asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” a query that goes back to Aristotle and, more recently, to Martin Heidegger but answers itself in the very asking. The something is sacred, and the nothing is sacred because the former is all that can be, and the latter can never be. “To say yes to one moment in life is to say yes to all of them,” Wiman writes, for “If all beauty is contained in one instance of it, all time is contained in this (any?) moment of creation.”

What fascinates me about Wiman’s faith is the question of his radicalism, although I suspect he’s aware that orthodoxy is more subversive than heresy. Denominationally Wiman is ecumenical; his perspective estimably latitudinarian, his rites seemingly High Church, a hermeneutics allied not with the flames of hell but with the spider hanging by a thread above them. He’s a Christian as content with doubt as he is with faith, with the question as much as the answer. However, it would be a mistake to interpret him as that variety of radical Christian who, in the 19th century, was an acolyte of demythologization or what, in the 20th century, was hailed as the Death of God gospel. Clearly, part of him prays for faith’s absence, implying that he’s rather cursed with belief. “I want it to be fiction, just as I often want God to be pure imagination, pure mystical abstraction,” Wiman writes, although he can’t help but know that God is also the “harrowing call of Christ in the dying eyes of someone I do not love.”

With their smug philosophizing, people can posit a superiority of the abstract, the mystical, and the allegorical, but that’s to ignore the concrete, the physical, and the real—with nothing so real as death. Wisely, Wiman avoids the idolatries of certainty, but maybe even more wisely, he’s also aware of the idolatries of doubt—which is not to say that he’s exactly doctrinaire with his creed. He writes that “resurrection is a function of faith and imagination. Suffering and death are facts. Resurrection we will never know, at least as far as knowledge is bound to life and time. Suffering and faith, at some point, will be all that we know.” Incarnation, resurrection, the Trinity—Wiman’s metaphysics of language is such that he acknowledges how indeterminate such terms are, how they gesture toward something impossible for them to ever fully refer. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have faith in those things, that he doesn’t hold a belief in that inchoate something. When asked by a podcast host why he’s not just a theist but a Christian, his only answer is that it’s because he felt Christ intervene at a moment in which he was needed. Perhaps this is answer good enough.

“If you understood Him, it would not be God,” Augustine preached in a fourth-century sermon, a perspective a good deal more eastern than Catholicism is sometimes given credit for, though the saint was originally a Manichean. The “world and the soul, our existence and God’s, are far more permeable—and much more possible—than words like ‘faith,’ ‘truth,’ or even ‘prayer’ can suggest,” Wiman writes. The spoken God is not the real God, to paraphrase Augustine by means of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu. Perhaps paradoxically, however, this is the great benefit of poetry: theology wishes to imprison faith, truth, and prayer, but poetry is always shifting, always liquid, a form commensurate with the kaleidoscopic divine. Before he was a believer, Wiman was a poet, and it’s obvious in his love of words and their sounds. Just as an architect imagines God drafting buildings or an artist comparing creation to a canvas, Wiman writes that the “power of the word of God, just like the power of poetry, comes precisely from its mercurial meanings, its tendency to slide free of every attempt to pin it down and to insinuate itself into every single life in a different way.”

Yet, that’s an oversimplification on my part. It’s not that God is a poet in Wiman’s estimation so much that God is poetry: “God is the poetry caught in any religion, a law against its closure. God is in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure.” And why not? As a form, poetry still contains those ancient traces of conjuration and incantation, the rhythmic beat of the scanned line sounding out the birth pangs of the universe, the shifting of stress and unstress like beads on a rosary, and the chimera of metaphor like nothing so much as God appearing out of the whirlwind or at least leaving those faint traces where his existence can’t be immediately discounted. Where Wiman sees power in poetry is that it doesn’t trade in certainties, it doesn’t trade in answers, it doesn’t necessarily even need to trade in meaning. It becomes the only form of language that approaches the I Am That I Am by which God first identified himself to Moses. Like Wittgenstein with his ladder, we can use poetry to climb toward the heavens, but we have no need to then push the ladder over. It’s ladders all the way down. “Poetry is the only sanity,” Wiman writes.

Where does that leave despair? If Wiman’s is a theodicy of poetics, then it’s nothing so simple as poetry being mere communication (though it can be) or simple consolation (though it can be) or even prayer (though it can be). Poetry is all the more mysterious, an elemental charge, a force underlaying people’s experience of reality, which is to say their reality. “God is so woven into reality that the question of God’s own reality can’t meaningfully occur,” Wiman writes. Atheism itself becomes a contradiction—not the boring atheism that mocks the Nobodaddy but the kind that doesn’t believe in the very Ground of Being—an impossible kind of atheism. Wiman writes that a “denial of the transcendent vision is a denial of reality itself.” Such is not a faith that requires ascent to unprovable axioms and unempirical claims; rather, it’s simply a faith that asks people to look and see. This is nothing so pedestrian as saying that a beautiful sunset is the face of God or there are traces of his grandeur in the nebula of the cosmos, though nothing is wrong with saying those things. The point in Zero at the Bone is altogether different: that reality exists at all is a miracle deserving awe.

When it comes to suffering, Wiman naturally turns to the Book of Job, in which God’s monologue to his destroyed servant is pure poetry. “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?” God asks. “Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?” For the traditional believer, this is a statement of the Lord’s omnipotence and of people’s unworthiness; for some critics, it’s God’s sputtering post-hoc justification after he’s been swindled by the Devil, some pretty words used to obscure the Lord’s responsibility in the world’s evil. Wiman doesn’t discount that this is God’s answer, but the word answer itself is maybe not equivalent to what comes from the whirlwind nor are response or argument. Rather, when suffering has subtracted everything that makes us human, when we’ve been burnt completely away, what remains is an ash called poetry, that mystical language whose referent is always something that paradoxically can’t be fully described in language. Theodor Adorno famously argued that after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible, but the truth is that after Auschwitz, only poetry is possible—the same as it’s ever been. Wiman writes:

If you ask me who I am,
how I live and what god I serve,
I have no answer. But once,
behind a disused shed,
in thrall to an untranslatable power,
I was myself, and I cried silence
adequate to the hour.

There are no literal answers to such questions, to the question of whom we even are or what we should worship, but there are epiphanies of transcendent things, untranslatable things, that speak to us fully about who we are, in a language only they know, in which the most appropriate prayer is silence.