Читать книгу God for an Old Man - Thomas M. Dicken - Страница 11

THE ULTIMACY OF INSIGHT

I had been begging my father to let me look down the well at my grandmother’s farm, which we visited a couple of times a year. In the 1940s, only the first floor of the old farmhouse had electricity. We had kerosene lamps to read by in the bedrooms on the second floor. Chamber pots and an outhouse were more of a curiosity to me than an inconvenience. And water from the well was brought into the house in big buckets. We all used a shared ladle to help ourselves to a drink. It was coldest and tastiest when a fresh bucket had just been hauled up.

The well itself was a few yards from the back porch. The concrete platform was raised a foot or so off the ground and a top made from wooden planks covered the hole. A bucket would be attached to a rope and gradually lowered into the water by turning the wooden handle of the round bar that was over the hole. I watched the grownups turn the handle to lower the bucket, then turn it to raise the filled bucket. I wanted to see what it was like down there.

I don’t remember how many times I had begged to be able to look down the well. Finally, my father gripped my legs and let me rest my body on the platform. I couldn’t see anything; it was just dark. Dad let me move a few inches closer to the hole. He told me to look straight down. I still couldn’t see anything. One more inch and the instruction to straighten out my body and to look straight down. And there it was: it was round and shiny. Dad told me it was the sky reflecting up from the water. It was bright and beautiful. I couldn’t believe anything could be that far down. It was the first time I ever experienced awe.

I was informed that if I ever moved the top and did that on my own, I would get a spanking I would never forget. It took a few days before I found a good time to go back and do all that on my own.

In a very different mood, Helen Vendler discusses the attempts by the poet Emily Dickinson to define the indefinable, such as dreadful, unremitting pain. This kind of pain consumes a person’s very substance and can only be described as an abyss of pain.6

I have never endured this kind of abyssal pain, having experienced only sharp, sudden pains that were relieved within a bearable amount of time by medical intervention. However, I have spent hours over the years visiting people in pain treatment centers of hospitals and other specialized facilities. In the rooms sealed off from sound and light, I said trivial things, offered clumsy prayer, listened carefully to almost inaudible responses, and always asked if the person in the abyss wanted me to return or to leave them free of having to deal with me. Always, from the abyss, they said they wanted me to return. Even though my presence must have added to their disturbance and pain, they chose the presence over the abyss.

Today, the word “abyss” more often points to an existential emptiness, the oblivion of death or the vacuum of meaning. It is possible for us to see ourselves as surrounded by emptiness, rather than as surrounded by the presence of God.

Jorge Luis Borges writes that Blaise Pascal was perhaps the first modern human to sense the ultimate implications of the early revolutionary discoveries in astronomy. If astronomers such as Giordano Bruno were liberated by these discoveries, Pascal found the “deep space” and “deep time” that were being revealed to be frightening. The awesome space “became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the abhorred universe.”7 The human sense of an abyss or a “deep” may have originated with the sea, and continued into the implicit world-perspective of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, but Pascal already knew that same fearful, fascinating dizziness could now also be experienced by simply looking at the sky. Perhaps for the first time, a human found himself torn between looking at the abyss in the sky and seeking after God.

Christian Wiman writes of the tension involved in exploring his recently rediscovered faith in God, while also trying to explain to himself and to others that all the doubt, all the uncertainty, and all the anxiety about his cancer, remains.8 He writes of a beginning of a poem on which he has worked: “My God my bright abyss / Into which all my longing will not go / Once more I come to the edge of all I know / And believing nothing believe in this:”

But the poem does not move beyond this point. He can’t force it to move. Of course, the reader notices the paradox of a “bright abyss.” It is perhaps like a tiny wet circle of reflected sky. The only way to speak of God, for some of us at least, is to speak paradoxically of the abyss. It may be that we are more certain of the abyss than we are of God. A “bright abyss” captures something of what we need to say. Such faith is not like anything that typically gets flaunted as faith. But Wiman can conclude, as he reflects on his fragment of a poem, that “I seem to see you in the black flower mourners make beside a grave I do not know, in the ember’s innards like a shining hive, in the bare abundance of a winter tree whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow.”9 Wiman has described the oddity of what it is like to find God in the abyss. He suggests three images. “The bare abundance of a winter tree” comes closest to describing how I might understand what an abyssal God is like. There is one more line: “Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that ‘seem.’” I search back for the “seem” and find it in the “I seem to see you. . . .” The word “seem” has the slippage, the fracturing, and the slant we need if we are going to speak of God. Only a word like “seem” will let us back into God from the abyss.

6. Vendler, Dickinson, 231–233.

7. Borges, Non-Fictions, 353.

8. Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 3.

9. Ibid., 13.