Christian Wiman’s Poetics of Spiritual Survival: A Review of Zero at the Bone

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair is the kind of book one half-dreams of writing in sleepless hours of the night, when the liminal brain has an almost tactile conception of the thing: sheaves of notes, extensive quotations, inspired jottings and poems cohere in a morphogenic field that never quite reveals its proper dimensionality. It is a project that most would abandon in the morning when what had fascinated by night appears formless, and only a fleeting trace remains. Christian Wiman, however, has enough experience laboring at the hinge of poetry and essay to make it interesting. In a way, the book is just an essay in the original meaning of that word: an attempt, a shot in the dark, a throwing of whatever lies at one’s feet at the nearest and most maddeningly featureless wall in order to see what sticks.

The book contains 50 entries numbered one through 50 and two numbered “Zero.” 22 of the entries are original poems, although, of those, one, “Particular Flesh,” is itself a hybrid construction, containing lineated verse, prose fiction and (perhaps?) essay. The remaining entries are some combination of previously published articles, works of criticism, what might be journal entries, assemblies of quotations, and snatches of literary experimentation. Wiman’s experiences with cancer, with suffering in general, and with faith as well as its opposite are the book’s recurring themes.

A thread of connection is not always evident (one entry is a breezy piece on working out in gyms from New York Times Magazine), and towards the end Wiman frankly admits the collection is composed of “disconnected fragments” that he has “thought and fought” his way through.[1] True, it is fragmentary, but it also has an atmospheric unity. That atmosphere — fevered, dogged, and marshy — is created by Wiman’s repeated attempts to cross or at least to blur the boundary between poetry and theology, to apply his formidable literary mind to the task of saying true things about God. Are those attempts successful, as poetry? As theology? Or is poetic theology a categorical error? Zero at the Bone does not really do theology, at least according to that discipline’s self-understanding. However, it does have a poetics of faith, or, more accurately, a poetics of that capacity for faith without which human beings cannot achieve self-understanding.

Aesthetic theology or theological aesthetics?

The references of the first chapter define the field of labor. In what must be a nod to Dante, a leopard makes an appearance in the first “Zero.”[2] The beast, however, is “sedated,” and so we are immediately faced with the modern problem of ginning up a desire for salvation without an awake and snarling sense of sin. The fact that the cat is drugged also marks out that Wiman will approach revelation through the gate of sensation. He quickly affirms this: “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses — miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels — a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.” This heralds a subjective approach that will dwell on the experience of faith rather than on the data of revelation itself. The pitting of truth against “ordinary contentment” is also notable.

The Wiman who speaks through these religious fragments is the poet-professor in Yale’s divinity school, where he is surrounded by a formidable cadre of systematic theologians and biblical scholars, as well as ethicists and experts in the application of religion to various practical concerns. Even in such a rarified atmosphere, the materialism of the larger society must be felt, and Wiman makes himself its opponent: In this he is faced with the dual task of coaxing future leaders, ecclesial and secular, to engage with, or at least not to dismiss out of hand, both poetry and faith in the self-revelation of God that forms the data of theology. The matter he presents is lesson-like: poems and snatches of poems are employed to introduce perennial problems of faith — the efficacy of prayer, the reality of evil and suffering, the interpretation of scripture, etc. This focus on problems, on the negative, may be a pedagogical device. Problematized religion is perhaps more appetible to the Yale crowd, and Wiman is patient, keeping the God question fluttering and twisting, obscured, yet at the center of his words.

References to theology ebb and flow throughout Zero at the Bone. “Kill the Creature,” an entry centered on the motif of the snake, is among the high-water marks. In it, Wiman writes of kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ, first in his incarnation, in which God humbled himself to become man, and finally on the cross, where he allowed himself to be killed. Wiman calls this “erasure for the sake of something greater. It is not reality, but relationship that is greater. That is to say, it is not reality as we know it, but the one we intuit at times by means of relationship — both with matter and with other minds.”[3]

The primacy of relationship has a theological pedigree. For the 20th century Jesuit writer Henri de Lubac, it is derived from the relationality that is inherent in God, in the Trinity, which, according to Christianity, is a communion of three divine persons. There is thus a stable, eternal relationality that all transitory relationships derive from and that makes relationship itself possible. Yet Wiman frequently seems to eschew this understanding for the Hegelian view that when God entered history, he succumbed irrevocably to change: “ … either the incarnation is absolute, or it simply didn’t happen. Either God is gone, or he never was.”[4]

It would be tempting to think of Wiman, at least in these passages, as a Hegelian. Yet his dialectical approach is usually closer to that of Marx, who turned the Hegelian dialectic on its head: Zero at the Bone is full of antitheses followed by negations: “ … the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.”[5] Both resemblances turn out to be superficial, however. The poetic project here, and it is a poetic project, is wresting theology away from philosophy, and that includes political and economic theory. But with philosophy gone, so is the capacity to receive, in a stable way, whatever meaning lies in revelation. Wiman pursues a religion that has “no final ground of meaning, which is not to say no God.”[6] How can human beings with rational souls relate to such a religion? “One follows the sounds.” And ends up where? “Poetry is the only sanity.”[7]

Why then, does Wiman pursue theology at all, if only to throw us back on the fickle mercies of poetry? Would not a literary fideism suffice for his purposes? A passage on the Lutheran minister and would-be Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer is revealing. Bonhoeffer’s associate wrote of him, “Because he was lonely he became a theologian, and because he became a theologian he was lonely.” Wiman glosses, “I keep wanting to replace ‘theologian’ with ‘poet.’”[8] In the context of the whole, this comment evinces a desire for poetry or poetic thinking to merge with theology, to do the theological work of understanding God; but what does that really mean?

Absent any clue from Wiman, we could turn to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, which is perhaps the most famous theological treatise outside of sacred scripture itself. Thomas’ effects are felt far beyond medieval Catholicism, extending to Protestant divines Luther and Calvin, even to today’s evangelicals. The Summa opens with a series of questions about theology, or sacred doctrine, itself; the second of which is “Whether it is a science?” Thomas answers in the affirmative because theology proceeds in a rational way from principles outside itself, those of revelation. Far from being an exercise in abstraction, theology is meant to serve lived faith by supplying it with reason. It supplies faith with expansiveness and stability.

Wiman does try to arrive at the truth about God through certain externals, but they are often fictive. He employs the poetic faculty to make externals, to push things out of his own mind into a reality in which they become truth. This is clearest when he writes about his drug-addicted physician father and mentally ill, also-addicted sister: “My family’s story often feels like fiction to me, especially when I try — as I have been trying here — to tell it to other people. But then something happens, and I experience again the ruthless, relentless nature of its truth.”[9] He never really settles that nature, but triangulates it somewhere between the reality of sin, the greater reality of mercy, and the need for humility in order to see the other two.

There is real insight here, but it is not stable, reliable or expansive. Instead, it is deployed to artistic ends. Is Wiman, then, practicing a modern version of what Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar termed the “aesthetic theology” of Romanticism, which attempted to speak of God and the world using a single faculty, the aesthetic impulse? Von Balthasar contrasted what he saw as the error of aesthetic theology to his own project of theological aesthetics, “a theology that does not primarily work with extra-theological categories of a worldly philosophical aesthetics (above all poetry), but which develops its theory of beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuine theological methods.”[10] Why does Von Balthasar reserve his sternest warning for poetry? Because poetry is like a river in March: full of melted snow and roaring wherever it must go. It mimics the sound and force of the best arguments, but it can’t yield their delicate conclusions because it lacks their dispassion towards aesthetic concerns. Poetry has its own kind of dispassion: it is unconcerned with stability of meaning where that endangers an aesthetic order of sense. Of course, poetry can borrow from theology, and in doing so make theology crystalline and gorgeous and real; but the operation of poetry is different from the operation of theology, even combined in the mind of a Dante.

To be fair, beauty in the Romantic sense is not one of the preoccupations of Wiman’s book, which plumbs the depths of the ugliness of addiction, estrangement, and chemotherapy. Yet there is a relevant caution about the dangers, both aesthetic and theological, of mistaking the distinct operations of theology and art for a merely departmental division. In Zero at the Bone, abstract passages on religion sometimes dampen the strange and clarion chords of Wiman’s poetry.

Yet Wiman does find in poetics a means of faith. That is, poetry does not reason about the data of revelation, but it may provide a way to persevere when one is pushed to a breaking point by pain and disappointment. “When Job needs to scream his being to God, it’s poetry he turns to.”[11] This is an honest estimation of what Zero at the Bone is up to.

Zapping rats and other bright sallies

Wiman shines as a critic, serving up penetrating close readings of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson and bringing in obscure mystical poets such as Gustav Sobin, whose verses he interweaves with the events of his own life. His entry on the Stevens-esque William Bronk is illustrative of Wiman’s whole critical enterprise in the way it allows him to get his fingers between the tectonic plates of poetry: “This is the dilemma of every poet (and it’s a tiny minority) who is both forced into and freed by an idiolect. Basil Bunting and David Jones are such poets. Robert Frost and W. H. Auden are not. Gwendolyn Brooks, yes. Elizabeth Bishop, no. Bronk’s place in the schema is obvious. His poems are quirks, freaks, almost belligerently unbeautiful, thought that suggests a stance and not a nature.”[12] He laments Bronk’s “privacy so absolute that there can be no such thing as shared speech,” yet ultimately decides to redeem at least one of his poems “Because it is beautiful, and beauty triggers an instinct for an order beyond the one it enacts.”[13] Brilliant. The whole chapter is inspired criticism, as is the one on Lucille Clifton.

Then there are Wiman’s own verses, which pop and shimmy like one-winged angels amid the turbid gray of disquisitions and dialectics. “Zapped rats abounded / on signs behind the house / but never once did we see one. / Zapped that is,” begins “Remembering a City and a Sickness.”[14] The bodies of the rats are “like hirsute breadfruit.” There is something Dantesque in these stinking lumps of verbal corporality slung amid all the philosophizing of the essays.

Other lyrics are more directly related to the themes of the prose passages. The single stanza poem “I Don’t Believe in the Soul” reads like Emily Dickinson on psilocybin and is worth reproducing in full:

“The quick flints avid at the feeder.
The bare trees like dendrites intuiting blue.
The burl that, looked at, blurs into a squirrel.
The little nonethelesses that keep me you.”[15]

The same careful modulation of and resistance towards religious meaning that marks the essays is at work here, but to artistic rather than discursive effect.

The “Against Despair” of the title is clearest in Wiman’s original poems, in which cancer references are surprisingly few and indirect. Instead, the lines lance upward to the life of the soul, to spiritual suffering and spiritual exuberance. An illuminating foil for this is L.E. Sissman (1928-1976), whose fastidious blank verse remained stubbornly fixed on the bleak observables of the hospital rooms where he sickened and died. Another useful comparison is Paul Murray, the Irish priest whose 2014 Scars: Essays, Poems and Mediations on Affliction covers similar territory using similar methods to Wiman’s. Murray’s verse, though, is unflaggingly pastoral. Like George Herbert (whom Wiman frequently references), Murray presents an experience of affliction that is calibrated to become medicine for the suffering soul. Zero at the Bone has none of this ministerial quality, even when it becomes didactic. It is the voice of one man revealing himself and letting others do with this information what they may — the voice of an artist. It is self-revelation, not divine revelation.

Subject matter aside, Wiman’s skill and range as a poet are on full display here. He is a master at supplying free verse with its final freedom — that of approaching meter, incorporating it, almost dancing with it, and then sending it back to the church basement wall with a flick of his elbow. Eliot is a guide in this of course, but so is Stevens:

Poverty is like a genetic bequest, polar loneliness.
The finical, fanatical, reciprocal chiseling of mind and matter.
And the long silences, late saliences of God and sound
set like glyphs in the mother country,
childhood….[16]

At times, though rarely, he even bursts into stolid American plainsong:

“The door she’s never thought to lock
is open when the neighbor needs some mayonnaise.
The Sunday they forgot to change the clock
they missed the preaching and went straight to praise.”[17]

The verse is not the most disciplined, but then, you wouldn’t want it to be in a collection like this, which is more like a chili than a consommé. The poems and essays abrade one another roughly, each asserting its individuality for a hot minute before succumbing to the flavor of its neighbors.

So, what is ‘Zero’?

Zero at the Bone takes its title from the final line of Dickinson’s 1096 (“A narrow Fellow in the Grass”), and in so doing amplifies the Edenic symbology that Wiman supplies snakes in “Kill the Creature.” It is not only tempting, but plausible to see Milton’s Satan, perhaps updated for deconstructing evangelicals, as the unifying thread of the book if not its secret hero. In seeking God beyond God, Wiman is most weary of the “essential and lethal skepticism” that was the Reformation’s gift to modernity.[18] He candidly admits that problematizing religion is rewarded in his circles and that it can even form the basis of a false spirituality: “You can become so comfortable with God’s absence and distance that eventually your own unknowingness gives you a big fat apophatic hug.”[19] His greatest survival tool against this cynicism that he deplores in himself and others, within religion and outside it, is poetry.

Yet, quoting Fanny Howe, he also reminds us that, in The Zohar of the Kabbalah, zero stands for God, or at least the place where “the end and the beginning become inseparable.”[20] So zero has something of a double meaning in this collection. It’s God and it’s his disgruntled creature, the devil. It’s poetry and it’s magic. It’s everything and anything that allows Wiman to encompass and purify religion, to bring it onto the page and give it a flickering complexity that eludes the leaden tongues of tent preachers back in the Texas of the 1980s. It’s also a weapon against the spiritual despair that comes from cancer, from its toxic treatment, from family struggles, from his own “Ninja blender for a brain”[21] that too easily reduces the comforts faith affords other people to mush. Most importantly, though, this zero (and it, stripped to the bone) is the authenticity, the poverty in a way, needed to smuggle something of the second person of the Trinity into the Bible-thumped, tradition-allergic, yet still Christ-haunted world of American letters.

Footnotes