Transfiguring medievalism: Poetry, attention, and the mysteries of the body

By Cary Howie

Transfiguring medievalism combines medieval literature, modern poetry and theology to explore how bodies, including literary bodies, can become apparent to the attentive eye as more than they first appear. Transfiguration, traditionally understood as the revelation of divinity in community, becomes a figure for those splendors, mundane and divine, that await within the read, lived and loved world. Bringing together medieval sources with modern lyric medievalism, the book argues for the porousness of time and flesh, not only through the accustomed cadences of scholarly argumentation but also through its own moments of poetic reflection. In this way, Augustine, Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante, Boccaccio and the heroes of Old French narrative, no more or less than their modern lyric counterparts, come to light in new and newly complicated ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526148643

Cary Howie

Bill Burgwinkle is Reader in French and Occitan Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Book preview

Introduction: Ave

Toward the end of The Troubadours Etc., the introductory poem to her collection Incarnadine, Mary Szybist’s speaker, having evoked passenger pigeons and Puritans as well as the troubadours of her title, asks:

At what point is something gone completely?

The last of the sunlight is disappearing

even as it swells—¹

For this poem, there is a deep and, in the spirit of sunset, a deeply colored ambivalence to the last of the sunlight. It is the last, as well as what paradoxically lasts; it is the remains of the day, even as it is what, of the day, remains. The question swells—it is nearly blank verse—even as it unspools, even as, like the last of the sunlight, it comes to an ambiguous close.

This question of light and language is, in a sense, also the guiding question of the book you hold in your hands, literally or otherwise. This book you hold, in whatever way, at the edge of your eyes, this book you have welcomed into your thoughts for this brief moment before something else—a lover, a dog, a colleague, another book—breaks into, breaks open, your grasp. Those of us who give ourselves over to words, for a living or at our leisure, cannot get rid of this question. Each word disappears as it swells, at least if we allow it to carry us away, at least if we ride its breaks into the shallow surf of the end of the sentence, the end of the line. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I am, however, inviting you to linger with this knowledge, to find the unknowing that incompletes it.

If transfiguration means anything, this is one thing it could mean: a light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear; a light that burnishes the edges of an accustomed figure until they shine differently; and a language, too, whose well-worn figures, including its figures of speech, suddenly swell with a dwindling, dazzling depth. The world has never not held such depths. The world has never not relinquished such surfaces.

Like sunsets and country roads, two of the figures at the heart of Szybist’s poem, the Middle Ages seem to activate an especially intense awareness of the paradoxes of time, speech, and perception in an astonishing array of contemporary lyric voices. Throughout the chapters that follow, these instances of lyric medievalism will provide both an alternative to the cadences of argumentative criticism and a choir, to which I’ll tentatively join my reedy voice, of lovers of the past, dreamers with the past, and not just any past but the uncannily specific past that the Middle Ages—always plural—always are. Szybist’s speaker observes, earlier in her poem:

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love

only through miracle,

but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,

how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.²

The distinction the poem makes here is as much between thinking something and knowing it, or between being given and being made, even self-made, as it is between troubadour and Puritan, twelfth-century Occitania and seventeenth-century North America. What it suggests, to me, is that the medieval singer—and, with him or her, the Middle Ages in general—opens the question of poetic and erotic agency, of what it is we do when we speak and when we sing, when we love and when we burn. If the Puritan is passive, granted love as a miracle, as an exception, absolutely beyond control, the troubadour is, in contrast, entirely erotically reflexive: burning himself, making herself, and, even before these reflexive techniques, know[ing] how. Yet the troubadour’s is a paradoxical know-how, inasmuch as it leads to self-combustion, on the one hand, and petrification (they become shrines), on the other. Whether or not this is an accurate description of the Middle Ages or early modernity, Szybist’s contrast manages to bring to the surface, without enshrining them, the paradoxes that constitute any relationship to a read or dreamed past, a past loved or lived. It is, in fact, a minor miracle that we can love what no longer strictly exists (what inevitably comes to us as something granted, even when we come to take it for granted). It is, in fact, no less a miracle that something survives the bright blaze of its own elaborate systems for producing and replicating knowledge, that some quick spark escapes the shrine.

After all, transfiguration, in the classic sense of what happens to Jesus on the Gospel mountain or in the sense, more particular to this book, of what allows a beloved body to shine with new and reorienting light, is not something you can just produce. It is more like the Puritan’s love, in Szybist’s terms, than the troubadour’s bright self-burning. Transfiguration is something that no amount of know-how, no technique, can produce. And yet, with Szybist’s troubadours, we might train ourselves to recognize the gift when it occurs; we might undertake the physical and poetic therapy requisite to keep our hands open. It is in precisely this role, and for precisely this reason, that I summon in these pages a series of lyric poets whose sense of the complicated, imperfectly present materiality of language, or history, or love, largely outstrips the more self-assured knowledge of critical discourse. I write these words, in other words, as at once a Puritan and a troubadour, a reluctant scholar and a poet manqué. If we can learn to see some of our all too familiar objects and concepts through the stained glass of lyric, we might see not just more vibrantly but more truly. If we can allow lyric voices and rhythms to recalibrate our senses, we may become alert to the very sensuousness of the world, even (in Szybist’s words) the incompletely gone world that is the past, in ways that restore to us not just this world but our very world-bearing, world-heavy, world-enriched bodies.

The dialectical work that this kind of transfigurative practice requires is, nonetheless, at once extensive and delicate. Its challenge is not to sublate the past into a more knowing present, not to evacuate the present for the sake of an only darkly glimpsed past, and not to pretend that scholarly languages aren’t always also erotic languages and poetic ones. Taken together, the languages of learning and lyricism may just break one another open. Given together, the languages of the Middle Ages and our late modernity may just allow something to crest on those breaks, to wash ashore, to come to presence in, and as, the thick texture of a complicated, longed-for world.

We could, in other words, take a lesson from the cats in Donna Masini’s poem Spiritual Awakening, for whom [r]itual and exercise … is knocking down, night after / night, my whole / shelf of spiritual reading.³ The poem uses the language of medieval and early modern religious life (the exercises in question a direct echo of Ignatius⁴) to propose a kind of counter-discipline to those we might, spiritually or otherwise, tend to expect of ourselves: a shelf of books not pondered, not appropriated for their content or form, not enlisted in an academic or religious project but, instead, knock[ed] down. And the rhythm of that knocking is the rhythm of repeated, sundered nights (night after / night) and broken wholes (my whole / shelf), binding after binding unbound, hitting the floor.

I’m trying / to teach them to wait, the speaker admits, but the poem’s main irony, its central insight, is that cat pedagogy is a punchline; human waiting may not be, in comparison, any more directly teachable. Meanwhile,

… Gina is rubbing against Meister Eckhart,

Smoky is chewing the corner of The Cloud of Unknowing.

Smoky and Gina don’t care about The Cloud of Unknowing.

They want

to eat. I stumble through the dark, open the refrigerator,

the small light and quiet air moving toward me as I imagine

light

moved in the old monks praying in their icy cells, as I imagine

grace, radiance, the vocation I’ve envied without knowing

what the call would sound like …⁵

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German preacher, and the anonymous Middle English Cloud of Unknowing represent, within this poem but also more generally, the strain of medieval religious thought that, more often than not, prefers to stress what of God it doesn’t know, what Denys Turner, among others, has called the apophatic tradition within the history of Christianity.⁶ But even if you aren’t familiar with these figures, even if you aren’t in on the unknowing joke in the penultimate line of the quotation, you may nonetheless be able to appreciate the difference between names like Meister Eckhart and names like Smoky and Gina, names that take us into an American everyday (and, in Gina’s case, an Italian-American everyday). You may also have had moments of wanting to rub against a book, rather than attempt to explicate its contents, to chew—or, in my case, to sniff—its pages rather than subordinate its material presence to some more spiritual reading. (I love thick, cheap paperbacks for this reason, for their old-man smell, their odd, compact lightness, the way they fit my hand as though a book were—imagine—made for a body, this body, mine.)

How does the speaker respond to Smoky and Gina’s nonchalance, their hunger? She stumble[s] through the dark, much as Meister Eckhart or the Cloud author would enjoin her to do, and she opens the refrigerator, whose tripped light trips the speaker’s imagination: it moves as I imagine / light / moved in the old monks praying in their icy cells. In that moment of imagining, the medieval monk both is and is in the refrigerator; he is full of small, sudden light, even as that sudden light, and its accompanying chill, surrounds him. But, if we follow the cats, we might well say that the monk is full of meat, too; any spiritual awakening is only as good as the flesh it inhabits. The speaker’s imagination then extends this small light to more abstract concepts, spiritual commonplaces such as grace, radiance, vocation, and call. As she admits her own ignorance: without knowing / what the call would sound like, the speaker acknowledges the limits of her own sensorium, indeed of her own ability to stitch the carnal and spiritual together (that is, to connect an acoustic call to a spiritual one), even as her ignorance becomes its own kind of ritual and exercise. For, after all, knowingly or not, she does respond to something here: Smoky and Gina, as much as any master or cloud. The speaker’s body, as well as her incarnate imagination, trips—stumbles, the poem says—like a refrigerator light, like a hand reaching into that light, pulling out what the poem calls "a can of Triumph Turkey Cuts in Gravy," as though this, too, were a numinous title. Between a cloud of unknowing and a can of cat food, where is the greater mystery?

This kind of equivocation—which isn’t so much a refusal to choose as it is a decision to welcome the otherworldly within the unsettlingly mundane—is at the heart, or on the shelf, of what throughout these chapters will appear under various signs but, most frequently, under the sign of transfiguration. What does it take to enable us to recognize the call when it comes, especially when it comes as a medieval call within a modern appliance, or a spiritual summoning within a stomach pang? Are the Middle Ages best experienced, sometimes, by chewing their corners, rather than attempting to explain them once again? Likewise, would our world of cats and cans become a little less rich, a little less resonant, without the shelves of spiritual reading that throw them into relief?

What is the light like, where you are? Here, wherever I am, the branches of this fir tree are bright with sun. The sign beside the window says, after the eleventh-century Saint Romuald, Sit in your cell as in paradise. What kind of paradise would this be? Stapler, desk lamp, picture of a dachshund dressed as Saint Francis de Sales, bathroom just beyond that door, that mirror, that dictionary I was given in fifth grade, the one with the torn-out page where the fu- words would have been. Somewhere, birdsong. There are cardinals that have lived all winter in one of these trees. When I remember to fill the feeder, they peck at the sunflower seeds. When I see the female, her bright beak, I say, Hello, Lady. If this were medieval Europe, and if I were the monk for whom those words about cells and paradise were written, would I say "Ave"? All of a sudden, I can picture the Virgin in a small bird, sticking it out through a rough winter.

Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine is, among other things, a series of annunciations, of engagements with the story of the biblical Annunciation, when Mary receives word of her world-defining pregnancy, when she, in the fullest sense, receives the word. In one of these, Annunciation under Erasure, Szybist unwrites the scene, so that space opens up within the words of the announcing angel:

The Holy

will overshadow you⁷

—words that announce no Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, as in the various biblical renderings, but just The Holy, its sententious capital letters calibrated against the absence, the breath, they break upon, so that what will overshadow you may well be a metaphysical concept or primordial Idea—The Holy—or, better, much better, a Holy Body: a body unthinkable without its holes, a body accessible only through, and in tandem with, its shadow. How can your shadow, the play of light and shadow that you are, make me more aware of my own complicated appearance within the world? How can holiness come to name this enabling interruption, that, put on hold, I am held together by something, within my name and every name, that withdraws even as it overshadows me?

Like the Virgin-bird or the dachshund-saint, like the cat-call of Masini’s poem or the not-spirit of Szybist, the appearances I want to visit in this book—the apparitions by whom I hope to be visited—consist of at least two things at once and, in that consistency, contest the ways in which we may be accustomed to thinking about identity, experience, language, and the world. If any bird can bear witness to, can embody, an old story that never gets old—some fluttering hope, should you choose to feed it—it’s important to take a step back from some of our certainties about what we might be looking at, and about the words through which we express our efforts to look. The visual metaphor (and it is always a metaphor) serves only to focus for a while our easily dispersible powers of attention, whose very dispersibility is of a piece with their readiness to reduce and define that to which they’re attending. Look: a bird. Look: a tree. Look: the Middle Ages. Look: a computer screen. Let me check my email.

This book issues from a paradox: it’s devoted to things, and persons, that we must, in many cases, learn to see even as they remain eminently visible. Likewise, there are things we could stand to know better or otherwise, things we know without knowing them, as well as moments of unknowing that matter more than any of our most immediate or sophisticated knowledge. Attention, in this book, is a word for how we go about engaging with a world that desperately needs our perception, our knowledge, even as the only thing it needs more than these is our respect for what in it is unperceivable, unknowable. Attention brings together this need for presence to the world (on our part) with the world’s own unfathomable presence.

There is an old word for this, one in a series of old words that I am keen to renew in these pages; this unfathomable presence is, in the most precise and most elusive sense possible, a mystery. I find it useful to hear, in the latter, an echo of what theologian Andrew Louth finds in the work of Gabriel Marcel, who distinguishes between a mystery, on the one hand, and a problem, on the other. As Louth summarizes Marcel:

A problem is a temporary hindrance, and a proper response to it is to attempt to remove it. The mysterious is quite different: it does not so much confront me, as envelop me, draw me into itself; it is not a temporary barrier, but a permanent focus of my attention.⁸

To be attentive to a mystery is not to remove it so much as to be draw[n] into it, to surrender, among other things, a more straightforward activity for something more passive or, to use a vocabulary with a longer and more resonant history, more contemplative. Louth stresses that this is a contrast, and not a dichotomy (there is, here and elsewhere, no life that is not at least in part a mixed life, active and contemplative at once) even as he readily concedes that ours is a moment too apt to import the criteria of the problem into the realm of the mystery:

But the contrast remains, and since problem-solving can be successful, whereas contemplation of mystery cannot, there cannot be in the humanities any hope for the sort of success that the sciences have known. Nor in theology: and especially not in Christian theology whose central mystery is focused in the birth of a child in a stable, and the death of a man on a cross.⁹

Now, medievalist readers may be more familiar, and more comfortable, with the rhetoric of wonder than with the rhetoric of mystery. Consider, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum’s classic synthesis, according to which, for the Middle Ages, "wonder entail[s] a passionate desire for the scientia it lack[s]; it [is] a stimulus and incentive to investigation."¹⁰ For Bynum, wonder desires to know, even as it may be unable to know. Wonder, in her account, treats the world as something slightly more than a problem and slightly less than a mystery. Louth, meanwhile, seems to be suggesting that there are phenomena—but it is almost catachrestic to call them phenomena—for which, or for whom, the proper response is not investigation so much as envelopment. The dirty baby, like the still dirtier victim of state-sponsored torture and execution, is not meaningless—recall that, for Bynum, meaning is what the wonderful points to—but it would be manifestly inadequate, not to say presumptuous, to say that birth and death were, first and foremost, meaningful.¹¹ (You don’t get any closer to figuring them out the longer you study them.) How much more, then, must the particular mysteries that this death and this birth embody for Christian theology (but even, I’d wager, for any imagination that dares to linger with them) exceed even the most passionate desire to find within them some kind or content of knowledge?

If, then, success is keyed to resolution, or at least to the ongoing, if perhaps interminable, quest for knowledge, might this be the moment to admit that, if this book does its job, it will have been a failure? That it might get you into the woods—or, but this is beyond me, into the stable—but never out of them? Attention might, then, be a way of saying how, as participants in the world, we acknowledge the mystery of that world—which is, of course, no less than our own mystery, the mystery into which we are born, over and over again. This mystery, re-encountered in our lives, is not particularly different from the mystery that structures the Scooby-Doo cartoons of my childhood or the Father Brown stories of my adulthood, a mystery that looks, paradoxically, more or less like a problem, solved only to be renewed in a different form. But in that renewal lies something wonderful, indeed, more than wonderful, permanent, as Louth puts it. There is an old word for this, too, familiar to anyone who’s spent time with knights wandering in the woods: romance.

So this is a book of paradoxes, a book in thrall to paradoxes. We might best appreciate the Middle Ages, sometimes, by taking leave of them, by grazing in the pastures of modernity. We might more fully participate in the modern world, we might be more fully present to that world, by putting its modernity, its modern prejudices (including its ostensible secularism), on hold, by waiting for the world, by waiting for our selves. Likewise, attention might not be the opposite of distraction so much as distraction’s hidden core, the bauble it keeps from itself: the thing it wants to want. There has to be a way out of our overwritten and overscheduled lives which does not seek some utopian abandonment of those lives but, rather, seeks to dive deeper into them, to change them from within: an attention at the heart of distraction through which distraction might come undone. In this book, the critical poetic equivalent of that attentive heartbeat within the sinuous skin of distraction is the mutual enfolding and disclosure of the medieval and modern, the scholarly and the lyrical, the literary and, for lack of a better word, the theological. (But please, hackle-equipped reader, don’t hear theology as whatever nightmare it might ordinarily be for you. Be patient with me.)

What I’m attempting to embody in these pages—and they are nothing if not a kind of embodiment—is not an opposition, not attention versus something else, even as I will fall repeatedly short of this goal. Opposition, in fact, might be very close to what Augustine famously diagnoses as the gnostic myth of evil’s substance: it may appear to make real something that, in fact, is strictly nothing. (Anne Lécu glosses similarly the deliver us from evil of the Lord’s Prayer: it teaches us not to resist evil, since to resist [it] would be to grant it too much importance.)¹² Attention might be waiting to be integrated into the very practices which most seem to preclude it, might be waiting to show how these practices are pliably other than they might first have seemed to be. There is another old word for this: transfiguration.

One of the paradoxes that this book is built upon is the power of poetry—often nominally secular poetry—to produce something like religious experience, as well as something like philosophical insight. Attention is a metonym for both of these things—philosophy, religion—though it doesn’t quite boil down to either of them. Poetry, too, in both its medieval and modern incarnations—and the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking—takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer. The Middle Ages knew this, loved this, better than we tend to allow. We, too, in our late modernity, when we shelve our suspicion, might be able to admit that the words we fear in the mouths of the pious are the same words we cry out, the same words we own and are owned by, in our passion and in our grief.

Try to hold these things together. Outside the window there might be a hydrangea whose leaves shake softly in the rain. Somewhere, out of view, birds might be making noise, not singing, really, so much as squeaking, sort of. I keep thinking that the birds must be making the leaves shake, but the birds are absolutely invisible. I superimpose what I hear (bird noises) onto what I see (moving leaves) and create chains of causation whose truth is not scientific so much as poetic, whose truth, this bird-moved bush, comes to me as the world’s essential fluttering, the squeak-and-thrash that we, too, fundamentally might be.

The fourteenth-century Little Flowers of St. Francis provides an exemplary instance of holding things together, holding them as they are