Lyric Theology: Art and the Doctrine of Creation

By Thomas Gardner

Art is an outworking of God’s creative process, a tangible participation in the shaping of the world. Through our artistic endeavors, we both express our understanding of creation and imbue that creation with new meaning. Four artists in particular—the poet Czeslaw Milosz, filmmaker Terrence Malick, novelist Marilynne Robinson, and lyric essayist Annie Dillard—actively wrestle with a world that reflects God’s glory while remaining at times deeply and troublingly obscure.

In Lyric Theology, Thomas Gardner unfolds the ways these four important contemporary figures, drawing on modes of thinking rooted in lyric poetry, explore what the world looks like when seen as created and received as a gift. Lyric thinking, he argues, dramatizes a mind and spirit reaching toward a beauty and complexity that can never be fully grasped but yet can be lifted up in praise and wonder, bafflement and song. The specific lyric responses on display here— resisting meaninglessness, wrestling with contrary impulses to both celebrate and turn away, embracing as revelatory the failure to see fully, and redeeming the world by lifting its particulars into song—can be seen as acts of theological thinking, deepening and extending the doctrine of creation by living out its implications in the world.

If the world were created out of nothing save the desire to extend the love expressed within the Trinity to creatures who might reflect it back in wonder and praise, lyric ways of making sense of the world—breaking free of straightforward conceptualization and argument and exploring inward, nuanced, and continually made and remade responses to the world’s particulars—bring this idea forward as a living thing. Drawing on his own work as a literary scholar and a lyric essayist, Gardner here gives us the tools to both understand and join in performing creative theological explorations of great subtlety, beauty, and originality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781481316224

Book preview

Cover Page for Lyric Theology

Lyric Theology

Art and the Doctrine of Creation

Thomas Gardner

Baylor University Press

© 2022 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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In memory of Roger Lundin (1949–2015)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Czeslaw Milosz

The Immense Call of the Particular

2. Terrence Malick

Always You Wrestle Inside Me

3. Marilynne Robinson

But if the While I Think on Thee

4. Annie Dillard

In Touch with the Absolute at Base

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Names and Subjects

Index of Scripture

Acknowledgments

I have dedicated this book to Roger Lundin of Wheaton College, who was a great encouragement to me as I worked on this book, both in our conversations about Dickinson and Milosz and theological issues, and even more in his steadying insistence that such writers were, as Jeremy Begbie put it in a tribute to Roger, theological voices in their own right. I miss him greatly.

I have benefitted greatly from friends and colleagues who have read and commented on and thought with me about portions of this work, including Jeremy Begbie, Brian Britt, Miriam Clark, Peter Graham, Bob Hicok, Tiffany Eberle Kriner, Esther Richey, Robert Siegle, and Edward Weisband.

Virginia Tech offered me a sabbatical during which I completed this project, for which I am very grateful. I presented some of this material, in earlier forms, in talks at Wheaton College, the University of Helsinki, the Bradley Study Center and the Department of Religion and Culture (both at Virginia Tech), and meetings of the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association.

I am also grateful for permission to quote from the following material: excerpts from Natura, An Appeal, Blacksmith Shop, The World, "Esse, The Spirit of History, No More, Throughout Our Lands, With Trumpets and Zithers, To Raja Rao, The Unveiling, Diary of a Naturalist, Lauda, Bells in Winter, A Mirrored Gallery, How It Should Be in Heaven, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Annalena, Consciousness, Realism, Winter, On Prayer, In a Buggy at Dusk, A New Province, Capri, Lecture IV, This, Return, and A Philosopher’s Home," from New and Collected Poems (1931–2001) by Czeslaw Milosz, published by HarperCollins and Penguin Classics. Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted and distributed in the United States and worldwide by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Penguin Books Ltd.

Excerpts from Apprentice and In Vain are from Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz. Translated by the author and Robert Hass. Copyright © 2004 by Robert Hass. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Introduction

In the prologue to her three-day meditation on how spirit reveals itself in the material world, Holy the Firm (1977, revised 1994), Annie Dillard reaches back to an experience two years before the writing when she was camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and finds there a powerful image that will become central to her thinking in that book. The image also brilliantly captures the underlying dynamic of the different sorts of lyric thinking I will be examining here. Dillard is reading by candlelight while camping alone in the mountains when the following occurs:

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a sputtering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. . . . All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax—a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.¹

The shell of the moth’s abdomen and thorax begins to act as a wick, drawing wax up through the gold tube of the moth’s body and bursting forth in flame:

The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out.²

This striking event—the moth’s hollowed-out body jammed in the candle’s soft wax, the wax rising up through the body’s wick into a head of flame—becomes for Dillard an image for different ways of taking in the world: A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. But it soon becomes clear that for a writer like Dillard these are not separate actions at all. They are linked. Sentence by sentence in this text, she devotes herself to the particulars of creation, lifting what she discovers in that pool of materials up through the bright wick of [her] mind and working those details into sense and significance or, sometimes, unending puzzlement, and finally bursting forth at what is seen there, in the fires of the spirit we call praise and lament and song. In what follows, I will call this three-part response to the world lyric thinking—focused on particulars, actively lifting them up through the work of a single, embodied imagination into flaring expressions of bewilderment, desire, and joy.

In using the term lyric thinker to describe Dillard and the three other artists I examine here, I intend to stress the musical way their thought moves as they lift the world’s particulars into fire, meaning, puzzlement, and praise.³ We trace lyric poetry in its origins to words sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and musicality is still a central feature of its definition.⁴ As James Longenbach argues, a lyric poem dramatizes a mind or heart in motion, often reaching toward something just out of reach.⁵ It moves toward meaning not primarily the way conventional prose does—through narration, description, or argument—but through a kind of patterning that Stephanie Burt calls analogous to music, in which sounds and images and figures of speech are played off against each other in a way that evokes lyric interiority, the dialogue of the self with the self.⁶ As listeners, we are brought into the process through which thoughts are not organized but discovered—what Longenbach calls the sound of thinking, creating the beautiful illusion of a fully articulated inner life.⁷ We could then say, opening up the term as Burt does and as I do in this book, that "lyric [is] not [simply] the name of a genre but the name of a mode: you can find lyricism in all manner of texts, even in sufficiently evocative realist novels (straining against their realism), although the texts that are most lyrical, often, are (unsurprisingly) short poems. Lyric escapes from prose meaning almost as the soul, or the spirit, escapes from the body in pneuma, the Greek word meaning both ‘spirit’ and ‘breath.’ "⁸

What I also want to argue here is that lyric thinking, as exemplified by the work of the four artists I study (and others), has proved invaluable in unfolding the implications and possibilities of specific theological ideas, in particular what is often called the doctrine of creation. The doctrine of creation is the idea that God created matter and time, the heavens and the earth, out of nothing save the desire to extend the love expressed within the trinity to creatures outside of that circle who might reflect it back in wonder and praise.⁹ The lyric, in its exploratory, weaving, and unweaving way of making sense of the world’s particulars, lifting them up into wonder and flame, seems particularly suited to reaching toward a beauty that can never be fully known or fully taken in, a beauty that continually beckons and continually hides. In such work, language, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, is being used to evoke a reality beyond its grasp, to evoke a sense of what cannot be said.¹⁰ In the way that it embraces and even celebrates its own limits, the lyric offers contemporary thinkers a form particularly suited to approaching a created world, a world as theologian Trevor Hart puts it, not yet fully unfolded, laden with a plenitude of as yet unanticipated form and meaning.¹¹ Perhaps even deeper, as we will see, lyric thinking seems particularly suited to engaging with the world’s apparent meaninglessness, understanding as it does that strangeness and fragility and obscurity are, in fact, a central aspect for contemporary readers of what must be taken in and responded to in the world’s display of God’s glory. The lyric, I will argue, approaches the world as if it were meaningful but also as if being hidden or obscured or lost and then found were part and parcel of God’s giving of himself to be known.¹²

Lyric thinking, or, as I will term it when applied to theological issues, lyric theology, does not so much explain or argue for the doctrine of creation as it asks what the world looks like from within the theological idea.¹³ What would it mean to receive the world as a gift, it wonders, when what we are given seems at the same time both enormously fragile and almost unsettling in its demands? What would it feel like to actually put this theological idea into action, to consciously engage the world in its light? As we will see, lyric thinking, working outward from its roots in poetry, cuts across differences in medium and genre and allows us to see deep commonalities in the way filmmakers, novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers, to name just the fields represented in this study, respond to a world understood as both deeply meaningful and deeply obscure, lifting it up into meaning and praise. Lyric thinking, to adapt Marilynne Robinson’s words about Jonathan Edwards, is, in its display of the highest human capacities, for generosity and love, equally with intelligence and aesthetic sense, particularly in the last of these [the aesthetic sense], . . . the means of our individual participation in a revelation that saturates experience, since Being itself is an emanation of God.¹⁴ Contemporary artists, I am arguing, as we engage with their work, offer us a chance to reexamine and freshly employ a theological approach to the world particularly in need of being voiced again today.

In his survey of the doctrine of creation, Colin Gunton begins with the crucial observation that God created the world out of nothing—out of no preexistent material and out of no preexistent need. He had no need to rely on anything outside himself, . . . creation is an act of divine sovereignty and freedom, an act of personal willing. It is something that God wills for its own sake and not because he has any need of it.¹⁵ And what God desires is to share himself, to share the love that is at the core of his being. Belden Lane, focusing on the Reformed tradition, describes Calvin’s understanding of this aspect of the doctrine in surprisingly personal terms:

In the first book of his Institutes, Calvin joined the beauty of a stunning cosmos with the mystery of God’s inner life as Holy Trinity. As he understood it, the transcendent Creator of all things is at heart a sharing of persons bound together in inexplicable delight, reaching out in love to a world meant for relationship. To what end does God by the power of his Word and Spirit create heaven and earth out of nothing? asks Calvin. Why is there such unlimited abundance, variety, and beauty of all things? So that we might take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater, he answers. The Trinity’s joy is made complete in a creation that sings in response.¹⁶

Creation’s theater invites us into God’s delight in himself. Dillard’s flame, human consciousness drawing the wax of the world’s particulars up through thought toward the source of beauty, is how the world sings in response. Delight, in many and surprising forms, is the part we have been called to play. Lane writes:

The impulse to create the world arises out of a loving dance of interrelationship within God’s interior life. Creation is a fruit of God’s longing for his Other, says Jürgen Moltmann. It is a consequence of God reaching out beyond the Trinity for ever more things to love. Calvin’s Trinitarian theology is similar in this regard to Greek fathers like Gregory of Nazianzus who employed the Eastern Orthodox concept of perichoresis in relating the Trinity to creation. Like the dancing, interpenetrating lines of a Celtic knot, the persons of the Trinity reach for more and more dance partners in the ever-expanding celebration of God’s glory.¹⁷

The lyric, at its heart, records and recreates such acts. It takes up the invitation to dance. What drives that dance is longing and desire, as theologians from various traditions have argued. David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, in his important book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, argues that worldly beauty shows creation to be the real theater of divine glory—good, gracious, lovely, and desirable, participating in God’s splendor. The beauty of creation is shown forth in the irreducibly particular, with the concrete and particular "inflam[ing] desire, drawing one on into an endless epektasis, a stretching out toward an ever greater embrace of divine glory."¹⁸ Dillard’s flame always reaches, never fully grasps. It is, in Hart’s words, enkindled always anew by the beauty that lies beyond the beauty already possessed, receiving the visible as an image of God’s transcendent loveliness, but longing all the more to enjoy that beauty face-to-face, . . . experience[ing] ceaseless delight precisely in that its desire can know no satiety . . . and so the true vision of God is never to arrive at desire’s end.¹⁹ As we will see in the artists we examine, this means that our responses to the beauty displayed in the theater of creation are not simple, or not only simple. In the grasp of something without bounds, they are simultaneously expressions of unsatisfied struggle and almost unwordable joy, lifting up the world in endless longing.

Rowan Williams’ remarks on what it feels like to be caught up in such endless reaching are particularly striking. If the soul’s pilgrimage, he writes in The Wound of Knowledge, begins . . . with the stirring of desire, . . . [the soul] awakened by beauty, then that journey, always marked by desire, by hope and longing, never coming to possess or control its object, is not something fully described in abstract terms.²⁰ God’s beauty is strange, and painful, and hidden. It is not particularly at home in straightforward prose, but, as the lyric knows, What cannot be said may still be sung. We praise that which we cannot speak, Williams writes. The violent love of God breaks through deafness and blindness; the violent desire of souls for God breaks through dumbness. The heart has no words but it cannot contain itself in silence. Williams turns for support to Augustine on the heart’s need to speak back, in something other than speech, to the beauty that has stirred and awakened it, turned its inner workings into fire: Love grows cold in the heart’s silence; love on fire, the heart’s clamor.²¹ This is where the lyric, tracing out an inner music, is of most value, putting this theological idea into sometimes surprising action.

Williams calls particular attention to Augustine’s many-sided, continually reconstituted wrestling with what compels and eludes. He writes: Augustine’s genius is in the wholeness, the sweeping comprehensiveness, of his picture of the believer shattered and compelled by God’s violent beauty . . . accessible to the violent, reshaping love of God.²² One can hear a startling anticipation of the work of the artists we will be examining in this book in Williams’ description of Augustine’s work:

Book X of the Confessions is a particularly passionate and moving declaration of what it is to be on the way and not yet arrived at journey’s end. It is a statement of the pain and labor of a life of unfulfilled desire, the stumbling advance towards that beauty whose compelling force first broke through the defenses of the soul, drew it out and set it on its pilgrimage—the vision, clear for a few rare and indescribably precious moments, never quite lost, awaking the ache of longing which nothing else will ever satisfy.²³

That stumbling advance will be described by each of the artists we will consider here as a kind of charged wandering or exile. As Williams puts it:

The heart does not look for an easy stability. Augustine . . . uses similar language to that of Gregory of Nyssa in describing the never-ceasing pilgrimage of the heart or spirit or mens. . . . Desire impels us on, so let us run, let us strain forward (Psalm 38:6), for the only way you can be perfect in this life is by knowing that you cannot be perfect in this life. . . . The heart is perfect when it knows what it lacks, knows that there will be no resting place for it among the things of earth. To be in the way of salvation is to be dissatisfied, disquieted within, never complacent about your condition or secure in your understanding or your stable spiritual attainment. . . . There is no rest in mere self-awareness, because to know the self properly is to see it set in the midst of the vast landscape of God’s workings, a landscape with no human map, trusting only to the hand of God.²⁴

One particularly troubling aspect of that landscape within which the soul wanders, crucial to each of the artists we will consider and in fact to any alert perceiver, is the finite nature of the stage on which beauty shows itself, what Williams calls the sphere of poverty, tears, loneliness, disillusion and the scars of countless unintelligible hurts. Such a world draws the soul to itself in two densely interwoven ways: The compulsion towards the love of God’s beauty comes not only from the loveliness but also the horror of the world. The love of God looks in hope for fulfillment of a joy already begun, but also looks for the healing of the world’s wounds; like all authentic hope, it is in some degree protest.²⁵ The lyric as well, equally compounded of protest and hope, puts that love into action.

Music, and here I would include the various forms lyricism or musical thinking takes, is, in Jeremy Begbie’s words, a voicing [of] creation’s praise.²⁶ In its focus on beauty and horror, its homeless wanderings and momentary arrivals, it lifts the many-sided material world back to its creator in flame:

extend[ing] and elaborat[ing] the praise which creation already sings to God. The doxology of creation has already found its summation in Christ: the one through whom all things were created became part of a creation whose praise has been corrupted, and in the crucified and risen Lord, creation is offered back to the Father, redirected toward its originally intended goal. The Spirit now struggles in creation to being about what has already been achieved in Christ. We are now invited into this movement in order to enable creation to be more fully what it was created to be.²⁷

As artists respond to the theater of creation staged before them, long[ing] for God’s presence, indeed, thirst[ing] for him, they reflect that beauty back to him, in many different ways. A great artist, Begbie notes, quoting Karl Barth on Mozart, is simply one instrument, one form of consciousness, through which creation rises, in particular and individual ways, into articulation and praise:

He does not obtrude himself in some mania for self-expression. Nor does he try to force a message on the listener. He does not "will to proclaim the praise of God. He just does it—precisely in that humility in which he himself is, so to speak, only the instrument with which he allows us to hear what he hears: what surges at him from God’s creation, what rises in him, and must proceed from him. He simply offered himself as the agent by which little bits of horn, metal and catgut could serve as the voices of creation."²⁸

If, as Trevor Hart argues, according to a theology of creation, . . . the world is to be received from God’s hand as a gift, then it follows that he giv[es] the world to us, to see what we may make of it.²⁹ This is the work lyric thinkers do—offering us examples of such receiving and making and inviting us to try them out for ourselves, while continually reminding us, in a passage Annie Dillard often cites from Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, that God’s giving is not necessarily without powerful complications: not as the world giveth give I unto you (John 14:27). It is those complications and the powerfully responsive forms they generate that this book will be most concerned with.

What I am exploring here is the way lyric thinking—an expression of the heart’s clamor, the heart awakened and shattered, reaching beyond itself—shows itself to be a particularly rich medium for contemporary artists interested in unfolding and testing out the theological idea I have just sketched. Indeed, one might argue that recent scholarly interest in the lyric has given us eyes to see just how powerful and sensitive a tool it has become for theological investigation.³⁰ Central to most recent discussions of the lyric is its difference from strictly conceptual or propositional prose. Robert von Hallberg, in Lyric Powers, for example, comments on the poet Robert Duncan’s definition of poetry as musical thought by noting that what these writers mean by musicality is a resistance to propositional knowledge within forms whose command of attention and feeling is beyond dispute.³¹ Poetry, he adds, with [its use of] musical language and figure, [presents] a sense of what will not be brought into propositional prose. Music leads away, von Hallberg writes, stretching toward feelings and insights and ideas of order and coherence not yet conceptually or comprehensively articulable. It evokes the edge of what one comprehends, employing patterns of thought and feeling unsatisfactorily accounted for in disciplined prose.³² Building on the poet and philosopher John Koethe’s claim that "the animating force of poetic speculation is always desire, rather than an ideal of impersonal accuracy, von Hallberg links the lyric’s unfolding of the edge of what one comprehends to something like Dillard’s flickering, ever-reaching flame: Poetry is an expression of hope, then. One thinks in a poem not so much of a truth as toward something unpossessed—maybe lost, like Eurydice, or never fully attained, like Beatrice. This is why the movement of a mind is a poet’s concern, why a critic speaks less of propositions than of a poem’s development."³³

The musical resources of language von Hallberg identifies—resources at the ready disposal of poets that are conventionally less accessible to essayists, say: figures, dramatic dialogue, juxtaposition, paradox, and all the devices of resonance—reach toward something rather than seek to possess it. They present a sense of wonder in the face of what cannot be adequately comprised in prose. When words cohere musically, von Hallberg writes, they allude to significance beyond paraphrase. Rather than spell[ing] out relations between statements, lyric thought leaves meaning implicit, loaded not unpacked, calling the reader to a structure behind the text, an order elsewhere beyond this page. The devices of resonance—echoing, rhyming, coming undone and coming together again—are how language says as if. They lead language outwards, toward what is present but can never be grasped, transform[ing] one thought into another, usually unforeseen, and sometimes indeterminate.³⁴ They lift the world’s particulars up, in thought, toward flame.

In his recent Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler also contrasts the lyric with more straightforward prose. The lyric, he writes, is not the fictional representation of an experience or event so much as an attempt to be itself an event. Rather than describing or interpreting something in the past, it gives us an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’ of lyric articulation, handling the past, if it does so, now. It reaches from here toward an absent you. Its special use of language, making extensive use of elements not to be found in ordinary speech acts—from rhythm and sound patterning to intertextual relations, foregrounds the lyric as [an] act of address, lifting it out of ordinary communicational contexts, [and] giv[ing] us a ritualistic, hortatory act, a special sort of linguistic event in the lyric present. Its language works against instrumental reason, prosaic efficiency, and communicative transparency, calling us instead to focus on the act of speaking and thinking itself, a speaker lifting what rises in him [or her] into speculation and lament and praise.³⁵

Such an action, unfolded in the lyric now, is, Culler argues, designed for reperformance by the reader: "Lyrics offer not representations of speeches by fictional characters but memorable writing to be received, reactivated, and repeated by readers, . . . texts composed for reperformance. That, essentially, is what the following chapters attempt to do—to reperform the musical acts of thinking various artists, in various forms, engage in, calling particular attention to what Culler calls a fundamental constituent of the genre: its effort to re-make the universe as a world, giving a spiritual dimension to matter."³⁶ By reperforming these acts of wonder or praise, building up pictures of how artists have productively engaged such problems over the course of entire careers, I hope to give the reader the experience of having entered into and wrestled through these ideas aesthetically for him- or herself. Reading is itself a lyric act. It makes, as Culler writes about the lyric, perhaps alluding to the central tenet of the doctrine of creation sketched earlier, much of nothing.³⁷ What I am interested in exploring are specific acts of thinking and speaking and singing that make much of creation in just these theological terms.

The four lyric artists I examine here explore what responding to the world as if it were God’s book, addressed to us in all its bewildering and troubling complexity, might look like. They each, in their own characteristic ways, driven in part by ways of thinking made available by the forms they work in and in part by their own concerns and obsessions, unfold individually distinct acts of consciousness that can be traced and unfolded over time, across a series of works. As we will see, one problem each artist quite distinctively inhabits and attempts to work out has to do with the tension between meaning and meaninglessness in the created world. The particular acts through which each artist embraces or enfolds loss, pulling the world’s particulars up through the wick of the mind, become, when read together, a sort of shared performance, a chorus in which the world is, bit by bit, lifted up and sung back to its creator in praise.

The first artist I examine, the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, consistently describes himself as being at odds with himself, as being twofold or struggling with two souls. When he turns to the earth, he is both ravished by the beauty of the visual world and appalled at the brutality of the laws that govern it.³⁸ He acknowledges, As a creature of the flesh, I am part of the [natural] order, but almost instinctively he pushes back against that thought, insisting, It is without my consent.³⁹ Aesthetic engagement, an aspect of what he calls consciousness, intelligence, light, grace, the love of the good, is for him the divine in man turning against the natural in him—in other words, intelligence dissenting from ‘meaninglessness,’ searching for meaning, grafted onto the darkness like a noble shoot onto a wild tree.⁴⁰ Responding to creation as if it were meaningful and intended, then, as if All this / Is here eternally, just because once it was, is, for him, an act of resistance or dissent, pushing back against both the world and something within himself.⁴¹ I will trace the many shapes resistance takes throughout the course of his work. In a number of poems, that act of resistance is simply implied, as in this late, straightforwardly lyric celebration of a blacksmith’s shop from his childhood:

I liked the bellows operated by rope.

A hand or foot petal—I don’t remember which.

But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire!

And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,

Red, softened for the anvil,

Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,

Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.

The memory is so powerful that it becomes present as he speaks. It is as if the moment, in its eternal existence, calls him back to itself:

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,

Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds.

I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:

To glorify things just because they are. (503)

But such moments, when read in the context of Milosz’ entire body of work, even as they anticipate a day in which the form of every single grain will be restored in glory, made whole in the eternity they now reflect, must be seen alongside an almost continuous confession on the part of the poet: my [true] part is agony, / struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate, / prayer for the Kingdom / and reading Pascal (331, 256). Even as memory involuntarily testifies to the apparently eternal nature of those moments that pass before his yearning eyes, the poet acknowledges that he cannot see how this can be: I [will be] judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this (331).

In Milosz’ most important poems, the lyric impulse to embrace creation as meaningful is consistently framed against, and takes its energy from, despairing observations, often prose-like in form, that argue otherwise. It would seem impossible for him to have one response without the other. A straightforward version of this sort of oppositional thinking can be seen in the late poem Meaning, in which he declares:

—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

What never added up will add up,

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

This is a simple version of the doctrine of creation—the idea that there is an other side to the world, pointed to by its particulars but never, in this life, fully comprehended. To engage in meaning making is to maintain faith in that eventual unveiling. Immediately, however, he acknowledges and takes on the weight of the opposite thought:

—And if there is no lining to the world?

If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,

But just a thrush on a branch? If night and day

Make no sense following each other?

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

If that were the case, he continues, and this hope were never realized, if the thrush were not a sign and night and day were not testimony to a readable intention behind them, still his words themselves would last, their lyric flickerings living on as protest, haunting the empty galaxies with the (as yet denied) possibility of meaning:

—Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish,

A tireless messenger who runs and runs

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

And calls out, protests, screams. (569)

His very screams of resistance and protest, judging by their almost involuntary springing to life inside him as if initiated and sustained by some pressure beyond him, would continue to testify to a life and meaning beyond, on the other side.

This particular combination of regret and great longing (183), offered in protest, is Milosz’ most striking way of inhabiting the doctrine of creation, unfolding its implications from within a lived-out life. For the lyric impulse to rise up in him against skepticism and despair, even in the broken forms of protest and grief, is, Milosz claims, to testify almost involuntarily to the eternal nature of what continues to call, despite all evidence to the contrary. A powerful image of such a response to the world is this one, from A Treatise on Poetry:

Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk.

Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt.

We are both the snake and the wheel.

There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable

Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting

And not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect,

Time lifted above time by time. (143)

In their lyric writhing, his poems forever attempt both to cross the road from one dimension to another—as Dillard’s moth grounded in the world’s material nature and lifting it up into the fires of spirit we call meaning and praise did—and to testify to what rises up to crush that act. What he creates in his poems is a mixed form in which the unattainable / Truth of being is kept alive as a living possibility even as it remains forever out of reach. Finding both the drive and its skeptical denial alive inside himself, Milosz allows their continued opposition to drive his response to the world, convinced that time [is] lifted above time by time. That is, in its crushed testimony to