Pascal's Fire

By Kristina Bresnen

An unnamed speaker navigates a world where God comes in the shape of a cardinal, speaks in the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe, and paints the desert with bones.

Driven by sound, heartbreak, and the baffling limits and possibilities of language, a nameless speaker sets out into a dream-like wilderness where lyric and narrative meet, time dissolves, and figures as various as Moses, the apostle Paul, Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal, and Zora Neale Hurston gather in a colloquy. Born from a region of preachers and stuttering prophets, from the gift of tongues and psalms of lament and praise, Pascal’s Fire negotiates the wonder of the unknown and the tension of belief and confronts the vulnerability of speech where it brushes up against death and grief, wind and desert heat, unquenchable thirst and the steady sound of an IV drip.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771965446

Kristina Bresnen

Kristina Bresnen has published poems in Canada and the US. She is from Montreal and currently lives in British Columbia.

Book preview

Speaking in Tongues

Hestia lies in a hospital bed, lashes scabbed with sleep. Her feet push against the footboard and twist the sheets like kelp around her legs. I feed her water with a dropper and, when I look, I flinch to see her tongue, raw and caked with mucous. Scattered half-drunk cups of juice and tea, white carnations glowing buoyant in a bowl of water by the window. Her favourite shells lined up on a shelf, stones, keepsakes. Time passes in strange increments, plotless and thirsty. The light blurs, shimmer of heat above the clanking radiator. I see it bend, refract, displace itself.

This bed is a raft. At night it gets cold. I strap the planks with willow bark and punt off from the shore. I cover Hestia with a shawl and wait for morning throughout the watches of the night. I mark the time in red. I invent names for stars I do not know and watch them rise and set. I hold her hand for hours, and when I grow tired, I nod off against the bedrail.

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To hesitate: from the Latin: to stick fast, stammer in speech, be undecided.

To adhere, hold fast. Hold back in doubt or indecision.

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Think of the tongue as a ship’s rudder.

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Once, I sat inside an abandoned hangar with two thousand people. A preacher exhorted us to speak in tongues, and so, together, two thousand voices clicked and groaned like small craft pitching in a storm. I sat, bewildered, and could not speak.

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If anyone speak in a tongue, Paul tells the Corinthians, let one interpret.

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From the Book of Exodus:

And Moses said unto the Lord, O Lord I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am of slow speech, and of a slow tongue. And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? Have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be thy mouth.

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Sufi mystic, Shaykh al-‘Alawī, recollecting the blind beggar crying out to Christ:

The question of invocation is of wider scope than you imagine. A sick man lay groaning in the presence of the Prophet and one of the Companions told him to stop and to be