The Purpose and Power of Art and Poetry (4/4): R. S. Thomas at last

At last we’ve arrived at the point where I try and pretend I’m ready to tackle R. S. Thomas’s poetry.

He represents a particular challenge – he very often combines a modernist verse form with a quasi mystical content. The latter draws me strongly in, whereas the former pushes me back. The absence of music doesn’t help.

My reason for attempting to rise to this challenge is because Thomas combines spiritual themes to some degree sometimes with scientific and artistic ones, something which obviously appeals to me given my star of truth lightbulb moment.

Deus Absconditus and Theodicy

The Long Healing prayer of Bahá’u’lláh contains words that capture this challenge: ‘I call on Thee O Manifest yet Hidden, O Unseen yet Renowned, O Onlooker sought by all!’

Wynn Thomas strongly emphasises that:[1] ‘Thomas’s great quarry was ever the deus absconditus to whom the mystics of the ages had paid their awed tribute.’

Interestingly, at the same time as he searched for connection with God, he was scourged by the problem of theodicy:[2]

Thomas was ever helpless to deny his nagging, underlying recognition of the cruelty of the laws governing the world of God’s creation.

He never shook off the problem:[3]

The problem of accounting for the overwhelming evidence of suffering in the world supposedly created by a God of love: it tormented R. S. Thomas his entire life.

In the end he had to resort to the same solution as I do:[4]

His strategy [in the end] was to foreground that very transcendent otherness of God, and to emphasise that when thus coolly view sub specie aeternitatis the otherwise vivid world of human experience faded into ephemeral, illusory importance. . . . [Also] language could at best be but a darkling glass that inevitably muddled understanding.

My poem is the closest I can get to capturing what this feels like.

Before we move on to Thomas’ more intermittent preoccupation with science and art, we need to look at a few examples of his poems about his struggle to connect with God. These are the ones that have most attracted me.

His consistent focus on this theme in his poetry came relatively late:[5]

[in 1972] recently settled in Aberdaron, despairing of both culture and politics,… he began to send out his distinctive verse probes into inner space.

. . . [Seamus Heaney in Stepping Stones says] ‘What I loved then were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish – full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating.’

Even though the theme draws me in, I need at the same time to confront the problem created by the absence of music and the pared back quality of his verse. Why wasn’t this enough to repel me from continuing to read him, as was the case with almost every other modernist poet?

One of his poems to which I resonate most strongly is The New Mariner[6] which will hopefully go some way to giving a sense of where I’m coming from.

Scanned from Collected Poems — page 388

I suspect its resonance is partly because of the delightful self-mockery of the joking title and closing lines, and the memories they carry of Coleridge’s longer ballad, The Ancient Mariner. He speaks of returning from his ‘impossible journeys’ with ‘messages I cannot decipher’ and ‘worrying the ear/of the passer-by, hot on his way/to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact.’

The sarcastic metaphor describing the way he corners materialists who seek to sanctify their creed by marrying reductionist fact with reductionist fact exactly captures my own sense of naturalism’s defects which I try to convey on this blog and in conversation, ultimately based in my sense that matter is really not all there is. How could I not be drawn by the magnet of such poetry to keep revisiting it, in spite of the surface limitations that usually repel me?

The modernist manner is not cryptic or elitist. That helps. But there is more to the way he uses this style than that.

He has phrases that capture for me exactly the experience Thomas is seeking to convey. He describes ‘silence’ as God’s ‘chosen medium’ yet insists that he is ‘telling/others about it in words.’ The short and broken lines within which these phrases are embedded show us what a struggle it is for him. He doesn’t have to spell it out: he creates an experience that conveys it. The modernist style in fact helps him convey what he is seeking to express.

Even if I didn’t share that sense of his skill, the content would probably be enough to keep me engaged. Much of what I try to write in verse involves attempting to capture the inexpressible. The silence of the ground of being has always teased and tormented me.

The phrase ‘God-space’ into which he sends out his ‘probes’ implies exactly the kind of unresponsive infinity that resonates with my idea of an elusive universal mind with which it is virtually impossible to consciously connect.

He had hoped, as I did, that advancing age would probably correlate with increasing restorative quietness, ‘a time to draw/my horizons about me.’ No such luck. Rather than watching ‘memories ripening/in the sunlight of a walled garden’ such as my wife and I find at Berrington Hall, he suffers with ‘the void/over my head and the distance/within that the tireless signals/come from.’

A wall at Berrington Hall

Which contains another deeply resonant idea for me.

The Universe Within

Anjam Khursheed, in his book The Universe Within,[7] summarises our situation: ‘Humanity stands on the dividing line between two universes: the conscious universe within us and the external universe that surrounds us.’

Such attempts to capture what I have come to call the inscape, a term borrowed from Hopkins, have always fascinated me, not least because of the quotation from Ali, the successor of Muhammad in Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys. In the earliest version I came across it reads:[8] ‘Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’ Anjam Khursheed in his book The Universe Within uses[9] almost identical wording from The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh[10] along with quotations from other religious traditions, to give warrant to the title of his book.

Khursheed raises an important point here:[11]

Our spirit of exploration and discovery in the external universe is not matched by a corresponding spirit for the inner universe. We are more comfortable conquering far away moons then exploring inner space.

Much as we might brag about[12] ‘the impressive gains in our knowledge of the external world, our knowledge of ourselves remains limited.’ We are essentially missing the point according to Laszlo:[13] ‘The critical but as yet generally unrecognised issue confronting mankind is that its truly decisive limits are inner, not outer.’

The initial trigger of my attraction to Thomas’ poetry came from his poem on this very theme – Groping [14]– where he writes ‘The best journey to make/is inward. It is the interior/that calls.’

Poetics

Wynn Thomas manages to explain in a partially convincing way how Thomas’ poetics work, but unfortunately does not deal with either The New Mariner or Groping.

One example he uses from the Collected Later Poems page 33[15] is The Echoes Return Slow.

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one’s knees?

He comments:

The poem … is written in the language and grammar of actual existential experience, and gives us the self agonistes, through lines that seem to be bent and buckled at the right-hand margins by the pressure of feeling to which they are almost palpably subject. The curt phrases, like those in Emily Dickinson’s poems, belong to an urgently compressed and curtailed style of mental notation, the poetic equivalent of the stammered morse code of a mind in the midst of spiritual emergency.

I definitely could not have put it better myself.

Another example he uses is What One Receives from Living Close to a Lake[16] a poem ‘that concludes with the following passage:

a clearing and made the entangled

forest of forms and voices,

anxious intentions, urgent

memories: a deep, clear

breath to fill

the soul, an internal

gesture, arms

flung wide to echo

that mute generous outstretching

we call lake.

He explains its power:

The layout maps the movement of mind, the line-breaks repeatedly suggesting the brief searching for the right noun to follow the qualifying adjective (‘entangled’/’forest’, ‘urgent’/’memories’, ‘clear’/’breath’, ‘internal’/’gesture’), for the precise verb for its purpose (‘arms’/’flung wide’) for the object that exactly complements the verb (‘to fill’/’the soul’). The result is the conveying not of thoughts but rather of the act of concentrated thinking – in other words, of ‘contemplation’ sufficiently sustained so as to become ‘meditation’.

Art & Science

One poem I’ll focus on in a bit of detail, of the many in his Collected Poems: 1945-1990 which focus on works of art, is Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale.[17] Max Ernst is not the only surrealist Thomas addresses in his poetry – there are at least two poems triggered by the work of Magritte (see link for an example of a trigger painting). This one particularly attracted my attention because of its reference to Keats and obviously his Ode to a Nightingale.

According to the MOMA website Ernst described this work, made in 1924 – the year of Surrealism’s founding, as

“the last consequence of his [sic] early collages—and a kind of farewell to a technique…” He later gave two possible autobiographical references for the nightingale: the death of his sister in 1897, and a fevered hallucination he recalled in which the wood grain of a panel near his bed took on “successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.”

Without the picture I doubt whether I would have been able to even begin to make sense of the poem and vice versa. I’m still frankly puzzled by both the poem and the picture: that was probably the intention of both painter and poet!

What Thomas’ poem seems to be doing, which is worth drawing attention to, is using free association to shape his response to the painting, as though trying to beat Surrealism at its own game. He clearly draws in Keats given the strong association between Keats and nightingales, though Keats is clearly listening to the song in the dead of night rather than at dawn as the painting depicts, and also because the Ode addressing the nightingale flags up the power of poetry, albeit coloured by a longing for death in this context: ‘I will fly to thee . . . on the viewless wings of Poesy.’ It reminded me of the words of Bob Dylan – ‘Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain’. Thomas fails to flag up the possibility that the gate does not only represent a possible escape for the children but is also perhaps inviting us to enter the picture and share the experience more closely.

He expands on the associations he has with nightingales beyond that to include migration and insects, implying, as a result, that the children’s flight could be some kind of migration from a hostile to a kinder climate, and suggesting that the children need to be shielded from the less pleasant habits of the nightingale than its song. His last association is to a sinister fairy tale, where the eventually dead children are covered in leaves by a robin not a nightingale.

He may be also drawing associations into other poems such as Guernica[18] where the lines ‘The painter/has been down at the root/of the scream’ may be making a back reference to Munch’s painting The Scream, though there is also a scream clearly depicted in Picasso’s masterpiece. When I saw that painting full size in our visit to Barcelona I was blown away.

Interestingly, immediately preceding Guernica in the Collected Poems we find a reference to the possible close relationship for him of poetry and science. He writes[19] ‘Baudelaire’s grave/not too far/from the tree of science./Mine, too,/since I sought and failed/to steal from it…’

The New Mariner at the end makes clear his contempt for reductionist materialism but he is not blind to comparable defects in religion as practiced. He speaks[20] of the ‘human,/that alienating shadow/with the Bible under the one/arm and under the other/the bomb.’ He is also aware of our more mundane but none the less lethal destructiveness when technology shackles itself to capitalism:[21] ‘They cut down trees/to have room to make money.’ He describes the call of whales as ‘regret/for a world that has men/in it,’ of which I had no memory when I wrote my wordy poem, Orcastration, on the same theme.

Even though these occasionally recurring themes around art and science do resonate to some degree with me, what really keeps drawing me back to his poems is his constant quest for a connection with an elusive God which is far more resonant. It’s the first time for me I have found poems whose bleak modernism perfectly expresses and conveys the poet’s experience in a way that is not dispiriting but rather inspiring, and for that I am truly grateful.

For me, it seems, the purpose of poetry is largely to capture deeply important but elusive experiences in words that will lift the understanding of every careful reader to a higher level. I have come to think that Thomas succeeds in doing so more often than most poets though not in every poem he wrote — but then no poet has ever succeeded in rising successfully to that impossible challenge, as a quotation I used in an earlier post makes clear:

Perhaps a fitting way to close this sequence is with the words of Wynn Thomas[22] which describe R. S. Thomas as ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ and goes on to say ‘This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.’

References:

[1]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams – page 205.
[2]. Op. cit – page 208.
[3]. Op. cit – page 210)
[4]. Op. cit – page 210)
[5]. Op. cit – page 212.
[6]. Collected Poems 1945-1990 – page 388.
[7]. The Universe Within – page 7.
[8]. The Seven Valleys (1945 edition) – page 34.
[9]. The Universe Within – page 23.
[10]. The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh – page 40.
[11]. The Universe Within – page 157.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 10.
[13]. Op. cit – page 133.
[14]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 328.
[15]. R. S. Thomas: The Serial Obsessive – page 207.
[16]. Op. cit – pages 259-60.
[17]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 445.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 437.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 436.
[20]. No Truce with the Furies – page 51.
[21]. Op. cit. – page 43.
[22]. R. S. Thomas: The Serial Obsessive – page 10.

Read Full Post »

Veils, Words & Values (5/5): Theodicy

Had the life and growth of the child in the womb been confined to that condition, then the existence of the child in the womb would have proved utterly abortive and unintelligible; as would the life of this world, were its deeds, actions and their results not to appear in the world to come.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith: page 393)

We ended the last post with this thought.  Wynn Thomas captures what he feels is Thomas’s achievement as someone ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ in the following words:[1]

. . . This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.

That just about summarises my response to R. S. Thomas’s achievement in this respect at least.

Even so, we have the third problem. It was hard for Thomas, in the absence of presence, to reconcile the elusive existence of God with the state of a world supposedly created out of his compassionate omnipotence – the theodicy problem basically.

As Wynn Thomas explains:[2]

Thomas was ever helpless to deny his nagging, underlying recognition of the cruelty of the laws governing the world of God’s creation.

The problem, in Wynn Thomas’s view was a torment to him:[3]

The problem of accounting for the overwhelming evidence of suffering in the world supposedly created by a God of love: it tormented R. S. Thomas his entire life.

Thomas is not the only poet, of course, who has been troubled by this issue.

Dickinson & War

Emily Dickinson’s poetic productivity peaked during the years of the American Civil War. Wolosky in A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson explains: [4]

[M]ore than half of her poetic production coincides with years of the Civil War, 1861 to 1865. The years immediately preceding the war… were also the years which Thomas Johnson identifies with ‘the rising flood of her talent,’ as well as with the beginning of her reclusive practices.

There was an amazing peak in 1863 alone. Betsy Erkkila describes it as follows, in a later chapter:[5]

[O]f the 1789 poems in Franklin’s variorum edition, over half were written during the years of the Civil War between 1861 and 1865; and of these, almost 300 were written in 1863, a year of crisis and turning point in the war, when even Union victories such as Gettysburg had become scenes of horrific bloodletting and mass death on both sides.

It is not surprising that one of the main concerns of these poems is ‘theodicy’:[6]

The first striking feature of these war poems is the fundamental and commanding place they give to the problem of theodicy. Dickinson’s war poems generally attempt to make out ‘the anguish in this world’ and to decipher whether it has ‘a loving side.’ This would mean its fitting into some wider schema, some purpose that would justify suffering, giving it place and hence significance.

This was a testing struggle as in war death is[7] ‘arbitrary and recalcitrant.’ In fact:[8]

The Civil War reached levels of carnage before unknown, made possible both by new technology and new strategies of total warfare, in combination with a profound ideological challenge to American national claims and self identity, political and religious.

Shira Wolosky lists other writers, including some poets, similarly challenged:[9]

Dickinson’s work brings to awareness the importance of theodicy as a core literary (as well as philosophical and religious) structure, in, for example, Aeschylus, Augustine, and Milton, Herbert and Donne, or, closer to Dickinson, Melville and Hopkins.

In the end:[10]

Religion in many ways is a paradigm that fails Dickinson, and yet, she never completely discards it. If she is not devout, she is also not secular.… Dickinson’s work… engages in endless disputation, which is endlessly inconclusive.

Shades of R. S. Thomas here also, it seems.

Eternity

However, he does perhaps arrive at a solution which was not surprising to me:[11]

His strategy [in the end] was to foreground that very transcendent otherness of God, and to emphasise that when thus coolly viewed sub specie aeternitatis[12] the otherwise vivid world of human experience faded into ephemeral, illusory importance.

He made the additional point that ‘[Also] language could at best be but a darkling glass that inevitably muddled understanding.’

I was driven to address the same problem in a sequence of posts. I came to essentially the same conclusion:

In the end though, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, any consideration of suffering that fails to include a reality beyond the material leaves us appalled at what would seem the pointless horror of the pain humanity endures not only from nature but also from its own hands. I may have to come back to this topic yet again.

Within that context I tried to give suffering a more positive meaning and purpose:

If we could only come to see our pain and loss as providing us, as a gift, with the currency we will need when we travel, as we all must at some unknown point in the future, to settle in the undiscovered land from whose borders no traveller returns, it would become possible to accept it gratefully rather than resist it pointlessly. We would not then unwittingly destroy it, much to our disadvantage later. Without this currency, when we die we will be like refugees, ill-equipped at first to deal with the challenges of our new homeland. If we were to realise this, not just with our heads but with our hearts as well, we could then do as Bahá’u’lláh advises us and greet calamity with the same peace of mind as we welcome all good fortune. That would be true wisdom and real wealth.

I’m still not sure how successful I was in that attempt, as there is a catch here though for many of us mortals. Given that in evolutionary terms human beings have been around for a matter of minutes, our tribulations shrink in that perspective. Clearly they would shrink to nothing in the light of eternity. However, as it’s hard for our primate brains to grasp the billions of years it has taken for us to arrive on the scene, to place them in the context of an eternity in which we have no faith, given the prevalent materialistic perspective on the world, is understandably impossible. As we dismiss the afterlife as a delusional consolation what little hope we may have can be all too easily torpedoed.

However, it seems to me that unless we do find a way not only to confront the issue of a hidden God, and the veils it implies, but also the related one of theodicy, it’s hard to hold onto a positive set of values and any sense of meaning in this traumatically troubled world we wander through.

In the end I do think there is any other way to get past the theodicy problem except through the perspective of an eternal after life. John Hatcher, one of the translators of Táhirih whose work we started from earlier in this sequence, explains it in this way in a post on the Bahá’í Teachings website:

Everyone, sooner or later, asks the age-old question: does an omnipotent, all-knowing God cause—or at least fail to stop—the suffering of the innocent?

Several major principles in the Baha’i writings urge us toward a solution to this substantial dilemma. For example, God is not restricted to this physical life in rectifying injustices we have suffered in our individual lives, nor is God limited to a certain span of time for working out justice in history, as we have noted earlier in this series of essays.

This observation may seem obvious, but it is the single most critical factor in coming to terms with theodicy—the important question of why a good Creator permits evil to exist. It means that we cannot possibly evaluate or judge what befalls us or anyone else in terms of what they endure in their earthly experience. Whether suffering ultimately results in justice or injustice, something beneficial or harmful, would be similar to our attempting to assess how someone will fare in their occupation while they are still in a formative stage within the mother’s womb.

Since our fruition is destined for another plane of existence, we can hardly assess what does and does not benefit that process, any more than a fruit tree could evaluate the beneficial results of its own pruning.

And that is probably about as far as we can take it in this sequence.

References and Footnotes

[1]. R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive – page 10.
[2]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams: The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry – page 208.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 210.
[4]. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson – page 107.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 158.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 111.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 112.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 125.
[9]. Op. cit. – pages 113-114.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 116.
[11] Op. cit. – page 210.
[12]. From Wikipedia: ‘Sub specie aeternitatis (Latin for “under the aspect of eternity”)[1] is, from Baruch Spinoza onwards, an honorific expression denoting what is considered to be universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon temporal facets of reality. The Latin phrase can be rendered in English as “from the perspective of the eternal”. More loosely, it is commonly used to refer to an objective (or theoretically possible alternative) point of view.’

Read Full Post »

Veils, Words & Values (4/5): Life, Art and Deus Absconditus

At this time, likewise, I most urgently request the friends of God to make every effort, as much as lieth within their competence, along these lines. The harder they strive to widen the scope of their knowledge, the better and more gratifying will be the result. Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts. Whensoever they gather in their meetings let their conversation be confined to learned subjects and to information on the knowledge of the day.

If they do thus, they will flood the world with the Manifest Light, and change this dusty earth into gardens of the Realm of Glory.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá  From a Tablet – translated from the Arabic)

Does this quotation prove that in some way my supposed fusion of the three skill sets, spirituality, arts and psychology, into one vocation, involving also a connectedness with other people, is delusional?

Well, I can’t prove it doesn’t. The dilemma as Yeats expressed it of there being a need to choose between perfecting the life and perfecting the art, a choice that too often seems to lead to a damaged life, may not be as inevitable as we have been induced to think. It’s impossible to prove either way.

In any case the choice I appeared to have made long ago but only recently consciously uncovered is not exactly the same. I fused the exploration of at least three different domains of value in order to better understand consciousness, both mine and other people’s, so as to enable us to enhance our experience and the mental models we apply to it. This inevitably involved reading, writing, reflection and consulting. Given that my 3Rs tend to be weighted in favour of solitary exploration it may look as though my introversion tipped me towards perfecting my art of understanding at the expense of my relationships. I can’t deny that this is possible and that people close to me have suffered in consequence. I also know with a high degree of certainty though that I have been enabled to help many other people deal more effectively with the problems in their lives, both in my profession as a clinical psychologist and in my personal life as well.

I am also clear that my fusion of art, spirituality and psychology lifted my game significantly in this respect.

I would never have been able to achieve as good an understanding of dreams and hallucinations without my long experience of delving into the hidden meanings behind poems and paintings, nor would I have been able to pass on skills relevant to constructively enhancing our models of reality without intensely practising the Bahá’í yoga of consultation over many years, nor would I have been able to assist people in the exploration of their inscape without all the various meditative practices I’d delved into over the years. All of those enriched my understanding of psychology which, of course, also enriched my understanding of them in return – a process of reciprocal creativity.

In a way my intense focus on those three domains was intended to enrich my life rather than demanding that I prefer them to life. Putting the SAP (Spirituality, Arts & Psychology) acronym into practice enriched my perspective by dissolving the veils and resolving the disputed values between them.

Life versus Art

T. S. Eliot was clearly in a different place altogether.

After years of waiting in the hope that, should Vivienne Eliot die, she and Eliot would marry, Emily Hale woke to a very different reality:[1] ‘Twelve days later, after Vivienne’s funeral, a second letter on 3 February, shows a change of mind. Over these days it came to [Eliot]: he could not bring himself to marry her.’ Instead of being a welcome event that cleared the way for future happiness it seems that ‘. . . his wife died too soon, because it brought on a problem he never intended to solve: marriage to Emily Hale.’ He faced a serious challenge:[2] ‘… Once Vivienne died obligations to Emily Hale erupted in his path.’

The situation was so different for Hale for whom ‘of course, marriage was the answer to the years of waiting. Imagine, then, her shock to receive Eliot’s letter of 3 February.’

The reason why he backed away from marrying her was classic textbook:[3]

The severance must be carried out whatever the consequences for Emily because he has to protect the solitude his gift must have if it is to flourish.

All the years he and Emily had shared seemed to count for nothing:[4]

This denies the reality of their shared moments and relegates Emily to a category that includes Vivienne, underlined by his claim not to be made for marriage.

In Eliot’s case his values clashed irreconcilably.

Much as Emily Hale had enriched his life, and no matter how many times in his letters to her over the years he had assured her of his love, it all counted for nothing in the end when he came to feel marriage to her would interfere with his poetry. Over many years this reality had been carefully hidden from Hale’s sight behind veil upon veil of words. The impact of his tearing down these veils was almost certainly traumatic, though we have no letters from that period to prove the point. He burnt them all. Ten years later she wrote:[5]

‘. . . something too personal, too obscurely emotional for me to understand, decided TSE against marrying again. This was both a shock and a sorrow, though looking back on the story, perhaps I could not have been the companion in marriage I hoped to be, perhaps the decision saved us both from great unhappiness – I cannot ever know.’

Sometimes for some of us, veils work in different ways that can make decisions about our exact values more difficult.

The Hidden God Problem

For Táhirih both the Twin Manifestations were still alive in her lifetime. Her problem therefore was not with the idea of a hidden God – it seemed more to do with why so few people seem to see what was obvious to her:[6]

From behind the veils of grandeur

the face of God is suddenly manifest!

O, believers, you need no longer heed:

‘You shall not see me!’

I have dealt elsewhere on this blog at some length with the idea of the brain as a filter as a way of explaining why it is so difficult to access any aspect of the transcendent. I don’t plan to go over that here but will be focusing on R. S. Thomas’s struggle with God’s inaccessibility and related issues.

R. S. Thomas there were three related problems starting with God as inaccessible:[7]

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

From which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come.

According to Wynn Thomas this problem haunted R. S. Thomas for most of his life:[8] ‘Thomas’s great quarry was ever the deus absconditus to whom the mystics of the ages had paid their awed tribute.’

And haunted is a resonant word in this context:[9]

[For Ruth Bidgood the word] ‘haunted’ signifies an awareness of a dimension of life that, while omnipresent, remains tantalisingly evasive, unreachable and unknowable.

But even if Thomas could connect in some way with God, there is the second problem of language. He probably wouldn’t be able to find the words to describe it.

Wynn Thomas refers to a poem by R. S. Thomas whose roots lie in the life and work of Bishop William Morgan who translated the Bible into Welsh in 1588. He admired Morgan’s ‘serene prose.’ There was inevitably a catch however:[10]

As a fellow writer, he is also particularly aware of how deceptive such ‘serene prose’ actually is; how it offers not the slightest hint of the ‘intolerable wrestle with language’, as T. S, Eliot memorably put it… So he imagined Bishop Morgan’s mouth as filled with ‘rows of teeth/Broken on the unmanageable bone//Of language.’

Wynn Thomas goes on to quote part of the poem:[11]

 . . . ‘Language can be/like iron. Are we sure we can bend/the Absolute to our meaning?’ This, of course, is a question the troubled Thomas throughout his long writing life, and one he returned to time and again in his poems.

In spite of both these obstacles:[12]

[In 1972] recently settled in Aberdaron, despairing of both culture and politics,… he began to send out his distinctive verse probes into inner space.

Scanned from Collected Poems – page 388

A respected poet was impressed by the poems:

. . . [Seamus Heaney in Stepping Stones says] ‘What I loved then were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish – full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating.’

In spite of all these caveats:[13]

[Aled Jones Williams] insists that to accept the insufficiency of language is not to deny that nevertheless it can perform an invaluable service in bringing us into the presence of spiritual depths.

R. S. Thomas seems to buy into this optimism up to a point:[14]

                      Had I

the right words, it is the poem

that would announce you to

an amazed audience; . . .

In a later book Wynn Thomas captures what he feels is Thomas’s achievement as someone ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ in the following words:[15]

. . . This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.

That just about summarises my response to R. S. Thomas’s achievement in this respect at least.

The third problem, theodicy, will have to wait until next time.

 

References

[1]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 290.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 291.

[3]. Op. cit. – page 292)

[4]. Op. cit. – page 293)

[5]. Op. cit. – Page 302)

[6]. The Poetry of Táhirih by John Hatcher & Amrollah Hemmat – page 95.

[7]. Collected Poems – page 361.

[8]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams: The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry – page 205.

[9]. Op. cit. – page 248.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 228.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 229.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 212.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 252.

[14]. No Truce with the Furies – page 58.

[15]. R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive – page 10.

Read Full Post »