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The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-1957513

2164-0041

David Shaddock,

American Literature and Culture

Twin commitments to simultaneously praise the beauty of the world and witness its horrors lie at the heart of poet Denise Levertov’s writing, activism, and spiritual path.One moment she would be deep in serious conversation on the nature of evil or the future of our planet; then she would suddenly see an iris bloom sticking through a broken fence and break into an improvised ballet step in response. Her essay on “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival” captures the interplay between her commitments to witness and praise: “If we lose the sense of contrast of the opposites to all the grime and gore, the torture, the banality of the computerized apocalypse, we lose the reason for trying to work for redemptive change.”These twin commitments brought Levertov, an English-born American poet, into intimate connection, as well as passionate conflict, with the Divine. In a very real sense, her faith life, her artistic life, and her political life were all of a piece, and all were informed with the kind of passion that kept Jacob up all night wrestling with an angel, demanding a new name for himself.This winter marks the fifteenth anniversary of Levertov’s death. She passed away on December 20, 1997, after a long struggle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The United States Post Office recently issued a stamp commemorating her as one of the ten most important poets of the twentieth century, and the first of two critical biographies about her was released this past year, with the other due out this spring.Although her first, more traditional book was published in England, Levertov came to prominence when she immigrated to America and adapted her English sensibility to the open forms and speech idioms that had been championed by William Carlos Williams. Her passionate denunciation of the Vietnam War, her active participation in antiwar organizing and protests, and her subsequent work on behalf of the environment earned her the devotion of a generation of activists. Her conversion to Catholicism in the last two decades of her life, along with her deeply moving religious poetry, earned her yet another group of devoted fans.I was fortunate to have Levertov as a teacher, mentor, and great friend, so I am able to offer some insight into her life work by sharing my own reflections on our many personal discussions on politics, poetry, and God wrestling.In modern theology, the term God wrestling (which Levertov herself was fond of) has come to mean a creative, dynamic, and above all personal relationship with God, the Bible, and religious tradition. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement, writes in his book God Wrestling II, “What went before we turn and turn like a kaleidoscope; with every turn there appears new beauty, new complexity, new simplicity.”God wrestling implies a hermeneutic theology. An absolute knowledge of God’s will is impossible; what meaning we can glean emerges from our active engagement and interpretation. Borrowing a term from contemporary psychoanalysis, I would describe the God wrestler as having an intersubjective relationship with the Deity. Contemporary psychoanalysis, drawing from such disparate sources as the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, and contemporary child development research, describes meaning in psychoanalysis as an emergent property of the encounter between two differently organized subjective worlds—those of the analyst and the patient. By extension, for the God wrestler, religious faith emerges from the encounter between our subjective world and a God who is himself a subject: a feeling, fallible being who, moment to moment, is in an intimate relationship with us.In order to fully encounter the Divine, we need to develop what Martin Buber famously called an “I/Thou” relationship with him. Buber drew on the legacy of Hasidism for his notion of what I am calling an intersubjective relationship with God, just as Levertov, from her earliest poetry, drew on the Hasidic tradition of her father, who, though a convert to Christianity, was the heir to a long line of Hasidic rabbis. One of the earliest Hasids, Rabbi Levi Yizhak of Berdichev, developed a religious practice that was a kind of divine psychoanalysis. He would go out to a deserted place in the countryside and pour out his stream of consciousness to God, not holding back any thought or feeling.But if the term “God wrestling” suggests a spiritual path of angst and struggle alone, describing Levertov as a God wrestler would be a serious mischaracterization. As her friend Al Gelpi notes in the introduction to The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, “Her early poetry shimmered with the almost sacramental mystery of each perceived object.” Underlying this poetry was her father’s Hasidic tradition of the Shechinah, the indwelling presence of the Divine in all creation. The response to her perception of this “sacramental mystery” was praise, which Levertov called “the irresistible impulse of the soul” in her essay “Poetry, Prophecy, and Survival.” The mystical perception of imminent divinity and the concomitant impulse to praise creation form a constant thread through Levertov’s work, from her earliest poems written in England to her last, mortality-infused poems.But to perceive Levertov as merely a mystic is to miss her engaged, iconoclastic, and prophetic side—a side where faith and passionate argument lived, however uneasily at times, in the same person. One can surely trace the roots of a faith based in wrestling with God to the example set by Levertov’s “Jewish Christian” father, who, as she writes in Tesserae, as a young student experienced “a profound and shaking new conviction. This Jesus of Nazareth, ‘despised and rejected of men’ had indeed been the messiah!”Levertov’s father did not see himself as leaving the Jewish faith, but as extending it, offering his own insights and struggles to the tradition of interpreters and God wrestlers who came before him. As she writes, “it was not to be absorbed into a Gentile world that he had broken, in sorrow, with his mother and father, but to be, as he believed, more fully a Jew.” The lesson that faith was based on personal experience and might lead one in a direction that completely defies the expectations of one’s friends and family was not lost on his daughter.As Jacob wrestled the Angel of God to a draw and won his name, he was also wounded in the thigh. The one who wrestles with God (or the Goddess) will often come away both vanquished and enlightened. Though the questioning, prophetic voice is mostly absent from Levertov’s early poems, the sense of being ravished or vanquished by an outside power is present. “Drown us, lose us, / rain, let us loose / so to lose ourselves” she writes in “The Way Through” from Here and Now, her second book. In “The Goddess” (from With Eyes in the Back of Our Heads), the key word is “lipservice.” The poem seems a rather violent admonition against spiritual trifling:She in whose lipserviceI passed my time,whose name I knew, but not her facecame upon me where I lay in lie castle!Flung me across the room, androom after room (hitting the walls re-bounding—to the laststicky wall—wrenching away from itpulled hair out!)till I layoutside the outer walls!By the time we reach “Caedmon” (in Breathing the Water), one of the poems in which Levertov announced her conversion to Catholicism, the story of the first English poet becomes a tale in which the subject is overwhelmed by a spiritual force with less violence but no less power than the Goddess:the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacingmy feeble beam,a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflyingThese powers are not enemies. Throughout Levertov’s entire career, she maintained that, despite the violence of the encounter, the antagonist is not God, but untruth and self-delusion. Every one of her poems is an attempt to spring us (and herself) from “lie castle.”The fierceness of the angel was matched by Levertov’s own fierce spirit. In her finest poems she could turn her blowtorch ire to a fine flame of political outrage or spiritual courage. But she would never spare herself from the same scrutiny: “Lord, not you / it is I who am absent,” she wrote in “Flickering Mind.” This voice reaches its apogee in poems written during the Vietnam War.In 1969, when I first met Levertov, her husband, Mitchell Goodman, was under indictment with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and others for having urged young men to defy the Selective Service draft. I was a student in her poetry seminar at Berkeley—a class that met at students’ apartments to honor a campus-wide strike for a Third World Studies Department.The horror of war was immediate and visceral for Levertov, who had worked as a nurse in London during World War II. War appeared early in her poems, as well, most prominently in “During the Eichmann Trial” from The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), which ends with the poet’s description of Eichmann shooting a Jewish boy who had stolen one of his beloved peaches: “there is more blood than / sweet juice / always more blood.”But this was our war. The blood was on our hands. The lies told to justify the Vietnam War were our lies—and for those of us who, like Levertov, were caught up in the movement to stop it, it is difficult to convey, at a distance of forty years and untold more bloodletting, the way the war dominated our every waking (and dreaming) thought. As Levertov wrote in her 1972 essay, “The Poet in the World,” “The spring sunshine, the new leaves: we still see them, still love them: but in what poignant contrast is their beauty and simple goodness to the evil we are conscious of day and night.”Levertov’s increasing stridency in her poems and her willingness to voice the revolutionary rhetoric of the New Left was seen by some, including her friend and mentor Robert Duncan, as leading to a diminishment of her poetic power. Though some of the antiwar poetry seems, in retrospect, woodenly rhetorical, her best antiwar poems stand with her greatest work. The Dante-esque rhetoric of “An Interim” is very telling:While the war drags on, always worsethe soul dwindles to an antrapid upon a cracked surface;lightly, grimly, incessantlythe unfathomed cliffs where despairseethes hot and blackLevertov’s antiwar and political poems are acts of great courage: courage to let her outrage speak, courage to carry her poetic vision as deeply into the fallen world as humanly possible in an effort to poetically enact the resurrection of the human spirit from despair.In “Poetry, Prophecy and Survival,” Levertov wrote that “a poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time” should be accompanied by “a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action toward stopping the great miseries that they record.” There is an Isaiah-like feel to this admonishment against words unmatched by actions. She goes on to say that the poet and the prophet “may exceed their own capacities.” The prophetic voice that Levertov developed in her antiwar poems led her to exceed her own capacities—the unflinching witness they bore helped carry Levertov from a kind of diffuse, quasi-agnostic spirituality into her life as a committed Catholic. The early antiwar poem “Advent 1966” chronicles and foreshadows the inner dialogue between her voice of witness and the redemptive promise of Christianity:Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babeis multiplied, multiplied, the flesh on firenot Christ’s as Southwell saw it, prefiguringthe Passion upon the Eve of Christmasbut wholly human and repeated, repeated,infant after infant, their names forgottentheir sex unknown in the ashes,set alight, flaming but not vanishing,not vanishing as his vision but lingering,cinders upon the earth or living onmoaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;because of this my strong sight,my clear caressive sight, my poet’s sight I was giventhat it might stir me to song,is blurred.In the complex rhetoric of this poem, it is not only the poet’s spiritual vision that is effaced by the horror of Vietnam. The horror has also impaired her ability to turn her poetic vision to the task of bearing witness to the carnage of war in its particular detail, leaving her transfixed by the endless iterations of carnage into a kind of insect-like consciousness. The poem continues: There is a cataract filming overmy inner eyes. Or else a monstrous insecthas entered my head, and looks outfrom my sockets with multiple vision,seeing not the unique Holy Infantburning sublimely, an imagination of redemption,furnace in which souls are wrought into new life,but, as off a beltline, more, more senseless figures aflame.And this insect (who is not there—it is my own eyes do my seeing, the insectis not there, what I see is there)will not permit me to look elsewhere,or, if I look, to see except dulled and unfocusedthe delicate, firm whole flesh of the still unburned.The implicit wish here is to be granted a clear vision not of the redeemer, but of one unique Vietnamese child. If there is a promise of redemption in this poem, it is not in the suffering of Christ, but in the poet’s bearing witness to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Yet it is this moral, prophetic voice, speaking through her political poems, that was to lead Levertov to her transcendent, Christian vision.Levertov’s new Christian vision, in characteristic fashion, announced itself in a poem, the “Mass for the Day of St. Didymus.” That Levertov had appropriated the form of the Catholic mass for her poem was of poetic interest to me; it was an important development in the ongoing dialogue between traditional form and “organic form” in her work. Here is a short excerpt from the poem’s Agnus Dei section:Come rag of pungentquiverings, dim star. Let’s try if something human stillcan shield you, sparkof remote light.Levertov read me her “Mass” soon after she had finished it. I can still picture the living room of her Stanford apartment, the late afternoon winter light. There was a hush in the room. She seemed both humble and transported as she read from her typescript pages. When she finished the Agnus Dei, I blurted, “Oh, Denise, that’s your masterpiece.” She shyly nodded and said, “I think it may be; I’m very pleased with how it came out.”At the time we didn’t discuss the poem as announcing her religious conversion, but she later made that explicit in her essay “Work that Enfaiths.” Her first acknowledgment to me of her newfound Catholic faith came sometime later in an offhand comment about how she had found the Angli-can service somehow lacking in passion, and so had begun attending Catholic services. Her conversion was a process, not an epiphany. There are many parallels here to Levertov’s notion of organic form in poetry: the Catholic Church had evolved or been “discovered” to be the exact right form that fit the emerging content of her religious life. This is more than an analogy—in New and Selected Essays, Levertov wrote that her poetry led the way in her religious life, and that her faith in God may be wavering, but that she does have an ongoing faith in what she calls, quoting Keats, “the truth of the imagination.”In the years that followed the end of the Vietnam War, Levertov’s political and poetic life became increasingly concerned not just for the survival of particular oppressed groups of people (though such events as the “Contra” civil wars in Central America certainly occupied her attention), but also with nuclear war and ecological holocaust—plagues threatening all of the world’s inhabitants. As a poet writing about nature she was driven not just to write poems of what she described as “pure celebration,” but also “inevitably to lament, to anger, and to the expression of dread.” Although she was often her old, ebullient self, my sense is that the confrontation with the twin possibilities of nuclear and ecological annihilation darkened Levertov’s mood considerably. Personal issues such as the end of her marriage to Mitch Goodman and her ongoing concerns for her son, Nikolai, who seemed rather adrift, played a part in this. But more and more our conversations concerned humanity’s role in the fate of the planet. She began to talk about evil as an active force in the world, trying at every opportunity to corrupt and destroy God’s work.At first when Levertov spoke of evil, I thought that she was speaking metaphorically, but I came to see that she had adopted a dualistic worldview, with its concomitant requirement that humanity’s role is to actively oppose the corrupting work of the Dark One. When asked why the church should have so often in history been on the side of the oppressors, she would reply that it was the devil’s way to insinuate himself into good institutions and corrupt them.Levertov’s dualistic leanings had led her on many occasions to take political stands with absolute moral conviction. It was this tendency that led poet Robert Duncan to warn her, in a 1971 letter that marked one of the first salvos of their relationship-breaking argument, that “the poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it.” Increasingly though, Levertov’s opposition to the point of view represented in Duncan’s more nuanced, if not exactly apolitical position, was based in her own literal religious convictions. Influenced as she was by the radical tenets of Liberation Theology, which located the battle between Good and Evil not in our souls but in the struggle of poor people against oppression, Levertov was now wrestling not with God, but for him.At this point in her ongoing intersubjective relationship with God, Levertov had moved from an immanent God revealed in all creation, to God as an overpowering force, to a God who requires our moral witness to evil, to a God who gave us free will but who requires us to actively oppose the force of evil in the world. In “Agnus Dei,” though, her relationship to God takes one last step: God himself requires our love and protection.This final step in her conversion to Catholicism involved not a sense of being overwhelmed by a blinding force as had happened in her earlier poems, but by being struck with the profound sense of God’s vulnerability and need for us.In “Agnus Dei” she takes the metaphorical notion of God’s radical innocence quite literally: he is an “infant sheep . . . having neither rage nor claws,” wholly dependent on human kindness for his survival. And our relationship with this God-being is completely reversed. Rather than depending on God for any salvation or intervention, it is up to us to care for and nurture his radical innocence. If this is what the salvation of the world rests on, it is a dicey proposition—we humans have “icy hearts” and are “shamefaced” in our passive wish to be rescued, and the innocence of God is a “dim star.” But it is on this remote possibility that Levertov bases her religious conversion: one that entails not just an “I/Thou” relationship with a God who will listen to our pleas and arguments, but a relationship like a mother feels for her infant—a total, protective commitment to this young and helpless life.In the Jewish mystical tradition in which Levertov was steeped, there is an important antecedent to the notion of God’s need for our intervention. According to the kabbalistic creation myth of the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, it was God’s loneliness and longing that led him to create the world, which he did by first withdrawing to create a void, then filling that void with his divine love. Unfortunately the “vessels” into which he poured his divine love could not contain the force of that love; they broke and “sparks” of that love were scattered throughout the universe. It is mankind’s job to liberate and reunite these sparks through love and ethical action, a process that can only be begun by us, without regard to the ultimate endpoint of redemption. Levertov and I both were moved by this myth, with its story of a vulnerable God and his need for our help to reclaim his creation, as well as its implicit understanding that whatever “sparks” we could liberate from matter would never be enough to complete the task, but were nonetheless vitally important.Once, when asked to contribute to an anthology of spiritual poetry, Levertov replied that she wouldn’t know what to send, since all poetry, by virtue of its very existence, is spiritual poetry. At first I wondered whether she was just frustrated about being pigeonholed as a spiritual poet—I knew she loathed being pigeonholed as a Beat or a Black Mountain poet and didn’t want to be known primarily as a woman or feminist poet. But as she continued, I realized she was being completely ingenuous.A reverent belief in the primacy of the poetic imagination underlies what Levertov calls, in the introduction to her collection The Stream and the Sapphire, her “slow movement from agnosticism to faith,” Levertov’s faith life was inextricable from her writing life, and writing was for her a profoundly spiritual act. The act of discovery—both of the content and the form of a poem, was for her a revelation of the “indwelling presence” of God. Belief becomes an act of imagination in poems like “Passage”:The grasses, numberless, bowing and rising, silentlycry Hosanna as the spiritmoves them and moves burnishingover and again upon mountain pasturesThis openness to discovery was accompanied by rigorous attention to detail and an almost fanatic demand for lucidity in her poems. I can remember, at the beginning of our friendship, when I was primarily still in the student role, debating for an hour the placement of a single comma in one of my poems. Here too is a key to her faith life, and to her eventual conversion to Catholicism. No slop in her poems, and no vague or universal spirituality in her church.The rigor that Levertov brought to her art informed her faith life in another way as well. Hers would not be an intellectual exercise, divorced from sensual, immediate experience. The idea that the rituals and teachings of the Church were just myths held little interest to her. In “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus” she calls herself, quoting Marianne Moore, a “literalist of the imagination” and issues this call:We must feel the pulse in the wound to believe that ‘with God all things are possible’ taste bread at Emmaus that warm hands broke and blessed.She is not, like an epiphyte, “nourished on air,” nor can she “subsist on the light, / on the half / of metaphor that’s not // grounded in dust, grit / heavy / carnal clay.” Here she expands William Carlos Williams’s famous “no ideas but in things” beyond an artistic dictum to a spiritual one. The blood of Christ’s wounds must be real to the imagination’s apprehension, not some mere symbol of human suffering.Levertov is not aligning herself here with a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of God’s word in the Bible. It is not an absolute belief she is after here, but a poet’s imagination of a miracle. She is bringing a poet’s aesthetic to the religious experience. You can hear a bit of Ezra Pound in the background here, imprecating against “dim fields of peace.” She wants, paraphrasing Marianne Moore, to have imaginary gardens with real miracles in them. The critic Northrop Frye wrote, in Words with Power, that “literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a relation between human consciousness and its natural environment that passes beyond—in fact outrages and violates—the ordinary common sense based on a permanent separation of subject and object.” To cut the metaphor in half and savor only the subject, as the purveyors of religion as mythology would do, is no less a diminishment than the fundamentalist’s trying to savor only the objective truth. The real miracle, Levertov is arguing, takes place in the field of the poem, where the subject is completely penetrated by the physical world and the physical world— while not losing a drop of its heft and feel—is lifted up, reborn from its inertness.In writing this article, I have had the pleasure of rereading a great deal of Levertov’s poetry and prose. I have dusted off old letters and heard her voice anew as I reread them. The gift that emerged from our spiritual discussions was permission—permission to believe and doubt in equal (or unequal) measure; permission to have as idiosyncratic or as literal a relationship with the teachings of organized religion as I needed; and permission to trust my own religious instincts.There was one time, though, that our wrestling with God might have come close to wrestling with each other. I was noting, perhaps with a touch of envy, the increasing presence of the literal figure of Christ in her poems. I said something to the effect that your religion has its messiah, while mine is still waiting for him. She turned to me, very seriously, and said, “Well, David, do you want me to convert you?” She was completely in earnest. I was tense and defensive for a moment, as Jews often are in the face of such Christian “goodwill.” Then I realized that I was in the presence of something very old and intimate in Levertov’s experience: she seemed to be channeling her father, a man who she said was made of equal parts zeal and tenderness. This intimacy diffused the tension. I was, in fact, a bit tempted, but in the end I demurred, and the subject did not come up again.In the last half of the 1980s, I encountered two very difficult experiences: my wife and I failed in our attempts to conceive a child, and my mother was killed by medical malpractice. Levertov was very supportive to me. In part through our ongoing dialogue and the life experiences we shared, I began to realize that faith does not require a moment of blinding understanding or enlightenment, but merely a commitment to be fully present to the experience of living— especially when it involves surrender to suffering, doubt, and longing.Doubt and uncertainty for Levertov often took the form of questioning a God who could allow so much suffering and injustice in the world. Her “St. Thomas Didymus” describes seeing the father’s spiritual agony over his son’s suffering and feeling closer to him then “the twin of my own birth.” The poem returns almost as a refrain to Christ’s cry, “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.” But faith does not alleviate affliction. Julian of Norwich, in Levertov’s poem “The Showings,” after “God for a moment in our history / placed in that five-fingered / human nest / the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox / brown hazelnut of all that is,” says “deeds are done so evil, injuries inflicted / so great, it seems to us impossible any good / can come from them” (emphasis in original).In 1982, Levertov moved from Boston to Seattle. As she settled into her new home, she delighted in the access that she, a nondriver, had to the shores of Lake Washington, with all of its sea birds and migratory birds. And she cherished the views of 14,000-foot Mt. Rainier. In her series “Lake Mountain Moon” from Evening Train, Levertov’s view of the mountain, emerging and receding from the cloud cover, becomes a symbol of a faith life built around absence and presence:EffacementToday the mountainis cloud,pale cone of shadowveiled by a paler scrim—majestic presence becomeone cloud among othershumble vaporbarely discernable,like the archangel walkingwith Tobias on dusty roads.This sense of living at peace with the Angel of God was perhaps most apparent to me when she came for a visit directly after a weeklong retreat with Brother David Steindl-Rast in Big Sur. There was a light in her eyes and a sense of ease in her body. It seemed to me that she had found a deep peace and an abiding sense of the presence of the divine. She expressed this same sense of peace in “Primary Wonder” from Sands in the Well, the last book she published in her lifetime:Once more the quiet mysteryis present to me, the throng’s clamorrecedes: the mysterythat there is anything, anything at alllet alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,rather than void, and that O Lord,Creator, Hallowed One, You still,hour by hour sustain it.Although I was present when she died, our last real visit was a few months before when I came up to Seattle and followed her up to Port Townsend, where she gave a reading. Though I had seen her latest work the previous summer, I was astonished at the number of new poems she read. These poems, later collected in the posthumous This Great Unknowing, were tinged with mortality, but not with despair. At her funeral, on a sleet-filled day at a Catholic church in downtown Seattle, her friends had to argue with the presiding priest—who maintained that a Catholic funeral mass was for the glory of God, not for the glory of the deceased, for whom we should rejoice that they are with the Lord—to allow a few of her friends to speak. We finally prevailed on him and were allowed to read a few of her poems. A bit of God wrestling at the very end!In my poem “The Certainty of Return” from 1996, which used as an epigraph Levertov’s lines “The certainty of return / cannot be assured,” I wrote, “Your life in me . . . has been a trellis that my own life has grown on.” Writing this essay has made me think again of that trellis, and of the fifteen years since she died. Despite the intervening years (during which I have often thought it was a blessing that she was spared living through September 11 and George W. Bush’s wars of choice), I can still feel the structure-giving presence I meant to evoke with the trellis image. If she were alive, she would not be surrendering to despair, but urging a tendril of spirit to lift off the top rung, into the wind, poised between purchase and uncertainty.