Letters to a Young Poet (7 page)

THE LETTER FROM THE YOUNG WORKER

 

 

 

At a gathering last
Thursday there was a reading of your poems,
Mr V
., it haunts me still; the only thing I can think to do is set down for you what is preoccupying me, inasmuch as it is possible for me to do so.

The day after the reading I found myself by chance at a Christian meeting, and perhaps it was this that really set things off and caused the detonation that has released so much commotion and energy that I am now heading towards you with all my faculties. It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something. I cannot
begin
. I'm simply jumping over what ought to be the beginning. Nothing is as powerful as silence. Were we not all of us born into talk, it would never have been broken.

Mr V., I am not speaking of the evening when we heard your poems. I am speaking of the other one. I am driven to say: who – yes, I can find no other way of expressing it now –
who
then is this Christ who meddles with everything. Who knows nothing about us, nothing about our work, nothing about our needs, nothing about our joys as we achieve, go
through and summon them up nowadays – and who nevertheless, it seems, always demands to be the
first
person in our life. Or are these things just words put in his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, they say. Yes, but among us he comes across as peculiarly at a loss. The conditions he lived in were so very different. Or does it in fact not have much to do with the circumstances – if he came in here, into my room, or visited me out in the factory, would everything immediately be changed, would all be well? Would my heart begin to pound and as it were move up a level and on towards him? My instinct tells me that he
cannot
come. That it would have no sense. Our world is a different one not just on the outside – it offers him no access. He would not
shine
through a ready-made coat, it is not true, he would not shine through. It is no coincidence that he went around in a seamless garment, and I believe that the core of light within him, what made him shine so strongly, day and night, has now long been dispersed and distributed differently. But that I think would be the least we could require of him if he was so great, that he somehow come out without remainder, yes, quite without remainder – leaving no trace …

I cannot imagine that the
cross
was meant to
remain
, which after all was only a path,
the way of the cross
. Certainly it should not be imprinted on us everywhere as if with a branding-iron. It should be dispersed in him himself. For isn't it like
this
: he simply wanted to create a taller tree on which we could ripen the better. He, on the cross, is this new tree in God, and we were to be the fruits at the top of it, glad to be in the warm.

Now we should not always be talking about what went on before but, precisely, the
After
should have begun. This tree, it seems to me, should have become so one with us, or we with it, we
on
it, that we ought not always to be occupying ourselves with it but simply and calmly with God, to hold us up more purely in whom was after all its intention.

When I say God – it is a great conviction in me, not something I have learnt. The whole of creation, as it seems to me, says this word, without deliberation, though often out of deep thoughtfulness. If this man Christ has enabled us to say it with a clearer voice, more roundly, more unassailably, so much the better, but now let's leave him out of it once and for all. We should not always be forced to fall back into the toil and sorrow that it cost him to ‘redeem' us,
as they put it. Let us finally come into this redemption. – And in other ways too the Old Testament is full as it is of forefingers pointing to God wherever one opens it, and always if someone is weighed down he falls straight into the middle of God. And once I tried to read the Koran. I didn't get far, but this much I did understand: there is another mighty forefinger, and if you follow it God stands at the end in the midst of his eternal rising, in an orient which will never be exhausted. Christ must have wanted the same. To point. But the people here have been like those dogs who don't understand pointing and think they are meant to go for the hand. Instead of leaving Christ's way of the cross, where the signpost was erected to reach far into the night of sacrifice, instead of moving on from this Via Crucis, Christianity has settled there and claims to dwell in Christ there although there was
no room in him, not even for his mother
, and not for
Mary Magdalene
– as with anyone who points the way and is a gesture and not a place to stay. – And for this reason they do not dwell in Christ either, the stubborn at heart who are always re-creating him and live from setting crosses which are crooked or have been blown completely over upright again.
They have this press of people on their conscience, this queuing up in an overcrowded place, they are to blame that the journey does not continue in the direction of the arms of the cross. They have made a
métier
of the Christian purpose, a bourgeois occupation,
sur place
, a pool that is alternately drained and then filled up again. Everything that they do themselves, according to their own insuppressible natures (so far as they are still living beings), stands in contradiction to this curious disposition of theirs, and so they cloud their own waters and continually have to refresh them. They are so zealous they cannot stop making
the Here and Now
, which we should take pleasure and have trust in, base and worthless – and so more and more they deliver the earth into the hands of those who are prepared to turn it, the failed, suspect earth which is good for nothing better, to temporal, quick profit. This increasing ransacking of life, is it not a consequence of the devaluation of the Here and Now which has been going on for centuries? What madness, to divert us towards a beyond when we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures here. What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high
time the impoverished earth called in all the loans that have been made on her felicity to provide for a time that lies beyond the future. Does death really become more transparent by having these light-sources dragged behind it? And isn't everything that is taken away, given that no void can sustain itself, replaced by deceit and deception – are our cities filled with so much ugly artificial light and noise because true illumination and song have been surrendered to
a Jerusalem
which will only be entered later? Christ was perhaps right when, in a time of stale and threadbare gods, he spoke ill of the earthly; though (I cannot imagine it otherwise) it amounts to an insult directed at God not to see in what is granted and conceded to us here – so long as we use it correctly – something that fills us with happiness, completely and right to the outer margins of our senses!
To make the proper use of things, that's what it comes down to
. To take the Here and Now in one's hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have:
that
is at once, to put it rather casually, the gist of God's great user's guide,
this
is what
Saint Francis of Assisi
meant to record in his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross,
whose only purpose in standing there was to
point towards
the sun. But what goes by the name of the Church had by then swollen into such a clamour of voices that the song of the dying man, drowned out in all quarters, was only caught by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his lovely valley. How many such attempts there have been to produce a reconciliation between Christian denial and the manifest friendliness and good spirits of the earth. But elsewhere too, at the heart of the Church, even at its actual summit, the Here and Now managed to gain its plenitude and its native abundance. Why is the Church not praised for having been sturdy enough not to collapse under the living weight of
certain popes
, whose thrones were weighed down with bastards, courtesans and corpses? Did they not have more Christianity in them than the dry renovators of the Gospels – that is, Christianity that is living, irrepressible, transformed? What I mean is that we cannot know what will come of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow unabated and not take fright if they suddenly rush into the natural ravines of life and vanish underground and race along unknowable channels.

I once worked in Marseille for a few months. It was a special time for me, I owe it a great deal. Chance brought me together with a young painter who remained my friend until his death. He had a sickness of the lungs and was then just back from Tunis. We spent a lot of time together, and as the end of my employment coincided with his return to Paris, we were able to arrange things so as to stay a few days in Avignon. They are days I shall never forget. Partly because of the town itself, its buildings and environs, and also because during those days of uninterrupted and somehow heightened company my friend communicated to me many circumstances of, in particular, his
inner
life with that eloquence which, it seems, is peculiar to this kind of invalid at certain moments. All that he said had a curious clairvoyant force; through everything that rushed onwards in what were often almost breathless conversations, one could see so to speak the ground, the stones on the bottom … I mean by that: more than just something of our own, nature itself, its oldest and hardest element, which after all we touch upon at so many points and on which we probably depend in our most driven moments, its gradient determining the way we incline. An unexpected and happy love affair also had a part
in it, his heart was unusually exalted, for days on end, and as a result the changeful jet of his life shot up to a considerable height. To take in an extraordinary town and a more than pleasant landscape with someone in such a frame of mind is a rare privilege; and when I look back on those tender and at the same time passionate spring days, they appear to me as the only holiday I ever had in my life. The time was so laughably brief, to another it would have sufficed only for a few impressions; to me, not used to spending days of such freedom, it appeared vast. Yes, it almost seems wrong to go on calling
time
what was more nearly a new state of being free, truly felt as a
space
, a being-surrounded by openness, no passing or transience. I was catching up on my childhood then, if I can put it that way, and a part of my early youth, all that there had never been time to carry out in my life; I looked, I learned, I understood – and from those days also stems the experience that it is so easy for me, so truthful, so – as my friend would have expressed it – unproblematic, to say ‘God'. How should
this dwelling that the popes built for themselves
there not strike me as colossal? I had the impression it could contain no interior space at all, but must be piled up of nothing but solid blocks of
stone, as if the exiles had no other thought than to heap the weight of the papacy, its overweight, onto the scales of history. And this ecclesiastical palace really does tower up over the ancient torso of
a Heracles statue
which has been immured in the rocky foundations – ‘Is it not', said Pierre, ‘as if it had grown from this seed like a gigantic plant?' – That
this
should be Christianity, in one of its metamorphoses, would be much easier for me to understand than the idea that one might recognize its strength and its taste in the ever weaker brew of that
tisane
which, so it is claimed, is prepared from its first and most tender leaves.