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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Something to Consider

Something to Consider

For twenty years I have been a poet, and not yet seen good reason to repent. Admittedly, reading Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ or Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’, I am strongly aware that my own works are those of a little boy playing marbles in the dust. But grubby little boys may sometime grow up, and have each a vision of the world which they neglect at their peril. So I would like, avoiding the large abstract statement about life and art which comes too readily to mind and mouth, to speak some kind of personal truth about the way poetry and Christian belief cohere or tug against each other in my own experience. Often I have found difficulty in communicating this kind of truth to a Christian audience. Not long ago I was talking to a Catholic Reading Group about Poetry and Us.

God knows why; perhaps the same sort of impulse that led me once, on Guy Fawkes Night, to let off a cannon cracker in every bar on my way up Lambton Quay, till at the Grand the manager spilt his beer down his waistcoat and hoisted me into the street.

Ten good people, in a public morgue upstairs trying to understand the statement of the eleventh person that one does not write poems in order to reform the world. Of course I soon reached the stage of talking solely about Poetry and Me. Then a strong-looking woman with her hair in a bun got up. Didn’t I think, she said, that artists should consider very carefully the possible moral effect of their work on the people who came in contact with it? – especially the young ones. That one had me on the hip. If I said Yes, I would be telling a lie; if I said No, she would be bound to think I was driving a wedge between Art and Goodness. If I hummed and hawed I would be lost like a heathen Irish sacrifice in a Killarney bog. But the day was saved for me. A youngish member with a lean, booze-battered face rose to his feet.

‘I don’t know what our speaker thinks,’ he said. ‘But I do know that if I were a writer I’d be mighty upset to think that every time I really got on the job, Miss O’Reilly was looking over my shoulder to see if what I wrote could possibly offend some weak-minded Child of Mary.’ Then he sat down again. It was, as I said, a Catholic Reading Group; but it could just as well have been the S[tudent] C[hristian] M[ovement].

I remember also how in my first year at university I was approached by a buxom woman member of the E[vangelical] U[nion]. She was blond, a trifle faded, and wore an habitual expression of triumphant sweetness. Day by day she left notes for me in the cafeteria letter-rack, urging the spiritual advantages of E.U. membership. In guilt and irritation, conscious of my sins,page 284 I endured this barrage. At length it became intolerable. So I put an end to it by the only means in my power. I left a note of reply, printed in block letters: ‘DEAR MISS X—, I AM AN ATHEIST AND INTEND TO REMAIN ONE. – J.K. BAXTER.

If I were choosing a book as a Christmas gift for an intelligent S.C.M. member, I don’t think I would choose The Screwtape Letters or something by Schweitzer. For a man I would choose perhaps Zohrab the Greek or The Way of All Flesh; for a girl, the stories of Katherine Mansfield or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I’d think it very likely that they already knew too much about religion in its intellectual aspect and not enough about themselves and their fellow beings in God’s vigorous and infinitely various world:

For over the known world of things
The great poem folds its wings
And from a bloody breast will give
Even to those who disbelieve.

The problems which most obsess a university student can hardly be solved solely by an act of faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s Passion, though such an act, if made, must infinitely refresh the soul. We are all too prone to suppose that spiritual action on one level is an effective substitute for the slow painful business of personal growth in grace and understanding. Indeed I have thought (perhaps unjustly) that intellectual discussion of the Christian faith, as distinct from a simple act of faith in Christ, provides for the S.C.M. members a bolt-hole from the painful realities of his or her existence. These real problems are likely to fall under all or some of the following headings:

Family difficulties –

Economic and emotional dependence on parents conflicting with the natural assertive and explorative impulses of young people; nostalgia for the safety of the home and fear of the world outside; clash of intellectual development with the home environment.

Social difficulties –

social awkwardness, especially in mixed company; acute isolation from the life of the varsity community; fear of unpredictable situations.

Sexual difficulties –

guilt about masturbation; fear of the opposite sex emerging in hostility or mock indifference; in some cases homosexual traits unexpressed but creating deep tension; an aversion to psychology, rationalised in religious terms, springing from a fear of suppressed sexual contents.

page 285

Difficulties in work –

acute anxieties at exam time; strong admiration or detestation of lecturers, on mainly invented moral grounds; partial paralysis of the intellectual faculties, rising from suppressed resentment towards parents.

In such a maze of personal anxieties a student will very naturally yearn for definite signposts; will follow readily any person who assumes parental authority; will accept readily a religious programme which regards overt sexuality or aggression as sinful. Yet these impulses are part of human nature, ineradicable, gifts of God for the furtherance of our personal good. We perish inwardly if we neglect them; and we need all the secular knowledge available to help us cope with their development, as well as the practice of prayer and self-examination. Therefore I would not choose The Screwtape Letters as a gift for an S.C.M. member.

I would like to set before you two distinct visions of the world expressed in the work of two Christian poets, both writing roughly a thousand years ago, one in Latin and the other in Old English. First then from the Confessio of the Latin Archpoet:

Si ponas Ypolitum
hodie Papie,
non erit Ypolitus
in sequenti die:
Veneris in thalamos
ducunt omnes viae,
non est in tot turribus
turris Aricie.

In my own translation the English runs something like this – ‘Should you bring Hippolytus into Pavia today, he will not be Hippolytus tomorrow: all roads there lead to chambers of love, nor stands among its many towers one turret of Diana.’

The next quotation comes from The Dream of the Rood which many consider the greatest poem in Old English:

Then the young man stripped himself, who was God Almighty, strong and resolute; he climbed upon the high gallows, bold in the sight of many, because he wished to redeem mankind.

From these two visions, one of Pavia, the city of carnal love, one of the hero Christ making ready to redeem the world, flows the stream of poetry which is not yet spent in us. To the Fathers in the desert Pavia presented no real problem: she was to them an image of concupiscence, to be rejected atpage 286 every encounter. To an S.C.M. missionary she would probably appear in much the same light. I confess that I have the same dread for evangelical enthusiasm and the theology of crisis that a traveller, once ambushed by wolves in a Siberian forest, would feel at the approaches of even a friendly Alsatian. A rigorous self-condemnation, a desperate attempt to annihilate one’s personality in a single act of perfect belief, the worship of God transcendent and wholly Other – these exercises, by a child and fool in grace, can rend the heart to tatters and lead one to despair. My own faltering spiritual development, certainly my training as a poet, has proceeded largely from the effort to reconcile the vision of lovely, wicked Pavia and the vision of the Man on the Cross.

Our definitions of Christian chastity are generally all too negative. The sexual vision is one approach to God immanent in Nature. If we regard it as an evil we are probably thinking blasphemously. Yet in our present society the girl who menstruates and finds she is a woman, the boy who discovers his own virility, if Christian, are all the more likely to feel themselves cursed. They are shut out from Pavia, and feel the deprivation though ignorant of its source. The Archpoet, standing at the monastery door and looking towards the world, saw Pavia ambivalently. She was to him the female mystery, a menace to monastic asceticism; and yet, without her, the life of the senses and the fullness of poetry were impossible. In the agony of sin, seeing Christ dead on the Cross, he denied her; in the morning of repentance, seeing her lovely and abundant, as if fresh from Paradise, he fell again at her feet. She was not Jerusalem, that city of living waters, to which the Christian pilgrim journeys. Jerusalem is to be and Pavia is always now. She was not Babylon, the gilded husk of temporal cruelty and power. If he clung to her he might fall again into the death of sin; if he rejected her he might cease to be human. What ground should he stand on and live?

It is of course true that God may be looked for and found by the discipline of conscious prayer and theological discussion. He may also make Himself known to us in spite of these. But what about all those who live otherwise? – the mechanic oiling a car; the man at the races watching the strong, swift horses; the woman putting on lipstick or window-shopping; the lovers twined under the park bushes or between smooth, proper sheets; the Maoris crying at the tangi, spearing eels, rolling stomachs at the concert party; the old man telling yarns to his cronies; the old woman gossiping over her tea. Are they denied the presence of God? By no means. God immanent in Nature surrounds us who are part of Nature, touches us at every point, sustains us as the sea sustains the swimming shoals of sprats and whales, sharks and octopi.

We think of Christ solitary on Golgotha, separate from us. But in His Divinity He is mother, nurse, and infinite Consoler of His creation. For love, having made us, He carries always our being in His hand; for love, having died for us, He carries our sins as well.

page 287

What then is Pavia? She is Alison walking among the medieval orchard trees. She is the Wife of Bath and the young witch of Burns’ ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. (Poetry is the language of immanence; this accounts in great measure for its moral ambiguity.) She is Christchurch seen at dawn from the Cashmere Hills. She is a symbol of the power and beauty of God immanent in flesh and nature. Within her orbit lies the whole imperfect, suffering creation in its process of becoming real in Christ. To the man whose eyes are darkened by his sins (and all eyes are at times darkened) she appears as a succubus, a devourer, a menacing and irresponsible evil; to the saints of God she is the very real and lovely world, whose dirt even they would not wish to remove lest she should be diminished. Her city gates are the womb and the sepulchre. In her marketplace, visible or invisible, stands the Rood, gathering the living and the dead, not in accusation but offering the gift of holy freedom. The poets, who have loved Pavia and suffered with her through many changes, though many have been fools and some criminal, may hope at their end to be contained in that freedom –

. . . the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,
Have mercy on,
God in His whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,
For the sake of their souls’ song.

These notes and jottings contain no doubt, like poetry, a good deal of wishful thinking and personal fantasy. I offer them to fellow Christians as a contribution: something to consider.

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