Reviving the Word

Recovered Body

Scott Cairns

The trouble with a great deal of contemporary religious poetry is that it lacks drama. Too quick to embrace preconceived formulas of faith, these poems often do not lead the writer (and thus the reader) into new visions of spiritual experience; the language, while full of praise, remains static. What’s missing is the process of discovery whereby language becomes the agent of emotional and intellectual knowledge—the one essential element in making poems convincing. An unfortunate consequence of this lack is that, for those of us born in the climate of postmodernism, these poems don’t ring true. The certainties don’t feel earned because they do not first engage the notions of indeterminacy in which many of us have been steeped. For religious poems to move the inhabitants of postmodern culture, they must dramatize the process of struggling toward meaning, rather than merely asserting the end result.

In his essay “Image Unto Likeness: The Body Breathing Again” [Image #22], Scott Cairns describes his poetic process as “sacramental,” and the metaphor is apt for a number of reasons. Sacraments are inherently dramatic: they are rites of passage from which the communicant emerges transformed. Moreover, they are physical: the body anointed, the body received on the tongue, two bodies made one. Yet these physical acts gesture toward the invisible, toward pure spirit. And it is this synthesis of body and spirit that makes the sacraments the embodiment of Christian mystery; indeed, the sacraments evoke the most perplexing mystery of all—the Incarnation, where, paradoxically, Christ is fully human and fully divine.

The drama of Recovered Body lies in Cairns’s refusal to collapse this paradox and in his acknowledgement of postmodern uncertainties concerning such a paradox. His poetry is unabashedly incarnational and evangelical. The body in the title is not a trope; it is the resurrected Christ.

Cairns seeks to erase the “glib divisions” that some Christians have made between body and spirit in an effort to distance themselves from the “body’s bawdy tastes.” Such separation ignores the complexity of human beings, and, indeed, ignores “the very issue which / induced the Christ to take on flesh.” For if we believe that Christ’s incarnation was born of God’s love, then we must also understand that “All loves are bodily,” as Cairns writes in the voice of Magdalen, “requir[ing] / that the lips part, and press their trace / of secrecy upon the one // beloved....” We may embrace Christ where He inhabits the physical, where the “mystery of spirit [is] graved / in what is commonplace and plain— / the broken brittle crust, the cup” (“Loves: Magdalen’s Epistle”).

This kind of sacramental view is at odds with the very language of the New Testament. For Cairns, the Greek language and the dualistic mindset it reflects lend themselves too easily to gnosticism, which holds that only the spirit is redeemable, a belief that devalues the central importance of the Incarnation and Resurrection. Cairns’s corrective is to recover the Hebrew tradition that permeated early Christianity. At the end of “Loves: Magdalen’s Epistle,” a poem that occasions Cairns’s most explicit statements of his mission, he makes his point with a single word:

if you’ll recall your Hebrew word

just long enough to glimpse in its
dense figure power to produce
you’ll see as well the damage Greek

has wrought upon your tongue, stolen
from your sense of what is holy,
wholly good, fully animal—

the body which he now prepares.

Where the logos of Greek refers to things already seen or done and is tied almost exclusively to reason, the Hebrew word, dabhar, embraces the affective nature, the muscularity, of language and experience, and begins to describe how, in William Matthews’s phrase, “the work of the body becomes a body of work.” It is not surprising, then, that Cairns dramatizes, metaphorically, the consequences of this quarrel between Greek and Hebrew by imagining the aftermath of the fire that razed the Alexandrian library:

And in that moment the sun first lit our city’s
eastern quarter, I found myself alone, in awe:
from that ruin, a forest had sprung up overnight,

....each trunk expanded
at its uppermost and wove a fabric overhead—

now white, now red, now golden from the sun’s approach.
Beneath that winding sheet our ravished corpus lay
razed, erased, an open, emptied volume in repose

insisting either new or strenuous reply,
or that we confess our hopelessness and turn away.

(“Alexandrian Fragments”)

In the uncertain moment after the conflagration that has ruined language, both Greek and Hebrew, those of us who stand in the remains are faced with a decision. In this vital moment, Christ’s body is interred (“an open, emptied volume in repose”) and his resurrection is imminent (“the sun’s approach”). Thus, Cairns brings us to the very cusp of mystery, where, after all of our arguments are ash, we must either hold our ground, trusting in and responding to the physical resurrection that springs from the ashes of death, or deny the life around us and turn away.

Structurally, many of Cairns’s poems travel this path, working through and stripping away the intellect’s abstractions and misgivings before arriving at a moment where rhetoric is rendered useless and faith is required. It is a sign of our times when an explicitly Christian poet who wishes to convey the immediacy of God’s presence feels that he cannot simply offer the things and people of the world as proof of Christ’s abiding love, but must instead work toward this physical presence by first engaging the intellect. A poet like Robert Hass, whose poems reveal a more nebulous, quasi-Buddhist worldview, can capture a feeling of meaningful presence by recording the world with haiku-like accuracy, pulling back inward into meditation, then traveling back out into the world again, stitching from two sets of potential disorder (the inner and outer worlds) a sense of ordered presence that is readily accepted by the reader.

For the Christian poet, however, where presence is tied to the body of Christ and to the truth of faith, the road is trickier. This kind of presence, unless first mediated through the mind (which even then is prone to failure), feels unearned by some contemporary readers. There is also the danger that Christian poetry will be hamstrung by a tacit or explicit evangelism from which postmodern readers recoil. Cairns understands this postmodern dilemma and utilizes it. As he asserts in his essay “Image Unto Likeness,” “poets of faith have begun to embrace postmodern epistemological troubling as offering a disposition far more closely related to the mystical heart of our faith than were the previous, more familiar, literalizing, poem-killing certainties that have, in our country, managed to trivialize both Christendom and Christ for more than half a century.” Thus, Cairns uses postmodernism in order to avoid “soul-crippling cliché” and “glib certainties,” and to instead find “discovered matter,” poems whose language possesses a sense of surprise and urgency.

The central section of the book, “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,” exemplifies another way Cairns transforms postmodern tropes and typologies. In this series of prose poems, Cairns adopts two postmodern practices—using a fictional persona and responding to received texts. But instead of employing these devices for the purposes of deconstruction, he uses them to recover the Hebrew tradition of midrash, which builds new layers of meaning upon the Torah’s stories while looking, as a rabbi once said, “for the questions behind the questions.” Or, as Cairns himself puts it in his introduction to The Sacred Place, he is interested in “the swoon of possibilities over the relative comfort of conclusions.” Thus Cairns offers a different version of the Adam and Eve story, one where the “Entrance of Sin” comes long before the fruit is tasted, where sin is linked instead to a withdrawal from each others’ bodies, which God, at creation, had deemed good:

And in later days, as the man and the woman wandered idly about their paradise, as they continued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and drink and spirited coupling, even as they sat marveling at the approach of evening and the more lush approach of sleep, they found within themselves a developing habit of resistance.

One supposes that, even then, this new taste for turning away might have been overcome, but that is assuming the two had found the result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was this: every time some manner of beauty was offered and declined, the subsequent isolation each conceived was irresistible.

Another stunning poem in this section transfigures “The Turning of Lot’s Wife,” first by restoring her proper name—Marah—and then by reversing the import of her final act: “In the impossible interval where she stood, Marah saw that she could not turn her back on even one doomed child of the city, but must turn her back instead upon the saved.”

These poems, rooted as they are in the Old Testament, deepen Cairns’s overarching argument regarding the body. While he wants to remove the shame often associated with the body’s appetites and asserts that a retreat into the mind’s isolation is the truer sin, his kinship to the Hebrew tradition reveals a more subtle distinction between the body and the flesh that is sometimes conflated by readers of the New Testament. As both the Syriac Fathers and St. Paul understood, the body, made in God’s image, cannot be evil, but rather it is the rebellious element in human nature that’s sinful—what’s termed “the flesh”—the will to turn one’s body away from God and creation.

This distinction allows Cairns to approach the Syriac stylites (ascetic monks who lived, prayed, and fasted while perched upon pillars) without betraying his own arguments about the body:

The way had become unbearably slow, progress
imperceptible. Even his hunger had become
less, little more than a poorly remembered myth

of never quite grasped significance.
....Occasional, erratic
movement at the tops of a few distant trees spun
his bearings some, induced brief vertigo, recalled

to him his hunger, if as a wave of nausea,
which abated, then poured back as he drew near and the trees
transformed to pillars, each topped by an enormous

weathered flightless bird enshrouded in a rag.

(“The Forest of the Stylites”)

The physical images are disturbing, and that very strangeness wrests the speaker free of the impediments created by his mind and returns him to his body. These Syriac ascetics do not deny the body; rather, their aim is to restore the original order of paradise, where the passions of the body were aligned with God. As the biblical scholar Dale Allison writes: “In their quest for angelic existence, they esteemed the body by mortifying the flesh.” Again, one of Cairns’s aims in this poem is to recover the physicality of Christian faith that was inherited from Judaism.

For all of their rhetorical weight, however, Cairns’s poems don’t feel heavy. He is too graceful and witty to become ponderous. Like Auden, whose influence upon Cairns is pervasive, Cairns has a good ear, a faculty that helps guide him into a language that feels discovered rather than made. Yet there is still a sense of control to the language. His lines strike a rare balance between sound and sense, embodying the tension between dabhar and logos. Further, he shares Auden’s conversational style and wit, his ability to combine cleverness and humor with darker emotions, often all in the same line, as in “Short Trip to the Edge”:

And then I was standing at the edge. It would surprise you
how near to home. And the abyss? Every shade of blue,
all of them readily confused, and, oddly, none of this
as terrifying as I had expected, just endless.

What? You find this business easy? When every breath is thick
with heady vapor from the edge? You might not be so quick
to deny what prefers its more dramatic churning done
out of sight. Enough about you. The enormity spun,

and I spun too, and reached across what must have been its dome.
When I was good and dizzy (since it was so near), I went home.

Throughout Recovered Body, Cairns disarms us with his sympathetic tone, sharing our doubts and questions, drawing us humbly into complex theological realms. Through his poems, we approach the revelations of the Incarnation and Resurrection slowly, admitting our weaknesses and maintaining our humor, until we find ourselves so close to the body and the blood that we must choose: drink from the cup or withdraw; taste the presence of Christ upon our tongues or turn away.

—Reviewed by William Coleman

Visit Scott Cairns as Image Artist of the Month for September '99

Issue #23 • Summer 1999