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Christian Wiman. Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.


 

WHEN THOMAS BROWNE, a doctor from Norwich, England, wrote Religio Medici in the early part of the seventeenth century, he set off a craze of imitations. Meaning simply “The Religion of a Physician,” Browne’s text inspired such satellites as Religio Stoici, Religio Libertini, and even John Dryden’s famous poem “Religio Laici.” Stoics, libertines, laymen: everyone wanted in on the action. But no one was able to replicate Browne’s success. Remembered for its style perhaps more than its substance, Religio Medici is a testimony of one man’s faith that ends up telling us a great deal about metempsychosis, Plato, witches, haecceity, and, most importantly, death. What we don’t learn much about is Browne’s life, the details of background and biography that might shape his beliefs into a story. One of the most enduring witnesses of faith in the English language, in other words, is memorable in large part for what it doesn’t say.

“I want to write a book,” declares Christian Wiman in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, “true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be.” Having already published seven collections of his own verse and three works we might as well call memoirs, Wiman crams his whole career into Zero at the Bone. Poetry abuts criticism, autobiography, philosophy, lectures, even sermons. What’s most fascinating about this jumble of modes, however, is that Wiman isn’t so much dancing between genres as testing the limits of the same genre as Browne. Faith is a poem, a memory, a rant, a self-interrogation, a capitulation to experience. Faith, for Wiman, “is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life,” whether or not “she has addressed it consciously.”

For most of us, the problem with answering this question is that testimony—the describing of our faith—is simultaneously too vulnerable and too prefabricated. Give one’s testimony? The word feels over-chewed, the activity drained of vitality by the dead air we use to summon it. This is a problem for the average believer as well as the writer. “There is a severe contradiction,” as Wiman puts it, “between our need to speak of ultimate things and the immunity of those things from speech.” Which isn’t to say we don’t attempt to smuggle our contact with ultimate things into speech. In church or temple or the wrong kind of yoga class, we do almost nothing else. The tension lies in how our experience of God, of grace, of that Being which is not an entity but rather the source of all being, so often escapes our best attempts at elaboration. In the face of this failure, we fall back on given forms, on words and story arcs that aren’t exactly untrue but that often increase the dissonance between what we say and what we feel.

The conversion (and reconversion) testimony is especially prone to narrative ruts. Saint Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is the wagon that first carved such ruts, arguably, a witness so powerful it has forced Christians, again and again, to fit their own stories to his model. We describe how we were lost. We describe how we were found. We pin the change, the shift, to a moment. But the harder task, the project intimated by Browne’s digressions and Wiman’s juxtapositions, is to give a sense of how faith overflows these limits.

An example: my wife is a believer, but she wasn’t raised in the faith. Not Catholic, not Baptist, not Presbyterian, not Methodist, not Lutheran, she found herself surrounded by nondenominational evangelicals in high school. She went to church, went on some ski retreats. She was dating a Christian boy. It was a good way to keep dating him. There were some high-intensity moments—worship in the mountains, an especially formative Easter—but no singular moment. One day, she was a Christian. She found herself behind a glass wall she could only see from her new orientation, her new belief. She converted without epiphany.

Browne and Wiman and my wife all share the same quandary. Grace surprises, startles, resists summary. Grace leaves us wordless. This commonality, though, is what makes the genre of testimony so compelling. The same difficulty of craft, of telling, vexes all. In Zero at the Bone, Wiman attempts to short-circuit, to interpret, to embody this conundrum. He gives a witness built partly around not-saying, around gaps and stutters, a testimony that insists we remain unsatisfied with the easy word. While it might sound like a writerly project, Zero at the Bone is a model of resilience. If the pith of faith won’t fit into a memoir, a poem, a confession, a dialogue, then let’s try another form, and another after that. And if they all fall short, if we keep confessing to our friends and small groups and children what we think we believe—if Wiman keeps casting the mystery of faith into lyric, into prose, into the silence between—perhaps the failures will complement each other, will eventually reveal a silhouette of grace in its unspeakable form.

 

Despite its idiosyncratic aims, Zero at the Bone is built on traditional witness, on Saint Paul’s ancient form. Having documented his return to Christianity in My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman uses the various entries of Zero at the Bone to adumbrate life after (re)conversion. He is a Christian all these years later “because once when I was suffering terribly and near death Christ came to me—in my mind, in my heart, through the minds and hearts of others, through what I was reading and what I was touching and tasting and seeing, he seemed everywhere dammit.” Reality imposed on him, broke in upon his worldly retreat, and he responded. This is the road to Damascus. This is Saint Augustine’s Confessions: “I heard Thee, as one hears in the heart; and there was from that moment no ground of doubt in me.” A traditional testimony.

But these simple proclamations are not the norm for Wiman. He cannot merely say, “I’m a Christian.” Instead, it’s always, “I’m a Christian. Which means that I have faith. Or had it once, and with such enlivening force that to deny it now would be a denial of life itself.” Such qualifications are constant, and usually followed by a matrix of allusions and philosophizing that Wiman weaves into a loose pattern of interlocking tenets. Longtime readers won’t be surprised. “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness,” he writes in the first entry, “but because one senses a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.” Elsewhere, he argues that we “cannot know the world independent of ourselves, but within such vertiginous existence, knowing that we do not know, the next step becomes possible.” What next step do we take after knowing that we do not know? “Myth and metaphor reacquire their kinship with the unconscious” is the text’s answer. “The dark matter (a metaphor, note) of reality becomes, instead of corrosively unknowable, the very terrain of faith.”

It’s easy to read sentence upon sentence of these kinds of assertions, to be pulled along by the click of their sense that’s actually the lilt of their sound, without really understanding what’s being communicated. The mix of compulsiveness and elusiveness is typical of Wiman whenever he closes in on “the very terrain of faith.” He is sharing his convictions, but the substance is fluid, eely. Interwoven with his illnesses, his roughneck days on a construction job in Texas, his attempts to raise precocious twin girls, the convictions amount to a kind of hard-knocks mysticism.

Even for a mystic, though, he’s unusually determined to elude dogma. Where Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century nun and mystic, constructs elaborate metaphors of her overwhelming faith experience—the seven mansions of her Interior Castle describe a soul’s progress to intimacy with God—Wiman wants to capture a disorder, a certain unmaking, that occurs if we take the implications of faith seriously. He tracks the way knowledge disappears into mystery in various fields, and often replicates this trajectory in his personal reflections. Discussing the physicist Carlo Rovelli, for instance, he relishes how the confidence of the “scientific and philosophical materialism and determinism that have choked the soul of the last century” has been more and more upended by quantum mechanics. The electrons move in waves. The electrons move as particles. The more we learn, the more we face the limits of our knowing.

These forays into mystery become overhangs into the abyss. The difference between abyss and mystery, one might even argue, comes down to an internal posture, a kind of ontological glass-half-full experiment. “It’s not that I don’t believe in [meanings] anymore,” writes Wiman, “it’s that I believe they are ultimately unknowable, even the most intimate aspects of our existence, including the mutilations that made us what we are.” Wiman, in essence, doesn’t brush over the notion that we must lose our lives to gain new life. Rather, such a demand becomes the crux of spiritual experience. That we gain new life is never as certain as the loss. “Resurrection is a function of faith and imagination. Suffering and death are facts.” Christ too was mutilated.

If this fusion of semi-nihilism and Christianity breaks from tradition, however, it’s partly a matter of emphasis. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, also believes that the “most intimate aspects of our existence” are unknowable. One small example is his treatment of the philosophy of mind. “Great is the power of memory,” he declares. So great, in fact, that “I cannot totally grasp all that I am.” This futility of understanding is a radical idea. The way we constitute and confirm the core of ourselves, our memory, is somehow beyond us. Like Wiman, Saint Augustine pursues wonder and learning until they recoil on themselves. He’s awed by the function of his memory, but the ground of his wonder trembles. Or that’s how it reads after one spends enough time with Zero at the Bone. What Wiman makes clear within Christian tradition is that without our insufficiency, the abyss of our own unknowing, much of our wonder isn’t possible. They work in tandem.

 

This centering of the abyss has practical consequences for Wiman as a poet, as a believer. It has practical consequences for anyone scraping their beliefs into some kind of communicable form. Throughout Zero at the Bone, Wiman includes several anecdotes about his attempts, his failures mostly, to voice his faith in everyday scenarios. We don’t hear him defend or explain his Christianity so much as observe the tension between his lofty ideas of language and God and the needs of actual relationships. The slipperiness of his convictions turns against him. A narrative essay titled “White Buffalo,” for example, details some of the disasters that befall his sister and father. Drugs, prison, assault, attempted suicide, and, in the case of his father, a death surrounded by squalor. His sister probes Wiman’s commitments amid these tragedies. She asks him if he believes in God, if he believes God will forgive anything, and even asks (given his multiple bouts with blood cancer) “what it was like to live with death all the time.”

Each question is a test of his integrity, perhaps of competing integrities. Wiman’s sister, after all, queries Wiman while she’s struggling with addiction and, at one point, while imprisoned. What she wants from Wiman is a human answer, a glimmer of that simple, even simplistic, hope that the institutions of faith so often truck in. But Wiman doesn’t think in those terms, hasn’t made peace with his faith in language that easily fits such raw, personal need. “I said I didn’t really think about God like that,” he answers, regarding forgiveness. “I didn’t think about him as an entity that judged and loved as we understood those terms.” A few pages later, he doesn’t even bother elaborating his other responses: “I said some other useless shit.”

Importantly, this theme, this type of failure, recurs. In a Socratic dialogue between two parts of himself toward the end of Zero at the Bone, he includes an anecdote about a woman who had a brain tumor. She comes to see him at a college ceremony in the Midwest even though “she might not have been able to name one poem” of his. But she’d “read something [he’d] published somewhere about cancer and Christ” and forces her way to him. Wiman, addressing himself: “And what did you tell her?” The answers listed are mocking, beautiful, half-uttered phrases essential to Wiman’s work and that the reader has already encountered. “We are what we are only in our last bastions. The knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.”

Unrelenting, he asks himself if the woman is dead now, or almost asks, and he answers himself in greater fragmentation:

—She’s dead isn’t—
—Goes safely—where an open eye— / Would drop him
—I have done my best—
—Bone by bone—

That’s the ending of the entry, a tumbling from inarticulation into silence that is essential to Wiman’s experience of belief. The bricks of his faith, the words he pretends to offer, fall away. “What did I say to her?” he demands of himself. But the implication is that it doesn’t really matter. If his verse or Emily Dickinson’s verse or the clever hammers he’s wielded against cliché feel insufficient in print, how much less sufficient was whatever actually escaped his mouth?

Through its fragmentation of content, its shifts between confidence and uncertainty and anger and peace, Zero at the Bone puts the reader in touch with the third rail of Christianity, of any religion. The abyss—our loss of meaning as a phenomenon rather than an idea—is central to the spiritual life. The movement between entries creates this electricity. A poetic truth is not identical to the insight of a memoir. Compression gives way to elaboration which gives way to interrogation. The space between the genres becomes a kind of aperture of induction. We zoom out to the ultimate questions—why is God absent? does the soul, shorn of the self, survive death?—only to narrow to the particular lives that must suffer those questions.

Following “White Buffalo”—his father’s death, his sister’s survival—is a poem titled “How to Live.” An appropriate theme given his sister’s recovery, except it’s about “Poor Mal, old pal,” a man whose car dealership is ravaged by hail. Only one windshield survives the storm. It doesn’t survive Mal. He decides to lift

a lug of ice big as a pig’s snout
and, like a token of unluck, and with that avalanching laugh
crash it through the one windshield in your lot
miraculously unstruck.

The whiplash is poetical and apophatic, the latter one of Wiman’s favorite words. What isn’t said, the transitions not given, create their own meaning. The self-destruction of Mal’s business, his last windshield, shines back into the self-destruction of Wiman’s family, but so does Mal’s madcap delight, his “avalanching laugh.” The failed testimony, the failed lives, are not the final word. The movement, the seesaw of clarity and obfuscation, only continues from there. After poor Mal in “How to Live,” we encounter a close reading of Emily Dickinson, a poem about “zapped rats,” and an adaptation of Wiman’s convocation address to Yale Divinity School, which includes a meditation on Jesus’s famous writing in the sand.

Through most of the fifty entries, though, Wiman is not wrestling with the positive content of faith—the Nicene Creed or the words of the Old and New Testaments or even his own experience of Christ—but with the negative pressure that accompanies belief, the fact that there is an order beyond the world that encases the mold of our faith in the same way the seeming void of space surrounds the earth. We often call this mystery. Like the apparent (but not actual) void, it creates boundaries and forms even as it extends into impossible expanse. We can talk about eternity, for instance, but the idea of everlasting life is surrounded by the dark certainty that the journey between this world and the next is as stark as oblivion. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard.” Eternity is ultimately a gesture to a reality as unknowable and unrelenting as annihilation, even if it’s paradise.

 

Wiman’s testimony, as should be clear by now, belongs to a lineage of experimentalists and mystics. In many ways, he’s torn in half between these two heritages. He goads himself in Zero at the Bone, belittling both his inability to be a wholehearted Christian and his inability to don his aloofness permanently, to be a distinguished, nihilistic intellectual of the modern ilk. “You think,” he accuses himself, “if you could eradicate Christ from your life…you would be—not happy, you’re not quite that stupid—but at least less split, more clearly and honestly you.” At the same time, he counter-accuses himself “that if you could truly live with and for Jesus Christ, if you could purge your language of every lie that tells you this is not possible, you would be less split, more clearly and honestly you.” Most importantly, he doesn’t believe either position is true. He knows these competing inclinations are temptations. They are the crosscurrents of meaning and longing and selfhood that cannot be resolved.

The clash of these two halves is also the engine of his creativity, of his efficacy as a witness. Zero at the Bone is successful bit by bit, sometimes more than as a whole. The poems are arresting. The essays are provocative. The faith, however reluctantly owned, is convicting. He’s funny too. But Wiman, in his own terms, is both a “creative” and a “destructive” writer. The creative writer partakes in “disclosing and furthering reality, equipping human consciousness to grow.” The destructive, on the other hand, is “waging an assault on the kinds of unconsciousness that falsify, obscure, and deform reality.” Wiman, by alternating among memoir, poetry, essay, and more, gives air to both instincts. He is hacking away at the comfortable language that distorts faith, while at the same time arguing for a sense of reality, a sense of God, that feels appropriate to transcendence. The two projects are intertwined. The language is stretched to the height of its power and accuracy by the demands of the faith.

Still, the self-help subtitle, Fifty Entries Against Despair, is not an accident or a marketing trick, a way to draw in the hapless library browser. It’s easy to place Wiman in the tradition of Saint Augustine and Thomas Browne, or even the medieval mystics such as Teresa of Ávila. What matters more, in my opinion, is that Wiman is in league with believers of all stripes who struggle to share their lightning strike of grace. Here is a man, after all, fêted by all the literary world for his exacting skill and uncompromising honesty. If even he feels like he can’t stuff the words of his witness with the right meaning, perhaps the rest of us can give our insufficient testimonies a break. Perhaps we can persevere through the awkwardness and alienation knowing that all attempts to bottle the transcendent eventually sound a little hollow, and that a better silence often precedes a better word. There’s no point in imitating Wiman, a singular voice of witness, but his greatest blow against despair is the mere fact that he continues to raise his axe against the storm in order to bellow, and cower, beside the rest of us. And when he fails his own standards—when the poem blanks, the essay peters out, the memoir underwhelms—he sinks into a new form and tries again.

 

 


Joel Cuthbertson is a writer from Denver whose fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, The New Atlantis, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

 

 

Photo by Juan Davila on Unsplash

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