Ugliness and holiness

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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I’m taking a break from my usual Zenpundit fare this time around, and posting some poems about the ugliness and holiness I see most evenings.

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When my capacity for writing about religious violence and apocalyptic fever has abated, and I want to set my mind on pause before I go to sleep, I often watch crime-thrillers: it’s a sort of meditation for me. And because it’s a sort of meditation, I find that odd things – single shots, often the ones film-makers call “establishing shots” – catch my eye and send me into poetry mode, where what I’ve seen triggers a clearer sense of what I intuit.

The secular sacred: i

In the relative darks of early darkness

a train crosses on a raised rail above the houses

where sleeping is beginning, its

windows and windows and windows lit up

with empty interiors, here and there

a person, but windows, mainly, and their

lights passing in sequence with a rhythm like

the rhythm of breathing, of the late train.

And how to get that in poetry, how to get

what the camera sees, the slightest of slightest

parts of the daily routine, entirely secular,

where plain people have transmuted

metal to transportation system? Tta-cha,

this passing of lights, lights, lights in the night.

It goes this way: the films show me something of the scope and range of human activity, and the scope – the sheer size of numerous cities – is so huge, and the range – from the heroic, the creative and even the saintly to the crazed, the dulled, the bereft and the vicious – is so great that my sense of how wide and deep the world is gets expanded way past its limits.

And the part of me that has experienced (and continues to experience) something that I can find no words for outside the religious vocabulary — “grace” and “radiance” – the part of me that is enormously thankful now and always for the privilege of human being, of sight, friends, speech, friends, books, friends, music, travel, the internet… that part of me, precious to me, somehow must come to grips with the gritty, the grimy, the “real”.

I have no theories about heaven, no belief or creed beyond a non-verbal assent, but it’s my sense that the condition of joy we call “heaven” – much like the condition of insight we call “poetry” – reaches “down” from whatever lofty spires or Himalayas we may suppose it abides in, into the dust beneath our wheels, beneath our feet… dust that my mind, at least, could easily sweep under the carpet.

And so, watching thrillers to put my mind on pause, I have to put the films on pause to write the poems…

The secular sacred: ii

How many gravestones can a camera’s eye

pass in a single sweep, and you think

God any less able to see? The sacrament

of cinema surpasses, pushes words

into admission of strange holiness way

past the tolerances of the religious,

way and away past any sense of what sacred

might mean except only the sacred itself,

felt fully in belly and brain of the city, the

splintered, splendored city. Nor, in

these needle-strewn streets, this broken

flesh and blood, is there mercy room

beyond pity of such pettiness, the

shattered dreams — so ugly, small, so holy.

After writing those two on successive nights, I made a note for some friends…

Those two, the “secular sacred” poems, are part of something I’m working towards by watching “gritty” films most nights, and triggered in particular by helicopter long-shots of freeways intercut with goings on at street level — giving me the feeling the world is far larger (and uglier) than (my) religious imagination usually reckons, with holiness in the discarded condoms.

So I’m trying to make room conceptually for a god or emergent world or mirroring pool wide and deep enough for gritty realism in these poems…

The secular sacred: iii

Now you think of it, someone must have

wanted him to walk down those steps from

the whore’s house round the corner

into the shadow and to his car, the street

laid out just the way it happens

in the film, someone put the camera

there or the street corner, setting

up a street corner is less effort than

growing a city from scratch and gives

greater freedom, so there was some intent,

some design to his coming down

those steps at that speed and time with

that look on his face, and directors

are not necessarily lacking in street smarts.

And I’m far from sure what sort of God, mirror or emergence will emerge from all this at the end, but it’s unlikely to have curls in a beard and be supremely nice, at least not just nice…

The secular sacred iv

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