{"id":3966,"date":"2011-05-12T19:23:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T19:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3966"},"modified":"2011-05-12T19:24:43","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T19:24:43","slug":"ugliness-and-holiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3966","title":{"rendered":"Ugliness and holiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> ]<\/p>\n

.
\nI’m taking a break from my usual Zenpundit fare this time around, and posting some poems about the ugliness and holiness<\/strong> I see most evenings.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 single shots, often the ones film-makers call “establishing shots” \u2013 catch my eye and send me into poetry mode, where what I’ve seen triggers a clearer sense of what I intuit.<\/p>\n

\n

The secular sacred: i<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the relative darks of early darkness
\na train crosses on a raised rail above the houses
\nwhere sleeping is beginning, its
\nwindows and windows and windows lit up
\nwith empty interiors, here and there
\na person, but windows, mainly, and their
\nlights passing in sequence with a rhythm like
\nthe rhythm of breathing, of the late train.<\/p>\n

And how to get that in poetry, how to get
\nwhat the camera sees, the slightest of slightest
\nparts of the daily routine, entirely secular,
\nwhere plain people have transmuted
\nmetal to transportation system? Tta-cha<\/em>,
\nthis passing of lights, lights, lights in the night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It goes this way: the films show me something of the scope and range of human activity, and the scope \u2013 the sheer size of numerous cities \u2013 is so huge, and the range \u2013 from the heroic, the creative and even the saintly to the crazed, the dulled, the bereft and the vicious \u2013 is so great that my sense of how wide and deep the world is gets expanded way past its limits.<\/p>\n

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” \u2013 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\u2026 that part of me, precious to me, somehow must come to grips with the gritty, the grimy, the “real”.<\/p>\n

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” \u2013 much like the condition of insight we call “poetry” \u2013 reaches “down” from whatever lofty spires or Himalayas we may suppose it abides in, into the dust beneath our wheels, beneath our feet\u2026 dust that my mind, at least, could easily sweep under the carpet.<\/p>\n

And so, watching thrillers to put my mind on pause, I have to put the films on pause to write the poems\u2026<\/p>\n

\n

The secular sacred: ii<\/strong><\/p>\n

How many gravestones can a camera’s eye
\npass in a single sweep, and you think
\nGod any less able to see? The sacrament
\nof cinema surpasses, pushes words
\ninto admission of strange holiness way
\npast the tolerances of the religious,
\nway and away past any sense of what sacred
\nmight mean except only the sacred itself,<\/p>\n

felt fully in belly and brain of the city, the
\nsplintered, splendored city. Nor, in
\nthese needle-strewn streets, this broken
\nflesh and blood, is there mercy room
\nbeyond pity of such pettiness, the
\nshattered dreams — so ugly, small, so holy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After writing those two on successive nights, I made a note for some friends\u2026<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

\n

The secular sacred: iii<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now you think of it, someone must have
\nwanted him to walk down those steps from
\nthe whore’s house round the corner
\ninto the shadow and to his car, the street
\nlaid out just the way it happens
\nin the film, someone put the camera
\nthere or the street corner, setting
\nup a street corner is less effort than<\/p>\n

growing a city from scratch and gives
\ngreater freedom, so there was some intent,
\nsome design to his coming down
\nthose steps at that speed and time with
\nthat look on his face, and directors
\nare not necessarily lacking in street smarts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em> nice…<\/p>\n

\n

The secular sacred iv<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that there’s holiness in needles
\nglinting in the sun and discarded condoms in
\nthe shade, and the fact there’s often
\nmore shade than sun, and other facts I
\nmight mention shouldn\u2019t dissuade us from
\nthe glint of clinics and the shade of
\ndiscarded habits, there’s holiness there
\ntoo, in the turning around of a life, and if<\/p>\n

grass needs to break through asphalt to
\nprove a metaphysical point, you can be sure
\nsome kind of holiness is reaching up
\nfor sky and to get our attention, which,
\ntoo, is a locus of the sacred, humming in
\ntime with the heartbeat of world and heaven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron ] . 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. * When my capacity for writing about religious violence and apocalyptic fever has abated, and I want to set my mind on pause before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,389,21,67,128,523,1,557],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-counterintuitive","category-creativity","category-movies","category-personal","category-theology","category-uncategorized","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}