`This Great Absence'

When I first read R.S. Thomas seriously, accumulating as many of his books of poetry and prose as I could find and afford, his work persistently reminded me not of George Herbert or Wordsworth or the other poets he cited as elective affinities, but of Ingmar Bergman. I’m not certain the Welsh poet-priest saw a single film in his life, but I’m not talking about influence. Poet and director shared a Northern landscape and a temperamental bleakness, and both returned obsessively to the theme of the via negativa. Here’s what I wrote about the “negative way” last year:

“God, by definition is ineffable and defies language, a feeble human creation. Those following the via negativa attempt to express knowledge of God by describing what He is not – a rhetorical strategy known as apophasis (`to say no’). In one of his sermons, Meister Eckhart said: `God is nameless, because no one can say anything or understand anything about him.’”

Bergman died on Monday, though it feels as though he died decades ago – a feeling we experience when an artist we enthusiastically discovered in our youth is suddenly gone. My favorite among Bergman’s films remains the first one I saw, on public television, in the late nineteen-sixties – Winter Light. A pastor, Tomas (played by Gunnar Bjornstrand), undergoes a crisis of faith. He is still in love with his dead wife but carries on an affair with a school teacher, Marta (the great Ingrid Thulin). A parishioner, Jonas Persson (the equally great Max von Sydow) is a fisherman tormented by the fear of nuclear annihilation. He visits the pastor seeking reassurance and Tomas tells him:

“Every time I confronted God with the reality I saw, he became ugly, revolting, a spider god – a monster. That’s why I hid him away from the light, from life. In my darkness and loneliness I hugged him to myself – the only person I showed him to was my wife. She backed me up, encouraged me, helped me, plugged up all the holes. Our dreams. (He gives a sudden laugh).”

Persson, understandably, leaves. Alone in his church, Tomas says: “No. (Pause) God does not exist any more.” And then: “I’m free now. At last, free.” I’m quoting from A Film Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants (Winter Light), The Silence, translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin and published in 1967.

Bjornstrand looks nothing like R.S. Thomas, yet their images, in memory, align perfectly. Thomas’ wife of 51 years, Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, died in 1991. Thomas lived another nine years, wrote some of his most heartbreakingly personal poems, and died at age 87. Both artists defied us to bow to the pressure of the age and understand their work psychologically rather than spiritually. There’s the same craggy austerity in both (Tomas and Thomas, as in “Doubting”), the same dourness broken by fits of passion. Tomas’ words in Winter Light are less artful than Thomas’, of course, but they express a similar spiritual torment. Compare them with a poem from Thomas’ Frequencies (1978), “The Absence” (which might have served Bergman as a title):

“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

“from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?”