`The Wonder of the Sun'

Opportunities to read outdoors are rare. In Houston, mosquitoes and humidity render the prospect unpleasant. In Seattle, living in a small apartment, I’m too busy with kids and work – until Friday. For a childless, whine-free hour I sat on a bench beneath a tall fir tree, in a bower of rhododendrons – an honest-to-God bower – on the campus of Seattle Pacific University, and read John Berryman’s Henry`s Fate, a posthumous collection of previously unpublished “Dream Songs” and other poetic scraps. The book, edited by Berryman’s biographer John Haffenden, was published in 1977, five years after Berryman’s death by suicide, and promptly disappeared from print and, seemingly, literary consciousness. I love it uncritically, or pre-critically. In an untitled “Dream Song” dated June 24, 1968, addressed to his young daughter, Berryman writes:

“Who coined despair? I hope you never hear,
my lovely dear, of any such goddamned thing.
Set it up on a post
And ax the post down while the angels sing,
& bury the stenchful body loud & clear
with an appropriate toast.”

That’s the jaunty Berryman defying the black woe that dogged his days. Here’s a less woeful Berryman on the same subject, in “The Alcoholic in the 3rd Week of the 3rd Treatment”:

“It is, after all, very very difficult to despair
while the wonder of the sun this morning
as yesterday & probably tomorrow.”

Always trust a pep talk delivered by a depressive. They know the territory, unlike the congenitally buoyant. On Friday, there was little “wonder of the sun” under Seattle’s overcast skies, but there were crows in conversation, industrious squirrels, and a lone Canada goose so distant his honk sounded like a beep. I was on campus to meet Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image, and writer in residence and director of the MFA program in creative writing program at the university. A reader of this blog whom I have never met, Mary McCleary, a painter in Nacogdoches, Texas, suggested I get to know Wolfe “because I believe you would enjoy knowing one another.” True enough. He’s an affable, unpretentious fellow, and we decided Mary McCleary’s paintings remind us of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.

We agreed to stay in touch and Wolfe gave me the two most recent issues of Image, the O’Connor-like subtitle of which is “Art, Faith, Mystery.” I sat on the same bench on the way back to the car to take a quick look at Wolfe’s gifts. Last fall’s issue includes a symposium, “Why Believe in God?” in which 15 writers address the question. I opened at random to the contribution from novelist Ron Hansen, in which he writes, “But we know God as the great mystery, beyond our categories, our justice, our sense of rightness, our ideas about world governance.” Then he quotes a poet:

“Interminable: an old theologian
asserts that even to say You exist is misleading.
Uh-huh. I buy that Second-century fellow.
I press his withered glorifying hand.

“You certainly do not as I exist,
impersonating as well the meteorite
& flaring in your sun your waterfall
or blind in caves pallid fishes.

“Bear in mind me, Who have forgotten nothing,
& Who continues. I may not foreknow
& fail much to remember. You sustain
imperial desuetudes, at the kerb a widow.”

That’s from the ninth of Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” from the final book he published in his lifetime, Love & Fame.