SEAMUS HEANEY
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practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and
stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated
life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil- no lyric has ever
stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited.
It
is like the writing
in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left
speechless and renewed.
I am thinking of Jesus's writing as it is recorded in Chapter
Eight of John's Gospel, my second and concluding text:
The teacher of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman
caught in adultery .
They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus,
"Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now
what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in
order to have a basis for accusing him.
ButJesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his
finger.
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and
said to them,
"If
any of you is without sin, let him be the first to
throw a stone at her."
Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the
older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still
standing there.
Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?"
"No one, Sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and
leave your life of Sin ."
The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the
usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is
arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It
does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, "Now a
solution will take place"; it does not propose to be instrumental or ef–
fective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and
whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a
space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus
where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.
