POETRY AND THE SACRED
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prayer, and offering also attempt to bridge apartness. See how prayer appears
in Milosz's description, as a path toward connection:
You ask me how
to
pray
to
someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ri pe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
I have been speaking metaphysically, but exile and estrangement are
markers of the sacred in the ordinary ways as well.
In
the lives of Catholic
saints, Buddhist masters, Hindu ecstatics, almost always some fracturing
appears-a breakage in the course of ordinary life allows the extraordinary
life, the extraordinary questions, entrance. Wallace Stevens described the
imaginative act as a pressing back from within against the outward pressure
of reali
ty;
one can say the same of spiri tual life. Ease cannot temper us in
the intimate encounter wi th the real, and those who see the ways of the
gods-Tiresias, the imagined figure of Homer, Oedipus after he learns the
truth of his life-are made blind by the fullness of what they see. Much
more than simple faith, it is the weight of inexplicable suffering and loss
and banishment that brings forth the great encounters in spiri tuallife.
Milosz's exile is not into blindness, but an exile of seeing and witness,
with the knowledge of extinction sharpened by war, especially the Warsaw
uprising, and the knowledge of suffering sharpened by the pressure of the
history that followed. Against these experiences, the imagination pressed
back: with the driving question of good and evil in human nature and in
the world, and also wi th the question of Paradise, about which, it seems, the
poet has never quite made up his mind-for many of the poems make of
this particular, temporal earth a Paradise that is both preserved by memory
and taken by transience. And so we come into the terrain of the second and
third of my themes, praise and time, which intertwine deeply for Milosz.
Praise is one of the fundamental gestures of the soul before the sacred,
familiar to us from the Biblical Psalms, from the Avatamsaka Sutra of Hua–
Yen Buddhism, fi·om Hildegard of Bingen, R.umi, and Kabir. Neither
propitiation nor flattery, in the mature spirit praise is the one answer we
can offer to the question of why we are here. Yet Milosz knows that what
he praises is drawn from this earth ly existence, and so he writes in "An
Hour":
