A Few Thoughts on 'Beyond the Alps' by Robert Lowell

While many poets seem to have got their knickers in an unsavoury twist over royal shindig invitations, I (good republican that I am) have been thinking about Robert Lowell. More specifically about ‘Beyond the Alps’, which kicks off his most famous collection, Life Studies, and also the little Faber Selected Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann. I believe several versions of the poem exist, some with extra stanzas, but I’m going to stick to the one from the Hofmann Selected (two 14-line stanzas, one 12-line stanza and a final couplet). The poem isn’t online and I’m not going to reproduce it here (I can’t afford Faber’s copyright fees), so this post will continue a long line of Surroundings articles which have, at best, a limited audience. Given Lowell’s lack of popularity in the current climate, that audience may be almost nil, but not quite. This “not quite” is exactly what Surroundings is about and, I hope, it's a "not quite" that is set to grow.

Now, ‘Beyond the Alps’ is a fantastic poem. I love it! It concerns a train journey from Rome to Paris through the Alps, with various diversions – the failure of a Swiss group to climb Everest, the train stewards (from the restaurant carriage?) who, amazingly, go “forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs”, a “skirt-mad Mussolini”, and the Pope’s purring electric razor and pet canary. The poem is about Catholic faith, perhaps the loss of it or at least a distancing from its orthodoxy. The train moves off from Rome and heads into the mountains and, as it leaves the Alps and comes back to ground-level, each stark peak begins to resemble a “fire-branded socket of the Cyclop’s eye.” The landscape, where we might expect woolly snow, feels more like a barren burned-out desert: clearly also a psychological state. One of the main arguments concerns the ambiguous closing couplet:

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

I stared at this for a little while, as it seemed a curious way to end. It contains the virtue of surprise, but also evades any sense of closure. Or, even if “closure” isn’t desirable, the couplet asks more questions than it answers and not all the questions stem from what’s happened previously in the poem. There is debate on this online in the New York Review of Books – Jonathan Raban and Edwin Franks debating with James Fenton. The debate sheds some light on the poem, I think. The reference to the Etruscans must have to do with a great civilisation, vastly influential in its cultural milieu, which nevertheless disappeared and left behind no literature and whose geographical power collapsed completely. The killer kings have themselves been killed by events, time, shifts of culture and power. Paris feels the same to Lowell. His world-view is disintegrating as he nears the city and he seems himself in it or, perhaps sees himself as it.

Paris would be black, as Raban and Frank suggest, because it would have seemed grimy at the time compared to Rome. However, why “our black classic” is the real question, as Fenton says. If something is “classic”, it is untouchable. It has status, accorded by the influential. A ‘Penguin Classic’ (Morrissey aside) or a “classic album” is such because it has been ‘canonized’ by those who have the power to make such decisions. Paris has that canonical quality. It is a great, iconic city. It is a “classic”, but a sooty, tarnished classic here. It mirrors Lowell’s internal crisis of faith, dramatized within the poem by the Pope (expressly exercising papal infallibility) making the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a dogma in 1950, the idea that Mary was bodily taken up into heaven at the end of her life:

The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
to Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?

Lowell’s loss of faith in strict Catholic dogma has led him to a city breaking up before his eyes, a city beyond the Alps where gods once held sway. It is a poem that still resonates in the shattered cities, physical and psychological, of 2013.

The Project:2

I guess a Christian-based Arts Festival may not strike every reader of this blog as something they’d want to rush out and go to. Well, fair enough! But this one will be high quality, inclusive, and no doubt inspiring for anyone interested in contemporary spirituality.

Introducing - The Project:2. It’s the first event in working towards something even bigger, although the programme, spanning three venues on one day, is ambitious and intriguing.

It’s happening this Saturday, 20th June in Edinburgh. Andrew Philip and I will be performing poems at 2-2.30pm (at ‘The Lot’, Grassmarket, Edinburgh) and then at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar from 7.30-8pm. There is a huge amount going on all around us. Tickets can be booked for the afternoon, evening, or both. Word is that they are disappearing fast, so don't hang about.

The Scott Rennie Case

I took a bus into Edinburgh’s city centre and managed to get in to see the debate over Scott Rennie live at the General Assembly. The public gallery and the video-link hall were both packed full. The debate lasted four hours and was (mostly) of a high standard, I thought. It was a court case carried out without public broadcasting cameras, so I don't want to go into detail on speeches. Kirk votes to back gay minister, says the BBC headline – and it did, by 326 votes to 267. Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church and the ratification by Aberdeen Presbytery have been upheld. I don’t know Scott, but I’m glad for him and wish him well. It was the right decision.

But the motion passed was more complex than the BBC make it appear. The motion recognised that the church has not yet expressed a clear-cut view on matters of homosexuality and ministry, and the decision on Scott Rennie was expressly stated not to prejudice that debate, which was originally to take place afterwards tonight in terms of the motion issued by Lochcarron & Skye Presbytery:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

However, due to the initial court case taking so long, it’s been postponed until Monday at 4pm.

In other words, the Church of Scotland General Assembly has decided that, under existing church legislation, the Presbytery of Aberdeen acted properly in upholding Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church. However, if the Overture issued by Lochcarron & Skye is passed on Monday, people engaged in sexual relationships, outside marriage between a man and woman, won’t be allowed to take up office as church ministers (in the future). So more or less everything is still at stake.

Live From The General Assembly

Those interested in following the Scott Rennie case at the Church of Scotland General Assembly (whether he, as a practising gay man, can retain his post as minister of Queen’s Cross Church) and the subsequent debate on sexuality, can watch it live from just after 6.30pm tonight. Whether it will be an edifying spectacle remains to be seen…

The BBC Report at the link states that "more than 400 Kirk ministers and almost 5,000 Church of Scotland members are said to have signed an online petition opposing the appointment." That 400 includes many retired ministers, and the 5,000 members belong to a Church denomination of over 600,000 members.

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Hmmm. I just read in today's Scotsman newspaper that the Church has chosen not to show this particular debate on its live stream because "the Assembly is meeting as a court." Well it's true that, in Scotland, the proceedings of a court can't be televised. I can see the reasons why court proceedings ought to be held in private.

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Latest news from the Church of Scotland website:

"Referred case: On Saturday evening the General Assembly will be exercising judicial functions, and like other British courts do not broadcast these publicly. Therefore there will be no webcast or Twitter updates of the Referred Case.

The webcast broadcast will re-commence with the beginning of the Overture from the Presbytery of Lochcarron-Skye. The timing of this event will be dependant on the length of the preceding material. We will annouce the re-starting of the webcast on Twitter on the General Assembly Updates page."

I guess this might read like double-dutch. Basically, the 'referred case' is a complaint made by certain individuals from the Presbytery of Aberdeen who feel that the Presbytery acted improperly in allowing Queens Cross Church to call Scott Rennie to be their minister. This is the court case, and will be in private.

However, the Lochcarron-Skye overture will debate the issue of whether churches will be able to call ministers in a gay relationship (or indeed in any sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage). The overture states:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

That debate will be live on the stream, using the link above. I suspect the outcome will be to delay having to make a decision for a few years...

Zagajewski on Religious Poetry

Fascinating interview with Adam Zagajewski (who I mentioned in my previous post on Adam Kirsch’s criticism) at the Poetry Foundation site. The whole article is worth reading, but I found the section on how religious/spiritual poems might be written in the 21st century particularly interesting.

Milosz once said that “we are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a conversation with Pope John Paul II, who commented upon Milosz’s work, saying, “Well, you make one step forward, one step back.” Milosz replied, “Holy Father, how in the 20th century can one write religious poetry differently?”

Zagajewski concurred: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from ‘professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”

His view is a counterpoint to the current fashion of irony, which he decries. “I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus, but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance,” he said. “How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small, but it’s my space.”

Most contemporary openly-religious poetry I have read has been terrible. Perhaps that's because the writers take two steps forward rather than one back? Perhaps because the poems outline something already discovered rather than their language contributing to an ongoing discovery process? Perhaps because they haven't found that space between irony and fundamentalism (much easier to jump to one or the other)? I think Zagajewski is onto something.

God, the Via Negativa, and Beyond

Todd Swift, of Eyewear, makes some very interesting observations about being in search of God.

Most dialogue about God at the moment is on the basis that God, if he/she exists, should answer our questions and conform to our methods of exploration. And if he/she doesn’t, then the Deity must either be a human delusion or simply (and for some, sadly) inaccessible to those who can’t ‘make themselves’ have faith. Questions are then aimed at those expressing faith, questions which originate with these assumptions.

But Eyewear takes a different approach to faith:

God is the despite, is the still, is the just about, is the almost - may even be simply the perhaps, or it could be. God is the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone. As such, it is a via negativa, and one's faith can only be fully sounded when the instrument one plays is beyond need, is denuded of the self - when one mourns not for one's own self, but for a greater love of another.

This made me think of a passage from one of the letters that theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote from the Tegel prison in Berlin in 1944 before being sent to Buchenwald and then Flossenberg, where he was hanged for his involvement in the bomb plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer tried to find a way of expressing faith in an inhuman time, and the instrument he is playing is certainly “beyond need”:

Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fail: it is in fact always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure – always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence.

Of necessity, that can only go on until men can, by their own strength, push these borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina. I have come to be doubtful even about talking of “borders of human existence.”

Is even death today, since men are scarcely afraid of it any more, and sin, which they scarcely understand any more, still a genuine borderline? It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weakness but in strength, not, therefore, in man’s suffering and death, but in his life and prosperity.

On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. The “beyond” of God is not the beyond of our perceptive facilities. Epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the “beyond” in the midst of our life.

And it’s worth remembering what “life” he is placing God in the midst of. In that existence, God is also, I think, “the despite, the still, the just about, the almost… the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone.”