Paul Hoover, "To the Choirmaster"

Hi all --

I have to tell myself to be patient with those who do not understand we are in a civil war. Who think that if they police us, they're doing their jobs. Who think that the fact things are okay now means that if we play our cards right, things will be okay in perpetuity.

I could feel the mood of the entire country change with the report of the 5 year old used as bait to lure out his father. I expect some I know will say that the child is illegal. I must not talk to those people. Not one word, not one syllable, not one wasted thought. For the last week, I have been giving to different causes in the Twin Cities in small amounts and I plan to keep giving. I cannot say I am doing the most I possibly can. I can only say I am doing what I must to avoid the shame of not supporting those fighting for the most basic rights.

I need to add to my New Year's resolutions. When I'm correct, I don't need to say anything. I need to learn to sit with what I have, focus on what it brings, figure out how I can build.

I did read this lovely and tough reflection from Phillip Luna about eating fine cuisine in prison: "The Night I Ate Wagyu Steak in Prison." I hope you'll take a look and find ways to support the author or others affected by incarceration. Luna got me thinking about how our expectations have to change as we get older. How a life wisely lived can't revolve around measuring up to one's boasts.

Paul Hoover, "To the Choirmaster"

I approach Paul Hoover's "To the Choirmaster," a short lyric inspired by the Biblical book of Habakkuk, with too large of a concern. A question which perplexes in how it perplexes: What is the relation between belief and knowledge? The prophetic voice of the poem provides a theory of creation. "Everything that is, lives and has size." It is a wonderful idea, renewing our experiences of the beauty of the world. It encourages exploration of the variable size of things, how they take up space, allowing us insight into life. But this seems to block any notion of scientific reasoning, as this theory resides in an almost completely religious realm.

Almost completely. The hard facts about how plants and earthworms have rich mental lives–how an octopus could play the piano–are welcome. Still, I believe the poem's religiosity meets its match another way. A perfectly secular reader can engage its key claim, "absence is not nothing," and feel they have hit upon the sort of truth you need when you are older. One that if you do not have, you are that much poorer for lacking. "Absence is not nothing" speaks to the love underlying grief. How years of our lives disappear because we are possessed, for ghosts do not fill spaces as much as they are spaces. You can say this is not knowledge in the strictest sense. It isn't the same as "water is H2O" or "the moon is not made from green cheese," a statement of fact upon which we build an understanding of the materials and forces comprising the world. But if you hold it is knowledge in any sense, then the question I have, one which is still too large, starts to come into view. What is the relation between belief and knowledge? What do we do with statements like "absence is not nothing," which speak to a uniquely human condition?

To the Choirmaster (from Poetry)
Paul Hoover 
  
  Art thou not from everlasting,
     O Lord my God, my Holy One?
           We shall not die.

The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time.
The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentum
at the edge of the sea, before it folds away.
Everything that is, lives and has size.
The mole sleeps in a hole of its making,
and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.
It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathes
and makes a place, for the comfort of the mole.
I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapely
and of a certain age, in the everlasting.
In the fierce evening, on the mild day,
How long shall I be shaken?

(Habakkuk)

Hoover starts "To the Choirmaster" with the grandest prelude of all. "We shall not die," for God is everlasting. I confess I struggle to use epigraphs properly, and maybe this is because, unlike Hoover, I cannot hear the voice of God before I write.

A question lingers. What does an intuition of eternity mean? An association with it? I am reminded of Anselm's proof of God's existence, where the conceivability of the "greatest" pulls your mind into a world you do not know. Something in this terrain must be more than felt familiarity; something must call to us. But what?

We are provided a meditation on how things are. "The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time. / The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentum... / before it folds away." A classical puzzle about reconciling being and becoming is our introduction. Being invokes solidity and persistence like a rock, and becoming entails the appearance and disappearance of waves. You can't put the two together exactly; the truth may lie with either or neither; time tests the limits of logic. However, you can attend to both. You, as the observer, can attest "Everything that is, lives and has size."

What calls us? What is the intuition of eternity? It is our experience, our encounters with living things of size. That is the mystery–you could say Heidegger's fundamental question of metaphysics, "Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?", is the ground of this wonder. The religious talk can be converted into secularism; the eternal need not be personal or personalized.

I vaguely remember the classicist Seth Benardete talking about belief and knowledge being of different orders. The way we usually teach epistemology, theory of knowledge, denies this. In epistemology, we start with knowledge as true, justified belief. It isn't strictly doctrinal, as justification leads to an infinite number of puzzles. But it does lend itself strongly to the notion that belief is merely knowledge waiting to be confirmed or rejected. We're living in an age dominated by cults, and a cult leader has the nuclear codes. I can't tell you that belief exists as a servant to knowledge; it may speak to other desires and drives. The political reality, strangely enough, intrudes on our theoretical discussion of what knowledge is.

When I'm looking at "To the Choirmaster," I am seeing talk of belief that can be secular, talk which leans toward knowledge. Hoover expresses this in a playful metaphysics. It means to be religious; it can say the totality of God requires that space itself lives. We, however, can understand that our own lives have carved something into time:

The mole sleeps in a hole of its making,
and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.
It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathes
and makes a place, for the comfort of the mole.

On the one hand, this resembles medieval praise of Creation. God as Choirmaster, directing His angels to sing the universe into existence. They sing the mole and its ability to make a home. The mole, they tell, can create a hole which "breathes and makes a place." A hole, a home, the mole knows to be alive.

On the other hand, time is a dark, ruthless duration. Many will never get a fair chance at life. Some are carved into time as victims of disease and injustice with short or tortured lifespans. You know where this is going; Fanny Howe speaks of life being worth living precisely because it isn't. We recognize what sustains us in life as living, too. What seems to be nothing must be uncovered, revealed, so we know where we are.

This is a religious poem which speaks of the everlasting, but it does not promise eternal life. For me, it recalls the themes of Heidegger. Terror and wonder in the realization of the loneliness and struggle of one's own existence. Hoover speaks of being a "shapely" absence, of being shaken in this life and in the space one leaves behind:

I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapely
and of a certain age, in the everlasting.
In the fierce evening, on the mild day,
How long shall I be shaken?

I cannot tell you the relation between belief and knowledge, but I can vouch for another thought inspired by Benardete. Self-knowledge is a species of belief (this I'm sure he said) but also very much knowledge. It is a home, not unlike what the mole has. But carved out of the dark, terrible everlasting, it is a life beyond us, calling to us, judging us. What's funny about Hoover's poem is how it has, for most of its duration, a certain calm in extolling creation. But the last two lines are squarely facing the power of the ruah, the breath of God: "In the fierce evening, on the mild day, / How long shall I be shaken?"