"It makes absolutely no difference whether gods and devils exist or not. The secret ambition of every true poem is to ask about them even as it acknowledges their absence." —Charles Simic ("Charles the Obscure")
When 80-year-old Cecilia Giménez set out to restore Elías García Martínez's beloved 19th century ecce homo fresco of Jesus, she embarked from a position of pure devotion. The fresco, which resided in a church near her home in Borja, Spain, had deteriorated to such a degree that she felt compelled to step in. Senora Giménez is not a professional. She was spiritually moved to take up the task. In a sense, the fact that the restored Jesus came out looking like a half-bearded monkey is rather beside the point. Many called it a desecration but, really, from a devotional perspective who cares what all the art historians and critics thought about her act, which seems rather like an organic development in a religious fresco's life, if you ask me.
But for my money, there's no more devotional act than translating a poem written by someone else. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who insists that you clean house before he enters and exposes himself to you, the translator willingly enters the head of the poet with the desire to learn something. He doesn't care that the head is cluttered with historical junk, family squabbles, doubts or strongly held though unpopular positions--even sins. It is the translator's pleasure to just sift around through the old boxes and dirty clothes—and with the utmost respect and no small ounce of humility. The Holy Spirit enters with the goal of bending you to his will; the translator, often a poet himself, bends himself to fit the often uncomfortable shape of the poet —and does it gladly.
While translating Osip Mandelstam from Russian, I lived in a haze like some sort of religious ecstatic. All day long the otherwise boring details of my life passed through a kind of Mandelstam filter (What would O.M. have thought of tofu? This film? Would he have been impressed by my coffee maker?). So much so that I began to think only in his terms. Is this enlightenment? Godhead? The Holy Spirit entering the heart and the head? I don't know, but translation is definitely a devotional act—even, I would argue, a poor translation done in earnest that inspires anger and dismay the world over. I reread my old translations over and over again and often find myself reentering O.M.'s long lost head—dipping in and out and finding new meaning, reassessing previous assumptions, like a rabbi engaging with his Torah or a priest with his bible. Not even reading someone else's superior translation of the same poem can keep me from returning to my own faulty efforts, worrying the words with my lips like old fingers on a Rosary bead on a Tuesday afternoon. I read my translations as compelling yet incomplete, as though there's still something meaningful to be discovered beneath the surface and my humble efforts were just a starting point. Then, maybe that means they are indeed complete. Of course the same could be said for any poem or piece of art.
*
I met Andy when we were in grade school—he was a year younger. My twin brother Keith and I were wandering around the edge of a neighborhood fair in the park near our home in Newport, Rhode Island, when this kid called out to us from a clump of trees and shrubby bushes. In that kind of louder-than-regular-speech whisper you use when you're pretty sure no one else will hear you even if you yelled it but you want to make plain that you wouldn't share this information with anyone else, he called out, "Hey, do you guys want to see a Penthouse?" Boy, would we! A couple of seconds later the three of us were standing together in the damp bushes looking down at a rain-swollen centerfold that must have been left out there in the elements—along with about a dozen empty beer bottles and some cigarette boxes—for weeks. After a few minutes of nervous (and confused) gawking, we walked back to the fair together and were friends from then on, at least until we all had finished high school, when we drifted apart as childhood friends sometimes do for no obvious reasons. We left the Penthouse there in the damp bushes with the empty bottles and cigarette boxes.
When the Iranian Hostage Crisis had dragged on for nearly a year and then-president Jimmy Carter was facing a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, Andy, whose father's best friend was being held hostage in Tehran, showed me a bumper sticker that read "Hey Ayatollah!" alongside a picture of Mickey Mouse flipping the bird. He dared me to tear off the rude Mickey part and affix it to the "Ted Kennedy" bumper sticker on a neighbor's car, the local chief of detectives' car, as it happened. I crawled on my belly so no one would see me and stuck it right over Ted's name, to make it read "Hey, Kennedy" with Mickey's naughty finger sticking up in the air like a white-gloved boner. Mission accomplished, I scrambled out of there and across Thames Street as quick as I could.
In the late 1970s Newport's Irish working class Fifth Ward neighborhood, this pretty much amounted to blasphemy. No one spoke ill of the Kennedys—my mother's initials were JFK and she was married to my father in the same church where Jack and Jackie had tied the knot a few years earlier—which is probably why I had accepted the dare in the first place. But by the time I got back to the corner where Andy, who was of French extraction, was waiting, I noticed my grandmother staring out at me with dark disappointment spreading across her face from a second story window of our house. I felt as changed then as I had the moment when I had first said, "I don't believe in God" a year earlier. Not because I really cared one way or the other then about Kennedy, Camelot, Democrats or Republicans or even about being Irish or working class, but because I did care about what she thought of me (which is probably why I never told her about how I felt about God). That, and I felt as though I had crossed yet another invisible line that no one could actually see but everyone just knew not to cross. She never mentioned it to me, but I would gladly have said a thousand Hail Marys and volunteered at a leper colony for a year to rid myself of the guilt I was feeling over the next few weeks.
*
I stopped actively believing in God just a few weeks after my First Confession. Among Catholics, First Confession prepares your soul for First Communion, which kicks off its trajectory toward Heaven or Hell. From then on you've got to confess relentlessly and do your Penance regularly—or else. Ideally, you should confess before you receive Communion each week. Since the Holy Spirit is said to enter our hearts through Communion it is recommended that you purify that sacred space, just as you'd scrub your profane space if a girl was coming over for the first time or if your landlord is stopping by. Finally, the deal is sealed with Holy Confirmation, where you take a saint's name to endorse your commitment to the Apostolic Church. I chose "James" because, being from a good Irish-American family, I was already named for St. James. Keith chose “Andrew”—already his middle name—and Andy chose “Damien.”
I remember my First Confession like it was yesterday. Sister Roseanne instilled in us the Heavenly Mystery of that sacrament. If you honestly confessed your sins to the priest, were "heartily sorry" for them and followed the priest's Penance to the letter, then you were cleansed, and ready for Jesus to enter your heart and bathe you in his Blessed Light. And she wasn't wrong—at least for the first few go-arounds. I remember readily stepping into the confessional, hearing Monsignor Shea's whistling lisp as he told me to slow down my hurried recitation of the Act of Contrition, and telling him my sins: fighting with my brother, not cleaning, my room, taking the Lord's name in vain. He told me to leave the confessional and say an Our Father and five Hail Mary's before leaving the church, which I did with much enthusiasm and contrition. And it felt great! I actually did feel cleansed and good and ready for Jesus to come over to my place. It was probably the most Catholic moment of my life. Over the next few weeks, I committed sins left and right, confessed them, and luxuriated in God's Mercy—a sort of wash, rinse, and repeat to Salvation.
Soon enough, however, that spiritual afterglow began to wane and then disappear altogether, never to return. I just didn't feel as pure after my Hail Marys as I had in those earlier weeks. At first I guessed that I hadn't confessed everything, so I would wrack my brain for anything that might have slipped past my conscience. I started telling the priest about things that I honestly didn't believe were sins—I was late for school, I didn't take a bath one night, etc.—and he told me as much. Eventually, in my pursuit for spiritual purity I started making things up. Things like “I hit my brother” or “I stole money from my mother's purse” or “I swore at my teacher.” Still no good. Over time, I realized that what I had initially felt at First Confession and the few after was only the result of believing all the hype and getting swept up in it. While I wouldn't admit it to myself or anyone else at the time, this is the moment I stopped believing in God. Would it have made a difference if I had felt the need to confess that I was pocketing the money my mother gave me to donate at Sunday Mass so Andy, Keith, and, I could slip out early during the confusion of Communion and buy Doritos and Cokes at the local deli? I doubt it.
It would be a couple of years before I was willing to admit losing my Faith altogether. Even then, it felt terrifying. Not that I thought I had arrived at the wrong conclusion, just that it didn't seem like something one said out loud, like admitting that you had masturbated after finding a rain-swollen centerfold in the woods at the edge of a park or that you didn't worship the Kennedys. I remember telling Andy that I didn't believe in God, and actually cringing like I was about to be smote by a thunderbolt then and there. Ironically, I had committed the ultimate sin and it felt as powerfully good as the moment at First Confession when the priest absolved me for arguing with my twin brother. Andy just shrugged and admitted that he never really had believed either. From then on out, it was just a matter of going through the motions until Confirmation, the sacrament in which you reject Satan and officially accept Jesus as your Savior, and finally become an adult in the Church. Other than funerals and weddings, it would be the last time I ever sat through a Mass. That said, there was no real crisis of faith or anything rising to a Joycean level of anguished, tortured nights of spiritual conflict. Basically, I had decided that if priests were going to continue lying to me, I was going to stop lying to them.
*
"If I believe in anything," wrote the poet Charles Simic, "it is the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church,” to which I say, Amen. But, like Simic, among other poets, who has helped me pass many dark nights, I am “hopelessly superstitious.” I don't believe in God or any other higher power in the universe. Nor do I believe in either karma or fate, let alone predestination, eternal salvation, or damnation. But I still can't throw one of my daughter's stuffed animals across her room into a toy bin without hurrying over to it, and resting it comfortably on top of the pile. Maybe it has something to do with the eyes. I don't know. And while not believing in astrology or a universal life force, I still check my horoscope regularly to see what the day, week, month, or year portends. If it's bad, I laugh it off; if good, I spend the day looking for signs to confirm its cosmic wisdom.
I also tiptoe through graveyards. A good cemetery makes me feel like I'm a true believer walking into the Vatican for the first time: full of peace, awe, and respect. All day long I can walk along tightly packed lanes of graves and crypts, read the names and dates carved on their surfaces, and wonder about the lives they represent knowing full well that these fine folks simply ceased to be when they stroked out, fell off of the ladder, or had eaten that bad piece of fish. But what really gets my reverence up are the other graveside visitors, those who come to pay their respects for the dead. The old man in the black beret who placed roses on the stones of all the famous poets buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The nearby grief tourists sacrificing cigarettes and offering songs at the final resting place of the late Jim Morrison. And the black-veiled widow who leaves flowers on the stone of her long-dead husband, even though groundskeepers and gravediggers are waiting in the wings to dump them in a trash bin as soon as she totters out of sight. And while it's easy to laugh at a bunch of Euro-hippies singing Doors songs in the center of a Parisian cemetery, I could hardly tear myself away from Baudelaire's grave site. I don't think I wrote a single poem that year that didn't somehow reference a cemetery. I may not believe in a place we go after death, but I certainly believe that the dead leave us here with more questions than when they walked the Earth and we can only search for the answers in what we remember about them when they were alive. And, honestly, what does it hurt to continue talking to them across the Great Divide?
Churches, too. You won't find me praying in one, but you might catch me poking my head in to check out the design for the Stations of the Cross or to see what's depicted on the stained-glass windows. There's something amazing about a person who honestly believes, when you see an elderly nun mutter the Rosary in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in an otherwise empty church or when you see a man genuflect as he passes in front of the altar or a woman beat her breast when the city bus passes a church. It might not change my opinion on the matter, but it can make me sort of shudder.
Once, on the same visit to Paris as I had discovered the wonders of Père Lachaise, I found myself nearly overwhelmed at Sacré-Cœur, the beautiful cathedral that commands one of the most fantastic views of the City of Lights. In the gallery, throngs of tourists and regular visitors alike waited in long, snaking lines to burn a candle for their lost loved ones. The translucent milky white wax piled so high on the stone floors of the church that black cassocked priests had to regularly sweep it all away with hard-bristled brooms to make room for more. Caught up in the stunning spectacle, I waited to light one for my own grandmother who had died a year earlier—in the same “We're-here-why-not?” tourist spirit, I think, that people line up to kiss the filthy Blarney Stone—but after tilting the wick of my candle into the flame of another and watching its wax drip to the floor, piling up with the wax of the others burning there, I felt a kind of spiritual cleansing like the kind I had experienced on the day of my First Confession. Afterwards, while searching desperately for a vegan restaurant in Montmartre, I remember thinking, "Great, now I believe in God again?!"
That hard question dogged me for months. It didn't jibe with who I was, but I did feel something that day at Sacré-Cœur, something overwhelming yet heartening. Yet spiritually disruptive as well. For about two weeks, I experienced a sort of cris de coeur, so to speak. If letting go of my Catholicism was so easy, it didn't make sense that it would be still easier to reacquire it. When I had stopped believing, Faith fell away so readily, it was as though I had never really believed in the first place, like the whole system was so flawed it just couldn't stand up to casual scrutiny, even to that of a Catholic so young he hadn't been confirmed yet. Yet here it was seemingly taking hold again. Then on one of many anxious and sleepless nights I wrote a poem for the first time in years and realized that was what all of my anxiety was about.
In his notes to an early essay, "Youth of Goethe," Osip Mandelstam wrote about the writing of Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: "Such things are created seemingly because people jump up in the middle of the night in shame and fear because they have blasphemously experienced so much and not accomplished anything. Creative insomnia, despair awakening in a person who sits on his bed at night in tears...."
“Creative insomnia.” Another Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, called it "pre-lyrical anxiety": that unnerving feeling that seizes a poet before the emergence of a poem. A poem, not God. No harm, no foul. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska put another way: “No one feels fine at four a.m.”
*
I haven't seen Andy in years and honestly despite how close we were then, I rarely think about him. But there's one story he told me that I always remember. Andy's father served in Army Intelligence while stationed in Frankfurt. While there, his unit devised a plan to test the security of one of the largest military bases in Europe by dressing up as nuns and bringing brownies to the guards at a security checkpoint. On the day of the operation, the soldiers happily accepted the gift and chatted amiably with the sisters while munching on the treats. The next morning, each guard to the man—and everyone along the way—reported to the base infirmary complaining that their pee had turned blue. In other words, they had dropped their guard and let the enemy into their hearts and heads—not to mention their bladders. Gotcha.
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