"We must travel in the direction of our fear"
A Point of Age, John Berryman (1942)

                                            Perils of Poetic Faith

by Maryam Ala Amjadi

One of the most euphorically vengeful and yet tastefully unaccommodating claims that the spade of my curiosity has so far shoveled from the cosmic terrain of poetic arguments into the trench of my prosaic discernments is Nietzsche's "God is dead". This lexically revengeful decree that sentences a creator who was presumably not only the perennial possessor of the word but also tantamount it, (The Word was with God, and the Word was God, Book of John, verse 2) if dared to be screamed at the pinnacle of human susceptibility, could only mirror necromantic reverberations in an epistemological reflection of it. The instantaneous notion that crowns our rumination as to why God's poltergeist still haunts this century, provided that this articulated expiration is either metaphorically or generically validated, was that God's unautopsied corpse though immensely mourned has not yet been ritually buried.
Nietzsche voices the death of the creator in the mouth of a madman with the questioning tongue of a riveted rambler because it is only the insane that are condoned to blaspheme with a sanctified sacrilege and it is only a wanderer of waywardness who has the nerve to unnerve the mentally lethargic by humming a premonitory dirge that disrupts the monotony of their everyday liturgy. The index finger, that in a moment of proclamation, a madman holds in the air, precisely because it does not point at anything particularly graspable is capable of lifting our gaze beyond the fingertips and eventually brings our glances home in the twirl of its digressive movements. In a frenzy of what are not quite unlike prophetic lamentations, the madman bewails the spook of doom in Fortuna's wheel with an indirect accusative finger at human knowledge which both connotes to a lesser extent, the Original Sin and more manifestly, the Copernican compression of the world.

"...what were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?"

The Madman in The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
In its rhetorical function, this question takes us back to the very warren where the forbidden fruit of familiarity alienated our first account of the perennial man and woman and converted them into "pilgrims on earth". The persistent struggle to adapt and survive in this temporary house called "earth" constantly locked them in a consciousness that hardly belonged to them and yet relentlessly reminded them that they are never at home. This confinement would have been more endurable had the insatiable fangs of time not devoured the key to a memory of their perennial abode in paradise. Now the groping hands of anxiety strive to find peace and are laid to rest in rituals as a substitute for memories. All our rituals are a celebration of memories, regardless of any verification that whether we have actually experienced them, they appease our relative sense of irrelevance with their collective function and channel the momentary flows of consciousness back into the stream of a communal unconsciousness.
The madman's questions are typically of a rhetorical nature, quite similar to the tone of divine verses that voice the accent of an autonomous existence from the layers of scriptural authenticity. There are numerous incidents in the scriptures of various origins where the poetic voice of faith collectively has a firmly ambivalent overtone.

"Do you really think you can force people to believe? If it had been thy Lord's will, they would all have believed.." Verse 99, chapter 10- Quran

He was teaching and saying "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers." (The assumed answer is yes.) Mark 11.17, The Bible"

 ...and for the one who never meditates on the Ultimate truth, there is no peace and for one destitute of peace where is happiness?" Verse 66, chapter2-Bhagavad Gita

This poetic device is partly meant to sustain the attention of the listener to what the implied answer might be and partly it is utilized to accentuate the autonomy of the questioning voice because it leads and restrains the boundaries of the interlocution it engages its readers and listeners with. The poetics of a rhetorical question potentially places the questioner, the listener and the replier interchangeably as one.
"Whither is God?" he cried "I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers" The Madman in The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
This not so abhorring reference to men as "murderers" is not as vindictively abrupt when we look for premonitory indications of the blood stained passages that can be traced by dribbles from the divine brush of nepotism in the very Genesis of the book of creation. The perennial poet versifies the simplicity of a narration that though unravels the poetic plot; it does not disclose the furtive layers of its prosaic existence.
"In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;..."
Margaret Atwood, In the Secular Night

The secular lamp designed by humans as opposed to the craft of the Divine dexterous hand, dawns more luminously at nights. Under the remedial rays of the sun, any day is just as frigidly secular as the other, but in the dark, when human beings are detached from their "worldly" unconsciousness, then it is the time to recall experiences that should seam up the void, experiences that are relived as memories. But when there are no original memories, they have to be fabricated and before they are fabricated they have be justified and accommodated into our life even as personal rituals. It is the monotony of the ritual that creates a self compensating system that will finally release a rhythm of its own within its very own boundaries.
If you did something with strict rigor, even something unimportant in itself - pouring a glass of water from the sink into the toilet every day at precisely 7 a.m., say - the ritual would create its own transformative energy. If every single day, at exactly the same stroke of the clock, one were to perform the same single act, like a ritual, unchanging, systematic, every day at the same time, the world would be changed."
Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986 Movie)

The secular hand endorses fabricated memories which are nothing more than the miserable attempt of Man to shift the focus of his/her worldview from a structured heavenly paradigm only to a terrestrial one that is relocated on earth. The celestial monarchy is substituted by an earthly one but it nevertheless functions in the same way.

"These days there is a new religion in the Ashbury neighborhood
A religion that is perhaps read in vertical lines
Bob Dylan's throat
Recites the verses of this religion

In"American lanes"
(On a funeral pyre) the skull burns later than the navel"
The First Journey, Tahereh Saffarzadeh

There is no longer much that is poetically readable in the act of creation. The death of God is synonymous with the death of the Muse and the vertically pain inducing relationship with creator for which the poet had to strain his/her neck in order to be showered with the inspiration of heavens is destabilized. The poet is shrunk more to the shadow of a contributor rather than an original creator. The poetry of the universe was written from a scratch when the earth was "welter and waste", when in the density of the dark it was "unknown" until it was introduced to the "known" with an imperative "Let there be!" And so, water was separated from earth, the known from the unknown and the conscious from the unconscious. This miserably unequal competition has always left the secular fingers blotted with the invisible ink of the divine.

"I was a formless I
The I by its perception transformed itself into the waters,
And you by your perception erupted into a flame of fire
And the flare of the fire floated over the waters,
But that's the tale of prehistoric times."
The First Creation, Amrita Pritam

The word was born long before the poet. The shaped, the flowing and the shapeless sounds of conception (combination of A-kara, earth U-kara, water and Ma-kara, shapeless matter like air or fire which is Aum) when pronounced became consequential voices even before beings began to cry the crawl of their way from the womb of the unfamiliar to acquaintance with life.

"-Achcha
-Achcha
It is a strange word
With a dim echo and an extensive tenor
Let us discern the word from the tone (sound)"
The First Journey, Tahereh Saffarzadeh

The sounds of entities that came into existence clashed with one another and then dissolved as a voice crystallized in a semantic container called the word. And the word was dictated by the self-sufficient voice of a narrator who was aware that its characters would retain faith in hope for the fear of its loss, only through reminiscence of their very own narration.

"Read in the name of your Lord Who created; created man from a thing that clings. Read, for your Lord is the Most Generous; and He has taught by the pen; taught man what he knew not" –The Lord to Prophet Mohammed, Quran, Surah Al-`Alaq 96:1-5)

Therefore there is no ritual without memories through which one can diabolically relive the already and/or the never lived. But first, memories have to be summoned to the altar of recreation in order to be ritually commemorated. They are the most accessible route to our origins as far as the mind can travel in the chronological tangle. They are the nearest phase to the two "unknown" territories between which we presently dwell.

"When I draped myself with your being
Our bodies were turned within in meditation.
Then our limbs entwined like flowers in a garland
As an offering at the altar of the soul."
Amrita Pritam, The First Religion

In that perennial tale where apparently the first victim of violence is commemorated, Cain slays his brother Abel. And the moral note of the story? Abel's innocence is immortalized only in sixteen verses of the Bible and he is referred to as Cain's "brother" two times in the Quran. On the other hand, Cain learns how to bury his shame from a raven. And then he is generously immortalized as the father all children on earth, therefore mitigating the designation of “Children of a Murderer” for mankind and the even more ironical phrase "murderer of murderers" in the tongue of Nietzsche's madman.

The "or" in Atwood's "or this is your story" tells us that the "I" who wanders alone in the secular darkness has to live with the story, with a memory whether it has been lived or not, regardless of any verification. You may be alone in the story, in a house that can never be your home because the windows of faith no longer open to doors of hope, but the story is yours and you make it yours only by recounting it. So you may be a lonely story teller, but you are not alone, because there is a reader/listener to every story. The first listener is you, yourself. The first reader/listener of every story is the storyteller himself/herself.

"...talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later. ‘
In the Secular Night, Margaret Atwood

The anatomical politics of our body has hung the ears on the outside and enrooted the tongue inside. The tongue speaks from within but is welcomed (heard) outside. The ears listen externally but perceive sounds as voices only internally. Therefore the interchangeable positions of listener/storyteller, writer/reader, and questioner/replier are all ritually commemorated in the individual as "I" who is at times also the addressed "you".

"Sharat, sleep has captured your eyes
They are bringing in another dead body
But nobody dies
Read a poem Sharat
A poem without the agitation of meter
A poem as luminous as a metaphor"
Tahereh Saffarzadeh, The First Journey

In the ritual of writing, though the shaky hand of the poet initially takes off from the instable fear of an "I", it eventually lands in a stable faith of a "you". The ontological fear that every poet/writer wrestles with when at the brink of his/her literary quest is that whether he/she will be able to rediscover and fill up the papery void with the "let there be" wand of his/her pen and thus transform undecipherable sounds into discernable words. If a poem is that complete moment when the poet/narrator, the poem/text and the reader / listener become one spiritual unity that walks up the road to life which is perpetually shadowed by clouds of death, then what the poet can hope for is the faith that this unison will be commemorated and ritually celebrated when he/she meets the reader/listener somewhere between the lines and brings the house of his/her meaning home to the reader's gaze. Fear no longer trembles for the unburied corpse of Faith still haunts it.