In the past year, I’ve returned to reading deeply in the theological tradition flowing from two early-20th Century, anti-fascist Lutherans, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As a Christian myself, I’ve long struggled with the discrepancies I’ve seen between Christian moral and ethical teachings as I find them in the world of scripture on one hand and the goals and priorities, on the other, of modernity/post-modernity, especially as embodied in the thought and behavior of Christians. I’ve returned to reading World War II-era theology this year in part because it is an election year and one where the Christian right has predictably embraced the worst possible social vision on offer. How is one, especially an ostensible co-religionist, supposed to make sense of the complete hypocrisy and apparent diabolism demonstrated here? It would seem easy to dismiss the problem as one of mass stupidity, but that has proved an unsatisfying and ultimately unhelpful way of looking at things.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul declares, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” For a long time, I was ashamed or at least embarrassed. More than two decades of writing into that discomfort have helped me understand that the “gospel” itself is not the problem. Indeed, the thing Paul refers to is something wholly different from the empty optimism, spurious legalism, and profane nativist dread animating American Christianity’s ghoulish parody of it. The great skandalon Paul alludes to in Romans 1:16 is what Nietzche would later refer to, with his own scandalized emphasis, as a unique “transvaluation of all ancient values.” Which is to say, it is the horror with which those who revere dominance and the “will to power” recoil from the idea of a God who would subordinate itself to the limitations of creatureliness (even unto death at the hands of its own creatures), from the paradoxical negation of all established moral and ethical correlations between power and “blessedness,” and from the injunction to serve those the “Internationale” calls “the wretched of the earth.” Incarnation, crucifixion, self-sacrifice: meeting the deadly despair of the human predicament on its own terms, looking for courage through the abyss of it, not in glorious transcendence. Regarding another’s suffering as one’s own. When Paul says he is not ashamed, he means there is power in this scandalous powerlessness.
I am increasingly persuaded that American Christianity’s embrace of Donald Trump is simply the latest expression of a terrific counter-scandal, effectively another, much more gradual transvaluation of values, whereby the dominant American secular and religious visions have aligned themselves with a cult of progress, the technocratic human image for which power can only mean domination, exploitation, and mastery. The key joke of this era is the one where the man puts a gun to his head, and when his wife starts laughing says to her, “What’s so funny? You’re next!”
My poem “Not at Duino,” was not written with any of this directly in mind. But this poem and the book it belongs to (Salms, University of Iowa Press, 2024) are engaged with the same basic problems of American expectation and experience. During twenty years of serious devotional writing and contemplation, the existential problem has only gotten worse. Has any better alternative to despair emerged? Maybe “emergence” isn’t the right way to think of it. Instead, any real alternative should be thought of as re-emergent. “Not at Duino” definitely doesn’t pretend to have made any new discoveries. That, in itself, would suggest another form of the very mastery it disavows.
“There is no way into the new that does not pass through the old,” writes Douglas John Hall,” [and] no passing through the old that announces itself as a fait accompli or that expects to get through unscathed is to be trusted!” (Hall, 185). Indeed, my reference to “Duino” in the poem’s title makes it clear that I’m looking backward before anything else, but by framing it in the negative (“Not at Duino”) I’m already arguing against any easy certainties offered by that backward look. The Duino in question, of course, is Duino Castle, near Trieste, Italy, where Ranier Maria Rilke had a mystical experience in 1912 and subsequently began composing his Duino Elegies. Significantly, Rilke finished the Elegies, as well as Sonnets to Orpheus, ten years later at Château de Muzot, which means that, though I’m sure those digs were also quite nice, he did so not at Duino.
The Elegies and the Sonnets are both major, if ghostly, presences in Salms, and to some degree therefore my book, like Rilke’s, both is and isn’t at Duino. This threshold state (“For abiding is nowhere” [First Elegy]) is the shared lot of all human beings if we would recognize it (“little at home in the interpreted world” [First Elegy]). Where Rilke nevertheless elevates the mere quality of enduring (“Remember: the hero lives on” [First Elegy]), the heroism he celebrates is also deeply qualified. It is not the heroism of classical strength, nor that of modern technique. Instead, it is humbled by forces beyond human power: “why then / have to be human—and, fleeing destiny, / long for destiny? … // But because life here compels us” (Ninth Elegy). It is a heroism that can locate the “Font of Joy” ultimately only in the “wide landscape of laments” (Tenth Elegy). And for us, the living, the heroism of the Elegies must be frustratingly at odds with our own concepts and desires:
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain
descending on black earth in early spring.—
And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost baffles us
when a happy thing falls” (Tenth Elegy)
By contrast, “Not at Duino” declares that the “hero’s way is not here” at all, and I’ll try to explain what I think that means and what, if anything, it has to do with “life in public.”
The poem begins and ends with the phrase “What to do,” which suggests the possibility of choice and therefore of ethics. Presented with the same certainty of death, the same inevitably frustrated will, all the same existential crises that seem to frame the living day (“what one would never choose”), and presented also with a history of mistakes so monotonous it makes death seem like relief (“having acquiesced / to the routine of preceding days / as instruction for rest”), the speaker of “Not at Duino” hears a question: “What to do?”
According to Rilke’s account, the Elegies began when, during a wild storm, he heard the first line of the sequence (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?”) being uttered by the wind. By comparison, “What to do?” seems pretty mundane. Literally, as if having already assumed the question of interest among the angelic orders to be moot, the speaker of “Not at Duino” instead looks to the worldly plainness of the day. Whatever may be happening beyond his comprehension, “the day remains.” Its moments continue to emerge, each one making the same demand, “What to do?”
Two other major things happen in “Not at Duino”: the day in its non-heroic plainness is paradoxically said to be “like” a “hero’s day,” and a choice of what to do actually gets made, and almost swallowed, in the middle of the poem. Having affirmed that the hero’s “way” is not here, the speaker indicates something almost heroic is going on nevertheless: “[the day] stands / Like a hero’s day—must be climbed.” There is, in the relentless obligation of choosing what to do, a labored climbing to the experience of being in time. And what this ascent lacks in complete transcendence is exchanged for the immanent music of surrender to immediate habitat: “Become the sound of a closing door / against the quiet morning /and gravel’s crisp responses to departure.”
The concern here, at first personal, is ultimately social, as well. As we approach another American election that feels as if it could lead us into an especially dark period, attention to this dynamic feels timely. What to do in the face of general darkness, what to do with the fact of my own death. These questions can be one and the same. What to do? Conform? Transcend? Answering with courage is not the same as answering with certainty. The place of rest is often less the place of comfort than it is simply the place we find on the other side of pain. What my poem does not explicitly say, but I hope it at least implies, is that the choice and direction that must be taken, again and again ad mortem, despite the certainty of failures, is away from ourselves, away from the lyric “I,” and towards our immediate habitat, yes, as I’ve already said, which is always our physical, natural and unnatural environment, our temporary home, but ultimately also towards others, towards those who share our predicament, the great family of the dying. To love all of this as it is and as it is becoming what it will be next, to act accordingly, to fail to do so as well. This is what the day demands.
