5-25-24--THOM GUNN--IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

PALPABLE MYSTERY

IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

Conveniently oblique makes visible

The painting on one wall of this recess

By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,

I see how shadow in the painting brims

With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out

But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,

Until the very subject is in doubt.

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,

Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.

O wily painter, limiting the scene

From a cacophony of dusty forms

To the one convulsion, what is it you mean

In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

No Ananias croons a mystery yet,

Casting the pain out under name of sin.

The painter saw what was, an alternate

Candour and secrecy in side the skin.

He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent

Young whore in Venus's clothes, those pudgy cheats,

Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,

For money, by one such picked off the streets.

I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel

To the dim interior of the church instead,

In which there kneel already several people,

Mostly old women: each head closeted

In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.

Their poor arms are too tired for more than this

--For the large gesture of solitary man,

Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

Reading and parsing poems is an exercise in reflection, a way to embed them in one's wandering life. For me, this is how poems come “alive.” This is how they add to my life and work on whatever powers I have to make sense of this roiling and unsettled world. When I read a poem, I see what is on the page and from then on it makes its way into my thoughts and my thoughts tend to shift according to what the leadings of the poem suggest. Individual words take on new meanings and I also encounter new words that are not part of my vocabulary. I find references to things and beings that are unfamiliar to me but meaningful to the poet and, thus, important for my understanding. The marvelous part of all of this is that the poem shifts and changes as I do. Or, perhaps, I change as the poet and poem uncover for me the layers of understanding. I begin to see what the poet has seen and I feel what might have been the poet's experience. It is an act of embodiment. There is no gaining or goal in any poem beyond how the poet gets the work on paper. From then on it is available to become part of a curious life. I do not think of reading poetry as a hobby, that something that one does when one doesn't know what else to do with idle time. It is a spacious and capacious working out of an intention in the moment. It is a passing look into something that might contain the infinite or the infinitesimal, or both. The leadings of poetry are vast and not easily contained. They are portals through which the reader can enter into the space of the interior life from the world of toil and distractions and fleeting meanings. The poet and reader can enter together.

What is the mindset of this reader that makes poetry so important?

As I live longer with each passing day, I seem to become more sensitive to the state of having one foot in the secular world and the other foot in the spiritual realm. I look for or make connections in everything I read and this makes the effort a fruitful one of personal edification as well as one of continual discovery. Reading and parsing poems highlight these distinctions. Reading this poem by Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is no exception. This has been a complex poem for me, as I flipped from one stanza to another to discern what attracted me to it in the first instance. There are many references in this poem and connections made by the poet. I was fascinated by the Caravaggio (1571-1610) painting the poet tries to understand and wondered how much of the poem that followed was in some measure a biography of the painter and maybe some shared autobiography with the poet. I don't think either one of them was a confessed religious person but everything about this poem is about having one foot in the spiritual realm and the other one in the mundane life all of us experience, a life of sensory experiences that shape what we can ever know of the mysterious spiritual life.

Poems aren't meant to make meanings for the readers as much as they exist to open up those possibilities and to draw into some form what plays in the mind of the poet. In this poem, Gunn has to wait for the sun to rise high enough to illuminate the painting (often titled “Conversion on the Way to Damascus”) and it is clear that he has come to see this painting in a church, an unlikely venue for a painting masterpiece hung within the shadows. Still, the play of light and shadow obscure the painting enough to make him wonder what he is seeing. He returns later in the day to be sure of what he was seeing. There is then light and shadow, the dim light early on making it difficult to see what Caravaggio has presented. Is this the foot in the secular world hidden within the church setting? Is this a preface to what we might make of the painting's subject and, maybe, an early suggestion of what we are to make of the play of illumination and darkness later on in the poem?

Once the poet has been able to examine the painting in better light, he picks apart the elements of the painting that support the biblical story of Ananias curing Saul's blindness and thus converting him to the discipleship of Jesus. In this process, one of transformation for Saul become Paul, Saul is given a new name. This made me think about what it is to have a name and how we identify one another by our names. We identify with our own for many reasons and we know others (if only superficially) by their names. The “other” is named and seen and, thus, belongs. The symbol pictured in the painting is that of Saul flat on his back with both arms uplifted. Is this a gesture of belonging, of acceptance, or of dubious wonder, a skeptical refusal of all that has befallen him (including receiving a new name that marginalizes who he thought he was) in the hands of Ananias? Is it a gesture of unchosen fate, of helplessness in the presence of God's power, of some version of refusal, or of gratitude?

The third stanza of the poem tells another story, one of the poet reflecting on what Ananias intended; a spiritual revival, or was it just a mission to exorcise sin? Cure of Saul's blindness brought back the sensory world to him but there was something converting “in side the skin.” At this point in the poem the poet recalls another Caravaggio painting in which a “young whore” is clothed in resplendent dress (“Venus's clothes”) but destined to be victimized in what is a very graphic turn for the poem. But this seems to illustrate, once again, the foot that stands in the secular world, apart from the pull of a more spiritual nature that seems to course through the entire poem.

It is interesting, in the fourth stanza, that none of these reflections on the potential for “enlightenment” and spiritual conversion are convincing enough for the poet. But here are old women, in the same church in which conversion is the theme, not with open hands and uplifting arms, but praying in the secret (“closet”) of their hearts, too tired to make the same dramatic gesture that so dramatically expressed Saul's all-encompassing conversion, if it was a conversion after all. Is it possible that Saul was already a man of the spirit (he was Jewish before his conversion to Christianity) and that his gesture was one of refusal? The old women are not so dramatically inclined nor able in their tired state to lift arms. Yet, the foot each has placed in the spiritual realm brings them to a place of “resisting, by embracing, nothingness.” The balance, then, is perhaps equal weight on the secular foot as well as the spiritual foot. What is to be seen is the gesture, or lack of one, but still an expression of what the poet feels is the mystery of conversion or transformation, something ephemeral and available to all of us regardless of our state of fatigue or blindness or state of sin. The “nothingness” recalls what Zen Buddhists refer to as the space of enlightenment, a space either populated by all possibilities or an infinite void to which no words can attach or describe, a vast space unimaginable and incomprehensible but still present for all of us in our daily toil, unsuspecting of conversion.

The dictionary terms for what has happened to Saul/Paul are shades of conversion. “Conversion” is 1) adopting a new religion (this is the formal intent of the story and painting about Saul), 2) change from one belief, opinion, or practice to another—or to a deeper loyalty to faith. “Transformation” is 1) to change markedly the form or appearance (the whore, for instance) and 2) to change a nature or function or condition. On the other side of conversion and perhaps what Caravaggio wanted to imply are “revelation,” a manifestation of divine will or truth, and “epiphany,” a spiritual event in which the essence of a given object or manifestation appears to the subject, as in a sudden flash of recognition.

None of these nuanced words seems to describe the experience of the old women, whose daily lives, despite the drudgery of them, are still able to access the same divine condition of acceptance, mercy, and grace. In some way, it seems to me that poet Gunn has found a way to imagine his own life in a way that was a rebuke to being a gay man at a time when sin and mystery were mixed together and “an alternate/ Candour and secrecy in side the skin” were possible. Perhaps the same was true for Caravaggio whose life was punctuated by excessive sensory and sensual experiences. Perhaps the same is true for all of us at any age and in all times.

The poem is one of deep contrasts and impressions. It is at least an exploration of how one might live on the streets and still have one foot deeply planted in the spiritual realm. If nothing else, the poem offers us a glimpse of our own lives with their failures and redemptions. Should a poem do more than this?