Aiding Helpless Awe

He approaches this spot via negative theology.

We are lonely for where we are.

Tim Lilburn in "How to be here?" in Poetry and Knowing goes on

Poetry helps us cope. Poetry is where we go when we want to know the world as lover. You read a poem or write one, guessing at the difficult, oblique interiority of something, but the undertaking ultimately seems incomplete, ersatz. The inevitable disappointment all poems bring motions toward the hard work of standing in helpless awe before things. "The praise of the psalms is a lament," the old men and women of the desert used to say. Poetry in its incompleteness awakens a mourning over the easy union with the world that seems lost. Poetry is a knowing to this extent: it brings us to this apposite discomfiting.

Even with out the enumeration of shortcomings, even without the intercession of poetry, the statement "We are lonely for where we are" resonates. Where we are is not an easy place to attain.

There is almost two — the one we that is lonely, the other we that is. And there is that magical moment when the being is the moment of longing. When all is arrested.

Of course there may be a tiny displacement between being lonely for and longing.

And so for day 1076
23.11.2009