Thirty years ago, the great American poet, A. R. Ammons, gave a reading down the road at Washington and Lee University. Christian Wiman, now a poet but then W&L economics major, describes it like this: “Ten minutes into his reading he suddenly stopped and said, ‘You can’t possibly be enjoying this,’ then left the podium and sat back down in the front row.
No one knew what to do. Some people protested from the pews–we were in a place that had pews–that they were in fact enjoying it, though the voices lacked conviction and he didn’t budge. Finally the chair of the English Department cajoled the poor poet into continuing. Ammons mumbled on for another fifteen minutes before the cold mortification of the modern poetry reading, and the beer-lacquered bafflement of the press-ganged undergraduates, did him in. “‘Enough,” he muttered finally, and thudded his colossal body down beside his wife like the death of faith itself.” (pp. 5-6, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art)
I am a teacher of theology and philosophy, a reader of fiction and poetry. It has also been my dumb luck to have faked my way through over 8 years of chairing a Bible and Religion department. So when Wiman, one of the greatest contemporary theological interpreters of the word faith brings up its death in a context which runs together the humanities, university students, and a department chair all sitting in a church, I feel like someone has hacked into my mind. The mind of someone whose doubts about vocation, church, university and God, when they arise, as they sometimes do, usually arise together in a tangled mess (which I suppose suggests either a failure of compartmentalization or mild depression).
What can Wiman mean when he says that Ammons sat down like “the death of faith”? Was Ammons losing faith in poetry, asking himself, mid-reading, whether poetry still matters? Or in himself as a poet, worried that he was too cerebral to ever be as popular as, say, Frost. Or was he just losing faith in himself as a reader?
I confess I looked up Youtube videos of Ammons reading to see if we could simply blame this on his lack of personality. But while he is no Amiri Baraka, he didn’t seem to me any worse than your average great poet.
Or is it just that, like most of us on occasion, he has lost faith in those “beer-lacquered press ganged undergraduates.”? Nietzsche famously quit his university post because he found it absurd to demand philosophy of himself or his students at particular hours of the week. Philosophy, he insisted, cannot be scheduled, and hence can have no home in the university. Just so, maybe Ammons’ doubt is not about poetry but about whether the university constitutes a livable habitat for poetry.
But I am avoiding the point. If Wiman had described Ammons’ despair as the death of faith, period, then we might reasonably be invited to speculate, as I am, about faith in this or that. But he describes it as the death of faith itself. That last word is what stops me in my tracks because I think it must mean all of these things, the death of Ammons’ faith in poetry, himself, the students, the whole thing.
The eleventh chapter of Hebrews says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Substance is a philosophical term usually related to other philosophical terms like being, essence, and accident, terms, you may be thinking, that are all the justification needed for our culture’s marginalization of philosophy.
But if you can be patient for two more minutes, I am wondering, What kind of stance is a sub-stance, a standing from below, an under-stance?
Understanding is a puzzling word. Say that our chemistry faculty here at Eastern Mennonite University understand chemistry. Why does our language encourage us to picture chemistry as a weight that they must bear up under, or picture them as the tent poles to chemistry’s canvas? Is that related to the way that, for our students, they stand for, that is, represent, the discipline of chemistry, as if on a witness stand?
If I do not yet understand understanding it may not be possible for me to understand how faith understands hope, stands under hope: hope, say, that the humanities still matter, that my prayers get past the ceiling, that my lectures are not just bottles to the sea, that I will die before the small tuition-driven liberal arts college dies, that Mennonite Church USA is at least one member of the body of Christ. Faith is the sub-stance of hope means faith is the backbone of hope, the skeleton that gives shape to hope’s flabby flesh, keeps it from declaring “enough” and collapsing back into its chair with a thud.
Or is that not yet quite right? If you’ll let me chase this rabbit into one more thicket, is it rather about the way hope stands? As if faith names the correct posture of hope, not slouching, but also not quite upright? Not faith standing under hope but hope itself when it is, as it were, sitting?
A few days ago, weeks after Wiman’s Ammons story had left me so unsettled, I came back to the book. And it turns out that Ammons also came back. Two chapters later Wiman writes,
The day after Ammons gave his disastrous reading, he squeezed absurdly but cheerfully into a student desk and tried to convince ten un-awed undergraduates of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s greatness as a poet. . . . All I remembered of the hour was the poignant incongruity of that towering, ungainly, large-spirited man trying to convey with words and gestures the pinpoint specificity of a poem.
–Peter Dula is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture, Eastern Mennonite University, and author, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2011). Before coming to EMU in 2006, he was the Mennonite Central Committee Iraq Program Coordinator. This post first appeared in a January 2019 newsletter reporting on Haverim, an EMU alumni groups supporting the Bible and Religion Department. He co-edited the Cascadia book Borders and Bridges.