Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall, the wall
of brick that crumbles and is replaced,
of twisted iron,
of rock,
the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:
Children and animals
who cannot learn
anything from suffering
suffer, are tortured, die
in incomprehension.
The problem of innocent suffering. Children and animals who suffer, are tortured, and die in incomprehension.
In Levertov's spiritual biography theodicy was the spiritual "wall" she couldn't get past. Many of us face this same wall. In my experience the problem of suffering is the major source of religious doubts.
"Human Being" provides a haunting description of this struggle. We experience moments of beauty and the mind can be filled with delight, but we are "never able to pass the wall." A wall that monotonously drags our hearts and minds back toward tragedy, pain, and grief.
In the last post I described how excessive and morbid rumination characterize a lot of doubt. Here we face the content of that rumination, what the mind is chasing, the wall we keep banging our head against. The problem of suffering, what Marilyn McCord Adams has called "horrors." This was my own experience. For two decades, from graduate school into my 40s, I keep hitting this very same wall. I started this blog during the final years of that season. The wall showed up a lot in this space.
Does "Human Being" provide us an answer? No. No intellectual answer is offered, but the poem will return us the cross-pressured nature of religious experience. The problem of evil is placed in tension. And I think that is really the best you can do, to place the problem of evil in tension with other experiences and convictions you know to be true. That tension proved decisive for Levertov, as it did for me. We'll explore that tension in a last and final post.
