Exile III

artist, unknown

A theme I keep coming back to in this journal is exile. 

Exile is a recurring theme in myth.  The Garden of Eden is one such example.  (At the end of this entry I include an excerpt from Father Andrew Greeley's Myths of Religion as an explanation for why I refer to Christian stories as "myths").  The Garden has been interpreted as the womb, our birth our first expulsion from paradise. 

I try to impress on my students how important it is to train themselves to think in mythological terms, because, as Father Greeley says, "Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words."  A myth, he says, "is a symbolic story which demonstrates...the inner meaning of the universe and of human life."  As Father Greeley, in justifying his use of "myth" in reference to Christian stories, explains:  "To say that Jesus is a myth is not to say that he is a legend but that his life and message are an attempt to demonstrate the inner meaning of the universe and of human life."

Our visiting writer this semester at the university where I teach, Amy Newman, wrote and published a book of poems called Fall, in which she explores the various meanings of the word, "fall."  My friend Beth and I had the opportunity not long ago to hear Amy read her work.  It was one of the finest readings we've been to. 

In one poem, Amy Newman likens our fall from grace at the Garden of Eden to her own birth.  It is a poem about exile.  She begins the poem with the definition:

--fall among.  To come by chance into the company of.

 

At my birth, I broke the surface of the water;

then I heard the end of the garden, and

felt the sadness of the exile.  I pushed,or was pushed,

and found the new world's skin, the gate, her private entrance,

my new world, then I became, was introduced

to all that would delight and annoy me,

 

leaned into the way out, felt light-headed,

the stirring of all that wet, the blood, the shame,

her being burst open.  I fell among the family.

And backward from the paradise:

the sounds of lambs, a bleating in rhythm.

Trees, marginal, and emarginate leaves,

 

cloudless partial sky like a tide.  All lost to me,

the urge of the reckless afternoons, insistent

in their distances, that gone astray

of what I dropped, so far behind me.

This poem should run backward:

My coming into being.

 

the heart beating in my conception,

the absence of my possibility, and then,

that fruit and its constant scent, its holy,

impossible gesture.  That flesh trouble,

made of seed, of want, and underneath,

the hidden, small, fineprinting.

 

*From Myths of Religion, by Father Andrew Greeley:

Many Christians have objected to my use of [myth] even when I define it specifically.  They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy.  However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists.  It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word thich conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they refer to myth.  The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith.