The Rectification of Names

April 9th, 2006 § 6 comments

In my expe­ri­ence, the spir­i­tual prac­tice that writ­ing poetry can­not help but become once you’ve cho­sen to make it your way of life is insep­a­ra­ble from the erotic prac­tice my writ­ing had to become before I could pro­duce the poems that were truly mine to pro­duce. The nar­ra­tive this state­ment hints at is too long to tell here, but I can at least sketch the story’s contours.

At two dif­fer­ent times dur­ing my teens, two men — one a com­plete stranger, the other a casual friend of the fam­ily — each took my body as his play­ground and his play­thing and abused me sex­u­ally. Each man was a preda­tor and each used my need for a sur­ro­gate father to lure me to him. My own father, after my mother sued him for divorce, left our house when I was three. As he walked out the door, he said to me that maybe — though of course I took it as a promise — maybe he’d be com­ing back. He never did, and, as any three-year-old would, I blamed myself.

I sur­vived both these trau­mas, though I lived for many years after­ward behind a veil of guilt and shame, of self-hatred, and the con­vic­tion that I was tainted, deeply and irrev­o­ca­bly, such that I would never again be wor­thy of another’s love. In ortho­dox Judaism, which I took as a teenager to be the guid­ing tra­di­tion of my life, god is the ulti­mate father, and because I was taught it explic­itly, I believed that if I could gain this heav­enly father’s approval, make myself good enough in his eyes to earn his love, then I would be good, and noth­ing, noth­ing — no mat­ter what I’d done or had been done to me in the past — could ever undo that achievement.

So I stud­ied the forms of daily Jew­ish life and poured as much as I could of my own liv­ing into it. The tra­di­tional reli­gious view of the rela­tion­ship between body and soul, how­ever, that they are sep­a­ra­ble and that the full value of human worth is located pri­mar­ily in the soul, and not the body, echoes in many ways the sep­a­ra­tion of mind from body that is a com­mon expe­ri­ence of those who have been phys­i­cally or sex­u­ally abused. As a result, learn­ing to love my yid­dishe neshama, my Jew­ish soul — which, as one of my rebbes used to say, was a pre­req­ui­site of earn­ing god’s love — could not help but implic­itly jus­tify the hatred of my phys­i­cal exis­tence that I already felt. Iron­i­cally, in other words, my embrace of Judaism actu­ally com­pounded the state of self-hating alien­ation in which I existed.

The first poems in which I named my abuse as abuse, describ­ing in pre­cise detail the acts and body parts involved, were pri­mar­ily ther­a­peu­tic and cor­re­spond­ingly unsuc­cess­ful as art. I remem­ber vividly, how­ever, how lib­er­at­ing it was not merely to have writ­ten them, but to under­stand that I had found a lan­guage in which they could be writ­ten. Sud­denly, my body was more acces­si­ble to me, more mine than it had ever been. I felt dif­fer­ently in my body as well. The world of sen­sual plea­sures opened to me and deep­ened, con­nect­ing me to my own desires and there­fore also to my own sense of belong­ing to, of hav­ing a right­ful claim to a phys­i­cal pres­ence in, this world, more pow­er­fully than ortho­dox Judaism had ever made me feel good.

Indeed, the more fully I expe­ri­enced myself as inhab­it­ing my body, the more the project of mak­ing myself good in god’s eyes revealed itself as the strat­egy it had been all along for not con­fronting what my abusers had done to me. Writ­ing those poems, in other words, helped to strip away the lay­ers of mys­ti­fi­ca­tion in which my body had been wrapped, uncov­er­ing the mys­tery — and I mean this word almost in its Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal sense: some­thing that can never be fully under­stood and that can be appre­hended only through rev­e­la­tion — the mys­tery of my own embod­i­ment. I no longer cared whether or not I had a soul that was dis­tinct from my body. More to the point, the approval of a god for whom the con­di­tion of that soul was a pri­mary con­cern became for me irrelevant.

Tikkun olam, a con­cept that is cen­tral to Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al­ity, means, lit­er­ally, the fix­ing of the world, and it refers to a reli­gious duty Jews are sup­posed to con­sider our­selves oblig­ated to per­form. In the mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion, tikkun olam means the task of gath­er­ing the frag­ments of the shat­tered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that god gave up in cre­at­ing the world so that the world could live and grow, and using them to recon­struct the orig­i­nal god­head. On a more mun­dane level, tikkun olam is rep­re­sented by such things as the strug­gle for social jus­tice. For me, writ­ing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As poet and trans­la­tor Sam Hamill has writ­ten, “The first duty of the writer is the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Con­fu­cius], “All wis­dom is rooted in learn­ing to call things by the right name.” It is in poetry, writ­ing it and read­ing it, that I find this wis­dom and its cor­re­spond­ing spir­i­tual prac­tice.

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