“No One to Drive the Car”

Abstract

Talk of poetry is embarrassing, I think, in the way talk of God is. Poets and critics who fess up to their literary activities and interests leave strangers on planes, distant relatives, and even a good many academics with very little to say. Qualifying their confessions with words like “avant-garde” and “innovative” can make these same poets feel like Wittgenstein’s lion who, if it speaks, nobody understands. The kind of awkwardness they produce is familiar to people who admit they believe Yahweh led his people out of Egypt or Muhammad ascended to heaven on a creature named Buraq. Poets and believers share the same sense of discomfort, the same struggle for response, which comes from not being able to explain their lives in familiar parlance. Simply in being spoken, vocabularies in the service of God and innovative poetry put enormous pressure on what they are doing as language—they mark themselves as systems of value, which reveal the demands they make on listeners, demands those listeners might resent or not understand. If only to appear less dogmatic, poets or religious people who begin to talk about what they mean and why they believe what they do often find that their explanations make matters worse, for commitment itself is embarrassing. It makes everyone vulnerable; it expands the gulfbetween people even as it leaves them without anything to hide behind.