I initially supposed that Dr. Ferretter was bored with the traditional modern American Literature curriculum, and this was why our reading list appears to be a random collaboration of poetry, and novels and weird prose/novel/poetry thing (Toomer’s Cane– please read it if you have not. You can borrow it from me) and movies and art. Yes, this is a literature class. I suppose I should have guessed something was up when I saw Andy Warhol and Alfred Hitchcock were on the reading list (when reading is defined as ingesting media of whatever form it may be). Then I thought it was a bit interesting that many of the authors were poets, painters and novelists.
This morning when I was exploring e. e. cummings (always spelled with small e’s) in the process of writing a research paper about why he is most definitely a love poet, it hit me like a speeding brick to the head. The literature we are reading is literature that explores concepts beyond human description.
Artists and authors compose in multiple mediums in an effort to grasp something that is beyond human comprehension. Their cultures don’t give them enough to work with, enough to explain the deeper things of life, the real one not the one the world around them is living in, so they invent their own kind of storytelling. They tell stories that are truer than knowledge and truer than their context.
Hemingway, Henry James, Jean Toomer, Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler –they all invent language, expression, form, medium, composition, collage and style to explain meaning that is beyond this present reality –which it turns out isn’t really reality at all. Cummings, perhaps more than any of them, is an example of this striving beyond the means immediately available to him to define true whole existence.
2 Corinthians 5:1-10
Our Heavenly Dwelling
1Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, 3because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.
6Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 7We live by faith, not by sight. 8We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 9So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. 10For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.
We were made for heaven! We were made for a reality beyond this one. Dickinson and Cummings and many of these other artists and authors glimpsed God. They saw him in nature and perhaps beyond. Dickinson scorned the church for their religion, and it breaks my heart that although she supposed there was more, it seems she never found it.
They could not express what their hearts were longing for because what they were longing for was not some material utopia; it was beyond this world. It is beyond this world. We are unsatisfied because we are made for relationship with God and the promise of heaven.
The only reason we are here is to gather the bride for the coming wedding to be reunited in our real bodies in the real world with our real love in perfect wholeness. Our souls groan for it.
Cummings was right. The purpose is love. The end is a perfect givingness. The bride will give herself to her Beloved and He will give himself to her forever. The end is a whole and perfect love, and it is going to be glorious beyond fathoming.
Freedom Song 