In the Light of Eternity
A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
For the past couple of weeks—since the U.S. election, but even before that—I’ve had a verse that’s lilted through my head in the idle hours of commuting, caretaking, and when I’m stuck on something at work (and if you’re listening to the recording, I hope you won’t mind if I sing it now):
. . . Put not your trust In princes and sons of men
In whom there is no salvation . . .
You can imagine that this is pretty timely, for just about everybody. It does not speak well of my Biblical literacy that I recognized this as the Second Antiphon, a hymn sung each week in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, but not as verses from Psalm 146 (Psalm 145 in the Eastern numbering).
But it’s the verse that comes afterward that strikes the heart even more deeply:
. . . when his breath departs, he returns to his earth
On that very day his plans perish.
This issue of Vita Poetica, I would aver, is all about Time. We’re certainly in the midst of a culture of churning events, but so many of our contributors in this issue are writing not about the evanescence of time, but rather, their efforts to plant a firm stake to measure oneself and the meaning of events against the largest scope–sub specie aeternitatis, or the light of eternity.
This is vividly expressed in Charles Sutphin’s story “The Woman With Red Hair.” In it, a male protagonist ruminates on the image, and meaning, of one of the 9/11 jumpers. A burnt offering, in fact, he notes: “On a poster at a museum commemorating the fall of the towers, I saw the woman wrapped in light.”
But he doesn’t merely think about her: rather, his internal monologue kenotically gives voice to the woman’s image, embodying the woman he has only seen in a photograph. In this gift he gives to her, and which Sutphin gives to us, we see the translation of her image from news item, to recent history, and now, to the category of myth. Nearly a quarter-century after the fall of the Towers, The Woman With Red Hair becomes a fixed reference, pointing to eternity.
So many of this issue’s poems also explore efforts to find a still point of the turning world, but with an ultimate, expansive reference: Ryan Service’s “Lux” shows how a hospital patient’s quick glimpse of him (her/)-self in a mirror can be both cosmically illuminating and physically grounding, all at once. Steven Searcy’s “Christ’s Baptism” is a radical personalization of the Biblical story–in this case, bring the Revealed story back to an earthly experience.
And above all these examinations, there’s the reality that there’s a finite end point to all of these strivings: On that very day, his plans perish. Alisha Goldblatt’s “Guarding the Body” traces that same process through the Jewish witness of holding vigil with a body before burial, from body through “fistfuls of dirt,” to “ a column of words in a newsletter.”
I look at Timothy deVries’s Through the Waters, the image that crowns our table of contents: the figures of woman, and a man with a child upon his shoulders. They are bearing their way through some kind of cataclysm, whether water, wind, or fire, or perhaps this is only a metaphor for the social collapse so many of us are feeling.
But they are bearing up the spirit above the deluge. Things still hold, and we are the ones, sub specie aeternitatis, who make them so.
