Hit me with wine / With water
A mother’s love for a fragile child, light dancing on a roadside grove, an old quarrel forgiven, a succulent orange or pungent olive, a lover’s touch—in all of these there can be striking grace. They are illuminated signs, rays of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. They invite us on a spiritual journey. The people of God have long tried to remain vigilant, to discern these easily missed signs. Their Shepherd has gathered the pilgrims, raised the signs into Mysteries, and provisioned the wayfarers with Word and Sacrament. And yet the quest is burdened by its own everydayness, by boredom, by the fear it is leading nowhere, by the danger of taking the sign for the ultimate destination, by the inevitable crush of suffering and evil. Sometimes the journey leads to betrayal and violence. Always it leads to death. The Way is not escapism, but an affirmation of creation. It calls for attention, reason, and love. But the quest does lead to an abyss beyond the mappable territory of our perception and capabilities. Once there, we can turn back, stay put, or jump. We know our leap will not clear the void, but we can leap in the hope that we will be caught by a greater lover.
Caitlin Smith Gilson both describes and undertakes this quest in her remarkable scholarly works. Smith Gilson is a philosophy professor at the University of Holy Cross in New Orleans, but it is not only a philosophical quest for her. It is a literary one as well. She has written a book on the novels of Huysmans and one on Dostoyevsky and Aquinas. Her other works, including her most recent book on heaven, are full of literary readings and allusions. Smith Gilson’s literary bent is evident in her writing style, where poetic passages punctuate rigorous argumentation. In the final pages of The Philosophical Question of Christ, Smith Gilson switches into the poetic register of the mystics, directly addressing God and once more evoking the quest:
I chased and failed until I could no longer understand, for Being is incommensurate with thought and requires more than understanding, more than thought, more than the self in order to be in the Being-of-God. And when Your Son died and resurrected, and my lowly time was elevated into Being, I was engulfed by Your primordial and cosmogonic chase and Your Love, and taken to the place of the Furies, now become the place of Love, the place of the impossible and incommensurate, retaining all that brilliance and now become the impossibility that is possible.
It is unsurprising, given sentences like these, that Smith Gilson has written a book of poetry—and a powerful one at that.
In Tregenna Hill: Altars and Allegories, the quest and its great themes are pursued across two long cycles of poems. Smith Gilson’s poetry is full of rich language and imagery, recurring and layered throughout the cycles. Consider the fourth line in the first poem: “Deep calls to deep in the voice of your waterfalls.” This is a one-line theology of the sublime, of how nature’s grandeur and power can stir religious awe. Yet another meaning is immediately layered on. The voice of God becomes “a slow tongue”; the deep calling to deep becomes the soul in prayer; the roaring waterfall becomes the quiet recitation of the Rosary: “Let your words transpire from body to bead and back again.” It seems we have left the torrent behind, but maybe not. Perhaps there is only a more controlled rhythm to the divine exchange. “Let the floodgates breathe,” the next line proclaims. The image soon shifts once more, as the natural sublime and prayer merge in the seashore tides: “Ave Maria etched in sea and sun / Amid beauty to recollect / And freedom to forget.”
Water recurs throughout Tregenna Hill, as the terrifying chaos of Genesis and an image of the divine depths, as a figure for both the ephemerality of time and the infinite, for both death and rebirth, for baptism. Yet water is no abstract metaphor for Smith Gilson. “Lay down your abstractions” is one of the collection’s refrains, the poet’s (self-)reproach to the philosopher. In these poems, water soaks clothes. It wets the parched lips of spent lovers that share a bedside glass. It is mixed and consecrated in the chalice. It sweats on the skin. It is a coffee’s “cream foam” on the speaker’s nose. It stirs smells out of the earth and the lover’s flesh: “The incense after the storm / Barefoot in its fragrance / It took you on / As you take it on your nape and neck.” The sensual and the spiritual weave throughout the poems, right through to the collection’s final eschatological lines:
Sing to these dying gods my dying God
Call home these sirens of despair
Lilting in the verses of receding waves
Tumbling in your flesh
For you alone can cross the infinite endings
And bring thyself from the threshold of home into home
Here is the water imagery one last time: the receding and then tumbling waves of divine love, a water song of precious blood, a God with a heartbeat that stopped but whose love still flows, a God to carry you over the threshold of death. These are among Smith Gilson’s most spiritual lines, yet they are still visceral. As Jennifer Newsome Martin writes in her illuminating foreword to Tregenna Hill, the poems are marked by a “holy defiance…aimed squarely at any suggestion that to position oneself toward the futurity of the last things is to expunge or obliterate the past or present, the then or the now, or the body in preference to the spirit.” This is also evident in Smith Gilson’s poetic ear, in her deft deployment of rhyme, near-rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Newsome Martin praises Tregenna Hill for its “sonic riches.” These are poems to be incarnated on the reader’s tongue and lips.
The poems emerge from a life’s ongoing quest, out of memories that span the years and take the speaker from Cornwall to Rome to New York City. They cover departures and reunions, the loss of loved ones and the growth of children. They are about “days” that have “an elusive substance of grace,” in which the speaker tries to “Satisfy the sanctity of a moment.” Thus we get transfigured descriptions of, say, husking ears of corn: “Husk the corn / Keep the time / Place worn hands on hair / A brilliant sheen in every cloak”; or of cooking with children: “How our little loves loved my crepes / And called them so many other names / In a thicket of clotted sugar and butterflies”; or of carving a jack o’ lantern: “Laughter laughing after the fact / We carved kindness into light / Holiness in the passing flesh.”
Like the Song of Songs, a major influence on Tregenna Hill (there is a kiss on the first page if not in the first line), these are poems that fuse the erotic and the mystical. They are poems about a passionate marriage and a passionate quest for God. The two loves cool and reignite. At times, the human love retracts from the divine love. It threatens to become idolatrous. But the human eros also stirs transcendence toward the divine: “Your unshaven face / Shoots me out of immanence.” The lovers ultimately become fellow questers after the divine, stopping each other’s ears against the “sirens of despair.” The vocation of marriage becomes a shared adventure, one that chooses love over a cheaper happiness. It becomes a leap made hand-in-hand into the depths of faith.
