Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Region of Unlikeness_ (3)

 GRAHAM DOES NOT strike one as being personally religious the way, say, Marilynne Robinson does, but she certainly seems interested in theology. Those lines quoted in the previous post, near the beginning of "From the New World"-- "Can you help me with this? / Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?"--certainly sound like they are addressed to a divinity, but the colloquial tone of the very next line, "God knows I too want the poem to continue," lets all the air out of what was starting to sound like a prayer.

The collection's title comes from a passage out of Augustine's Confessions that is quoted in the book's "Foreword." Augustine writes that he "entered into  my innermost being" and "saw above the eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light. [...] I trembled with love and awe, and found myself to be far from you in a region of unlikeness." 

The region of unlikeness, then, is where Augustine is, a place wholly unlike the place where the light of God is, a place of estrangement...maybe also self-loathing, alienation, isolation.

The poem titled "Region of Unlikeness" seems to be about a memory, although the memory belongs not to an "I" but to a "you." (Which could still be Graham, I think.) A young woman, very young perhaps, wakes up in Rome next to someone whose name she does not immediately recall and then makes her way home at dawn. Self-loathing, alienation, and isolation all seem to be in the mix. The "you" has overnight become a person different than who she once knew herself to be, living in a different world than the one she lived in yesterday.

Not exactly a religious poem, but the sense of displacement and separation certainly parallels what Augustine was writing about. But the light mentioned by Augustine is harder to find. God is absent in Region of Unlikeness, but the absence is noticed, which makes a difference. Registering God as an absence certainly differs from from leaving God entirely out of the reckoning. 

The collection's last poem, "The Phase after History," gets explicit about God's absence, playing off of Exodus 33, where God partly grants Moses's wish see to him--but not face to face, only from behind, while Moses is tucked into a cleft place in a rock.

     And there is the Western God afraid his face would come off

into our eyes

     so that we have to wait in the cleft

rock--remember?--

     His hand still down on it, we're waiting for Him to

go by,

     The back of Him is hope, remember,

the off-white wall,

     the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-of-fire fluttering

as we wait in here

     for His hand to lift off,

the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-air

     getting coated with waiting, with the cold satinfinish,

the thing-which-trails-behind (I dare do all that may

     become a man,

who dares do more is none)

     getting coated, thickly. Oh screw thy story to the

sticking place--

So, denied God's face, we are waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the promised glimpse of His back, with our three things (soul, spirit, conscience?) getting a little worse for wear, and in the meantime we have turned into Macbeth...which portends no good at all, it seems to me.