Air and Ghosts

Abstract

91 ERIKA VEURINK Air and Ghosts • nne Sexton called her relationship with the monk Brother Dennis Farrell “a love built on air and ghosts.” He told her he loved her. She told him he was haunted. It began with a fan letter he wrote her in 1961 after the publication of her first poetry collection. Fan mail is generally one-sided optimism, but who has ever written without the slightest hope of being the exception ? This is my understanding of prayer. Correspondence is inevitably imbalanced. ‘ Anne Sexton wrote back to Brother Dennis. She wanted to believe in God. Could he help her? She thought of God as “large, covering up the sky / like a great resting jellyfish.” I think God would rather be called a feeling than a sea creature. But if he created both, what’s the harm? ‘ Conversion is courtship of ideology. When Anne Sexton told the monk “for some reason I love faith, but have none,” she was offering a challenge. I have a theory. In every relationship one person releases a fantasy while the other enacts one. If timed perfectly, it’s compatibility. When we love the wrong things well, we are caught in the miscommunication of what it means to be human. ThefirsttimeIlovedarightperson,itfeltlikefallingasleepontime. ‘ Another theory: Pick a god. Hold it loosely. a 92 ‘ Brother Dennis mailed Anne Sexton a crucifix after the exchange of a few letters. He introduced something physical to the exchange. He braved a new dimension. The cross was something to sink her teeth into. ‘ My pastor growing up said, “We should all be wearing empty tombs around our necks. It’s the resurrection that matters, not the death on the cross.” But where is the romance in an empty tomb? The cross and Christ were soaked in blood and vinegar, lit by cracks of lightning. It was a seed then a tree then a vessel then a grave then a symbol. Sexton fashioned a necklace out of the crucifix with packing string and wrote that she would “never wear it without a feeling of humility and awareness.” As a kid, all I wanted was to know my salvation was set in stone. I bowed to false gods on the bathroom floor just to try things out. I fashioned plenty of crucifixes. ‘ All love is iconography. Worship is high art. ‘ The monk sent her a photograph of himself, which Sexton hung above her desk. “I am hunting for the truth,” Sexton wrote to the monk. “It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you there is another truth, a secret life.” ‘ 93 Sexton thought writing should be painful.1 Otherwise, leave it unsaid. She understood the way suffering glimmered in the right light. In this way, prayer and poetry come from the same place. Sexton said we are all writing “God’s poem.” ‘ In her confusion and visions, in her forty days in the desert, there was the monk, waiting, ready to apostatize, for a word, for a chance at his new religion—Anne. ‘ I imagine Anne Sexton swore not to write poems about flowers or spring, but then flowers and spring happened anyway. The planet shuddered and her private world spun in a neighboring orbit. We are the worlds we occupy. We are the worlds we leave behind. ‘ There is a surrender in the act of extension. ‘ “I wish we were real,” wrote the poet to the monk in their final correspondence . She died of suicide years later after the publishing of her last book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. The invocation read “For Brother Dennis, wherever he is.” 1. Interview with Patricia Marx. “Interview with Anne Sexton.” The Hudson Review. Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1965–1966), pp. 560–570. ...