God Is Burning

Abstract

photo : tereza cerenova WORLDLIT.ORG 17 all seemed to know this. We know what the Buddha said about desire and suffering. And a lot of the Daoist alchemical literature talks about the world-destroying, corruptive characteristics of unrefined, unsublimated desire, which they termed minor yin and yang, in opposition to the world-creating, nurturing, fecundating power of refined, sublimated desire, which they termed major yin and yang. The initial hexagram of the I Jing is a very powerful description of sublimated desire. It may be that desire that isn’t alchemized, that isn’t sublimated, leads to an attitude of fear, paradigms of scarcity, and a worldview characterized by life for some and death for others, violence. On the other hand, sublimated desire, alchemized desire, leads to an attitude of love, paradigms of abundance, justice, creativity, and life for all living things. The Gospels of the New Testament see into this quite deeply, I think, critiquing as they do a very specific and particularly virulent form of desire: desire that imitates the desires of others, desire that multiplies through imitation. Being highly imitative creatures (we absorb language, family culture, social culture, national culture all by conscious and unconscious imitation), we are dangerously susceptible to this particular form of desire, desire inspired purely by another’s desire. I’d call it inauthentic desire. It’s genuine desire that’s been hijacked and redirected toward a substituted object. Advertisers understand this better than we do. Every time they use a celebrity or someone more beautiful than us or richer than us to endorse a product, they’re tapping into our tendency to want what someone else wants. Advertisers use this tendency in us to want what others want as a very powerful tool to get us to buy things we don’t really want or need, using money we don’t have, and thereby squandering our natural desire—energy which, if alchemized, could fuel more creativity and less consumption. For desire is at the heart of art-making, poetry-making, the creation of forms and objects. So we can’t do without desire, eros. It’s the raw stuff that gets turned into mathematical equations, musical compositions, sculpture, paintings, poems, plays, stories. As creativity, desire is redeemed. As consumption, desire is debased. Desire itself needs to be redeemed. September 2017 Born and raised in Hong Kong, Jennifer Wong is completing her creative writing PhD on notions of home, otherness, and identity in contemporary diasporic poetry at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Goldfish (Chameleon Press, 2013), which explores childhood memories, rituals, and social taboos in her hometown. God Is Burning by Li-Young Lee Through an open wound in God’s left side, springtime enters into the world, sticky, green, with a taste of iron. That’s not the wound I hurt from. There’s a dull pain in God’s right hip, around which throbbing axis all worlds, visible and invisible, revolve. That’s not the pain that keeps me awake at night. God is poor, naked, and alone. But not the way the wren is poor. And even the wood thrush has feathers. Even mice have coats. Even cows have hides. And God’s not alone the way I’m alone, my whole life merely a commentary on those verses: You are as close to us as breathing, yet You are farther than the farthermost star. The sigh God sighed long ago birthed lighted aeons dying in time. The sigh I sigh upon remembering Cain was my brother, and so was Abel, fans every lit cell of me, breathing, naked, hungry, thirsty, and sore since birth, into an open tear, a burning tear through which God surveys creation, each a wet and living eye in which God binds the Alpha and the Omega. Visit the WLT website to listen to the author’s recording of this poem. Editorial note: From The Undressing, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in February 2018. Published by arrangement with the author. ...