Our society was in a shabby state already when experience presided over essence, when ‘eat, and drink, and be merry’ mattered more than who you were and where you came from. But this practical atheism leads to existentialism or nihilism, or to each one of them back and forth. So people commonly go from trying to hope in, or experience, something above what they believe in (existentialism) to feeling hopeless and acting like it because they find no reason to believe that life is meaningful (nihilism.) Not only are words dead; Western civilization is dying. It could live; but it doesn’t have the will. When rationalist man becomes too proud to rely on the God of the Bible, he seeks truth without God’s revelatory help. Finding no truth, he quits looking for it, and tries to be satisfied with eating, drinking, and making merry: drugs, drinks, cars, traveling, sports, sex, or what have you. After this fails to satisfy, existential angst takes over and wins out. So he seeks a grandiose experience to have faith in or he falls into a condition of hopelessness. Seeking no more the truth because they think it can’t be found, the rationalist philosopher and the postmodern poet go about killing off communication; and the lost society that they exhibit goes about dismantling or demolishing everything that a belief in God’s truth once built. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (Matthew 12.25.) We need the power of God in Jesus to exclaim, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34.) But ignorance and impenitence may prevail in order to bring judgment down for sin. After Jesus rose from the dead, he stated, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24.25, 26.) It may be that the epitaph of Western civilization will be, “Ought not it to have suffered these things, and to enter into bedlam and hell?”
The condition of today’s poet is one of despair. He is as articulate as a ‘reconstructed ancyclical’ and as pointless as ‘a tin wing in the wind.’ Like in Two Ghazals, he ‘never sees the sun’ and always ‘looks for the darkest place,’ even when he speaks of ‘the Bread of Heaven’—the Bread of Heaven who is, the Bible says, ‘the light of the world.’ If he had ever eaten this Bread, there would be no despair, his darkness would be flooded with light and color, and poetry marked by entropy would die off. There is no coming out of this condition unless despair is not so far gone as to make dread impossible. Despair is to lose hope, maybe to the point of hopelessness; dread, however, may lead to hope through faith. The poet of our time is in a state of despair because his philosophy is not filtered through faith in a transcendent personality.
About John Thompson’s last book of poems, Patrick Lane says, “The poems are sometimes grim but they are by a poet writing at the farthest reach of his mind.” If the poems are like the Two Ghazals, they must be entirely grim and they must come from, not only the farthest, but the darkest and deadest part of his mind. The character in Two Ghazals, together with the author himself, is in a state of despair that was wrought from the philosophical belief that truth cannot be found and should not be sought. Each soul that has abandoned, is at odds with, or is distanced from, the truth wherein the remedy is for both despair and dread, must not dally with time. He has no time to waste on playing with words to form meaningless verse. Before despair becomes utter despair, it is possible for a sense of dread to lead to prayer, life, and relief. “I have not sought Thee, I have not found Thee,/I have not thirsted for Thee:/And now cold billows of death surround me,/Buffeting billows of death astound me,—/Wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” (Christina Rossetti, Love is Strong as Death.) The voice in this 19th century poem goes from dreading to seeking in an instant. Conversely, the distinguishing mark of postmodernism is resolute skepticism. If you believe that certain knowledge is unobtainable, and you are a writer, you might see no use for reason or rules and no rationale to make sense, much less to create beauty. It will seem reasonable, then, even though reason itself is not believed in, to despair. But if sin has not filled its measure to end in despair yet, the soul may reach up and out to the God that he has been told does not exist, and ask, even while ‘buffeting billows of death astound’—: “wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” The poet of this present age, like the people whose lives reflect the bleak world of the poet’s miserable verse, is fast approaching an irremediable, irredeemable end in the absence of God’s favor.
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