A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press Lineage Series) by Kaminsky Ilya & Towler Katherine

Author:Kaminsky, Ilya & Towler, Katherine [Kaminsky, Ilya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936797-33-2
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Published: 2014-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Rachel is a trickster. Samson is a psychopathic killer. David is a brilliant politician. Solomon makes trade not war, and becomes the lover of Sheba. And so on. But the ultimate thrust of Nakedness is theological.

It seems clear to me that the being we in the West call “God the Father” swallowed God the Mother in prehistory. That is to say, the God of male monotheism, who keeps demanding worship, the warrior and judge and tyrant God that Blake calls Nobodaddy, absorbed the powers of goddesses who were worshipped for millennia before He came on the scene. The Sumerian goddess Innanna and other ancient goddesses were in charge of things like childbirth and lawmaking, for example. But remember the wolf who swallowed grandmother in the story of Red Riding Hood? Grandmother doesn’t die, and God the Mother doesn’t die. She’s there inside the belly of the beast. Which is to say, we can see traces of her in the biblical texts. I’m interested in that. But I’m also interested in the return of the repressed. In the final section of Nakedness, called “Intensive Care,” I imply that God the Father is in pain, just as we are in pain, because he is pregnant...with His repressed female self. That’s the argument I make in the essays of Feminist Revision and the Bible, as well. What I really believe is that we can all be midwives of the Divine Female; we can help her be born into the world again.

In Kabala, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, the divine Female is called the Shekhinah. God and His Shekhinah have been divided since the catastrophic moment of creation, and the purpose of history is to reunite them. Whenever we perform a good deed, we assist in that reunion. And good sex models that union. This is all part of the midwifery I’m talking about.

But we also—we poets—we also have to imagine her. That’s our job. That’s what I found myself trying to do in The Volcano Sequence. That book burst from me with the “thick and magnificent rage” of a volcano, after a block of almost three years. I channeled those poems—let them arrive, became an aperture for them, promised I wouldn’t tell them what to say. As they arrived, I could be angry about the image of the Father God we have created, the warrior and judge and tyrant. My psalms were born as anti-psalms:

I am not lyric any more

I will not play the harp

for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful

noise to you, neither

will I lament

for I know you drink

lamentation, too,

like wine

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