So much of what we experience in our lives is incomprehensible. The indescribable and the uncanny haunt us as we move through the world, and when reason confounds and intuition abandons, all we can muster is hushed intimation: “What does it mean?”
The way a friend comes back into our lives. The synchronicity of learning a new word and seeing it everywhere afterwards. The horrors of a faraway war. An unforeseen illness, an assured demise, an equally absurd recovery. The random and coincidental rise and fall like the tide upon our shore, and we struggle to make sense of the crashing.
In Bresnen’s first book of poetry, Pascal’s Fire (Biblioasis, 2023), she turns to God for understanding. The entire book, a narrative, fragmentary sequence, is a sort of prayer in that original sense of the word, “to ask, to beg, to entreat.”
Our narrator tends to a sickly Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, who seems on her deathbed, receiving the slow drip of an IV, surrounded by the sterile and indifferent instruments of a hospital visit.
I see Hestia in her hospital bed. I see blisters on her back the size of hockey pucks. I see black bile I mistake for blood and wipe it with a kleenex.
There is grieving, and a quest for the right words that might justify grief, that might bring revelation and make sense of suffering. But the narrator does not know them. Thus begins her spiritual quest, in which she summons a cast of historical characters to speak for her.
Moses features prominently, whose own stuttering before God the narrator returns to often and identifies herself with. And Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus is ultimately what she seeks, though she also at times fears it. Also the Sufi mystic Shaykh al-’Alawi, and the first cousin of Mohammed, Ali-Ibn-Abi-Talib. And Jewish prophets and Torah scholars, and saints of Christianity, Jerome and Augustine and Gregory. And poets, too. Rilke and Ammons, Berryman and Dickinson. And Marilyn Monroe and Zora Neale Hurston. Bresnen scours and skims the entire tradition of world literature for a sign, a scrap of wisdom that would satiate her desire for understanding.
The quotes are well chosen. Each one is like the peak of a vast mountain range where one can glimpse, by the tropes invoked, the full scope of the narrator’s project. Some favorites:
A man is hid under his tongue (Ali-Ibn-Abi-Talib)
O my brother, the contemplative is not the one who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust (Thomas Merton)
The better a man learns to pray, the more deeply he learns that all his stammering is only an answer to God’s speaking to him. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
We have to be in a desert. For he whom we must love is absent… We must be rooted in the absence of place. (Simone Weil)
Not to discover weakness is / the Artifice of strength— (Dickinson)
On this hero’s quest for vision and voice, the narrator encounters archetypes that propel the narration along and bind the fragmentary style together with the glue of storytelling. There’s a shaman who offers guidance, who lights the way.
Out of the cave appears a man. He grinds tree root to make porridge and, kneeling, hands it to me in a small wooden bowl. He lays his hand on my shoulder. What is it that you want? he asks. His breath smells of figs and hickory root, his skin is the colour of wood shavings, singed at the edges.
Bresnen has a fine, soft ear.
There’s an antagonist, too, who goes by the name of Dr. Dieffenbach, who, like the sterility of the hospital visit, would surgically remove all meaning and hope from the undertaking.
Dr. Dieffenbach thought that the source of the stutter was the tongue itself, and so he cut “triangular wedges” from the mouths of many patients. He envisioned a world in which precise instruments would be developed to facilitate such operations and imagined his life filled with metal tools
Ultimately the narrator is seeking that divine revelation such as Pascal had one night that compelled him to sew the word “FIRE” on the inseam of his coat. She desires the kind of revelation that would rekindle the smoldering hearth of Hestia and give her the will to keep going; Hestia who is really the narrator we learn in the last line of the poem, who is really Bresnen herself (“The word I most often falter over is my own name”). The reveal is not a shocking one, and not very revealing as a point of closure. Yet it maintains a tone of intimacy that undergirds the entire book.
A sober, tender voice, honest and yearning. Pascal’s Fire is a work of commendable scholarship that burns with a quiet intensity like a distant campfire in the darkness.
8/10