Certainty has killed more people than doubt.

 

This thought echoed in my mind repeatedly as I read “Doubt,” a prose poem / meditation / essay, just five pages in length, that makes up the second of the five sections that compose Fanny Howe’s new book, Gone.

 

“Doubt” considers the problem of belief as presented by Simone Weil, flanked on either side by Virginia Woolf’s suicide & the death in the Auschwitz gas chamber of Saint Edith Stein, the one-time Husserl protégé, born an Orthodox Jew & for a time an atheist, who became a Carmelite nun. Along the way, both Dostoevsky & Hannah Arendt also make appearances.

 

Howe, as anyone who has read her work must realize, is one of the most intensely moral human beings ever to write poetry. Moral not in the Bill Bennett sense of prescribing right vs. wrong, but rather – & this is a large rather – in her commitment to honesty & questing for truth. That’s why, at least in part, writers who share very little, if any, of Howe’s profoundly Catholic mysticism nonetheless can be completely persuaded of the importance of her work.*

 

Weil’s writing has been used by her advocates – Howe clearly is one – to raise her death by anorexia out of the realm of pathology into a question of choices. What is so interesting – & characteristic – of Howe is that she’s after something altogether different here. Having drawn connections between these three premature deaths of women during the war years of the 1940s, Howe notes that each

 

sought salvation in a choice of words.

 

But multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary.

 

I cannot imagine a contemporary reader coming across this & not hearing Jack Spicer’s last words, recounted by Robin Blaser at the end of his lengthy essay, “The Practice of Outside,” that concludes Spicer’s Collected Books:

 

My vocabulary did this to me.

 

The concept of a lethal vocabulary joins these two deeply religious poets – Spicer’s own skepticism** isn’t at all remote the experience of St. Stein or Weil &, though Howe herself doesn’t draw the connection, Woolf’s filling her pockets with stones in order to drown speaks to the same sense of an insubstantial body that Weil sought through starvation.

 

But Howe does something that Spicer either doesn’t or can’t – she names the lethal vocabulary: inexact.*** Yet the problem of exactness presents precisely the question of certainty. & conversely the problem of doubt. Doubt & belief are clearly the sides of a particular coin, in which will & self are deeply entwined. Poets, Howe notes, “tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind.” Thus, although Howe doesn’t quite say this, poetry might be understand as a form that nourishes doubt. The reason that Howe doesn’t, as near as I can tell, is that she equates doubt also with the “abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for” – the quotation belongs not to Howe but to Arendt. This would be as true for good as it is for evil. It could, & again this is something that Howe does not say, be true also for the poem, almost by definition a “deed that cannot be accounted for.”

 

All these things that Howe doesn’t say form as much a part of this poem as the things she does:

 

Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person – hidden like a laugh inside a sob – that loves even more than it loves to live?

If there is, can it be expressed in the form of the lyric line?

 

Thus I find myself in the curious position of “arguing” with a poem. Doubly curious, in that I’m not at all certain that I don’t, at some deep level, agree with Howe’s unstated premise, that doubt, held properly, has the capacity to heal.

 

Coming out of a century in which certainty gave us the gulag, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, coming into a century in which a single world power feels uninhibited in its use of unilateral deadly force, in its capacity to hold prisoners without recourse to the right of habeas corpus, in its willingness to cancel any aspect of the Bill of Rights it sees fit to ignore, I find myself troubled deeply by the promise of certainty, which invariably must also be the promise of belief. Howe’s heroines, at least Weil & St. Stein, represent instances of believers who arrived at this state through doubt. By means of language.

 

This is why Virginia Woolf is such an interesting figure in this poem. It is she whom we see first in this poem, having

 

committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.

 

“Staved off,” i.e. repelled, as though Freud represented what exactly?

 

Which in turn makes me think of the poet who is not mentioned here, Hilda Doolittle, who, whatever the wreckage of her own personal life, survived the war & did not merely read Freud, but had in fact been his analysand.

 

If you read Howe’s poem, you will see not merely that I am arguing with it – even where arguing might not mean disagreement – but that I am doing so almost wildly “out of order.” Which is to say that, for me at least, Howe’s “Doubt” proceeds not in a linear fashion, certainly not in the logical sequencing we associate with the dull progress of the undergraduate essay, but rather that it circles its topic, or intersects with it at multiple angles. 

 

“The poem as” is its own genre. The poem as journal, as letter, as novel. As essay, it so happens, is one of the more mature intergeneric modes. It’s not a form that one associates automatically with Fanny Howe, deservedly known as one of the finest lyric writers of our time, but it’s one she handles with the same fearless commitment she brings to everything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* There are days of the week in which I would say that this is the answer to one question I’ve heard on several occasions: what makes Fanny Howe a language poet?

 

**             Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him.

 

Or, later in the same sequence for Ramparts, in Book of Magazine Verse:

 

Mechanicly we move

in God’s Universe, Unable to do
Without the grace or hatred of Him.

               

*** That at least is Howe’s name for it. There is, of course, no assurance that Spicer would have agreed to this characterization of the issue with regards to himself.