After Empty Heaven

Some people think that emptying heaven of the gods may have created a dangerous void, a dangerous interregnum, and that without religion as a stabilising factor public morality might break down. The poet Wallace Stevens is mindful of this, but his hope is that poetry will address this new situation. Out of this poetic music Stevens hopes new possibilities of union and accord will emerge - 'in which being there together is enough.'

But, DZP asks, can poetry take the place of empty heaven? Can salvation be found in art when religion fails? Denis Potter (see Priests of Our Time) attacked the efforts often made in the name of religion to bandage the injuries of life. Such religion is couched in the language of false consolation, for religion is not the bandage but the wound, a wound caused by the longing for some kind of perfection, for something more than the merely human.

People have often thought of this world as a place of exile, and they long for a somewhere else, a better place. In Pennies from Heaven, Arthur thinks there must be somewhere where the songs are true, but his longing cannot transcend sentimentality. In Blue Remembered Hills the longing is for the supposed lost innocence of childhood which turns out to be no more than nostalgia. Such innocence is a myth. Our sins are indeed original. When one of the children is burnt alive, the others deny any knowledge or responsibility concerning it.

Nostalgia can paralyse us in the present. A longing for a better place beyond the rainbow can actually deepen human wounds. The expectation that we will be compensated somehow, somewhere, sometime, goes deep with us. We feel that something must turn up, to rectify matters, to balance the books. It's as if there is a higher perspective which will make everything right in the end. This transcendental superstition has dream-like quality which places it beyond disproof. It is a wounding illusion, because the only boat that awaits us is Death; a boat which has no compensating cargo.