Jehan Georges Vibert:
Trial of Pierrot (Not Dated - late 19th century)

"I will have levitated by the means of tugging up on my own shoelaces."

I might be one of the least religious people you could ever meet. I don't have much particular animosity toward religion, only that I don't belong. Their lore doesn't interest me much, and their metaphors tend to lose me. For instance, I will never understand the concept of a personal lord and savior. I cannot understand what that phrase means nor imagine what such a service if competently performed, would even look like in practice. I never bought into the idea of original sin, either. I appreciate the good works various religious bodies perform. I am rightly appalled by the evil organizations engage in, seemingly as a matter of course. Any collection of individuals organized together becomes capable of evil far exceeding any individual's potential. I believe that groups must be more careful lest they inflict unintended damage on others. The notion that one collection of people is necessarily superior to another due to their beliefs disgusts me.

All that said, I acknowledge that my life has been a Faith-Based initiative. I understand that conservatives hijacked the term Faith-Based back during Reagan's sorry administration to demonstrate what they imagined to be their moral superiority. They sincerely believed that their brand of belief in God, I guess, or, probably, Jesus, rendered them political superheroes. They performed the hard sell on this notion and seemed to gain some traction with it for a while. I suspect that some voters felt reassured that their politicians were godly people, even though the one sure sign that you're dealing with godly people has always been that they won't proclaim themselves godly. The real ones perform their good works without advertising their affiliation. They figure godliness might be self-evident, I guess.

Still, when Christmas is pending, I set about writing my annual Christmas Poem Cycle. As I explained in an earlier dispatch, I give these instead of boughten gifts. The Muse makes Stöllen and Chocolate Nut Mosaic Cookies and pies; I make poems. I have no recipe for poetry, though I engage in some rituals. I spend some time finding pictures to accompany my poems. I scour the open-source image world, looking for evocative ones. After twenty and more years at this, I might have scoured all the available images, or so it certainly seemed this year. The collection I managed to cobble together looked distinctly unpromising this year.

Nor did I have many burning ideas aching to get expressed boiling inside me. I set my goal of about sixteen poems and set aside four days to accomplish this. The first three days, I somehow managed to meet my quota. I enter the fourth day with twelve completed poems of various quality. Only time can adequately judge the goodness of any poem. Not even the author can tell at inception. Delivering them demands perhaps more foolhardiness than faith from me, but my poetry writing remains a Faith-Based initiative. Not one rooted in Biblical lore or catechistic understanding, but the more primitive blind faith.

As always, I began my poetry writing this year with little more than good intentions. I have flagged plenty throughout the process, my faith ebbing and peaking like tides. I might have written one great poem this cycle so far, but rather than encourage me, the appearance of a great one more often fills me with a sense of doom. I know how unlikely it will be for me to create two poems for the ages in one year's cycle, so I sensed that I'd peaked on the first day when that great one came my way. I applied more faith and continued.

I'm uncertain if my faith necessarily echoes any underlying belief. It more often engages when I sense my belief in myself flagging. When I'm dragging tail, I need an injection of faith, not when my faith's blooming. My faith might serve as the crutch compensating for a wounded limb. I do not keep going because of my conditioning but rather because of my lack of it. I would never consider planning ahead for what I would be writing while creating my poem cycle. The content must emerge from the curious context and not be smuggled in down my pant's leg. This condition encourages faith since it might be the only thing remaining after I've stripped myself of any crib sheet preparation.

And there I sit again, staring out my window into the center of my universe, empty of ideas. These poems come as inspirations, though they do not always immediately live up to their name. The inspiration part might be an emergent property appearing after a few apparently fruitless attempts. Yesterday, as I struggled to create numbers nine through twelve, I watched myself title a fresh poem sheet, "Place Title Here," before uploading an interesting image and starting a stream-of-consciousness exposition. I was two or three stanzas into it before something clicked, and I realized what I had started. Then, I could complete what ended up being a half-decent poem with a title I took from the very last line: Forever Mysterious.

I employ my Christmas to muster my faith. Not my faith in seasonal religious allegories but faith in my own Christmas stories. These might not always seem like something that should be hung on trees. Their purpose, besides as gifts, was always as exercises to bolster my own faith, if not in myself, then in the mysterious. How I managed to produce those poems beggars explaination. I hold no coherent idea of how I do it. Only the future can properly judge their quality, the future, and their recipient. Almost nobody will spit in a well-intended Christmas poet's eye. They appreciatively accept the story I share, and all's maybe a little righter with this world. I pass my Christmas newly renewed by my experience with faith. I will have levitated by the means of tugging up on my own shoelaces, it will seem.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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