In Medias Res
Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
If you’ve been following Vita Poetica Journal through our first editions, you will have noticed that we’ve tried to cultivate an awareness of all of us as a spiritual community—reflecting together on the momentous events of the past two years. (And if you’re new to Vita Poetica, we’re glad you’re now along for the ride!)
Amid the pandemic, we took refuge in contemplation; later, after a turn in the year, we were ready to act from our deepest spiritual impulses, to move out and forward.
I suspect that now, most of us are bewildered about the season we are in now, and what it means. The muddle of our experience offers no easy arcs of meaning: the pandemic has petered out, kinda-sorta, but remains at a dull roar, like the forgettable but constant sound of a white-noise machine that you periodically remember is still droning. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and its horrors have been a strange re-entrance of the past into the frame of our lives—an echo (but slant!) of Cold War childhood for the older among us.
Nothing’s ever over, it seems. And the very muddled-ness makes sorting through it—the necessary task of pilgrimage—seem both daunting and defeating at once. The arc appears to bend, it seems, toward Nothing in Particular. After all.
I’m writing at that juncture of the year when the gap between the cyclical nature of the Jewish calendar and the (chiefly) linear calendar of Christianity can seem un-crossable—to say nothing of all the cycles and lines in other faiths. It’s thick in the week of Passover, Western Easter is concluded, and my own Orthodox celebrations seem an impassable gulf away. All around, these feel like eschatological times for everybody.
Maybe all these seeming polarities, immanence and transcendence, the perpetual and the final, are all present in every moment. (Just as God is “everywhere present and fillest all things.”)
Many of the writings in this edition of Vita Poetica seem calibrated to just this uncertain moment, and how to navigate the uncertainty seems to be the individual’s artistic task—which is then shared and multiplied with others.
I was immediately taken by the juxtaposition, in Barbara Sabol’s poem “Flare” of the brilliant leaves with the dying grandfather’s sudden deathbed rearing—and how the dead leaves, at the end, are scattered once more. The remains of the season blow back in to the wind. Perhaps this is futile, but the ending seems to be a kind of surrender. The epiphanies are both cyclical and linear at once.
The moment of surrender is the moment of emergence: Look at the images from Abigail Platter’s Ophelia’s Baptism—variations on an updated Millais that evoke the original even as they differ. “A baptism is a surrender to death,” she writes, “in hopes that one might come back up for air transformed. Here we find a murky space for the kind of wallowing that just might also contain new life.”
What’s required is for us to seize the mission in the moment—check out how Heather Morton learns to grab back onto the vocation as a writer that has (actually) grabbed her, and how she learned to graft her vision into the sweep of Biblical, propositional narrative she had been handed; and how Devon Balwit’s “A Reading of Revelation,” shows the immobility of complacent pride for the central character of Flannery O’Connor’s story.
As the world moves forward, backward, emerging outward, we must ask ourselves the questions Peter Bankson proposes in “Garlic Lover”:
Is there a memory in garlic I’ve abandoned in myself?
Is every bulb somehow linked to Garlic Central,
waiting for the word?
Perhaps this portends a resurrection—however we figure it.
Are we just waiting to be unpeeled?
