Psalm 23: Evangelical Poetics of Duration
Using Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation as a lens, I summon my evangelical experiences reading Psalms to describe evangelical poetics — here the poetics of duration.
In this whole series, I am centering Psalm 23 because it is a brilliant prism for tracing experience as one of the Psalms of first-person speech and for analyzing poetics of Relation as a truly famous and globally recognizable biblical text. The song séances, therapeutic couches, and Bible studies where I encountered evangelical readings of the Psalms form the basis for my impression of this poetics. My own knowledge about evangelical poetics is partially conveyed by my Prelude. I have claimed that evangelical poetics of first-person Psalms speech have placed the biblical voice on lockdown — the Psalms as a prison and even a graveyard for ransacking spiritual gems. Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of Relation” will help me move towards a critical, aesthetic analysis of evangelical poetics. And Glissant’s participation in poststructuralism’s open poetics will help me describe the distinctive values and techniques I see at work in evangelical readings.
For a moment, I will focus briefly on Glissant’s poetics and then use his lens to describe three features of evangelical poetics: the poetics of durability, transparency, and generalizability. — In a rare, general statement about “the poet,” Glissant says a poet is distinguished by the “power to experience the shock of elsewhere” (Poetics of Relation, 29). A poet’s ability to experience and use language about such a shock facilitates for readers a kind of encounter with elsewhere — a particular kind of métissage (mixture) that opens a new dimension enabling a reader “to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open…” (34). I think this is worth explaining, at the risk of simplifying it too much: Someone reading a poem in a chair, on a train, lying in bed — while battling cancer, getting ready to have a baby, struggling with bills — is both there and elsewhere — is neither there and nor elsewhere. The poetics of Relation is almost like a third dimension of experience that is only available because someone crafted poetics. It feels important to emphasize that Glissant sees this new dimension as a poetics and an agency — the third dimension is not just created in the fantasy of literary space — the dimension can and must be enacted in the world as a creole, métissage (mixture) of human solitary/solidary.
Marcus Cain, Human Beings as Mountains #3 (2006)
Acrylic, gouache, ink, and watercolor on paper. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Gift of Marti and Tony Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation
(1) Evangelicals Read Psalm 23 as a “poetics of duration”
The “poetics of duration” is fascinating to Glissant. He refers to the poetics of duration when he briefly mentions the “great founding books of communities” (15) like the Hebrew Bible. He’s fascinated because these long-lasting texts have the power to showcase “the linked histories of peoples” (33). Old texts have seen a few things.
Glissant sees the poetics of duration as an accumulation of poetic sediments — and each sediment hints at totality by itself being an energetic expression of open poetics. Like a multi-colored, layered mesa whose durability exposes and preserves all past events — a slow sequence of events — a compilation of many, specific, human activities that energized distinctive interpretations, actions, and practices. Poetic sediments are magmas, slags, sands, and slurries left behind by the energetic poetics of past people who engaged that old, old text.
Some interesting forms of the evangelical poetics of duration emerge when we zero in on the Psalms. Since antiquity when they were first put to parchment, the Hebrew Psalms have endured — on song scrolls, embedded into narratives and commentaries and speeches — famously held fast and whole as ‘official’ Psalms in inked up medieval codices, on Reformation pages pressed under movable type and by coding languages that hold words on post-modern screens. Evangelicals are one part of this long story of duration — the Bible’s poetics duration— evangelical poetics of duration relies on everything from official English translations printed in their leather-bound study Bibles to snippets of psalm phrases in evangelical praise songs (like Psalm 42 in “As the Deer” or Psalm 23 in “Still Waters,” “My Shepherd,” and “I am Not Alone”).
These phrase snippets are worth detailing, at least anecdotally. When I first fell in love with the praise song, “As the Deer" I came to understand that the first line was a quote from Psalm 42. This factoid was not something that drew me into any kind of research or analysis. It simply offered the praise song an exotic pastiche. The fact that the praise song drew from Psalm 42 did not increase or decrease my investment in singing the song, at least not that I recall. My current search shows me the “quote” is more of a riff anyway — the lyrics I knew were lifted from the entire poem by Martin J. Nystrom (1984). The four opening words, “as the deer panteth” do not even follow any major biblical translations. King James and the Revised Standard call the deer a “hart.” The verb is “longs” in the NLT, RSV, NRSVUE, “craves” in CEB, “pants” in the NKJV, NIV, and “panteth” in the original King James. Nevertheless, this confetti poetics carries the Psalm forward. And these confetti poetics are the norm. For example Psalm 23 is referenced in the song, “Shepherd” credited to “CityAlight.” The first line “Though I walk through the valley” is a perfectly exact rendering of the phrase from the King James Version. But the song riffs off in its own directions, with lines like, “Lord I know that You seek me when I'm trying to hide,” “you light my way,” and “I'll trust in You alone.” These poetics might be said to echo those of Psalm 23 in Hebrew or in the King James — but they are not lines from them. This poetics pre-exists evangelical praise songs. For example, Ada R. Habershon’s lyrics “They Tell me There is a Shaded Vale” are printed in a hymnal from 1908 — the hymnal quotes Psalm 23:4, but the poem quotes no other lines from Psalm 23 — it applies all of the shade and death imagery to the Christian script of the crucifixion. I am calling all of these phrase echoes and citations — confetti poetics of duration.
If Glissant is to be followed everywhere — (for he is most energized not by the poetics of duration but by the poetics of Relation) — when he says: “the preferred scene of the poetics of Relation is plainsong or a yell (in duration or in the instant)” (200), he is talking about the special place of musical voice and sung speech in the making of free poetics from the bellies of the world. Can his references to song help us with our question about evangelical poetics of duration? Not directly — until we are able to describe what kind of “belly of the world” American evangelical poetics are singing from…But indirectly, Glissant’s love of song will bushwhack a path for us…
It would be tempting to say that the durability of Psalm 23 in King James English is like Glissant’s “plainsong” while Psalm 23 in the durability of praise song fragmentation is like Glissant’s “yell.” But we will have to get specific, (as always) with what exactly the evangelical poetics duration is. I think evangelicals sing a different kind of music — a different poetics of “lyric” tradition.
Above, I alluded to a form of duration — the phrase fragments of Psalms in evangelical praise songs — I am struck by the coherence of these confetti poetics with the old “Western” concept of scripture. The Latin and Greek heritage of the term scripture doesn’t anticipate anything about durability or even religion/sacred poetics. The Greek skariphasthai "to sketch or scratch an outline” and the Latin scribere "to write; i.e., to carve marks in wood, stone, clay, etc.” feel like a remarkably flimsy form of poetics — momentary efforts by individuals writing on tenuous materials. Nevertheless, the very persistence of religions like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is correlated with, and perhaps even caused by the temporal durability of their writings — of their scriptures. Are religions of the book actually pushed forward by their practices of deep cut confetti? I won’t make wider claims than the focus of this essay, so I’ll ask again — are American evangelical poetics pushed forward by their confetti poetics — the scraps and carved marks — that they perpetually make — the wisps and scraps of scriptural poetics used and reused all over the place?
A more obvious form of scriptural duration, very much activated by evangelicals, is the important place of English in American evangelical poetics. Recently celebrating its 400-year birthday (in 2011), the King James Bible enjoys broad respect in Western literary cultures, and if the bumper stickers are to be believed (e.g., “If it ain’t the King James, it ain’t Bible”), its English underwent an American apotheosis among some evangelicals. Then there is the New International Version (NIV), the American cousin of KJV — one of my evangelical college professors was on the translation committee. An NIV Bible sits in most evangelical pews and runs across everything from the pages of teen girl Bible-zines to the projector screens of mega-church pastors. The Common English Bible, the English Standard Version, the Good News Bible, the Message — and English Bibles for surfers, for veterans, for Lego-afficionados. The “diversity” enshrined by all of these English Bible markets obscures the way English itself is rising as a global mono-language.
An example of evangelical English poetics: A “He Gets Us” commercial entitled “Second Language.” The first thing to say about this poetics is it reflects the pure categorical collapse of evangelical mission to digital capitalist marketing. One cannot tell the difference between selling, influencing, and advertising. Some quick research behind the entities making these commercials will find political lobbying groups everywhere. The “Second Language” advertisement is, on the face of it, about multi-lingual efforts to understand Jesus’s love. But because every person speaks English as a second language, their efforts to put knowledge of things like love, forgiveness, and apology into words — into English words — are likened to the spiritual process of learning about Jesus — a process apparently filled with innocence, vulnerability, and cute linguistic mishaps like accent slips and miscomprehensions. The subjects in the advertisement are converting, not to a religious faith (they do not mention Jesus), but to a global mono-language and its vehicular poetics of spirituality.
Evangelical religious conversion cannot distinguish itself from a marketing campaign pushing a global mono-language.
The English language itself is a form of the “poetics of duration” that evangelical spirituality rides on.
Behind the English of the Evangelical Poetics of Duration
To recap — evangelical poetics of duration take various forms. Evangelical poetics have….
…totally solidified in King James English
…totally “diversified” into capitalist identity-markets for English Bibles
…totally fragmented into thousands of broken phrases in English praise song lyrics
…totally collapsed into politically funded marketing campaigns for a global mono-language, the English language itself
So, with these four kinds of evangelical poetics of duration in English. Glissant will help me trace a pathway to a “deeper” more foundational form of duration beneath the vehicle of English.
…Let us begin again. Duration has been a defining feature of any text referred to as scripture. A poetics of duration is produced by the value/practice of reading and re-reading a text from the past. In this sense, a poetics of duration is not unique to evangelicalism. But the distinctive kinds and forms of duration in evangelical poetics are an important site of analysis.
One of Glissant’s first discussions of the “poetics of duration” comes while reflecting on the “great founding books of communities” (15). Glissant eyes the “Old Testament” (Hebrew Bible), along with Greek, Latin, French, Icelandic, and African epic literatures that founded communities.
“This is an immense paradox, the great founding books of communities, the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the African epics, were all books about exile and often about errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but, through relating the community's apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim...These are books about the birth of collective consciousness, but they also introduce the unrest and suspense that allow the individual to discover himself there.” (Glissant, 15)
Glissant gathers these specific texts of community-founding and notes their shared causes of durability: filiation, a root language, and perhaps less obviously — their epics of exile and errantry — in other words, their epic failures. Filiation is a lineage-based, ancestral identity. A root language is a community-forming, often sacred and ancient, language with at least some significant linguistic ossification. Epics are those community-founding stories that are also often sacred and ancient. But where Glissant gets interesting is this notion of an epic of errantry (forms of misfitting or disobeying) and exile — I am calling the latter “epic failure,” because it’s memorably catchy, and it’s hella insightful! Epic failures enabled subsequent communities to carry the spic texts along, to carry them beyond the territories and societies that began them. These exiled epics easily become displaced poetics, according to Glissant. They allow a future “individual to discover himself there” (15).
These kinds and forms of duration — root languages, filiation, and epic literatures of territory and failure, of place and displacement — will be relevant to the poetics of the Psalms — those famous Hebrew songs of the “Old Testament.” But these forms and kinds of duration (filiation, root language, and epic failure) are not obviously comparable to evangelical (Christian) poetics. Early Christian uses of this old text can be mapped into this duration — but there are very important Christian inventions, as well.
The only other time Glissant discusses Jewish or Christian scriptures — he formulates how Christ (and Greek philosophy) impacts the poetics of duration:
“Then, with Plato, the individual becomes the tomb of the soul. In this way the philosopher introduces the process of individuation and generalization into the tradition of Near Eastern thought, where it is sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting. This will be completed (resolved) in the occurrence of Christ. Christ, and He alone, manifested incarnation without the Fall, filiation without the weight of heredity. In him Parmenidean Being and Platonic soul are joined. It is, however, possible to make a case for the real "break" in Western thought having taken place with Plato. …[and so, Glissant formulates Christ]: To an undivided ethnic community, with the legitimacy of filiation, an individualizing act that inaugurates a History of Humanity is appended. Thus, the exclusive linearity of this filiation is succeeded by the undiversifiable linearity of a generalization.” (Glissant, 50–51).
Glissant is helpfully observant: For Christians, Christ interrupts the poetics of epic (both its success and failure) with “an individualizing act that inaugurates a History of Humanity.” This new form of durable poetics worked because the history of humanity was unhinged from its predecessor’s forms and kinds of durability — from its epic place/displacement (the Levant in ancient West Asia/North Africa), from its root language (See T.M. Law, When God Spoke Greek), and from filiation — which Christians transformed into a divine lineage for one individual who introduces the “undiversifiable linearity of a generalization” (50–51). What Glissant means by “undiversifiable lineraity of a generalization” might better be rendered in terms of specific Christian inventions: Christ was posited as the new “first man” in whom all men are fashioned — time no longer belonged to filiation but rather to personhood that was constituted christologically (although European and American racial history showcases how filiation by skin color was ferreted into this so-called “universal” personhood).
In short, the Christian poetics of durability is at least theoretically achieved not by specific epic/territorial/linguistic/filiation identities — but by the generalizability of poetics itself — by the old text and an new appended set of writings that make open poetics of “the word” its core value/practice. By inventing poetics (“the word”) as a divine person, and then making that divine person the basis for both a universal personhood and a history of humanity — Christian poetics demoted all of its poetics into generic examples of universal personhood; it denied the potential in its own christology to revere the poetics of persons.
I wish to live in complete errantry from this poetics of duration.
What is probably disappointing to Glissant, at least it is disappointing to me, is that Christian poetics of scripture does not have any explicit mechanism (like a Talmudic dialogue presenting sediments of reading) to ensure that readers encounter anything close to a poetic totality of mixtures and encounters. It was left to the Christian sermon to convey the sediments/sedimentation of poetic duration — but evangelical sermons are so infrequently about Others. American evangelical sermons are almost entirely about personal application. They are a poetics of self-help, not a poetics energized by the shock of elsewhere, by the wisdom of others.
“The thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought. Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth-mine. But thought of the Other can (dwell within me without making me alter course, without "prizing me open," without changing me within myself. An ethical principle, it is enough that l not violate it. …The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then l have to act. That is the moment I change my thought, with-out renouncing its contribution. l change, and l exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance. … If, thus, we allow that an aesthetics is an art of conceiving, imagining, and acting, the other of Thought is the aesthetics implemented by me and by you to join the dynamics to which we are to contribute.” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 154-55)
Christians adopted a christology that, ironically, killed the “other of thought.”
…this quote by Glissant about the energy that is destroyed for a sterility of “the thought of the Other” is a good transition to the other two features of evangelical poetics that Glissant is helping me analyze — generalizability and transparency.
A Few Final Thoughts on Evangelical Poetics of Duration
First, if the evangelical poetics of duration largely ignore the sediments of time—they also vastly carve away at their “old text” — not in the way praise songs dissolve Psalm lyrics into thousands of excerpted phrases — but they carve away at their “old text” in still yet another way — deliberately ensuring durability — not of poetics but of certain verses, passages, symbols, or theological ideas. (Jill Hicks-Keaton, The Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.)
Second, although Christian missionaries have been the largest driver of multi-lingualism in Christianity—translating the Bible into countless languages—their approaches were not oriented towards encounter and Relation but towards spiritual dogma and cultural censure. I think of the examples where local traditions of spirituality were moralized — negatively marked as pagan or illicit or even demonic—in the cultural colonialism that sought to export not just “the word” but an American brand, culture, and politics of poetics.
Finally, I want to read Jonathan Z. Smith’s essay “Sacred Persistence: A Redescription of Canon” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 36-52 [Reprinted in a Routledge volume on readings in the theory of religion in 2010]
