The eminent Old Testament scholar and theologian, Walter Brueggemann, writes tellingly about the different modes of Psalms. He divides them into three primary categories. While the contemporary Christian church tends to focus on the pastoral Psalms of thanksgiving and praise, he directs attention to the more idiosyncratically Jewish Psalms of "disorientation" and "new orientation." The Psalms of lamentation and the "penitential Psalms" fall into the former category in articulating the Psalmist's (and the people's) sufferings and tribulations, often from a locus of captivity and/or exile--literal and spiritual.
Psalm 13 opens with a characteristic expression of abandonment & isolation:
"How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?"
Psalm 137, one of the most famous of these Psalms, begins in exile:
"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres."
The cessation and absence of song are traits of these exilic lamentations. Such metaphors have been present in the spiritual and aesthetic lives of Psalmists from the Babylonian exile to the Shoah. They have inspired composers from the Renaissance to today, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt. These poems are complex, invite multiple readings, and resist the pat triumphalism that characterizes much contemporary usage of the Psalms.
Indeed, Theodor Adorno's dictum that "after Auschwitz there can be no poetry" still resonates, as sirens blared in Israel yesterday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. That harrowing annual ritual commemorating the Shoah reminds us that even the starkest Psalmist metaphors can be rendered inadequate.
I have been reacquainting myself with the life and music of Hugo Distler, the early 20th century Lutheran composer and conductor who took his own life in 1942 (he was 34). "Until now I believed that God was with me, but now I believe that he has forsaken me." Echoing Psalm 22 ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") Distler's words upon receiving the consription orders from the Nazis drove him to self-inflicted martyrdom. Even more tragically, friends were working to exempt the exceptionally gifted musician from service in the SS, but that news did not reach him in time.
Another artist who has been much on my consciousness lately (see previous posts) is the "mad" poet John Clare. Institionalized for the last 30-some years of his life, Clare echoed the Zionist laments of the exilic Psalms in his letters:
"I am in the ninth year of Captivity among the Babylonians and any news from Home is a Godsend or blessing."
In drawing our attention to the Psalms of disorientation, Brueggemann warns his readers of the uncomfortable landscape they inhabit, with violent language of bitter comlaint and unsated vengeance. While the opening of Psalm 137 vividly evokes captivity, exile, and the unsettling quiet of silenced songs, the end of the Psalm is disturbingly violent:
"O daughter of Babyon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"
I do not presume to be enough of a theologian or literary critic to unpack the layers of significance in such language. I appreciate Brueggemann's identifying of the Psalmists' process (and progression) from despair to vengeance to eventual faithfulness. He describes such cries for vengeance as "venting" and cites their necessity in such a complex relationship.
Clare could be equally violent when describing his captivity and the sufferings (both real and imagined) he endured in the asyla:
"...When people make such mistakes as to call me God's bastard and whores pay me by shutting me up from God's people out of the way of common sense and then take my head off because they can't find me--it out Herods Herod"
Distler, as noted above, felt forsaken, and in another letter describes the political realities of the Nazi regime as a time
"in which God has apparently relinquished power to the Evil One."
With telling self-awareness, he analyzes his own state of mind:
"I suffer increasingly from a chronic despondency that borders on depression and is certainly the result of the irritating war of nerves. There are no words to describe how horrible the present and the near future look to us."
Distler's music expresses the anxiety & fear--the angst--of his time, and his impressive output of sacred music reflects such struggles. Much of his music is based on Lutheran chorales. Distler's motets are masterpieces of the 20th century as Bach's are to the Baroque. And like Bach, Distler does not shrink from the theological and human complexities of sacred poems like Isaiah's "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." (Fürwahr, er trug unsere Krankheit, op. 12, no. 9 is one of Distler's crowning achivements in his unfinished magnum opus of Sacred Choral Music). While Bach often hid the chorale tunes in the middle of dense textures of elaborate counterpoint, Distler's scores are more disjointed. Wide leaps and extended melismas characterize his melodies, haltering rhythms trip over one another as they accelerate, and snippets of recognizable tunes briefly appear, like a swimmer lifting his head above the water to gasp for air. These motets sound like no others, and deserve a wider berth in our appreciation of the tradition. And lest the reader think they are all darkness and despair, Distler struggles to emerge from the abyss and--if not attain--at least glimpse the light.
"May the great light in the midst of the great darkness that dominates the world grow and finally triumph...Most important: that we soon have peace. Let us pray above all for that."
Unlike Psalm 137, most of these Psalms of lamentation contain a pivot point where the disorientation, bitterness &/or vengeance yields to doxology. Distler's quote echoes the pithy example of Psalm 13, the first verse of which opened this essay. The last half of the 6 verse Psalm continues:
" Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
lest my enemy say "I have prevailed over him,"
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken."
Then, the seemingly out-of-the-blue (like an unprepared harmonic progression) hinge from demanding complaint to praise:
"But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me."
Through the complex and untidy process of confrontation & complaint, with spiritual & emotional honesty, the Psalmist actively cultivates relationship with God, with remarkable self-awareness of his rights & his place. That is, at least, one reading of the above. In that light, I read Distler's and Clare's writings with a look to the whole, mourn the tragedies of their respective ends and celebrate the affirming power of their work with renewed zest and will.
The Psalmist in 137 asks "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Clare lamented a similar fate with more disturbing imagery when asked about how his poetry was progressing in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, his "home" from 1841 until his death in 1864:
"Why, they have cut off my head and picked out all the letters in the alphabet--all the vowels and all the consonants and brought them out through my ears--and then they want me to write poetry! I can't do it."
And just as the Psalmist uses metaphor to work through the process of negativity via the demands for revenge, Clare managed to retrieve a few vowels and consonants, and like his older colleague, Christopher Smart (another "mad" poet and Britten muse, to be discussed later!) wrote remarkably visionary poetry while institutionalized.
Distler's tombstone contains an epitaph from John 16:33:
"In the world you are afraid, but be of good courage,
for I have overcome the world."
Clare's final poem 'Birds Nests,' contains a similar message of comfort from the sanctuary of Nature:
'Tis Spring warm glows the South
Chaffinchs carry the moss in his mouth
To the filbert hedges all day long
And charms the poet with his beautiful song
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