Whence Kindness and Gentleness Come

 I woke up shivering this morning with the weight and misery of my dad's deteriorating health condition seemingly concentrated into a little ball in the center of my gut. I curled up into a fetal position and wrapped myself more tightly in the down comforter to feel better and get more warmth. But it didn't do much good. 

"Comforter," I apostrophized to myself, "where, where is your comforting?" 

I get that G.M. Hopkins wasn't talking about bedclothes when he wrote that line. He was talking about Jesus, or God, or whatever. But I never believed in any of those characters. I know I have not been abandoned or forsaken—because there was no one to do the abandoning and forsaking. 

Why, then, should my heart respond so much to Hopkins's agony, distilled in that line? Why should Thomas Hardy have spent a career railing against the crimes and indifference of a Deity he never actually believed in? Perhaps, as Kingsley Amis put it, it's not so much that we actually disbelieve in him, as that we hate him. 

But no; that's not it either. I do not actually feel rage against a phantom. No "wraith's progress" for me, to borrow a phrase from Cummings. Who, then, am I angry with—if not a ghost from a Bronze Age text? "O which one? is it each one?" Obviously, the answer is: my fellow mortals—the ones who tell me to expect comfort whence no aid will come. 

People like my dad's ICU nurse who want to tell me in these moments about all the conversations they have with God. 

In a very early piece on this blog, I wrote that my favorite poets had always been rebels—rebels against society and the established order, sure; but—a stage prior to that even—rebels against God. Metaphysical rebels, in Camus's phrase. And rebels most specifically against the household deity of my own upbringing: Optimism. 

My dad's God, in whom I was encouraged to believe, was the spirit of life itself. The goodness in human beings. The power of love and connection. The trust in life's continuity. I have never doubted that my dad genuinely feels the presence of these things. Even in the hospital, he smiles every time he wakes up. The ICU nurses comment on how he's always so happy.  

But as I child, I realized I was an atheist not only with respect to the Christian God, but to my father's deity as well. I've never believed in the "spirit of life and love" any more than Jehovah. Love never seemed very powerful to me. I felt that the world was one in which there was no "help for pain," as Arnold put it. Yet, it seemed blasphemy to say it. 

And so, the poems that gripped me the most were those that gave utterance to this forbidden thought. The pessimism of Heine's "Morphine" came to me in adolescence with all the shock of a long-suppressed truth: "Sleep is good, death is better/ And best of all is never to have been born." 

(Hopkins entertains this thought too, in his moment of abandonment and despair quoted above—"all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep"—calling it a "comfort serves in a whirlwind.")

And yet, with adulthood, I've gradually realized there's more to it than that. Even Heine wrote in another poem that it was better to be a live philistine on the Neckar than the most kingly shade in Hades. And I have never doubted that my dad genuinely feels the presence of his deity, his power of life and love, whose being seemed so nebulous to me. 

My dad's optimism was never an act, or an exercise in wishful thinking. It's who he actually is. He genuinely welcomes the world—this world—with joy each time he opens his eyes to find it. That's why he smiles every time he wakes up—even if it's to find himself still in the ICU. (That's certainly not the mood in which I woke up today, as mentioned above.) 

My dad's actual, unforced default is good will toward all things. 

This is true even of his subconscious, which the psychoanalysts once assured us is the realm of the unbridled Id; of libidinous aggression. My dad's existence calls the universality of their theory into question. Even when he was having hallucinations, the things that appeared to him were all expressive of his inner state of joy and decency. 

This, more than any dispatch from the spirit world, is the real mystery before which I humble myself. And so, there is another line of German poetry that comes to me with the shock of truth: "I have often asked myself, and never found an answer/whence kindness and gentleness come," Gottfried Benn wrote (Hofmann trans.).

I've never received an answer either. But I know it when I see it. Unlike the hypothesized deity, kindness and gentleness are two mysteries I have no trouble believing in—because I have seen them in my dad all my life.