The Blessed Uncertainty

On the poetry of Anna Greta Wide

Fed up with conditionality.
Sick of if and would.

Thirsting in despair
for the present indicative

Examples: I am. I live. I know in whom I believe.

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Two new collections of poems by Anna Greta Wide were recently published in Sweden, Sedan kan allting hända, and Vem vänder i ljus mitt mörker? One of them (don’t remember which) is taken from unfinished manuscripts left in a suitcase in some attic for half a century.

I have no real idea how to summarize Wide’s poetry.

It seems almost impossible, not due to the vastness of her work, or because it’s very difficult to penetrate. It’s just too close. It brings to the surface things I’m all too familiar with, yet don’t really have the courage to fully face.

Anna Greta Wide’s work, especially the latter, is basically a battle with the existential darkness of incipient secularization, and at the same time, a defiant embrace of the immutable hope of the Cross. Her poems are replete with an almost unbearable horror and doubt, yet which for that precise reason can portray the contours of grace so very clearly.

Wide’s work unquely represent the radical existential disorientation of modernity in the mirror of a suffering faith. It illuminates the unfolding of secularization, and the intellectual and ideological climate developing during the early 20th century. Her poems are really about Hedenius and Söderblom, about the Moon landing, the Cold War and the Second Vatican Council. About the disenchanted world and an emptiness much worse than any conceivable disaster, and indirectly about the bitter fruit borne by all of this during our own current period.

A few years ago, I wrote a dissertation on death. A friend gave me Wide’s Kyrie as a… Graduation gift. “There’s something about death that fails to convince,” goes a line from the work. Exactly. My sixty thousand words summarized and made redundant. I had said little beyond this.

There’s much in her poetry that I just don’t get. There’s a good deal that I don’t like very much, and which I can’t understand why she chose to print. Then again, there are words and lines that pierce right through my heart like nothing else I’ve ever read, which are like holding the hand of a friend who has walked this exact path before. Across an ocean of sixty years.

I heard her voice from an old radio recording a couple of weeks ago. I got to think about Jeff Mangum’s infatuation with Anne Frank:

My dream girl don't exist
Took her photograph from a history book
…
She didn't know that I'd be hanging around
So one day she took a stroll to town
And walked in front of a Greyhound bound
For New York Central Station

Wide’s language approaches phenomenology. The form and presentation of her poems fixate upon the concrete, the immediate experience. Even when she approaches abstractions, it’s the sense, the weight and almost bodily impact of them that we meet.

Yet with that most profoundly wonderful
you can try to do whatever you like
That thoughts are generative and luminous
That there is music. And children begotten.

Poetry is meaningless if it does not seek truth and to bring it forth. And truth is Wide’s constant fixed star, a seeming compulsion to know, to own and to dwell in truth. A hunger for that which is real, and a longing to share it with the rest of us. An exhausted, struggling realism in a time where almost everything is pointing towards nonsense, relativism and unreality.

For say what you will - the blood was real

A longing for Something that just exists.

Wide is not really a philosopher, however, for better or worse. The poetry is of course above philosophy in the classical hierarchy. But Wide is for this reason more or less defenseless against the throngs of sophisms and refined errors that characterize the intellectual environment of the Western 20th century. Just like almost everyone else, I guess.

I imagine that I perhaps could have disspelled some of her doubts if we could have sat down together and looked closely at Aquinas’ epistemology. Or how Garrigou-Lagrange fuses thomism with St. John of the Cross. That we could have laughed together at our miserable uncertainties in the light of Mother Church’s quite tangible, quite living and robust unification of Faith and Reason.

But then, Wide would have been less Christ-like. She wouldn’t have been able to carry forth from suffering the treasures we now can partake of.

Because in the middle of all of this, Wide, in rebellion and defiance against the relentless weight of the zeitgeist, anchored in some sort of despondent intellectual Swedishness, in a very unique way describes the Christian hope which stands out against bleak hopelessness. The mystery of faith, luminous in the blackest of darkness in one of the most profound paradoxes of the faith. The hope of the cross and the crown of thorns through the dark night of the soul, sharpening and rousing her sisters, love and faith.

The clear and lucid hope reflected in the mystery of how Christ Himself also carried the intolerable burden of God’s absence.

"They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt.", Chesterton wrote.

"Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

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If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to thee,
the night is bright as the day;
for darkness is as light with thee.

Ps. 139:11-12.

And I can’t really imagine a more relevant perspective towards the times in which we now live apart from Wide’s. If she described and lived a faith under duress during the spring of secularization, Cohen’s cold and broken hallelujah, the social order and the worldview complex that her poetry both assumed and challenge have long since withered, now facing the time of harvest.

The radical uncertainty, not just in terms of the more profound existential questions, but regarding entirely concrete issues. In whom we can trust. Where we are going. Deeper than boredom. The polarization, and the violent isolation thriving in the omnipresent digital unreality where almost nothing can be taken for granted any longer.

In this context, is there anything healthier than Wide’s almost foolish affirmation of something that really is? Her insight that against a background of pitch black darkness, the mystery of faith suddenly becomes visible as something much greater than mankind could ever understand, far beyond what reason can own, dominate and penetrate.

That what Wide terms the blessed uncertainty actually brings forth and gives birth to faith and hope, just like the felix culpa of Adam finally became the seed of a grace infinitely greater than any earthly paradise.

Only thus.
Only with a thousand questions
storming through the soul

like in a bombed cathedral
with doors and windows blasted out
and the wind playing through the nave

I love you