The Work of Mourning:
“A Vale of Tears”
'hope had mourning on' ~Hopkins
Vale of Tears,
עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא,
Emek HaBakha)
*The phrase vale of tears (Latin valle lacrimarum) is a Christian phrase referring to life and its
earthly sorrows, which are left behind only when one leaves the world and
enters heaven. In English, "valley of tears" is also used. The origin
of the phrase is uncertain, but the most accepted view is that it comes from
the Catholic hymn "Salve Regina", which at the end of the first stanza
mentions "gementes et flentes in hac
lacrimarum valle", or "mourning and weeping in this valley of
tears.*
Putting
psychoanalytic conceptions of self-transformation through speech in dialogue
with early modern devotional techniques of spiritualizing the physical, this
essay asks how Robert Southwell's poem
"A Vale of Tears" constitutes a work of mourning.
…Contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of subject
formation attribute immense importance
to processes of mourning…is not simply a reflection on how one negotiates
loss throughout one's life but more primarily how the subject is itself
constituted by mourning: formed, that is, by and through loss. From this
perspective, mourning is not simply something the subject engages in when
confronted with abandonment; but, rather, the subject is itself an effect of
loss-the product of a series of renunciations and compromise formations…
…Aesthetic and
spiritual practices are, at bottom, modes of renegotiating identity, strategies
of mourning aimed at confronting divided-ness while living out imaginatively
the sense of self-unity that the subject is constitutionally deprived of.
…the process of psychotherapy operates by enabling the
patient to "reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the
sense of necessities to come" (Language 18). In short, it is symbolic acts of interpretation that enable a subject
to transform objectifying and traumatizing events into subjectively meaningful
experiences. Devotional and religious writings often present explicit
examples of this desire to mitigate feelings of meaningless and loss, centering
as they often tend to do around the desire for identity with God as the
absolute Subject, the source and the delta of all meaning…
This therapeutic dimension of devotional writing is evident
in the work of the early modern Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, particularly his
poem "A Vale of Tears," published in the year of his execution, 1595.
Southwell's poem presents an unusually dramatic illustration of how the
therapeutic efficacy of early modern religious poetry often derives from its
careful organization, its movement from a rhetoric of division, emptiness, and
loss to a language of union, identity, and wholeness. This movement occurs
through the speaker's shifting disposition toward the Alpine landscape that he
confronts in the poem. When the speaker begins, he perceives the landscape as a
horror vacui, a wholly godless,
objectifying, and alienating unreality. Through a process of poetic meditation,
however, it emerges as an appropriate setting for a spiritually meaningful
transformation of self that is enabled by an increased sense of God's presence.
In this respect, Southwell presents a variation on the technique of
spiritualizing the physical, a well-established convention that consists, as
Saint Augustine says, in the knowledge that "every good of ours either is
God or comes from God" (27). In "A Vale of Tears," the
devotional practice of spiritualizing the physical consists in the act of
relating elements of creation that appear void of meaning because they seem
unrelated to God's goodness, back to their divine source. Through the poem's
emphasis on paradox, visual and aural oppositions, and its insistent
representation of an objectless but omnipresent mourning, it expresses the
speaker's feelings of loss and self-division and his ultimate hope for union
with God. The formal dimensions of the poem perform this movement from loss and
division to the emergence of a meaningful sense of spiritual purpose.
…As Southwell puts it, it is a place "where nothing
seemed wrong, yet nothing right" (line 32). To this extent, the landscape
presents an encounter with meaninglessness, a scene, that is, w here God's
presence remains indiscernible…thematic focus clearly resembles the meditative
sentiments found in the meditations one sees in Saint Ignatius Loyola, where
the practitioner "is to consider who God is against whom I have sinned,
reflecting on the divine attributes and comparing them with their contraries in
me; God's wisdom with my ignorance, God's omnipotence with my weakness, God's
justice with my iniquity" (27).
This meditative process of focusing on one's lack in the
face of God's perfection is…to admit: "I am divided and lapsing with
respect to my ideal, Christ…”
No comments:
Post a Comment