Truth-and-Darkness Page 49
"Ishtar" is, perhaps, the most spiritual/incarnational of all Judith Wright's
poems. Like "Eli, Eli" it has a serious, slow beat but it is less based on ideas
and more on a "feeling" for life. It is filled with a sense of birth and growth,
with the past and with "the shadow of the future." The sense of the presence,
in absence, of an Other permeates the whole. There is a clear recognition that
"the event", life/living/dying/death, will happen whether one denies or affirms
it, thinks it through, submits or rebels; no matter what one thinks or hopes.
This is not to be fatalistic. It is simply the truth of the body and of all things
that live. The pervasive presence of the goddess is not menacing but relational.
The poet and the goddess, the Wholly Other, are engaged with each other - in
absence and then face to face . There is a positive statement of the locus of the
meeting : "the truth of my body has all to do with you."
With “the truth of my body", "Ishtar" is positioned at the heart of incarnational
theology and spirituality. Poetry in itself is a form of "incarnation" - the poet
"enfleshes" the divine in word:
...poetry is an act both sacred and sacralising. ...(Poets) create works
which themselves fortify creation and exist as, in a sense, sacred
spaces.58
In the sacred space of "Ishtar" poet and reader are face to face with the
goddess. This tableau creates an image that contrasts with and is in opposition
to the image of the creature before the Creator who is at a distance and
governs from afar, very far from "the truth of my body."
It is in our bodies that we journey in search of truth, a voyage that leads to the
edge of darkness where the river disappears. There is no plot and no final truth
that can be grasped tightly and held on to, the way the Cycads hold on to the
known when that old bargain has long since been broken. The "journey into a
new kind of light"59 does not mean an escape from darkness. Whatever "truth"
may mean it has correspondences with death and darkness as well as with life
and light. Otherwise "it is as if we sought to welcome in life only its minimal
parts." 60
58 Buckley. Poetry And The Sacred, pp.8 & 9
59 Moore, Critical Essays, p.76
60 Blanchot, p.129
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