At a bar in Manhattan last week, a friend and I drank beer out of green bottles and talked about the film we’d just seen, Wong Kar-wai’s melodrama, 2046. We also talked a bit about another melodrama: this newsletter. My friend suggested that, rather than filtering the grim world through my diaristic perspective each week, I should think of some prompts. What about A prayer for hard times, he said.
Eleven slain in Buffalo, one million dead from Covid-19 in this country. 83 days of war in Ukraine, 826 days of drought in California. In the Book of James, it is written that “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” There are either no righteous men left, or they have given up their praying.
What does prayer avail, what could it? I don’t know. It’s a thing for the devout or the desperate, the compassionate and the careless alike. At any rate, it’s not a mode I can work in. I tend to agree with something Primo Levi once said: “Faith is something you either have or you don’t. You cannot invent it. You cannot invent your own God for your own personal use. It would not be honest.” I could invent—could pray with my lungs to the yellowgreen gods of summer, could give small thanks to the small hopes of new seasons—but it would not be honest.
That chapter in James begins on a different note, in prophecy rather than prayer:
Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
This feels more in the tenor of the times to me, the hope not for peace but for punishment. Prayer these days feels like prophecy defanged, a cope for the powerless. What you do while you wait for judgment to be rendered; what you do when there’s nothing to be done; a hedge, a truce, a hope. But both prayer and prophecy—of this Christian kind, at least—require faith: “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.”
A prayer for hard times? I can only think of a few that mean much to me, that work without that faith. Adrienne Rich’s “Tattered Kaddish,” that brave and beautiful prayer for all suicides: “Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel / on ones we knew and loved.” Plenty of Charles Wright’s poetry, though they’re purgatorial and agnostic: “God never enters into it, nor / Do his pale hands and pale wings, / angel of time he has become.”1 There’s Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” a rebuke of American Christian jingoism, in which a ragged messenger prays aloud that God “help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead[.]” Perhaps you could also count Joy Williams’ Ninety-Nine Stories of God, a series of aphorisms and parables in the style of Kafka, Crane, and the Book of Acts. All are numbered, with their titles at the end:
64
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison:
“The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.
Before God and with God, we live without God.”
I PITY THE FOOL
In another, called “WHALE,” people try to come up with the saddest sentence they can. One of them is The last whale swam deeper. It’s remained stuck in my head ever since.
A prayer for hard times? The best I can do is such phrases and fragments that lodge in my head: The last whale swam deeper. Lately it’s been The index of prophecy is light2 and Such is the sun-picture3 and Blue whale ship-strike risk in near-real time. Hardly prayers, they’re little pebbles to keep in your pocket. You can repeat them, but they have no direction, their valences are unstable, they do not give themselves up to anything. They are ways of holding on to language in lieu of anything else to hold on to.4
That last mantra is from a random page of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report. Blue whale ship-strike risk in near-real time. It’s almost a line of iambic pentameter, missing a syllable at the start. It is mystical to me, futuristic and calamitous. Technical language, after all, has become our language of prophecy. In the age of drone strikes and climate disasters, things are doomed or saved by risk assessments and policy reports. Blue whale ship-strike risk in near-real time. I keep saying it over and over: Blue whale / ship-strike / risk in / near-real / time. Is that a prayer? I don’t think so. I think it means that our forecasts have outpaced our piety. Blue whale ship-strike risk in near-real time—God of the sparrow, God of the whale—What could the latter be for?
Last week I saw an Instagram Reels video, shot from a drone, of a sperm whale stranded on Fonte da Telha Beach in Portugal. Beachgoers were wading into the ocean, trying to push it back to sea. Whales often beach themselves when they’re sick or wounded, like when they’ve gorged themselves on too much plastic. This one had been struck by a boat and died on the beach. The videographer, apparently in earnest, put music over his footage: the Michael Jackson song from Free Willy. A prayer for hard times? I wonder if it’s even possible, amidst all this crass inspiration, this delusion, this stuff of Hollywood, praise bands, kitsch.
A prayer for hard times? Would be written in dust so the hawks could see it, their third eyelids blinking in the heat. Would be sung, probably. To each other, perhaps. Would be murky and green and membranous. Would be recited in luminous zones, in centigrade, in coal seam fires. Would be a coming to terms, a forcing of future, a bequeathing, an admission, an abandonment. Would be left to be finished. Perhaps, though not likely, by you or by me or by us.
But I’ve got a feeling that a prayer is like this: a bunch of people on the beach, heaving together in beautiful unison, trying to keep alive something that is only there to be saved—magnificent and ancient in the surf—because it already knows it’s going to die.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
When writing the above, I thought of Charles Wright’s “Little Ending,” collected in one of my all-time favorite books of poetry, Sestets: (Note that the line breaks might be messed up on mobile.)
Bowls will receive us,
and sprinkle black scratch in our eyes.
Later, at the great fork on the untouchable road,
It won’t matter where we have become.
Unburdened by prayer, unburdened by any supplication,
Someone will take our hand,
someone will give us refuge,
Circling left or circling right.
from my incoming texts
“draft like a pile of legos on the floor”
“@99&/ soo good”
“Need to find a PA somehow”
“Fuck me up Boston”
weekly wiki
Read back about climate change reports, death by fossil fuel, and the museum that burned. Get a print issue. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.
from Wright, Charles. “Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey.” Sestets.
from Rukeyser, Muriel. “Second Elegy.” Elegies.
from Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” The Atlantic. June 1859.
At times, they are merely found phrases, strangely enchanting, like the one on the pinup postcard at that bar: Study in Knees at Cypress Gardens in Beautiful Florida.