Dr Omar Sabbagh, On Chrisan Wiman, 180715 1 Only Plenitude at The Void: On Christian Wiman’s every riven thing ‘To love is to feel your death given to you like a sentence, to meet the judge’s eyes as if there were a judge, as if he had eyes, and love.’ (‘Gone For The Day, She Is The Day’) Christian Wiman’s spiritual meditation, My Bright Abyss, is in my view on a par with another outstanding spiritual autobiography from just over a century earlier, Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Indeed, in the ‘Preface’ of perhaps the most penetrating book written about Chesterton, Hugh Kenner’s Paradox in Chesterton, Marshall McLuhan avers that Chesterton possessed a ‘metaphysical intuition of being.’ And I’d say the same about Wiman. Part of the ‘metaphysical’ aspect of Wiman’s gambits in this superlative collection, every riven thing, shows up in how integrated the formal craftsmanship is with the sentiments expressed thereby. Wiman is both like Eliot’s ‘metaphysical poets’ in this sense, anything but dissociated, as well as in a very pronounced way echoic of Eliot himself. The first poem in the collection, ‘Dust Devil,’ starts us in Wiman’s childhood, ‘in a time when time stopped.’ The devilishness of the toy ‘top’ detailed in the poem is a complement to the toying of both child and adult author, recollecting – but more than this, as we’ll see, the devilry of Fate or God toying with him. In this thin-versed poem, Wiman speaks of his ‘art’ in paradoxes, as ‘flourishing / vanishing,’ or as artifact of both, ‘cohesion / illusion.’ And this tallies with his (already mentioned) superbly poised spiritual meditation, where he follows in the footsteps of the likes of Bonhoeffer and Weil, and the Jurgen Moltmann of The Crucified God. Whether we call it ‘affliction,’ ‘the void,’ or what have you, these Christian thinkers were eminently modernist in seeing God, not as necessity, but as ‘contingency.’ The essence of Christ’s mission resided for them in his penultimate words, about having been forsaken. These thinkers – Wiman in their train – locate God, plenitude or infinity, precisely in His absconding and voiding. God is the god of reality, thus: which means that the essence of mortal life is what happens to you, shorn of your own egotistical intentionality or wishes or projections. If God is the Real, then there’s nothing romantic about God. The next feature that struck me about this collection was how often Wiman thematized poetry itself. By this I don’t mean the idea expressed in ‘This Mind Of Dying,’ in which the prayer