Reflection on Shabbat of the Sukkot Week 2008

Written by Judith Rosen-Berry Friday, 17 October 2008

After so many words written, spoken and read, I have arrived at that point in the year when I want to say as Phillip Larkin did—“That there is nothing to be said—then perhaps to just leave it at that.  But I cannot help but wonder and then share with you the question: how was it that a poet, who spoke so persuasively to his audience, came to believe that he no longer had anything to say, and as a consequence he devastatingly believed that he was only giving them poems which were like something almost being said. It concerns me that Larkin’s observation reflects something of my own experience with the many words I have spoken, delivered in sermons over the last few weeks of the holiday season: that numerous words that I reached after were in fact only like something almost being said, but not actually said.

The impasse that I have reached is given further striking illustration in a poem that Larkin composed entitled Myxomatosis, where he describes how when confronted by a rabbit caught in a trap he simply has nothing to say:

Caught in the centre of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where are its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.

In answer to the question Larkin kills the rabbit with his stick, explaining:

                                       I make sharp reply
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

His words: “I’m glad I can’t explain” are fleetingly characteristic of the remarkable honesty that Larkin was known for, not only about the plight of animals, but about the traps that lie in wait for humanity too. His inability or perhaps unwillingness to offer any kind of answer for the chaos and misfortune that threaten to overwhelm us, indeed ensnare us, doesn’t really come from a lack on his part, but from an acknowledgement that answers and explanations, religious or otherwise, are no longer possible for us, in fact they may never have been possible.

This is why in Larkin’s poem he doesn’t simply say that he couldn’t explain but that he was glad that he couldn’t explain—because to do so, to attempt to explain, would have been to perpetuate a lie.

Larkin’s view, if we agree with it, somewhat destabilizes the literary and narrative purpose of the linear journey, the journey—metaphorical or real—from chaos to redemption. From lack of faith and fidelity to the “promised land”. Because it challenges the idea that we will arrive at some finality, some clarification or explanation even, of what it was all about. It is challenging because on the whole we do not expect to hear our teachers say for example: “I cannot explain what we are doing here” or “after all that we have been through there is nothing to be said”. But perhaps we should demand that honesty from them rather than accept words spoken like something almost being said. And instead of the trope of leading and following in the steps of a sure guide (Moses/God), our journey needs to become one of interrupted passages, sidesteps and missteps. Or, in the language of Jacques Derrida, the step/not.

It is a peculiarity of the French language that the word pas means both “step”, as in faux pas, when we make a wrong step, and “not”, as in je ne sais pas, “I don’t know”., In the world of crazy French post-modernism, pas then is a word that that fluctuates but in an instructive way (not arbitrarily) between two sometimes opposite meanings. Thus, pas can mean step/not, it can mean to take a step but then again not to, to follow in someone else’s steps but then again not to. Step/not allows us to see how deeply embedded the ‘not’ is in the path we take. How deeply embedded the impasse is in the pass, and more generally how deeply the impossible is embedded in the possible (Derrida paraphrased from his work The Postcard).

This emphasis on impossibility and impasse then does not mean that we should give up on our path. Rather it is pointing to the creative possibility inherent in the faux pas, the misstep.  This may mean that we are temporarily lost (for words), but not perhaps as Larkin suggested hopelessly lost. 

Judith Rosen-Berry

16.10.08