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The Divinity WithinPrevious Post
Sometimes I write to try to figure something out
I hadn't understood before, that somebody else has said.
I've no idea what "the divinity within" might mean,
And yet I've heard it said so often that it must mean something
Everyone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.
It could mean we're created in God's image, if there were one,
Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,
Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.
It's not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the world
Is real enough without it. It's that each ordinary life seems at the same time
So miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be.
Why do we think we're something other than we are? Look at the stars,
Or else don't bother, since there's nothing there to see. You realize
They're there, and yet you can't imagine what the worlds that they sustain
Could be like, or if those worlds exist, though there must be billions of them.
How could those lives be anything like ours, with its private sense of time
And memories that speak to me alone, like Sally's hair? Of course the inability
To feel them doesn't mean they can't be real, but what does real even mean
When it's applied to things we can't begin to understand? I understand this life,
At least I think I do. But how can a life that doesn't have this sense of self
Or the past or poetry, even if it's written in the stars, be one that speaks to me?
Perhaps instead of being part of something too immense to understand
Or inhabiting an expanding multiverse in which every possibility is realized
And equally real, each person's life might be in some sense all there is,
Whatever that might mean. I know it sounds absurd, but it isn't any more
Ridiculous than all those narratives of God I grew up trying to believe.
What makes a life divine isn't its perfection or its power, but its estrangement
From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees. I wish I understood
What people mean by an eternal life. I only know that mine is singular,
Complete and coextensive with the transitory universe that it contains—
As though it were like God's and comprehended everything, but small.
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John Koethe's most recent books are Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury). “The Divinity Within” will be included in a new book, Cemeteries and Galaxies, to be published by FSG in April, 2025. [Author photo by Tom Bamberger.]
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William Blake, Albion Rose, ca 1794