paperless statements

Not the first time this has happened. I’m driving along in my van feeling stupid, guilty, back to square one, etc., and I send up a prayer like, “What the HECK, God? I want to drive off an overpass right now. Please give me a sign.” I don’t mean this as a Gideon’s fleece type of prayer. I really don’t mean to be testing God. I already know that he loves me! But these little prayers emerge naturally, like fire ants from a decaying tree stump.

Today I felt especially disconnected, shamed, ganged up on, paranoid, small, angry, sick, wicked, tempted, gross, unshaven, physically stinky, wronged, messed up, disgruntled, foolish, unsatisfied, broke, proud, needy, helpless, hopeless, yucky. In short: guilty, guilty, guilty. Although in my head I knew God had a plan for me, and that he was directing my steps (or, in this case, the mild swervings of my van), I still felt—how did we say it in the 80s?—grody. I felt grody to the max. So I sent up a desperate little prayer.

The prayer became like the Elven rope Galadriel gives Sam in the movie version of Lord of the Rings. Magic rope. Beautiful, holy, apparently thin but impossibly durable. Because I said the prayer while listening, absentmindedly, to the live version of the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away”—the final two minutes of which feature Pete Townsend singing, over and over, “You are forgiven! You are forgiven! You are forgiven!” I mean seriously, two minutes, and in a wild bed of crashing drums and electric guitar. Grace upon grace. I no longer pictured driving off an overpass.

I didn’t cry this time. I just knew. I didn’t even care whether it should be considered a “sign” or not. I recognized, however, one of the myriad reasons God allowed the lyrics of “A Quick One” to spring forth from Pete Townsend’s creativity 46 years ago.

Hence this modification of Genesis 50:20— “As for you, Pete Townsend, you meant it as an innovative nine-minute rock operetta, but God meant it for good, that Aaron Belz should be kept alive, as he is today.”

[Written & performed by The Who; Live at Leeds (1970)]

Conducted by Millie Belz (9) while subject was working on something else more important; transcribed by Millie via pen and ink; April 14, 2012

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Millie: So how did you get inspired to be a poet?

Aaron: I don’t know.

Millie: You don’t know?

Aaron: No.

Millie: What have a recently done?

Aaron: Nothing.

Millie: Are you considered a good poet?

Aaron: Yes.

Millie: Are you a gorilla?

Aaron: Yes.

Millie: Have you ever had an interview?

Aaron: Yes. Quite a few. Too many.

Millie: How’s your work going?

Aaron: Fine. I guess.

Millie: Did you expect more in life?

Aaron: [pause] Quite a bit more.

Millie: Have you ever broken an arm.

Aaron: No. YES!

Millie: Do you like interviews?

Aaron: Mm-hmm.

Millie: What thoughts confuse you, about your work?

Aaron: Why I’m doing it.

Millie: What to you like most about your work?

Aaron: It’s all the same.

Millie: Is there anything you like about your work?

Aaron: Yeah. It’s creative.

Millie: Is there anything you hate about it?

Aaron: All the paperwork. [sigh]

Millie: Is there absolutely nothing you like about paperwork?

Aaron: Nothing.

Millie: Let’s continue this later, okay?

Aaron: Okay.

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[“God Will Take Care of You,” Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace, 1972]

If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after—the need for approval, publication, self-promotion: isn’t this what usually goes under the name of “ambition”? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (What could be more desperate, more anxiously vain, than the ever-increasing tendency to Google oneself?) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.

Christian Wiman, “God’s Truth is Life,” Image Issue #60 • Winter 2008-2009