The Longing for Resonance in a Disenchanted World

Sylvia Plath's Spasmodic Tricks of Radiance

Photo by Volodymyr Tokar on Unsplash

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Last week I explored the recently popular topic of enchantment/disenchantment and suggested that Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance overlaps with these ideas in some revealing ways. Instead of disenchantment, Rosa speaks of the world grown mute. And instead of enchanted, he talks of resonance. But we have fundamentally the same dynamic at play. The individual either feels cut off from some ineffable, Other source of wonder and goodness (a source that for Rosa is “uncontrollable”) and is therefore alone in a cold and indifferent universe, or the individual feels called to by some Other thing or being (or Being) and responds to it with gratitude or prayer or delight or some other gesture, and is in some deep way transformed by the interaction. I think most of us feel ourselves to be moving between these two worlds as we navigate a secular society that pulls us toward a controllable, materialist, “dead” world ripe for manipulation and an uncontrollable, transcendent, Creation, preserved moment-by-moment by God in an active gesture of love.

At the end of last week’s paid substack, I made the following claim:

My thesis would be that each of us has an innate desire toward the transcendent, and a truly disenchanted world is a world cut off from the transcendent. Can a world created by God every truly be disenchanted? No, as I hope to show in the coming weeks. And the result is what Charles Taylor calls the “cross-pressures” of modernity. The pull on one hand toward a disenchanted view of the world and on the other hand toward some intimation of the transcendent. But we all need something transcendent to hold on to, to orient our lives, to give us meaning, direction, and purpose. Whether we believe in the transcendent or not, we experience enchanted moments that elevates our lives above a strictly material account of existence. The question is what to do such moments. For the Christian, we position those experiences as moments of grace from God. But what about for the secular person? How are they to explain these moments of resonance? I hope to come back to this topic, maybe next week, with a poem by Sylvia Plath.

This week is that week. What I want to take up is the fascinating subject of how a secular poet deals with an experience of deep resonance that feels transcendent without abandoning her secular commitments. In other words, how does Plath deal with Taylor’s “cross-pressures” of modernity? It’s part of my thesis that moments of deep resonance, where we are confronted with the transcendent nature of Being, are a normal, natural, and healthy part of human existence. And everyone needs to learn how to narrate those experiences in some way. Romantic love is one very common narrative. Self-actualization is another. The occult seems to be a growing one. I suppose in this season politics is a way some people tell their story of an encounter with the transcendent. Of course there’s always traditional religion. And then there’s nature. Which brings us to Sylvia Plath and her beautiful poem, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.” I’m not going to reproduce the entire poem here, but you can listen to her read it in this YouTube video. What we want to watch for is how she encounters a transcendent experience in nature and chooses to re-narrate it as something materialistic:

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Plath begins with some lovely lines describing the black rook arranging its feathers on a stiff twig in the rain. What’s remarkable about this image is that it’s unremarkable. A rook is not considered a particularly beautiful bird. And hunching is not a particularly glorious position for a bird. It’s just a bird, in a tree, in rainy weather. But much like William Carlos Williams famous “Red Wheelbarrow,” “so much depends” upon this bird, in a tree, in rainy weather. We know this moment is significant to the speaker because immediately she states, “I do not expect a miracle / Or an accident / To set the sight on fire / In my eye, nor seek / Any more in the desultory weather some design, / But let spotted leaves fall as they fall / Without ceremony, or portent.”

Of course, to say she “does not expect a miracle” suggests that that is precisely what happens to her. The rook appears to her as a miracle that sets her sight on fire. This is despite the fact that she does not seek “any more” (suggesting previous belief in God) some design in the weather. Instead, she lets “leaves fall as they fall,” meaning nothing, portending nothing. The sky is mute, the rook is mute. This moment in nature which in a flash seemed miraculous is really mute. Resonance has been declined.

And then there is a turn in the poem: “Although, I admit, I desire, / Occasionally, some backtalk / From the mute sky.” Here we very clearly see Taylor’s concept of the cross-pressures of modernity. The speaker does not “any more” seek “design” in the weather (for the weather is cold and indifferent and mute), and yet a part of her does desire the sky to speak. She is pulled between a desire for the transcendent (and thus a resonant experience with nature) and her secular materialist commitment to a mute world.

The speaker goes on to explain that she can’t complain that the sky is mute, because she still has “a certain minor light” that takes “possession of the most obtuse objects now and then.” Her examples are mundane: a kitchen table or chair. What Plath intends here has never been entirely clear to me, but I think the idea is that in common everyday objects something sparkles now and then, a “minor light,” perhaps like the Moon is to the Sun. But it’s very important that this is a minor light. Something has been lost and the speaker is cognizant of this loss. This is a point Charles Taylor is good on—that modern people experience the disenchantment of the world as a loss, a retreat of something great. Here the speaker does not say the world is mute entirely, but it only speaks in whispers. And notably, those whispers primarily come from manufactured goods—kitchen tables and chairs—not the nature world, not the world of the black rook in rainy weather.

At this point the speaker moves on and announces that she now walks “Wary (for it could happen / Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical / Yet politic, ignorant / Of whatever angel may choose to flare /Suddenly at my elbow.” It’s striking that she walks “wary,” as if she wants to avoid these moments of resonance or transcendence, as if they upset her settled understanding of the world (a world that is much like Eliot’s wasteland—“dull, ruinous”). She’s aware that the world is enchanted. That angels may “choose to flare” at her elbow. And all she can do to protect herself is to be skeptical. But even that isn’t enough.

The next section beautifully captures the experience of the transcendent, of resonance with the natural world, and the way we might stubble into these experiences:

I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality.

Notice that as Rosa describes in his book, the image of the rook calls out to the speaker (“so shine”), and the speaker responds to the rook physiologically (“seize my senses, haul / My eyelids up”). And through this exchange the speaker is changed (she gains “a brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality.”). And importantly, the rook remains free, uncontrollable. This is precisely how Rosa describes resonance. The opening phrase to this section, “I only know,” suggests that the speaker struggles to make sense of this phenomenon, but she knows the phenomenon is real and important. She also know that it has the power to do what few other things can do in the wasteland, to offer a “brief respite from the fear / Of total neutrality.” That is the great fear of the wasteland. That the universe is mute and indifferent to humanity. And all things are equal in their meaninglessness.

She continues by saying that she will continue journeying through this fatiguing life by piecing together some kind of contentedness, a tone of resignation. And then she ends the poem, coming to a conclusion about this moment of transcendence:

Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

In the end, the speaker acknowledges that “miracles occur,” but she redefines miracles as “spasmodic / Tricks of radiance.” Illusions of transcendence caused by glitches in the brain. Nothing more, nothing less. We remain in the wasteland. And yet, as dismissive as this is, we have the speaker’s final words, the long wait for the “rare, random descent” of the “angel.” It appears to me that she still can’t quite break free from language of transcendence. The sky may be mute, and yet we still wait for some angel to descend from it. Even if we assume, as I suppose Plath wants us to, that the angel is an “angel”—a mere spasmodic trick of radiance—the fact that the speaker is forced to use religious language betrays once again the cross-pressures of secularism. She naturally feels pulled toward the transcendent and yet remains “skeptical” of anything beyond the material.

What are we to make of all this? I think what’s valuable here (aside from the heart-breaking beauty of the poetry) is the way Plath poetically captures the modern predicament. When we encounter these moments of deep resonance that call us to the transcendent, as we often will if we are out in Creation, how do we narrate these encounters given a secular commitment to materialism? Her answer is “spasmodic tricks of radiance,” but the problem here is that something significant is lost. The moment loses its beauty. The rook is no longer an experience of something Other which we respond to and are changed by; instead it is merely some odd synapses firing (or misfiring, as it were) in our brain. In other words, Plath’s poem leaves us with an impoverished account of resonance, one that doesn’t accurately fit our experience. Part of the Christian witness we should offer is an account of the wonder of being that doesn’t leave us impoverished.

I do have one final closing concern. Plath’s speaker encounters this experience in Creation by stopping and observing. I worry that had Plath been born 60 years later, she would never have seen that black rook in rainy weather (assuming the poem is autobiographical). She would have been staring at a phone. The possibility for resonance would have been missed because she would have been entirely focused on a controllable device (smartphone) rather than on her uncontrollable surroundings. It’s not enough for Christians to merely offer an enriched account of existence as Creation, we have to be participating in it as well, not always locked in our own heads (I’m preaching to myself here) or glued to a screen.

To return to my thesis from last week, each of us has an innate desire toward the transcendent, and a truly disenchanted world is a world cut off from the transcendent. In a world created and sustained by God, we cannot help but have moments were we experience the Created-ness of existence, the way God preserves all things, and our resonance with that Creation. The question is only whether we will stop and be grateful for these moments and acknowledge them for what they are, or will we deny them their power and re-narrate them as spasmodic tricks of radiance.

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On a totally different topic, I was pleased to join Russell Moore to talk about mental health on his podcast last week. Take a listen!