Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman

This was a really good book. I had heard of Christian Wiman. I think I read his first book, My Bright Abyss, but I’m not sure. I heard a lot about him, though. He has had cancer for 18 years, diagnosed shortly after he was married. He nearly died several times and had 11 different major treatments. In interviews, he said, “I spent much of 2022 and 2023 in bed and would be dead now, had a spot in a clinical trial in Boston not become available. For months it was dicey, and then proved successful.” He was the editor of Poetry Magazine for 10 years and now teaches at Yale.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to read about despair, but everything I read about or by Christian Wiman I like, so I decided to try it. The book is a memoir but not one written as a story. It’s almost like a journal. The title says "entries.” Maybe these were journal entries. They were essays or reflections of various lengths.

I feel fortunate that I don’t suffer from serious depression—at least so far—the way many people I love and know do, but in part because I do know and love many who do, I find it fascinating to learn about what it is like to be depressed and theories on what causes depression. In this book, Christian Wiman does not really try to describe or explain depression but he reflects on what is on his mind. There are times of joy, sadness, and all kinds of emotions. His writing is so beautiful, it’s a joy to read it. Wiman is a poet and includes many poems by others as well as his own. There is a lot of prose, too. His mind goes all over. He brings in so much knowledge and thoughts about other books and writings. I can’t imagine how much he has read. Yet it all hangs together eloquently. I want to re-read it.

One of my favorite passages is below. One thing I think is counter-intuitive about sadness or depression is that somehow it is comforting to read or listen to something that is incredibly sad. Why is that?

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world,

but no: there isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.

I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

This may be the saddest poem I know. As with other Bronk poems [This poem is by William Bronk, who Wiman writes about and quotes at length. -mm], it sends me reeling through my own life, grasping after my own anchors: my wife and my work, my God. Oh no.

And yet, this minor poem brings me major peace. Why? Because it is beautiful, and beauty triggers an instinct for an order beyond the one it enacts. And because usually we suffer the drifts of the world but do not really feel it. It happens to us but not in us. One of the functions of art, says Kearney, is to make us active rather than passive with regard to our memories and therefore our futures, to help us move “from melancholy to mourning.” True enough, both in general and with regard to this one poem. And yet every time I read this cosmically compressed elegy my chief feeling is not grief or mourning, but elation.

I have a friend who suffers periods of deep depression. When I read this poem, I thought of him. He used an analogy of wrestling with his dad and actually “pinning him.” He said it left him feeling bereft, realizing his dad was not all-knowing and all-powerful. Now he was on his own, “the only adult in the room,” and he didn’t feel capable. We all have that kind of experience, don’t we, where we find out our parents are not the superheroes we thought they were? When I read this “Oh no” in the poem I thought it depicted so well what we feel: Oh no, I have to figure this out myself? Oh no, I not only have to figure this out for myself but for my children, too? Or my parents as they age? Oh no!

And even though this poem doesn’t explicitly say it, I think our “Oh no” is about God, too. Oh no, God’s not going to make everything perfect? Oh no, even though I pray and do all the things, bad stuff is still going to happen to me? Oh no, innocent people are going to be killed in wars, accidents, and catastrophes?

Why does this poem make Wiman feel elation? Why is it one of my favorite passages in the book? Wiman writes about sound, form, the frequency of Being, repetition, careful substitution, deletion, and not-saying. I think all of that is true and some beyond my conscious awareness. And somehow, saying so well, so perfectly what I feel but can’t put into words makes me elated, too. Wiman writes, “Something of our deepest sadness, which is our deepest loneliness, has been faced and, precisely because it has been faced, lifted up.” Yes.

Once, when I talked to friends about an author I liked, I said that some of her sentences seemed to glow on the page, like gemstones. This book is full of gemstone sentences.