When I was in high school, I volunteered at the local library where my job was to help children learn to read. It was not an easy job, but I did some good in the world, and made some money doing it. The money went into a bank account. When I was ready to graduate from high school, that money paid for my registration to college. It is a miracle to watch someone learn how to read. It is a miracle I went to college. While reading Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell (Bookshop), I remembered my high school job to teach children to read and recalled what it felt like to inhabit the desperate, frustrating, and sometimes miraculous space where a person becomes literate.
Poetry is as much about remembering as it is about reading. Any teacher will tell you that the process of teaching someone to learn how to read feels anything but miraculous. It is a slow process, frustrating. At no other time can you feel words desperately wanting to mean something, the mind grasping for meaning and not finding it. In his new stunning poetry book, Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar metaphorically transforms this frustration into an extended metaphor representing the long and slow process by which a person finds grace. If learning to read is the torturous process by which a person learns to translate sounds into words, and words into meaning, mystical grace is perhaps the process by which a person unstitches herself from the warp of meaning, undoes the threads of words and matter that tie a soul to this planet, finally undoing even the matter itself, until, what? Nothing.
“The Miracle” and the Miraculous
“The Miracle,” one of the early and more remarkable poems in Pilgrim Bell, starts with a reading lesson. Akbar writes: “Gabriel seizing the illiterate man, alone and fasting in a cave, and commanding READ, the man saying I can’t, Gabriel squeezing him tighter, commanding READ, the man gasping I don’t know how, Gabriel squeezing him so tight he couldn’t breathe, squeezing out the air of protest, the air of doubt…”
It was this passage that reminded me of what it felt like to teach a child to read.
All this training, for what?
So that God might speak to man, is Akbar’s answer, though he doesn’t quite put it in those words. He puts it into these words: “It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle.”
What is grace but another name for being empty? Being holy. Perhaps the pun on the hole is no mistake.
The poem continues: “Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone.”
The paradox of mystical poetry is the ineffable cannot be described in words.
Varieties of Mystical Experience
When Dante wrote the Paradiso, he encountered the same difficulty. How does a man describe God in words? Dante explains that he is able to write about what he saw through the process of accommodation. We are not to take the imagery of the Paradiso literally, nor are we to imagine time as unfolding in a linear fashion. The Paradiso happened in one instant, the imagery of pure blasted light. Dante describes it as his brain literally being smite. Dante writes: “I have seen things that one who comes down from there cannot remember and cannot utter” and “much is permitted there that is not permitted to our faculties here” and then this: “to signify transhumanizing per verba is impossible; therefore let the comparison suffice.” (Translation Durling Martinez, Bookshop).
The experience might have been God; the unfolding of the rose was all Dante.
And so, mystical poetry can be personal because, as Akbar writes: “The key, filed smooth to fit every lock, opens none.” Perhaps nature is manifold in its beauty and horror only to ensure that there would be something in everything to awaken each person. Religious experience is indeed full of variety.
All of this is to say that the mystical, if is arrives, it arrives as mystery, in the mind itself, in multiple forms. There are six poems titled “Pilgrim Bell” in this collection, and each instance provides a new variety of mystical experience. Each instance is almost a renewed call to prayer.
Akbar notes in the first instance of “Pilgrim Bell,” “My savior…Up until now he has been. / a no-call no-show.” The turn of phrase is brilliant. It takes us from belief, to disbelief, and the poem spins wildly around that axis.
“Pilgrim Bell” returns again in another form. In the second “Pilgrim Bell” Akbar almost seems to console himself about his inability to access the mystical. “The stillness you prize. / Won’t prize you back.”
There’s an irreverence, and also a reverence in these poems. “all piety leads to a single / point: the same paradise / where dead lab rats go.” There’s frustration and doubt when transcendence doesn’t arrive.
There are marvels here enough to fill a whole book, and Akbar does it. His abundance is almost sickening sweet. He knows it. There’s a poem called “Cotton Candy.” There’s not much that is bad here. Akbar wouldn’t have it. “It’s so unsettling / to feel anything but good.”
Like Meditation
Have you ever meditated, reader? I have. I have meditated while trying to teach children to read. Sometimes it worked. More often I just breathed. Akbar also has a poem for this. It’s another “Pilgrim Bell.” It goes: “How long can you speak. / Without inhaling. How long. / Can you inhale without. / Bursting apart…”
We can hold the universe in our heads with our literature, but in the end, our voices can only say so many words on a single breath.
Akbar confronts the problem of evil, but he doesn’t wrestle with it. It arises. It falls away.
Akbar is concerned to have “envied the wicked when I saw / the prosperity / of the wicked.” He doesn’t linger long in doubt. “Tell me how to live. / And I will live that way,” he writes, in another instantiation of “Pilgrim Bell.”
There are so many “Pilgrim Bells,” and these are also extended metaphors, reminding us that there are so many forms for experiencing the divine, so many ways the divine manifests.
Akbar writes another “Pilgrim Bell.” Here he ends it with: “Every person I’ve ever met. / Has been small enough. / To fit. / In my eye.” The body itself is mystical. The mind, too. The spirit of Emily Dickinson resides in this. After all, she wrote: “The Brain—is wider than the sky.”
Perhaps the brain is beneath our feet, too? I have read that the fungi connect the forest together with as much intricacy and complexity as a human brain, each tree a node, each weed a node, too. The fungi bringing together the oldest tree, so that the eldest can feed the youngest seedling. In this manner, the ancient old growth feeds the first leaf of the tenderest shoot. Nature is indeed mystical.
I wouldn’t know this had I not read it. But do I know it at all? Akbar describes heaven as a place with no opportunity costs. Just abundance. He plays on Eliot’s “Do I dare to eat a peach” when he writes “Every orange I eat disappears the million / peaches… I could have eaten.” But in his mother’s heaven he can eat all the peaches he wants.
The last poem in the book, “The Palace” is the weakest. How do you end a book about grace with grace? You cannot end it.
Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell at Amazon.com (affiliate link)
Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.