The forest where the Kaluli live in Papua New Guinea is so thick that space is mapped by how far sound travels. In Chiapas, Mexico, they say that if you dream of a jaguar, people are coming. If the jaguar bites you in the dream, then those who are coming aren’t people. In the Christian tradition, Satan has a smell, but God does not. Every act of love in India is a reenactment of romance lived out countless times in innumerable previous lives. The Romans had so many redheaded slaves that the name Rufus, or “redhead,” became the most common slave name. Albrecht Durer never saw a rhinoceros in person.
It sounds like a heady mixture of Harper’s “Findings” section, anthropological field notes, and an imagist poem. Welcome to the work of Eliot Weinberger. An eminent translator, poet, and experimental essayist, Weinberger has been publishing beautifully eccentric books with New Directions since the 1970s, each as adroitly sophisticated as the last. What makes Weinberger’s writing unique is that he’s one of the last living practitioners of a modernist sensibility and taste — polymathic learning, gnomic prose, and a revulsion for the rhetorical — that was mortally wounded by New Left politics and buried by the online personal essay. Everyone is woke posturing on Twitter, and then here comes Weinberger, eyes on fire, ambling out of the wilderness like some lost prophet from another age, talking about Icelandic metempsychosis or the obsidian knives used in Aztec human sacrifices.
Weinberger’s latest work, titled Angels & Saints, is about just that — the cultural lodestar of myth, thought, tradition, rumor, and scholarship regarding angels and saints in the major monotheistic religions. Written in his typically peripatetic style, the book wanders between the thoughts of Aquinas on angelic bilocation to the legend of the prophet Ezra’s lost books to descriptions of miracles involving levitation and living human hearts drained of all blood. The book is breathless and leaves the reader reeling. A typical paragraph is worth quoting at length as an example of Weinberger’s style and skill:
Erudite, verbose, and slightly unsavory, the beauty of Weinberger’s prose is itself given a visual counterpoint in the multi-colored grid poems of ninth-century Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus printed in the book. They look like beautifully illuminated word search puzzles and were, we’re told in the afterword, meant as sort of poem-puzzles, trapping the eye and engaging the mind in order to inculcate meditation on the mysteries of Christ. It isn’t really obvious how one should read them, which is the point. You’re drawn in by their beauty and then left wandering through a labyrinth of language, searching for meaning. As we’re told in the afterward, “Devotion often requires labor to reach enlightenment.”
Much is made of the breadth of Weinberger’s learning. And it’s true that the number of facts and dreams and quotations that fill Angels & Saints is intimidating. But these things are just the raw material of his poetry-like prose. Ezra Pound wrote in a 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe that “poetry should be as well written as prose.” Weinberger turns the dictum on its head, making his prose as recondite and immediate as poetry. What he’s really doing when he overloads us with conflicting theological opinions about the sex lives of angels or various states of dead martyrs’ bodies is gently unweaving our certainty about reality, returning the world to a state of mystery and grandeur.
Often, this works, but sometimes, it doesn’t. At its weakest, Weinberger’s technique gives us a rootless view from nowhere, especially evident in some of his writings about Christianity, a subject that requires an author to take a stand. The Irish critic Denis Donoghue said that pragmatists consider themselves superior to belief because they feel independent of its claims, when in reality, they merely “act on beliefs they don’t feel obligated to articulate.” The difference between the pope and the defiantly skeptical poet Wallace Stevens, Donoghue wrote, is that “the pope does not claim to have invented, or deduced from his private desires, the articles of his beliefs.” At his weakest, Weinberger is like Stevens. We should all be so lucky.
But at Weinberger’s strongest, each of his sentences thrums with its own vitality. Each subject feels like it’s been granted a second life in text. In an essay called “The Laughing Fish” in his book Karmic Traces, Weinberger traces the literary representation of the fish from an 11th century Kashmiri text up to D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. The tranquility of observing fish, Weinberger writes, “comes from its total lack of human association. Fish have no connection to our emotional life: unlike other creatures, they do not mate. … They hardly squabble, they do not care for their young. Even insects work. A fish swims and eats and is pure movement and beauty.”
Angels & Saints is much like fish as Weinberger sees them: Its power comes from unburdening us of all of our casual associations. The language meanders through a history of paradox, of opposing opinions and contradictory revelations. And just when you begin to wonder where it’s all leading, you realize that the movement, free and purposeless, was the point all along. Pure movement and beauty, angels and fish.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
