The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [88]
Like prophetic language, the images of apocalypse are meant to make us uncomfortable. That is their value to us, especially in a culture that has come to worship comfort. Using an apocalyptic lens, one might say that the desolation of a slum reveals who we are as a nation, a people, far better than the gleaming stores of a shopping mall. We are forced to look at what remains when pretense, including our pretense to affluence, is taken away. But apocalypse as a form of prophecy not only reveals the fault lines of the status quo, it takes our true measure with regard to it: the discomfort we feel when the boundaries shift is the measure of our allegiance to the way things are.
Apocalypse takes us far beyond the usual bounds of language and custom. If you’ve ever experienced the strangeness of being a healthy person in an Intensive Care Unit, or a hospice or nursing home, then you have experienced apocalypse in this sense. The world turned inside out, revealed as radically different from what we thought we knew, all the things we value so highly—productivity, control of mind and body, the illusion of personal autonomy—suddenly swept away. And our response to this revelation—whether it depresses us and makes us want to run, or whether we can discern hope, and love, and grace in this strange, new place—is a measure of our true condition. It reveals us to ourselves.
And isn’t this one of the goals of writing? Contemporary writers live at a far remove from John of Patmos, whose identity as a writer was inextricably bound to that of his community. Artists in the late twentieth century have come to lament the loss of a communal role. Yet it has not entirely eluded us; in times of crisis, apocalyptic times, people still look to artists for something, maybe even hope. There is the story about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova standing in the long lines outside the prison in—I’ll call it St. Petersburg—waiting to leave letters and packages for loved ones caught up in Stalin’s purges, not even knowing whether they were dead or alive. Recognizing the poet, a woman approached her and asked, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied, “I can,” and notes that “something like a smile passed fleetingly over what once had been her face.” Akhmatova at that moment fulfilled a prophetic role, as well as an apocalyptic one: I can describe this. Just the act of describing can be defiance, in the face of terror; it allows the powerless a glimpse into another reality, one in which words and images (not guns and prisons) have power.
Akhmatova’s story suggests that writing is an inescapably communal act, as it depends on both writer and reader (or listener). The writer must be willing to see, the reader to hear. Listening to John’s Apocalypse day in, day out, I began to notice how much of it is concerned with the acts of seeing and writing. In the very first chapter a voice like a trumpet says to John: “Write on a scroll what you see” (1:11). When John turns to face the voice, he sees a figure that he describes, memorably, as holding seven stars, with a sword coming out of his mouth, and a face as bright as the sun. On touching John, the figure says: “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld. Write