"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Karen Winterburn is an emerging poet who's won several awards from the Utmost Christian Writers site. In addition to the first prize in this year's Novice Christian Poetry Contest, she took home the award for best rhyming poem for "Aporia of the Gift", a polished yet natural-sounding piece of formal writing that blends Derrida's philosophy with echoes of George Herbert's "Love Bade Me Welcome". She's kindly permitted me to reprint it below. You can also read my critique of her poem "Call Out of Exile" at Winning Writers.
Aporia of the Gift
An "aporia" is a paradoxical impasse. The philosopher Jacques Derrida claims that true gift-giving is an aporia, an impossible contradiction in terms because it always implies self-interest and expects a return. A mere exchange of equally valued items is not true gift-giving. But God shows us what true gift-giving is. He is both the Giver and the Gift. It is impossible for us to reciprocate with a gift of equal value. But he doesn't lavish us with gifts to shame our poverty. As long as we are trying to pay him back and settle the account, we cannot freely receive what he offers us. If we accept our poverty before him, we will see that his Gift to us is union with him: union of Giver and receiver and Gift. This union is the only solution to the aporia of the gift. And only by virtue of our union with God can we freely give to and receive from each other.
What I have owed in love I've always paid, measured out in small change—nickel and dime. I'm nothing if not just and fair in trade. I am that woman holding up the line: I calculate the cost of Bread and Wine, exhaust my coin while still the Loaf expands; Wine inundates and shifts the paradigm: overflows it; elevates, countermands and understates the debt it takes out of my hands.
I want to pay my bill! I estimate it's astronomical; it multiplies as Love devises to inebriate and fill me past my means to amortize my liability. I agonize, liquidate my estate, consign the lot to such a Love: who does not itemize or keep accounts or hold the Gift he's got on lay-away till I can pay sans caveate—
—to such a Love as this. No recompense for such unheard-of Love is on report, nor have I anything of consequence to make return. My whole life comes up short: my yearning is a poverty that thwarts my moves, my airs, and leaves me impotent, with bare and baffled heart. No speechless sort, I stammer at the stop I've reached, consent to yeild, receive the Feast—to eat and be outspent.
Love quiets me. Love sits me on his knee. "You are yourself," says he, "all I desire." Might Love be satisfied in colloquy? We wink and whisper till my eyes acquire his own spark. My darkened heart now afire with borrowed Light bestows itself and—swift to cede—receives itself! Might Love conspire to grant affinity to me, uplift this heart to make it one with Giver and the Gift?
