TENEBRAE

Introduction to CLAY VESSELS

image of G.M Hopkins by R. McGovern

Clay Vessels, a book of poetry and images, by Rev. John McNamee and Mr. Robert McGovern, published by Sheed and Ward, 1995. Publisher's website and catalog

Consecratio mundi

It was McGovern who first spoke to me about his sense that we had within us the power or the chance, maybe the need, to make of something ordinary, something sacred. This notion has a history old enough so that he used the Latin phrase, 'consecratio mundi', the world consecrated, the potential to create, to make of something out of nothing or not much, to shape harmonies from the noise all about .

Father John McNamee, Robert McGovern, Aileen McGovern, myself and other friends had been getting together at the McGovern home, looking at his works in progress, reading some of McNamee's poems in progress, tending to one another, paying attention to each other's work and lives; a circle of friends repairing ourselves in one another's company. From time to time McGovern would do a woodcut to go with a poem McNamee had made. Together printed, such would go out to Father McNamee's parishioners as Christmas gift and greeting, or as announcement of an event at St. Malachy Church. More often the poems and cuts had an affinity or resonance less literal than one illustrating the other. We came to see their work as expression of a faith, maybe better called a troublesome fidelity of these two men. A fidelity finding itself nourished with the surprise of beauty in difficult places rather than with creed, profession of truths, ritual.

The images and poems here were made by two friends. One a woodcarver, husband, father and now even grandfather, professor of art, historian, rooted solid as the maple at the doorstep of his home. The other a priest, restless contemplative; stuck, stationed, posting himself, in the 'projects of the poor' for a lifetime. Some common origins: their surnames speak of ancestry, births timed to the Depression and that humbling of American spirit, boyhoods on the streets and in the row houses of immigrants' West Philadelphia. Their growing years tuned to the sounds and sadnesses of a world elsewhere at war. Then different paths to different stations.

McNamee is a man alone. Though nearly every waking hour he is surrounded by others: both at his beck and call - the secretary, the housekeeper, the parish minister - and those he serves; always the doorbell, the phone ring, the letter asking attention to passages in families not his own, tending births and christenings, the growing up and graduations, and weddings, the visits to the sick, the jailed, the dying. He always consoling, comforting, challenging and encouraging - with it all always marked by an aloneness, prayer in an empty church, the nightly ascent to a bed alone. He has a sense of paths not taken, of the promise of self made to a church that seems too often to have become a backwater of foolish men in medieval costume, curators of a museum that has collected stuff of no interest to anyone anymore.

McGovern on the other hand, a man engaged, bound, social. As much as he shapes wood with gouge he is shaped by the kids and students and colleagues and friends. Yet, with him also, so many hours alone - his hours with hammer, gouge, chisel, his imagination, and the wood. McGovern, as contemporary of Jonas Salk, knows of the achievements of this century and the irreversibility of fate. As deeply as McNamee's poems evoke a sense of other paths, other decisions, McGovern's works recognize the impossibility of a destiny other than one's own - the knife cuts once.

There is in both a lingering matter they see as faith. There is in both an undimmed capacity to wait for something sacred to erupt into a profane and broken world. Their words and woodcuts are their squinting , their pointed fingers.

The pages of this book are meant to be penetrated rather than turned, places to begin one's own contemplation. McNamee's lines are religious ones. The Latin scholars would understand, 're-ligare', lines thrown into the unknown and tugs felt back at our end, sometimes, once in a while. McGovern's woodworking like a farmer with a spade, pushing it into soil with faith that earth will not fail him.

Cuts
The woodcuts copied by high speed press for this book begin with a surfaced slab of wood; basswood often, sometimes cherry, pine or boxwood. McGovern goes at the wood with a gouge. Each cut into wood becomes light on these pages. Wood left alone presents ink to the press of the paper: black. McGovern works in the light. Start there to see his images.

He buttons this book together with two roses; frontispiece and end piece. Both full blossom. The front one in two dimensions, the only light let in is the line of gouge, with the crossing grain of wood hinting at a receding plane beyond a transparent flower. The rose at back curvaceous, suggesting another dimension, most wood cut away and the darkness the woodcutter left are the recesses of the petals. Straightforward enough. McGovern is no trickster but I must if I am to see what he wants to show, pay attention to the dark and the cut before the suggestion of light and shadow takes me to the representation of a rose.

There is a sad Christ image 'Behold the Man' (Pilate's demand), it is printed opposite 'Dark Forest'. The one easy for the eye to understand is the mysterious one. The other, the abstraction, the image is actually more direct - tangled woods in half-light with half seen shapes. McGovern gives me the tangle of the woods and then lets me rest easier with the Christ. Note the strike of knife in the shaping of Christ's torso, no different than the shape of lights and darks on opposite page.

Those representations, people. scapes, scenes and still things are only part of his work. McGovern gouges light onto page when he cuts away wood.

Sounds
Early monks mumbled the words of divine scripture. They took the scriptures as script or score not text; the sound of God on their lips, in their ears, not correspondence from one absent the scene. Hard for us literate people to distinguish the word from its grapheme. Read McNamee's poems like the monks read scripture not the way we read the morning paper. It is in the sounds.
His lines go in breath spaces. Breaths go between each line to set the rhythm. He suggests some other silences in his laying the poem on the page;

"...clay cups... " is the next image, not the completion of the previous one.

There are other silences in the poems that will be missed if read as text. The sound of "...grim ghost ships at concrete anchor" with all eleven plosive consonants rocking the breath's sound waves back and forth between lips, palate, tongue and larynx, are real waves of energy bouncing against the impediments of our voicing, buffeting our insides. The sound is the sense. McNamee lofts gentled sounds to evoke, re-present to the reader, the small grace illumined by the ghetto woman living in a desolate space.

Just as their are staccato rhythms in the length and depth of McGovern's gouges into the wood, so in McNamee's lines, there are sonorities and silences that guide toward the small earthy graces that have been given to these men that they are now trying to grant us.

Sense
There is a materiality, a carnality in these works that is no element of style but is the substance of them: sounds of the words, and light-strikes of the images, reflections of light bouncing from the pages into our eyes. I think that McNamee and McGovern are sensing the way into a presence in a world in which theology, if not faith, is moribund; in which spirituality distracts from embracing creation in its messy and confusing wholeness. The people living about the Eastern Mediterranean a few thousand years ago came to a great assertion: "The world makes sense." The Greek word 'logos' refers to this. The act of creation was to form this harmony , this logos, from the chaos.

Four images by McGovern, as many lines by McNamee as in all the other poems combined, center this volume. The images and the poem were separately made by McNamee and McGovern after a journey they had made together. They had gone to Austria to the home of Franziska Jägerstätter, widow of Franz Jägerstätter, a young father of three daughters, Thirty-six years old when killed as a resister of the Nazi warmakers in 1943. To most of us this Franz fellow was an unnecessary hero, a headstrong fool, maybe even a man of disturbed thought in a world that had gone stark mad. To McGovern and McNamee something else was going on in this man's life, this woman's life - one partnered life really - worth the pilgrimage. How they see so differently this coming/going on of something sacred in an, until a moment now fifty years away, ordinary country family :

And McGovern's image shows it from the other side, from the interior of the home, the empty doorway through which he had departed, and path where he had gone away. The view Franziska and daughters had. The hole Franz's leaving left.

The scene is a peaceful farmhouse doorway, three children going toward church in a quiet Austrian village, in a valley out of which Franz goes, in a time of, in a place at global war, saturation bombing, mutilation, death, and vengeance never seen in the whole history of the world; not until McNamee and McGovern were boys, now looking on the scene as men at the other end of life than boyhood.

We stagger to the close of a century and to the end of a millennium. Our grandfathers took on the beginnings of this century plowing fields with horses and with burgeoning hope. We, circling this world in space shuttles and jets, complete these times uncertain. Aware that the start of these thousand years were a dark age for our European ancestors, we look back over more recent holocaust, genocides, famines, wars and pestilences; all overcoming invention, discovery, cures and immense material gains and transformation. Faith has run out, fire that warmed us, ashes. We have been deafened by amplified, broadcast words, blinded by images everywhere thrust at us through televisions and projectors, Horrified by our own cruelties. Our creeds and professions hollow, faith, passions and ideologies, philosophies which we wanted to warm us, as often immolate.

McNamee asks,

How was it possible for their to be but one man to opposing immense evil in a place so dense with the signs of faith? In McGovern's, Pilgrim of the Mountain, the pilgrim is but a small aside in the dark swirl of mountain, rock and violent sky.

The work here of McNamee and McGovern does not assert that the world makes sense - that there is a logos. The authors are not shy about dark places, nor of reminding us that is where we often are. It is in these difficult places that they make their work. They, as in McNamee's line "...search the shadows await a late Rising..." They sense the presence of the mystery in the chaos of the world, different than predecessors who sensed the presence in the order, the harmony of the world . So toward Franz Jägerstätter they point. Here is the penetration of the sacred into the profaned: this pilgrim of the mountain.

The book has a calendar in its composition, and a passing through this time and geography. Early on an Advent wait, hopeful and expectant, and winter chill. Then the trembling wait of lent. Easter then Jägerstätter, the gift of a faith that demands everything in return, the ferocity of a sun that turns a lake to cloud. But also the lovely woman, her scent and shape, his pull - "Her grace graces psalms..." Earth made sacred, his desire consecrated.

And finally a rose, as at first but deeper and only a rose; then McNamee in last poem claims 'sunlight pours down on darkness'. We need this beauty more than bread.