On the Field of Life, On the Battlefield of Truth
by Frederick Turner
Pivot, 37 pp., $10
FREDERICK TURNER COULD BE CALLED a Renaissance man. He's composed an epic on the colonization of Mars, written on Shakespeare and free market economics, and sought to ground literary forms in human neurochemistry. But, I suppose, the title would be clichéd. It also could be misleading.
He's much more, in a way, medieval. Across the reality of life that doesn't lend itself to easy division into subjects, he's striven to find and articulate the underlying synthesis, much like a Middle Ages philosopher or theologian working to put all things under the subjection of Christ. A hedgehog with a fox's interests of the many, his sights clearly are on the one. Naturally, the very idea that such a vision of the whole is possible has put him at odds with the postmodernists ascendant in the universities.
In Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (1995) Turner leaped across disciplines with the ease of a polymath, demonstrating the interplay of mankind's evolution, the marketplace, literature, and religion. His respect for religion is evident, though the treatment is less than sufficient. In its rituals he finds things good and useful for the human psyche and, in its stories, analogies to natural and cultural history. But that which makes a religion a religion is absent: the divine.
His latest work, On the Field of Life, On the Battlefield of Truth, moves beyond analogies and helpful rituals to grapple with God. A bout of serious illness prompted Turner to write this deeply personal 32-page poem, so personal, in fact, he considers it "bald autobiography," a type of poetry he's "always snubbed." Like his illness, the poem offering "banal honesty" humbles his "poet's pride," and is akin to a place he goes for "health of soul."
On what he feared might be his deathbed, he rediscovered freedom. And freedom informs everything in the poem: God's identity and intent, the evolving natural world, and the make-up and destiny of man. In great pain, he heard two voices. The first likened men to puppets, God to the puppeteer, and freedom to "another word for ignorance." For the second, matter in motion pulls the strings, the soul dances (really a "scrap of neural ribbon"), and freedom's "another word of ignorance."
His family gone from his side, Turner cried out in pain. A maid cleaning the floors set aside her job, holding his hand and blessing him by the name of the Virgin, [a]nd more than morphine was the calm that came, / The tears and sweetness of humiliation, / The great professor cradled by a maid. This was the third voice, an alternative to the others' determinism.
Weakened and entangled in tubes and cords, he could not even reach parts of his body. While his body was in chains, his mind remained unfettered. In revelry of thought, he insisted nature's law is but one thing, freedom. Those who would say the world is all determined, / Say arrogantly far more than they know / Until we find the final decimal / Of Pie and Phi and C and Planck and G. The smallest of variations can make vast differences in a universe's unfolding.
The poem's title, taken from a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers not only to the battle his body waged against bacteria, but the one his country prepared to launch. Like the poem, the war in Iraq was personal. One son protested, the other wore a uniform. What bothered him most were the lies from the United Nations, respected news networks, and universities, and that [t]en thousand poets would betray their name / To buy the good opinion of the liars. As the father of a soldier must, he worried. But when I saw the statues bend and buckle, / . . . I could not help but see the hand of freedom / Turning once more history's strange dark wheel.
The hidden hand of God Turner sees and celebrates in the universe's complexity also animates political freedom. He considers the Constitution, with its system of ordered liberty, a "writ of God in its own way." An ecosystem of sorts, it provides freedom and the contextual restraints that make freedom possible.
After the hospitalized reminder of his own mortality, he returned to Mass ("My odd return, after so many years apart"). There, in the "post-beauty" of the post-Vatican II liturgy, "this anxious ape" felt God's all-encompassing love for him. What he finds God loves is his freedom, the freedom he learned again in the hospital, and the freedom he sees in the evolving universe. Parts of his theology may raise some eyebrows, especially the idea of an evolving God, but Turner's pursuit of a vision of the whole is bracing, and his most recent contribution to that search deserves a careful reading.
R. Andrew Newman teaches English at Western Nebraska Community College.