Emily Mason

This article reads Peter Larkin’s poem “praying // firs \\ attenuate” as a way to think the divine in relation to the ecological as a mutual poetic giving. It suggests that the poem entangles the reader in a series of relational imaginings that complicates the modern commodification of the nonhuman and questions a secular fatigue with the divine. Through a Catholic metaphysics in which all things—human, nonhuman, holy—are entangled, Larkin’s religious ecology maps the way to horizons promising that which cannot yet be imagined. In an entangled, layered, rhythmic, and echoing poetic form, Larkin reveals the intimate relationship between plenitude and the attenuated, gift and scarcity.

This discussion locates the doctrine of grace as one way of negotiating Barthes’ references to Christianity in his late writings. The dynamic influence of the divine experienced by the believer through faith, grace has the capacity to transform suffering into a meditative or ‘neutral’ thinking analogous to meditation or prayer. For the grieving Barthes, grace promises relief without negating the course of bereavement and so enables the act of writing. In recalling the maternal, grace also allows a focus on the mother Barthes develops in relation to the work of George Bernanos and Blaise Pascal, as well as Marcel Proust. After establishing Barthes’ interest in grace in Mourning Diary as well as A Lover’s Discourse, The Neutral and Camera Lucida, the essay discloses the working or movement of grace in three ideas current to these writings: ‘twinklings’, the ‘punctum’ and tears. These terms not only map the way to Barthes’ projected ‘new life’, or Vita Nova, but reveal an attentive engagement with Christianity and mysticism through which he discovers his neutral or non-egoic way of mediating grief. If ‘literature is like religion’, as Barthes claimed, then his writing is like grace, moving him and his reader towards an equanimity framed by, if not faithful to, Christian discourse.