The Poet, the Desert, and the Big Dipper

Jun 11, 2025

In my last post, I shared John Caputo's use of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as examples of thinkers who grappled with what we might call cosmic indifference to humanity, let alone a single human life. I also suggested that Martha Silano's beautiful poem "Once" might offer a path not taken.

Skimming through a poetry anthology yesterday morning, I was struck by an excerpt from Charles Erskine Scott Wood's Poet in the Desert.

I have entered into the Desert, the place of desolation. The Desert confronts me haughtily and assails me with solitude.

These lines open that long poem - a little over 100 pages in this early edition - setting the scene for what becomes a dialogue between the Poet and Truth. As a poem it reads pretty stiff and stodgy, frequently repetitive and overwrought, but some of the ideas that Wood is playing with are really interesting and in sync with that theme of cosmic indifference.

We see it over and over again. Just before the entrance of Truth, for instance, the Poet calls for it to come:

Where are you, Truth, where are you? The Desert is empty, vague, vast, and terrifying; Its stillness is as the spaces between the stars, So that I hear the murmur of my own heart and am afraid. I look up to the sky, which is eternal, And down to the hot sand, which is eternal, And I am afraid of my littleness. I know the brevity of my existence, Which is like the passing of a cloud.^[1]

Like Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, Wood turns to both the immediate natural world and to the cosmos to articulate a sense of human inconsequence. Imagining the hosts of humanity that have lived and died before the present moment, the Poet remarks that the Desert doesn't care about them at all, any more or less than it cares about anything else:

The Desert cares no more for the death of the tribes than for the death of the armies of black crawling crickets. ... I look up unto the stars, knowing that to them my life is not more valuable than that of the flowers; The little, delicate flowers of the Desert, Which, like a breath, catch at the hem of Spring and are gone.^[2]

This isn't just an articulation of ephemerality and mortality, but an attempt to grapple with the place of life in an immense cosmos. Again, just before Truth enters, the Poet asks:

Where are you, Truth, where are you? The Desert is pitiless. I am frightened of its bigness and its indifference. I am alone, an atom thrown out from Eternity, Allotted to do my part.^[3]

And the question, it seems, is: what is that part? In the second section of the poem, we Truth declares a sort of mass normalization, wherein everything is equal:

What is Man, that he should oppose himself to her eternity, Or think to know her infinite perfection? Shall the child understand the mother? To one who stands upon the promontory of a star, Are not the ants and bees as precious? Their knowledge admirable? Nature is wonderful in the infinity of her largeness, And of her smallness; The clod of the field as mysterious as a star; And a grain of dust as the mountains.^[4]

Again, that swinging from the natural world of earth to the cosmos, imagining the cosmic view from "the promontory of a star." What a beautiful thought!

I have started a full (though probably speedy) reading of the poem and am interested in seeing where it goes. But I'm also interested in this poem from a more historical perspective. I don't know a lot about Wood, but I know of him as a part of the network of those raucous rebels of the early-twentieth century, that circle of American anarchists and socialists and bohemians that we might deem the more radical edge of American modernism. As a lawyer, Wood defended many of the day's most well-known radicals, engaged in politics, and contributed articles to that circle's many storied publications.

I also know of his Heavenly Lectures and, combined with this, I can't help but wonder a bit about his intellectual biography... especially his religious biography. Early in The Poet in the Desert, we find Truth and the Poet skewering the "ignorance" of priests, and the poem folds churches into its larger critique of authority and civilization. This seems to fit with what I know of Heavenly Lectures, and perhaps with his circle's general take on religion.^[5]

And as was reading through the poem, I wondered: how does a person become a radical in the United States in the late-19th/early-20th century? And in particular, how does one become a religious radical? After all, whatever his later beliefs, Wood matriculated through many hallowed establishments of American life: he graduated from West Point, fought in the army, was involved in establishment politics. At what point in his life does he begin musing on cosmic indifference? How does he find his way to a broad critique of modern civilization, from the state to the churches and everything between and beyond?

I've been needing a small, manageable research project to use as an example in a class I teach. So I think this is a good candidate: exploring the religious life of Wood and perhaps others in his circle, with an eye toward understanding the intellectual and religious evolution of such a figure. We'll see where it goes.

I can't yet speak to exactly where Wood's poem leads and how he resolves this problem of cosmic indifference. But I feel compelled to turn, again, to another vision, in which cosmic indifference is perhaps less of a problem than it seems.

Any Common Desolation

can be enough to make you look up at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost, shot with late afternoon sun ...

This poem by Ellen Bass, "Any Common Desolation," would seem by its title and opening lines to promise heartbreak, despair. But the bulk of the poem is a list of sights and sounds and smells and memories; these things range from intimate (one's mother helping you to put on socks as child) to seemingly impersonal and fleeting, such as the sound of a cow chewing grass.

What are these things? A type of knowledge:

... You may have to break your heart, but it isn't nothing to know even one moment alive. ...

That list is big in spirit, capacious, and it brings us to the narrator walking at night in their backyard...

the Big Dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can't bear, dissolves and, like a needle slipped into your vein--- that sudden rush of the world.

And like that, we are back among the stars again -- but what a different view!