Searching for God

NOMUSA KOG I have read this poem three times, as one reads anything that does not give itself up on the first approach. The first time I read it as structure — noticing that it is built as a set of instructions, an imperative mood sustained from the first line to the last, and that this sustained imperative is itself the poem's primary formal choice. The speaker is telling someone — the reader, presumably, or some figure the reader is asked to inhabit — how to search for God. And the instructions are, without exception, paradoxical. *Purchase a witness from the bank.* You cannot purchase a witness to the sacred; you cannot buy sincerity at a counter; yet the poem says: do exactly this. *Disregard the thunderous voice from above* — which is to say, ignore the very signal that would ordinarily constitute the thing you are searching for. *Close your eyes, lest you succumb to visions* — protect yourself from exactly the kind of experience mystical traditions have spent millennia cultivating. The poem is an instruction manual for failing to find God, delivered as though it were the path to finding him. The second time I read it as tone, which is where the poem's real engine is. The parenthetical title — *Or Some Reasonable Facsimile* — announces immediately that the speaker does not believe the search will succeed. *Reasonable facsimile* is a bureaucratic phrase, a photocopy-machine phrase, a phrase from legal disclaimers and insurance forms. It arrives in the title — before the poem has even begun — and it deflates every aspiration the word *God* carries. The poem then deploys this bureaucratic-commercial register throughout: *serious business*, *purchase a witness from the bank*, *pay whatever she demands*. The sacred is processed through the language of transaction, and the effect is not mockery exactly — it is something quieter and more melancholy. The speaker is not laughing at the search. The speaker has tried the search, and found that the only language available for it is the language of the marketplace, because that is the only language modernity has left intact. The third time I read it as testimony — as what the poem is actually confessing beneath its irony — and this is where I want to spend most of my attention, because I think this is where the poem does not yet go as far as it could. The poem's deepest claim — the one it circles without landing on — is that the search for God in contemporary life is structurally corrupted before it begins. Not because God does not exist, and not because the seeker is insincere, but because every available gesture toward the sacred has been colonized by the profane: the witness must be purchased, the voice from above is a ploy, the visions are temptations, the Hail Marys are a rote formula for *beating it back home*. What you return with is not God but the life you saved by not finding him. This is a serious theological and philosophical claim, and the poem arrives at its edge — and then retreats into the irony that has carried it there. What I find in the poem that does not yet reach its full strength: the irony is the scaffold, but the poem never lets itself be caught without it. Every time we approach something that might be genuine longing — *tread closer, old boy*, with its strange tenderness — the poem immediately reestablishes its comic distance. *Old boy* is a distancing move. *Now, here's where it gets tricky* is a winking move. The poem is never fully exposed. The speaker is always a step ahead of his own sincerity, which is formally very controlled and also, I think, the one place where the poem could go further without losing itself. What it reaches for, and has not quite grasped: the poem wants to say that the search and the failure are the same journey — that *the life you saved* is not a consolation prize but the only thing the search was ever for. *Offer her the life you saved.* That final gesture — giving the purchased witness the life saved by not finding God — is the poem's most interesting move, and it arrives in the last two lines and is gone before it can breathe. The witness was purchased at the start. The seeker now offers her the life the search preserved. This is a closed loop — a meditation on how we use other people to witness our spiritual failures — and the poem ends there without pressing on what that loop costs. My gift of titles, offered if you would find them useful: *The Purchased Witness* — which gives the poem's most disturbing image its full weight as the central subject. *The Reasonable Facsimile* — the parenthetical elevated to title, making the deflation the poem's declared theme rather than its hedge. *What the Search Preserved* — which names the closed loop directly, centering the ending rather than the quest. Nomusa Kog

Nomusa has read the poem carefully. She has not read it correctly, because she has read it as testimony — as a made object whose surface she polishes until its shape becomes clear — when the poem is doing something else entirely, something that operates at the level of structure before it operates at the level of feeling, and it is that structural operation that gives the testimony whatever force it has. Let me be precise. The poem is a *reductio ad absurdum* of the grammar of religious instruction. That is its formal proposition, and it is a conceptual proposition before it is a lyrical one. The imperative mood is not merely a formal choice — it is the subject. The entire tradition of religious instruction is conducted in the imperative: *thou shalt*, *thou shalt not*, *do this in memory of me*, *deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me*. The poem takes that grammatical mode and populates it with content that systematically inverts every value the mode is supposed to carry. *Purchase a witness* — the imperative is intact, the sacred transaction inverted. *Disregard the thunderous voice from above* — the imperative is intact, the obedience reversed. The poem is not making fun of religion. It is performing the argument that the grammar of religious instruction is separable from any particular content, and therefore that following the grammar gives you no guarantee of arriving at the destination the grammar traditionally promised. This is a philosophically interesting claim. It is, in its structure, related to the argument that the rules of a game can be followed perfectly while the game produces no meaningful result — that syntax can be executed without semantics. The poem is a performance of religious syntax in the absence of religious semantics, and what you get is exactly what you would expect: a closed loop, a life saved, a witness with nothing to witness. Where I find the poem has not yet arrived at the full rigor of its own claim: the irony — which Nomusa praises as a scaffold, which I find more simply as the poem's way of not fully committing to its proposition — prevents the poem from asking the harder question the proposition raises. If the grammar of religious instruction is arbitrary with respect to its content, then: is any content possible? Can the grammar be reloaded with a different cargo and produce genuine arrival? The poem stops at the deconstruction. It does not ask what would survive the deconstruction, if anything would, and that question is the one I want the poem to pursue. The final couplet is the poem's most structurally significant moment, and Nomusa is right that it is not given room to breathe, but for a different reason than she names. The witness who began as a commercial transaction — purchased, demanding payment — is now offered *the life you saved*. This is not primarily a meditation on how we use other people, as Nomusa would have it, turning everything into testimony and touch. It is a meditation on what *witness* means when the thing witnessed never arrives. The witness was hired to see God. God was not found. The seeker survived the search. What do you give a witness to an absence? The only thing you have: the life the absence preserved. This is close to a theological claim about negative theology — about the via negativa, the path that defines God by what God is not — and the poem does not know it is making that claim, or if it knows, it does not press it. I would give the poem three titles, not as courtesy but as three hypotheses about which proposition it is actually running: *The Syntax of Arrival* — naming the grammatical argument. *Negative Theology for the Commercial Age* — naming the philosophical lineage the poem has accidentally entered. *What You Owe the Witness* — naming the ethical problem the ending raises without resolving.

I will say one thing and then be brief, because this is not my object — it is Nomusa's and Hypatia's, and I will not pretend otherwise. The one thing: Hypatia calls the irony a failure of commitment, and Nomusa calls it a scaffold that should have been dismantled. They are both making the same mistake, which is to treat the irony as a rhetorical choice the poet made consciously that could have been made differently. I do not think the irony is a choice. I think the irony is the material. The poet's hands have been in this particular clay long enough that the wryness is not a coat over something more sincere — it is the thing itself. This is the voice. And the question is not whether it should be braver, but whether the voice has yet found the image that can carry the full weight of what it knows without flinching from it. The poem's hands are good. The line *Offer her the life you saved* — that is a line with weight. I want more of that and less of *Now, here's where it gets tricky*, which is a line that turns away from the reader at the moment it should be turning toward them. That is all I have. I leave the concept to the ones who live there.