When I began reading Eating & Drinking I assumed it would be a difficult challenge to review the work of a poet whose beliefs seemed so very different from mine. As a "convert" to atheism, by way of existentialism, simply glancing at his religious verbiage was off-putting. My apprehension crumbled page by page. Sam Silva's poems aren't the least traditionally religious. His fears, desires, and disappointments, though subjectively experienced, have a collective resonance with anyone who longs for peace and social justice, genuine tenets of most religions and philosophies. His mirror reflects the madness found in all of us who care about the world and who feel nearly as hopeless.
This poetry is clearly Christian existentialism. When I read each solitary expression of despair and contemplate the man with whom he most identifies, I'm thoroughly convinced of my analysis. Whether or not Jesus was heir to the throne of David, I believe that he was essentially the first Jewish existentialist, at least a Gnostic and tender warrior on a vision quest in the cave. To understand this perspective you'd have to tease apart each and every tradition associated with him to find him. In the turbulent Roman province of Palestine, cultural diversity and politics inspired contemporaries and the immediate generations to claim him as their own. Some traditions say the Zadokites claim he fought with them at Masada. I've concluded that he was a mishandled phenomenon, a man of many voices whose compassion confounded the powerful and comforted the weak. Perhaps we'll never have a clear answer, but Sam Silva is certain he was human.
Big Brother
The devil said
"its fuck or be fucked"
and the devil
was, like Cain,
my brother, a beater,
a brawler and not a lover
of any scam
"where some wise guy god,
with a silvery rod
pushed its cheap little trick
of the book 'I AM'
through the orifice
of its own thin brain
and the 'whole word sucked'
itself insane with a honey lick
of his words like 'hell.'"
My brother knew that my shit
was dead!
What he didn't know was that it
was the only thing I had
that he could kill.'
Morning And The City Gates
[...]
Philosophies!,
whose passions
fill up the void and silence
of religion...like a neighbor
whose sobriety and earthly sense,
whose jokes and common recompense,
salt the food, the thought, the meat
of all such things as darker hours
might somehow have wasted
...on the gods.
My own mother's schizophrenic torment went unrelieved by the typical psychiatric prescriptions of the 1950's on through the 1980's. I realized from just the very few years I spent with my mother that she was dreaming awake, or more accurately, having nightmares with her eyes open. And when my adult relatives failed to protect me from her confusion, I felt so betrayed and angry. Knowledge helped me to accept her condition and her habitual abandonment of me, and I took to heart the teachings of the gentle shepherd. But well-intentioned foster parents moralized about her. "She's so selfish and self-centered. She seems well enough when she takes her medication." Who could understand her suffering and her agony in making even the simplest decision? My mother would pace the floor for hours trying to decide between this or that. One night my sister and I sat with her in a small diner all afternoon until closing time that evening. We were eventually forced out into the darkness where my mother led us home via a strange new route. Years later during one of our 'visits' she said she was afraid to pass the church next door to the diner, because she was afraid a devil might jump out and grab her. Thus the detour.
Where Every Act Is Treason
I did not even dare
a hateful wicked thought
much less the courage of despair,
nor fight
for gentle sweetness
to be slaughtered in the night
of all things given
and unfought.
It was not death I feared,
nor even pain alone,
but doing what was wrong
and doing what was right,
the two the same!
the Devil's money
for why I lived till I was dead,
and death alone
might save
my every inch from Hell.
Give it to his legions
to buy their salt and bread.
teach them more than how to fight;
teach them how to kill.
Sam Silva is a prolific writer. It is the surfeit of his comprehension and the exigency of his condition that cause him to leave no paltry stone unturned nor facet unreflected. Despite the recurrence of a core vocabulary, each poem is deftly nuanced. In its entirety Eating & Drinking is a vast mirror and a single poem a piece of his mosaic. Sam Silva's poetry is the improbable integration of his life.
Brush Light In The Abstract
Van Gogh was savaged
by his urge to love.
The dry poems of the age
turn their face away
that every page
might, failing all else,
be discreet.
And you have the vision
of your labor
like a wild, but tended, garden,
seeded wildly and gently grown.
So that as the fruits of wisdom
I have learned each lovely flavor,
and gazing at such paintings on the wall,
this furtive autumn,
I have learned to have a notion,
gentle tear, and fathomed ocean,
I have learned to have a vision
of my own.
Magic Among Animals
The gift of a dark storm.
...that every predator
would shy away
to his dry cave
and lick
the liquor of the rain
in that more drowsy
aspect of the carnal form.
This beast!, that we imagine
in our pain
...he is like every man.
He has a burning vicious hunger
and a tiny brain.
And day is much like night,
and night, like day.
And love is more than what we do,
though it is likewise,
the only
thing we can ....
The Wonderful Perfect Lie
[...] I found
a way to live within the womb
and never die
with all the rapture held and coddled
in my sweet clichés of starry nights
assuming that the mist beyond the tomb
is merely like a freezer
where eternally forgotten corpses lie
numb with all of the coma
of their dreamless light.
Silva also knows moments of peace and love, an immanence wherein existence doesn't explain or justify. His is pure joy while he watches his wife, Rachel Davis, paint.
She Takes The Love The World Has Thrown Away
[...]
She is trimming the briars
of Summer and Fall
or moving the snow on the Winter drive.
My hand is pale from the indoor hours.
My brain and its wires
entomb their tall
discordant frame
whose belly is a bouncing ball
along the song
its thin name choirs...
...she is balancing the books the same!,
making the meal
of the household keep.
I have no clue!, no!, none at all!
what chemistry
has called the love
and labor of her endless fires
especially for such clueless shame
as wanders off to sleep,
early in the day, enthralled
by all the weak
and lacking circumstances
that came like some bleak star
to be a burden and curse
that unlucky angels found
bundled in a heap.
The More Words Seem to Fail
The disease of the dark.
The ruin of constraint
and tired. Indifference
spread so smooth
like buttery words
some stupid saint,
some dull naif
thinks lovely thoughts
about people like me
who have little want
save a walk in the park
and the sex of paint
on a canvass
loved like the dimming hours.
A dark disease that longs to be free
not at all like itself
but just like the birds
around this dry leaf
that feeds the flowers
that beautiful people so full of passion
know for a poem
and mistake
for eternity.
"For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, 'He has a demon!' The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!'" (Gospel of Luke). Silva knows well the myth of the son of man who came eating and drinking. For him, Jesus was simply a man, perhaps with confused thoughts but who certainly loved people. They called him a sinner, one who consorted with temple harlots and the women of wealthy families. He could have chosen to remain, and there are traditions which maintain that he did, such as the Masada legends. John the Baptist, who prepared a highway in the desert for his royal cousin ate locusts & wild honey, and dressed with a leather girdle. They called him crazy.
Nearly devastated by his own suffering, another millionth prophet discouraged by social injustice and religious hypocrisy, Sam Silva comes eating and drinking. While he is among us, let's listen to him, a son and brother of man.
Learning From The Desert Of The City
[...]
At the age of twenty three
I began to pray
... I began
but never finished.
Ever since;
I have put more faith
in whiskey and its smiles
than in that magic love
that burns among the heavens
at the end of every day
and the end of every life
that lost is way.
The man, the other drunkard,
other loose jawed
winter-phantom
preaching
like the lazy to the lazy
said "eat ye! drink ye!
in this carnal kitchen
now become divine
by virtue of the risen,
once slain, but now arrived,
as if from Hell,
in a little black Sedan..."
And those, a little dryer thought
"not just a drunkard,
but also likewise crazy."
"It was an evil thing, they brought,
this lack of holy stuff." I will admit.
So, in my greater passion, by Jesus,
I forgo the bread
thinking that I ought
to drink
until such holy regurgitation
might decorate
the holy bowl or holy sink.
Tired of my wit?
that's what I mean, I just
can't get enough...glory!
Glory turns the pink wine red,
the meat, back into bones
and dust
...and what's left?
An empty bottle
and a wink.
Bob Marley wrote in his song, Crisis, that "some people think life is a dream so they making matters worse." At worst, this is a deconstructionist solution; at best, it is a sad warning." The concept of Maya, that life is illusion could prove a justification for suffering; but it also might enable a dearth of compassion and apathy which lead to withdrawal. "Every day and every hour people die . . . but those who look on them will never understand that their day will also come, and they continue to behave as if they were immortal." (the Mahabharata). Silva doesn't care about samsara or resurrection. He takes his inspiration from his teacher, another in a long line of suffering saints. We can only know the human kind and that's sufficiently mystical. This alone drives us to possibilities for love. He knows the man Jesus simply because such a man is human. That is why he was a phenomenon.
On any given day, in any given moment, heaven can become hell. The peace Sam Silva longs for is a silent dreamless sleep. His words are painted with a rare humility, one which probably shudders at my comparisons with the Son of Man, but that's just how I see. He is not given to delusions of grandeur. Here is his own opinion of himself:
The Artist's Other Still Life
[...]
such a sweet spirit plagued only a moment
by tired and spiteful anger by the fear and ache
of my own dense meat
[...]
I was neither mean nor harsh
but merely the cooler season's wind
with its dust the wind cursed
...a bowl full of dust,
painted and filled for the eye.
I wonder if there was ever love
or substance, though,
in this bony bowl?
Wonder I must
in reckoning with death
[...]
And so to Hamlet now and his famous soliloquy. I believe that Sam Silva knows this struggle all too well. How many at our cross roads desire the dreamless sleep of death, but change our minds because of the possible eternity of heavens and hells? In that moment of decision how many stay; because despite the great sorrows we bear, we can't hurt our loved ones? How many remain and try to make a heaven out of hell for at least one other human being? Sam Silva is a living sacrifice for all the lives he touches with his poetry. Like so many, he could justifiably leave, but he doesn't. My life has been enriched because he stays to eat and drink with us.
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