Kythe Heller

S

This project emerges from a condition that is itself apophatic: the continuation of a conversation that death has made impossible and necessary simultaneously. S is a hybrid work of poetry, philosophy, and theology written in ongoing dialogue with the late poet Fanny Howe — begun together in the final year of her life and continuing, by a logic the apophatic tradition alone seems adequate to describe, after her death. It is a work about what cannot be said, written from inside the experience of not being able to say it.

Fanny Howe's theology of poetry is one of the most sustained and least theorized apophatic projects in contemporary American letters. Her central concept of bewilderment — developed across The Wedding Dress, Gone, and decades of poetry — is not a metaphor for confusion but a precise epistemological and spiritual proposition: that the condition of being lost, of radical unknowing, of the self made sufficiently transparent to receive what it cannot generate, is both the ground of genuine poetic attention and the threshold of theological encounter. Bewilderment, for Howe, is not a failure of orientation. It is what orientation feels like when it is honest.

This project takes Howe's proposition seriously as a practice and a premonition. The poems and philosophical meditations gathered here are composed through methods that deliberately court unknowing: the Tarot deck of mysterious quotations she gave me as a technology of chance and apophatic attention, drawing on the Hermit card's disciplined solitude and the wisdom that emerges not from the panoramic view but from the light held low, illuminating only the next step; aleatory writing practices that displace the authorial will and open the text to what cannot be planned; and the experience of grief and its transformation itself as an apophatic condition — the absence of her generating a presence that exceeds the categories of presence and absence alike.

The theological lineage running through this work is explicitly apophatic: Meister Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit, the Sufi doctrine of fana, Simone Weil's attente and decreation, the negative theology that Howe drew on throughout her life and that she and I discussed directly in the conversations which suggested the premise of this work. What unites these traditions is the conviction that the deepest knowing — of God, of the real, of another person — requires the dissolution of the knowing self. The poem, in this tradition, is not an expression of the self but a practice of its transparency.

The project engages the apophatic through multiple formal strategies: poems that approach their subject only through negation and indirection; philosophical prose that circles what it cannot state directly; the deliberate incompletion of statements that close too soon; and the use of silence, white space, and the unfinished line as active rather than merely absent. The Tarot's structure — the numbered Major Arcana as a sequence of thresholds rather than a narrative — provides an organizing architecture that is itself apophatic: each card opens a door that leads not to resolution but to a deeper unknowing.

At the heart of the project is a question that is also a practice: what does it mean to write with someone who is no longer here? The apophatic tradition offers the most honest answer available — not channeling in the popular sense, but the recognition that genuine intellectual and spiritual friendship creates an interiority that exceeds the boundaries of the individual self, and that what passes through that interiority after death is neither invention nor transmission but something the tradition has called, in different languages, the continuing life of love in the form of attention.

This project will be submitted as poetry / with a hybrid multimodal contribution engaging poetry, philosophical prose, and audio / visual elements drawn from the Tarot and from the material culture of Howe's practice and our correspondence — offered as a living demonstration of the apophatic claim that the most faithful forms of knowing require passing through, and remaining within, what exceeds our language entirely.