Reviewed by Fred Lurie
The Resemblance of All Things
by Bernard J. Lurie
Resource Publications
52 Pages; Print AU$16.00, US$10.00, ISBN 978-1-6667-3745-5
First of all, you probably noticed that the author and reviewer share the same surname. Could we be related? Yes, the late author and I are brothers. Before you stop reading, please be assured that there’s another reason why this review isn’t like usual ones. It won’t be full of bare assertions of praise. Rather, I will stick to descriptions of what the author is attempting. The quality of the poetry will be evident from meaningful selections of typical passages. Its merits will be displayed, not repeatedly claimed by the charitable panegyric of a brother.
Resemblance has had two other published reviews. Both reviews were favorable and written by unbiased, professional reviewers. The late John M. Ridland, emeritus Professor of English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, also praised the work. He called it, “(a) tour de force theological investigation, rendered in verse of the highest order.”
The book is a single, 52 page poem written in a format of seven-line stanzas of iambic hexameter verse. Resemblance considers a number of topics. It deals with God’s nature and the religious and philosophical problem of God and Evil. It also argues that no thing is truly limited to being only what it initially appears to be. Each thing bears a Resemblance, and connection, to all other things. God is the potential of all, encompassing all, and yet apart from that totality of every thing. He is, “. . .(w)hom each thing may contain, but nothing can confine,. . . ”
Resemblance is the product of Lurie’s lifelong study of religion, philosophy, and the classics of English poetry. The author had a particular interest in Spinoza’s philosophy, which is likewise at the intersection of religion and philosophy. The book is divided into four parts. Each part is prefaced by a single prefatory line indicting that what follows is directed to a different biblical prophet. None of them speak in the poem. The prophets are addressed indirectly, through intermediaries of God, regarding matters about which they prophesied. It does not restate their views. Neither does the poem advocate on behalf of or against any faith.
“The voice to Job that spoke from out the whirlwind: . . . ” is the beginning of the first part. The poem then starts its discussion of evil. Job was a good and wealthy man. The Book of Job presents the question of why evil exists, as it describes Job’s loss of family, wealth, and health. The two non-sequential stanzas that follow, like every one of the stanzas of the entire poem, are in iambic hexameter and seven lines long.
“So do not say of evil, “Why must these things be?,”
Nor of the good things ask, “Why do they not exist?”;
For all things are, and all that might be must occur;
And as all numbers all the other numbers join
In sets whose permutations never know an end,
So too each thing is joined to every other thing
In sets of endless permutations of events.” (p 1)“And be a prophet of the rooms that bear the name,
“The pains of Job, which must exist if all things are”;
And know that neither choice nor fate nor accident
Has caused your misery, nor brought you to these depths,
But free will and predestination both being true,
The doors that you have chose, which I by love foredain,
Leave yet unclosed those doors, unchosen, which remain.” (p 6)
But such is not to condone evil, or be resigned to its existence. The poem deals at length with God’s opposition to evil, and discusses its eventual elimination. A glimpse of that discussion is the following.
“I said, “Each thing that harms a part must harm Myself,
That my desire must be that harm did not exist,
And all its cause extinguished into nothingness; . . .”” (p 9)
Additional illustrative stanzas follow. The iambic hexameter meter sets a pattern for the gracefulness of the poetry. The author’s adherence to the poem’s meter also creates a framework for its clarity in presenting arguments concerning complex topics.
“The still small voice Elijah heard upon the mount:” is the start of the second part. Elijah lived during the reign of Ahab. Ahab was king of the Northern kingdom of Israel, after it broke with the Southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah. Elijah preached against the idol worship of the Canaanite god Baal that was promoted by Ahab’s queen, Jezebel.
The next stanza urges the reader to also challenge the idols of his own mind, and to question himself. Not just others. The poem argues for an expansive view of all things that are beyond our own selves. Each thing is not only a part of the whole, but incorporates that whole.
“And also tell My people where the way is found –
Upon the simplest, yet most difficult, of paths –
To doubt what seems to them the closest and most true –
The rightness of their selves, the wrongness of their foes,
The partial sight of each their judgments, wants and views –
That they who so remove all idols from the mind
Might see them each as but a one of all that might.” (p 19)
Later in this part of the poem, the expression of Resemblance is further developed. It is that an understanding of any individual thing is not limited to how that thing alone first appears to be. More is revealed by an examination of the parts that seemingly make that thing. More too is revealed following an inquiry into the whole of the thing being considered, which comes to reveal yet more wholes to consider. God alone stands apart from all other things. Part of this discussion is seen from the following two sequential stanzas.
“And this shall be the song of songs that I shall sing –
“Come, for I alone am called, ‘I am what I am’ –
As there is not a thing that is the thing it is,
Nor thing that truly bears the essence of its name;
But inward in each part yet lesser parts infold,
And from each whole new wholes yet greater wholes compose,
That outward yet seek Me who always am beyond!“For I am He who am not part of any thing –
Who, holy, separate, am unreachable beyond –
Unknowable who sees, but who cannot be seen –
As if I were a dazzling and a blinding light –
Who am a father born as if from My own rib –
Whose body is that form that always stands beyond,
And clothes within the seed of all potential things!” (pp 22-23)
Just as the poem argues that each thing bears a relationship to all others, in its concluding part it opens further to invite a broad, interdenominational view of the Creator. This can be seen by the identification of the prophets as prophets of the New Testament as well as Old Testament, and mentioning the founders of faiths. Examples of this can be seen from the following two segments of three lines each that appear in non-sequential stanzas.
“And bless us who know, like this Buddha, that true cause
How this, though non-existent, balance of our mind
Yet from abstraction might its own potentials make – . . .” (p 49)
“And bless us who know, like this Christ, the inward peace
That comes to those who by their lowliness are made
Unceasing vessels of new insights from above – . . .” (p 50)
Resemblance is a serious, long poem about questions that have always engaged mankind’s interest. The great amount of thought and effort that went into the development of its ideas, and their artistic presentation, are evident throughout the work. It meets what the author proposed as the task of art:
And this must be the task of art and prophecy –
To speak that yet unknowable consistency
Of every thing, no matter seeming how unlike! (p 25)