Anita Monro

18 Kristeva, Powers ef Horror, p. 115. 19 Kristeva, J., Hannah Arendt: Life ls a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2001); Kristeva, J., Hannah Arendt, Female Genius: Life, Nladness, Words,Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

20 Kristeva, L!fe Is a Narrative, p. 55. 21 Kristeva, Life Is a Narrative, p. 7. 22 Kristeva, Life Is a Narrative, p. 56. 23 Kristeva, Life Is a Narrative, p. 85.

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Presiding from the broken middle

RACHEL MANN

Poetry, if it has any weight and value, does not need explanation. Nor does it especially benefit from theological justification. Poetry, as art and craft, lives in and for itself, even if we have the urge to put it ;to some utilitarian or theological use. Poetry is an end in itself. However, given that this is a book of theological and liturgical reflections and I've produced poetic responses to the nature of Eucharist and presiding, some account of the genesis of these poems is appropriate. The aim of this account is not to instruct the reader how to interpret the poems, which in any case would be a cheap and pointless move, but to help the reader locate the poems in a story and, thus, help them to find a place for the poems in this book.

When I was approached to contribute to this book I initially proposed writing a more or less conventional paper on what I called 'Presiding from the broken middle'. For any number of reasons this paper didn't emerge; a number of poems from the 'broken middle' did. In order to understand the context for these poems I need to say something about the concept of the 'broken middle' and my use of it. My first encounter with the term was in the difficult and profound philosophy of the late Gillian Rose. l do not propose to rehearse the main moves of her philosophy here; however I do want to acknowledge that her use of the term lay in her determination to reject the tyranny of binary opposites (e.g. totalizing 'modern' systems versus the fragmentation of the 'post-modern' other) as well as her desire to criticize the postmodern strategies which originally dealt famous mortal blows to such oppositions. Hers is a philosophy which resists the tyranny of extremes but also argues for the beauty, moral power and, in a sense, clarity of the broken middle. Her work on matters of law and ethics has a compelling beauty which recognizes the power and surfeit of competing moral claims and demands and yet argues for a sense of 'shalom' as justice which does not allow for the 'victory' of one claim over the other. Her famous autobiography, Love's Work, reveals that her commitment to inhabit­ing the 'broken middle' was not merely theoretical, but personal: theologic­ally and personally she was resourced by both Judaism and Anglicanism, inhabiting a not always comfortable place between the two, resisting the temptations of ready answers and solutions to living. Famously, she uses Staretz Silouan's 'keep your mind in hell and do not despair' as the epigraph

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