Loss Of Faith Poem by gershon hepner

Abstract, aesthetic, an allure
still clings to scriptures like a wraith,
but can’t for unbelievers cure
the loss ineffably of faith.


Michael Kimmelman writes about Alfred Brendel, poet as well as pianist, in NYR, June 12,2003:

He talks about Edwin Fischer’s “musical character, which was neither artificial nor forced, but which bordered on the saintly.” His description of Robert Musil’s writing––“mystical experience, albeit viewed by a scientific mind, looking out over cognitive boundaries and examining what is verifiable” ––might almost describe his own approach to the keyboard. I am reminded of the German painter Gerhard Richter, a near-exact contemporary of Brendel’s, another ironical man, who also emerged from a childhood under Hitler to immerse himself in a highly traditional art as a constructive alternative to the destruction of the war. Both are enemies of the benign; skeptical, clever men whose art, in its modernity, has sometimes seemed too cerebral, and who share a curious and complicated, almost embarrassed ambivalence towards religion, to which they attribute an abstract, aesthetic allure, as if in lieu of faith.


5/31/03