Where the Light Comes In

Over the past two years I have embarked, with enthusiasm, upon at least four major writing projects.  For one reason or another, none of them have really taken off.  In one case, I was collaborating with another  writer and we deemed it necessary to each do some more work along our own personal lines first.  In another—a fiction  project—the story is strong, the desire to write it down is greater but things seem to malfunction when the words are committed to the page.  The other day my new computer mysteriously erased over 5,000 words I had just joyfully written in one sitting.  As any writer can tell you, the first 5,000 words are often the most difficult because they signal to your psyche that you have committed to this story and that you are prepared to sit down and spend the better part of a year living with it in your heart and in your head.

Personal tragedy struck in the middle of all of it as I lost my father and lived through the horrific first three weeks of waiting for my  nephew to wake up from a coma after a devastating car crash put his life –and ours— on hold.

Sitting with my mother and sister by my father’s bedside during the three days before he died, I was reminded of my adolescent years in  Spain.  My father lay in a hospital bed but back then people in Spain died at home, surrounded by their families like he was, but without the intrusive machinery that is part and parcel of the experience in a hospital today.

While there, we did what they did in Spain—we cried, we told stories, we tried to console our mother and, incongruously—from time to time, we even laughed.  It was, I think, Joseph Campbell who once said that the experience of death is much like the experience of birth. Both are liminal moments—the kind described in our heroic journeys which point to  those watershed times in our lives where boundaries are crossed.  They also refer to any time when we summon the courage to change our minds.  This is perhaps the most difficult thing of all.  Try doing this on any entrenched belief that “has you” and see what level of resistance is summoned from within.  We are locked in by our perception of how things should be, of how they should develop, of how much we can control.

In the face of death, you suddenly and clearly become aware that there is nothing we can control, that the notion of control is an illusion  of the worst kind because it keeps us addicted, it keeps us imbalanced, it keeps our minds from resting on the present so that they can bounce around from anxious thought to anxious thought in the mistaken notion that this will keep us safe.

If there is a liberation in grief, in the passing away of things, it is precisely that loss of the sense of control.   You realize, quite quickly, that everything is transitory, everything can change at the toss of a dime.  Over the past few months, the haunting line from a novel by Arundhati Roy – everything can change in a minute—kept going through my head.   Everything can change in a second, a minute,  a day.  Everything can change and everything has changed and you are left only with the decision to accept or resist what fate has decided to dish out and resisting, it seems to me, is sinning in the way it was once described.  It means you are literally missing the mark.

Through all of this, words have kept me sane.  Leonard Cohen’s “Ring the Bells”, offered consolation.  The song was based, I read  somewhere, on a story a Buddhist teacher told about a young man who arrived at a Monastery with a broken body and who was advised to meditate on a cracked vase.  After many months of meditation, his teacher informed him that he had outgrown the need to meditate on the cracked vase but the young man refused to get rid of it.   The reason, he said, was that the crack on the vase reminded him of his own personal imperfections and his tears and it was through the cracks, he argued, that the light came in.

One of my favourite mythological heroes is Hephaestus, the smith of the gods. In the Greek myth, Hephaestus is lame and imperfect and is  thus rejected by the other gods.  Hephaestus is even thrown out of heaven by his own mother, Hera, because she cannot bear  his imperfection even though it is precisely this imperfection that allows him to fashion miracles from bronze, silver and gold.  He is the first wounded healer, the powerful archetype of the age brought to light by the psychologist, Carl Jung.  Without the wounding, there is no way for the light to get in.

So the words may have disappeared into the computer ecosystem but the will to write the story, to allow it to inhabit my consciousness, has not.

Things change, the centre does not hold, people get hurt and people pass away.  The stories our imaginations fashion become even more powerful then.  They make sense from  nonsense, provide consolation where none can be found and—as long as you can release them after committing them to paper—they bring the promise of beauty back into the world.

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