Anam Cara

8

T

HE

B

EAUTY

OF THE

F

LAW

Breakage, whatever its cause, is the dark complement to the act

of making; the one implies the other. The thing that is broken

has particular authority over the act of change.

LOUISE GLUCK

T

HROUGH A

B

LURRED

S

URFACE

:

T

HE

G

LIMPSE OF THE

E

SSENCE

I LOVE THE WORD ‘ESSENCE’. IT HAS MYSTERY, HEART AND luminosity. It reminds me of the way a cloud can open over a dark Conamara lake and turn it into a shimmering mirror of silver brightness; for a few moments the lake illuminates. The essence of a thing is always elusive and hidden. The dream of art and prayer is to come nearer, even to slip through to dwell for a while in the vicinity of the essence. Daily life is blurred. We live between endless layers of darkening and occasionally brightening veils, but for the most part we remain outside the walls of what Kant affectionately called: ‘the thing in itself’. We manage merely to live in the neighbourhood of things. Their essence remains beyond our reach. The essence of a person is even more elusive. The medieval mind used the word ‘ineffable’ to suggest the essence of individuality. Your essence is the utter ‘isness’, the utter ‘youness’ of you.

A lovely friend in London, an eminent philosopher and psychotherapist, told me once that when his second child was born he was granted, for one moment, a pure glimpse of the child’s essence. Often during his child’s life, there have been such moments and even now in the dark-lands of adolescence, where conversation is scarce and where monologue frequently dims into single syllable glowering, the father is still given the occasional clear view. Through the blurred, awkward surface the beautiful radiance of his son’s soul becomes briefly visible. This view always recalls him to a sense of the hidden eternal light of his child’s life.

A

FTER THE

B

LEAK

J

OURNEY,

THE

H

IDDEN

D

OOR INTO THE

B

RIGHT

F

IELD

I always feel like an escaped prisoner.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

IT IS HEART-RENDING TO SEE PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO RESPECT FOR themselves and are unaware of any light or beauty in their lives. We have a sacred responsibility to encourage and illuminate all that is inherently good and special in each other. This can have an incredible lifelong effect, especially on children: to encourage them to dream and live so that their dreams might come true. Sadly, many people do not even suspect that deep behind the veils of anxiety, emptiness and labour, there dwells a beauty of essence. How have they become so exiled? What evicted them from the inner sanctuary of their own presence?

Tragically, it does seem possible for a person to utterly destroy their sense of inner beauty. Sometimes this is the result of being badly hurt. How ironical it is, when someone inflicts hurt on us and then departs, that we continue inflicting the same hurt on ourselves, over and over. The ripple of deep hurt continues to beat and beat against the mind. At some deep unconscious level these people become blind servants of a certain pattern of inner destructiveness. Gradually they lose sight of beauty and light. It is as though they find themselves pinned in by all the negative and sore wounding of their lives, encircled by the psychological forces they have set loose on themselves. It is a slow and painful task to break free from the wounded and wounding circle of one’s own anxiety. As always in the world of the mind, recognition is a huge transformative force.

When we enter into this world of vulnerability, we stand at a precarious threshold. Anything could happen to us. We are brought through such times by grace alone. In the inner work of personal integration, memory offers us the light by which to decipher the hand of providence secretly leading us through these forlorn and desperate landscapes. It is the paradox of spiritual growth that through such bleak winter journeys we eventually come through a hidden door into a bright field of springtime that we could never have discovered otherwise. This is the heart of the mystical. It is not about building protectionist armour of prayer and religion; it is, rather, the courage for absolute divestment. In the sheer vulnerability of Nothingness everything becomes possible in a new way, but there is an immense temptation to flee back to the shelter of old complacency. Now could be the most important moment in life to steel our courage and enter the risk of change. Meister Eckhart says: ‘Stand still and do not waver from your emptiness; for at this time you can turn away, never to turn back again.’

T

O

D

ISCOVER THE

D

IVINE

B

LUEPRINT

IN

Y

OUR

S

OUL

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact

instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that

pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose

unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to

shine through life’s foolscap.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

THE HEART OF ALL CREATIVITY IS THE AWAKENING AND flowering of individuality. The mystery and magic of being an individual is to live life in response to the deep call within, the call to become who we were dreamed to be. In primal terms, it is the call to discover and realize the divine blueprint in the soul. This is where true freedom awaits us. Freedom is not simply the absence of necessity; it is the poise of soul at one with a life which honours and engages its creative possibility. There is no other presence in creation that has such potential for freedom as the human self. Yet like seagulls in the unsheltered cold and ferocity of the ocean, we often nest out on the cold ledges of famished extremity and neglect to remember the meadow where the flowers await. Naturally, there will be times when truth of heart demands that we live on the ledges. To remain there, however, resembles an addiction to misery.

To be an individual is to ‘stand out’ from the group or the system and such separation always entails vulnerability. Deep in our nature there is a desire to belong, to fit in. Our bodies are fashioned from the clay and it is strange for the body to be a separate object able to move around in space, no longer umbilically linked to the earth. Perhaps this desire to fit in is the draw of ancient gravity, the desire of the separated clay to be one with the earth again. This gravity of belonging is also evident in the animal world. Animals love to take shelter in each other and dwell together within the embrace of the herd.

My desk faces a window onto the moors where each day a flock of sheep graze. These Conamara sheep are Zen-like. They dwell utterly here among the mountains and seem to look on the humans as a transient intrusion. The freedom of the human individual is also the loneliness of never being finally able either to submerge its mind in the silence of the earth or melt into the simple innocence of the herd. Indeed, the great irony is that the human becomes most destructive when it reneges on its individuality and succumbs to the herd-mind. A person often does things within the web-instinct of a group that he would never even countenance as an individual. Some dark, primeval rhythm awakens to release a force of destruction that is anonymous and relentless. It is no wonder that the classical tradition had the dictum: eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. The vigilance of the critical intellect enables us to recognize the temptation to regress into herd instinct and to take responsibility for our choices. Faithfulness to individuality is at the heart of compassion and creativity.

More often than not, we feel so enmeshed in the life we have that the prospect of change appears remote or impossible. Thus, we continue on the tracks that we have laid down for ourselves. We are unable to think in new ways and we gradually teach ourselves to forget the other horizons. We unlearn desire. Quietly, over time, we succumb to the dependable script of the expected life and become masters of the middle way. We avoid extremes and after a while we no longer even notice the pathways off to the side and no longer sense the danger and disturbance that could be experienced ‘out there’. We learn to fit our chosen world with alarming precision and regularity. Often it takes a huge crisis or trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us. Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul. It makes a clearance. Again we can see the horizons and feel their attraction. Though we may wince with vulnerability as we taste the exhilaration of freedom, we feel alive! ‘Oceans’ by Juan Ramón Jiménez captures this beautifully:

I have a feeling that my boat

has struck, down there in the depths,

against a great thing.

And nothing

happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

– Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

And are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

(translated by Robert Bly)

The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence. Individuality is not a thing or a position, nor the act of fixed or stolid identity. Individuality is the creative voyage of aloneness in which the gifts and limitations of real presence emerge. The nature of the beginning inevitably holds the rhythm of the future. The secret of individuality is powerfully suggested by the act of birth. We come to the earth in an intensely vulnerable way, for birth is an act of separation. We are cast out into the emptiness as the cord is cut, yet the wound of connection remains open for the visitation of beauty.

E

MERGENCE

:

B

REAKING THE

S

HELL FROM

I

NSIDE

The sadness and despair of beauty laid bare.

HERMANN BROCH

WE USED TO HAVE HENS ON THE FARM. EVERY YEAR CERTAIN HENS would offer themselves for the adventure of love and motherhood. The sequence of events usually began when a hen would distinguish herself through accentuated ‘clucking’. The adult powers intuited that she was having a passionate liaison; consequently, she was chosen to sit for weeks on a collection of eggs. With the warmth of her feathered body she hatched the eggs. If the weather was very cold and the eggs were almost hatched, my mother would bring them in beside our kitchen fire. Then over days the new chicks would begin to emerge from the eggs. Again the journey was signalled through sound. You would hear the little chicks’ beaks faintly tapping at the inside of the shell. Then the sound would become louder and gradually from the inside the shell would be cracked open. The plastic-like inner sealing of the shell would appear. You would see the little beak push against it, almost the way a finger does inside a balloon. Then the sealing would break and the next thing a wet little yellow-haired, greased-up chick would waddle out, looking wet and miserable and fumbling in its movements. After a while it would dry and become the sweetest little creature adorned in a fine fur of golden feathers.

When we are wounded, we close up. Rather than soft, porous skin growing back over the opening, we decide to grow a shell. This idea came to expression in the following poem:

F

OSSIL

No

Don’t cry

For there is no

One to tell,

A mild shell

Spreads

Over every opening

Every ear

Eye

Mouth

Pore

Nose

Genital,

A mildness of shell

Impenetrable

To even

The bladed scream;

Soon

All will be

Severed echo,

And the dead

So long

So unbearably long

Outside and

Neglected

Will claim

Their time.

After being hurt, it is natural and indeed necessary that we draw back inside the shell. No-one can force us to emerge and risk growth. Indeed, the probability is that under pressure the retreat will go deeper and the shell only become harder and tougher to crack. Once we recognize how control and self-protection rob life of all vitality and rhythm, we will find ourselves slowly advancing towards the threshold of risk and trust once more. Because life is so short and its invitations so thrilling, it is such a waste to become absent from life. The memory of the birth of new life through the wall of a shell has always remained for me an image of transformation. When the new life had found its form within that sealed darkness, the dream of light awakened it. In an absolute risk for the unknown and the unseen light outside, the chick broke its only shelter, destroyed its nourishing protection, to stand naked and tiny in a foreign world. And sure enough, within a short time, it becomes a joyous and excited participant in the possibilities of its new life. Although there are no guarantees in the kingdom of risk, nature shows us, time and again, that it is precisely at that moment of greatest risk, the moment when everything could be lost, that the greatest change happens. A new life opens out into a new world that could not have even been dreamed before this. It is difficult to find the courage and vision at the points of deepest wounding to believe that new risk can take us into new life. But there is no alternative. When we remain sealed away inside the shell, we are no longer able to hear our own life. Even the voices that really care for us sound like severed echo. We will grow only more deeply lost, unable to hear even the whispers of the heart.

T

O

C

REATE

B

EAUTY OUT OF

W

OUNDEDNESS

Beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life.

NIETZSCHE

WHEN WE DECIDE TO EXPLORE OUR LIVES THROUGH CREATIVE expression, it is often surprising to discover that the things that almost destroyed us are the very things that want to talk to us. It could be years later; time makes no difference in the inner sanctum of this encounter. The wound has left its imprint. And yet after all this time the dark providence of the suffering wants to somehow illuminate our lives so that we can now discover the unseen gift that it bequeathed. The labour and discipline of creativity refines our blemished seeing, and gradually an unexpected gift comes to light. Because creativity demands patience, skill, expectation, desire and openness, it leads us to another place where we learn to see in the dark. Nothing is said directly in a creative work; it is obliquely suggested. Perhaps creative expression is a way of telling something indirectly that we could never tell out straight.

Beauty is not all brightness. In the shadowlands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty. The primeval conversation between darkness and beauty is not audible to the human ear and the threshold where they engage each other is not visible to the eye. Yet at the deepest core they seem to be at work with each other. The guiding intuition of our exploration suggests that beauty is never one-dimensional or one-sided. This is why even in awful circumstances we can still meet beauty. A simple instance of this is fire. Though it may be causing huge destruction, in itself, as dance and shape and colour of flame, fire can be beautiful. In human confusion and brokenness there is often a slow beauty present and at work.

The luminous beauty of great art so often issues from the deepest, darkest wounding. We always seem to visualize a wound as a sore, a tear on the skin’s surface. The protective outer layer is broken and the sensitive interior is invaded and torn. Perhaps there is another way to image a wound. It is the place where the sealed surface that keeps the interior hidden is broken. A wound is also, therefore, a breakage that lets in light and a sore place where much of the hidden pain of a body surfaces. Unlike the natural openings in the body, a wound is an unexpected, foreign opening. Some accident or dark intention forced the breakage of surface. A wound awakens and focuses the reserve of the immune system. The overriding desire of the body is to seal the opening, to heal and restore its inner darkness. Yet the wound takes its time to heal. While the wound is open, new light flows into the helpless dark and the inner night of the body weeps through the wound. In the rupture and pain it causes, a wound breaks the silence; it cries out. It ruptures through the ordinary cover of words we put on things. Each wound has a unique shape and signature. Woundedness is one of the places where normal words and descriptions break down. We know the distance words have to travel whenever we attempt to tell someone of the pain we feel. It is no wonder then that the wound as the sore point of vulnerability cries out for some new form in which to express itself. As we have seen, the beauty of great poetry and music is often infused with pathos.

The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold beauty of perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart. It must also be said that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place. For instance, compassion is one of the most beautiful presences a person can bring to the world and most compassion is born from one’s own woundedness. When you have felt deep emotional pain and hurt, you are able to imagine what the pain of the other is like; their suffering touches you. This is the most decisive and vital threshold in human experience and behaviour. The greatest evil and destruction arises when people are unable to feel compassion. The beauty of compassion continues to shelter and save our world. If that beauty were quenched, there would be nothing between us and the end-darkness which would pour in torrents over us.

H

IDDEN

W

HERE

N

O - ONE

C

OULD

F

IND

Y

OU

: T

HE

M

ONASTIC

C

ELL IN THE

H

EART

Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning,

the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

ISAIAH 61:3

EACH SHAPE OF VULNERABILITY HAS A DIFFERENT ORIGIN. WHEN I was in priestly ministry I once came to know a woman who had just got news that she was soon going to die of cancer. We worked together for about a month. She was a woman in late middle age. She had a very caring husband and four grown-up children who adored her. It is a privilege to be invited to inhabit such a threshold with a person in the last weeks of their life. Time takes on a huge urgency. Superficial façades drop aside. There is nothing left to lose or protect. Some of my friends often say they would love to die quickly. They would fear the loneliness of a long, lingering departure: so much better to die without knowing it. Yet this can be such a precious time. The blur of distraction and defensive pretension can give way to real conversation and true encounter. It can become a time for the essence of a person to shine through. As illness wears out the covering of the body, the soul shines forth. As this woman came to trust me, I discovered that she had not really talked to anyone for over thirty years. Early on in her marriage, something had broken down irreparably between herself and her husband. She simply lost what she had with him and could not get it back. There she was inside this home, the mother and the heart of it. She learned to go through all the external motions and she became an utterly convincing domestic actress. But inside she was lost. Gradually she began to accept that there was no path outwards. Then she made a decision to live her intimate life inwardly. She undertook the journey. She went inwards as far as she could and over the years she managed to build some kind of hermit cell within her own heart. And that was where she really dwelt. When she began to talk about herself, it was clear that she spoke from a refined interiority. In a sense, she was not a mother living in a suburban house with husband and children. She was someone who had long since departed to an interior monastery that nobody had discovered. And when death began to focus more clearly around her, she was not afraid. Death was no stranger to her. Having had to build a sanctuary where no-one ever visited, she had come to know the mind of death. She was not thrown by the cold clarity of death’s stare or the unravelling force of its singular eye. Nor was there any bitterness in her. She had allowed as much transfiguration as she could. Against the hidden pathos of her life’s distance, she had no resistance. She had garnered a fragile beauty from isolation.

‘N

ÍL

S

AOI

G

AN

L

OCHT’

WHILE VULNERABILITY MAY BE THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THE beauty of a work of art emerges, the work of art itself inevitably has some vulnerability in its form. There is an old Irish proverb, ‘Níl saoi gan locht’ – there is no craftsman without a flaw. Though every work of art dreams of being perfect, there is always some flaw and one rarely meets an artist who is happy with her work. This restless and divine dissatisfaction is imagined by the novelist Hermann Broch, who portrays Virgil’s dissatisfaction with his Aeneid; he wants to destroy it. I once had the unexpected privilege of spending an afternoon with one of the greatest poets writing in English, R.S. Thomas. During our conversation he was talking about his life as a priest among his people and of his love of being outside in the landscape. At one point he said that if he had been able to stay inside more and remain at his desk, he might have become a great poet. As he was a very serious man, there was no trace of irony or space to counter the claim. But I was amazed that such bleak self-critique could dwell alongside such magnificent and accomplished work. In the end every artist is haunted by a few central themes. Again and again, they return to the threshold of that disturbance and endeavour to excavate something new. This is the magnetic draw at the heart of the wound, the secret force of a silent hunger whose infinite longing is to find its unique voice. When the heart of that force finds its true form, a masterpiece emerges. Elaine Scarry says, ‘The beautiful thing seems – is – incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of being without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “newbornness” of the entire world.’

T

HE

S

LOW

W

ORK OF

I

NTEGRATING THE

F

LAW

I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.

AGHA SHAHID ALI, ‘Farewell’

BEAUTY’S LIGHT COMES UP SLOWLY AND SHYLY ALONG THE EDGES of limitation, confusion, anxiety and helplessness. In such a terrain one would expect anger, resentment, bitterness or destructive negativity. Yet a spirit and atmosphere of graciousness often emerges when the human heart reaches into its own nobility and allows the destructive reaction to disappointment and hurt to open into something more healing and creative. Regardless of outer circumstances and even inner turbulence, we always have the freedom to choose differently. This is a difficult freedom. In many instances, it may be beyond our reach. However, the freedom to choose graciousness is a freedom no-one can take from us. We will always dwell on the frontier of our own limitations and weakness. Each of us is deeply flawed somewhere. We are made of clay and our clay is haunted by gravity. Frequently the flaw can be a point of pure negativity and destructiveness. When the flaw is that severe, it needs to be decisively engaged. Nevertheless, life can take a wonderfully creative turning when we choose to integrate the flaw. It need no longer be a force that diminishes or damages. We can discover the freedom every so often of abandoning the speed and stress of the linear route. The flaw will take us down boreens and pathways we would otherwise never have travelled. We begin to discover new landscapes. Although the journey becomes slow and frequently arduous, through the fractured lens of more vulnerable vision we learn to see neglected corners of the heart that have long awaited the affections of our eyes. We come to remember again that we were not sent here for worldly achievement alone. We find that we are being gently rescued from the illusion of progress, and fragile dimensions of the exiled soul begin to return. In a similar vein Rilke wrote: ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows; by being defeated decisively by constantly greater things.’

Howard Rheingold has written of how, in Japanese culture, the presence of the flaw intensifies the depth of an object’s beauty. The crack in a vase might be prized as a beautiful signature-moment in which the spirit of the emerging object and the humane heartfulness of the artist criss-crossed. The presence of the flaw personalizes and deepens the beauty and character of a thing. The Japanese have a special word to describe this: ‘wabi’. Indeed, this personalization of time as beauty also finds expression in the word ‘shibui’, the beauty of ageing. Rather than being a fall away from beauty, ageing can be the revelation of beauty, the time when the inherent radiance becomes visible.

The shape of each soul is different. An individual is a carefully fashioned, unique world. The shape of the flaw that each person carries is also different. The flaw is the special shape of personal limitation; angled at a unique awkwardness to the world, it makes our difficulty and challenge in the world different from that of others. When we stop seeing the flaw as a disappointment and exception to an otherwise laudable life, we begin to glimpse the awkward light and hidden wisdom that the flaw holds. As we look deeper, we begin to realize that the flaw might be the first window into a world of difference that we rarely notice. Maud Gonne was an animating force in Yeats’s inspiration; in his poem ‘Broken Dreams’, he writes:

You are more beautiful than any one,

And yet your body had a flaw:

Your small hands were not beautiful . . .

Leave unchanged

The hands that I have kissed,

For old sake’s sake.

T

HE

M

IRROR IN THE

U

NKNOWN

Whoever cannot seek

the unforeseen sees nothing,

for the known way

is an impasse.

HERACLITUS

THE FLAW SEEMS TO BE THE POINT OF FIXED OR CONSTANT vulnerability, the place where the hope of order is fractured. The revelation of someone’s flaw startles and fascinates the social world for it is usually viewed as a helpless, fateful exception to an otherwise ordered life. Yet when viewed against the mystery of the strange and unknown world within, the flaw invites our understanding and compassion. Amidst the infinite diversity of creation, no thing stands out like the human being. Nothing else here is quite as surprising and strange. Because we belong to the human fold we become prisoners of our own familiarity. There is nothing in the world as intense as a human person: each one of us is inevitably and helplessly intense. An individual is a creature in whom difference has come alive. In him difference is everything. Unlike a stone or a tree, it is as if the individual has an inner mirror where he can gather and glimpse himself. This inner mirror is cast at an angle to the mind. It is a small mirror which for the most part remains blurred. When the inner mirror clears, it is but for a millisecond. No-one achieves a full, direct view of himself, only the merest glimpse as swift as a thought. Yet this glimpse grounds everything about your life and illuminates your work, friendships, destiny and identity. All are secretly dependent on that concealed splinter of mirror. It makes everything that happens to you yours; without it, you would simply be an empty receptacle for experiences. You would have no home within you, no place where your life gathered, no source and no centre. The loss of the mirror would reduce you to a sequence of perception, an assembly of qualities. Its absence would make you anonymous.

T

HE

U

NKNOWN

D

WELLS IN

R

ECESSES

OF THE

H

UMAN

H

EART

THE DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE OF OUR TALK ABOUT OURSELVES AND who we are is feeble. Listening to much of the language of contemporary psychology and religion, you could not be blamed for imagining that some analyst had actually managed to turn the mind inside out and had decoded it. Most talk about the self disappoints because it presents not the deep, autonomous and unknown inner world, but cipher figures that are easily recognizable as members of some psychological syndrome. Psychology tends to over-identify the flaw with deficiency. The unknown is not simply out there, outside us. The unknown dwells in the recesses of the human heart and becomes especially explicit in our flaws; consequently the true language of the self is hesitant, shadowed and poetic. There is no direct, analytical description of a soul. Even all the epic poetics of a language would not be large or deft enough to embrace the mystery of one human soul. ‘I Am Not I’ by Jiménez expresses this clearly:

I A

M

N

OT

I

I am not I.

I am this one

Walking beside me whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And whom at other times I forget;

The one who remains silent when I talk,

The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

The one who takes a walk where I am not,

The one who will remain standing when I die.

(translated by Robert Bly)

I

F

O

THERS

C

OULD

S

EE INTO

Y

OU

?

THE IMAGINATION SENSES THE COMPLEX DEPTHS THAT LIE concealed beneath the surface persona. From this perspective, it becomes clear that in many of our interactions with others, we are barely there. One becomes deeply aware of this in time of trouble. Though racked by emotional torment, you can still continue to function. Sometimes indeed this very façade is what enables us to endure and overcome troubles. Shakespeare wrote: ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. It is a wonderful grace to be shielded and covered from the world, especially in difficult times.

Imagine how impossible it would be if the inner life were visible. When you came into the office, everyone would look up and be able to read exactly what was in your heart as though your skin were transparent. If our inner wounds were visible to the curious eyes of strangers, we would never achieve healing. Put simply, if interiority were directly visible, society as we know it would be impossible. The conventions we observe would lose their authority and confrontations with others would become the norm. People-watching would take on a new and disturbing significance. Gossip would emerge from the nether region of surmise and exaggeration to achieve the status of fact. The standard of the normal person could never be employed again. Without the restraint of body-covering, raw individuality would leak into the social matrix from every corner. Were the threshold between the inner and outer world to disappear, the life of each person would become a permanent, external theatre and the façade of the exterior would become very fragile. This breakdown would call a new kind of society into being. No facts about yourself and none of your thoughts or feelings could be concealed. Yet the meaning of what was now visible could be complex and hidden. Such transparency would be terrifying – an inner life lived out in the open before everyone’s eyes. In such a world the idea of friendship would certainly be different. Perhaps this transparent world is where the pre-born and the dead live.

T

HE

D

ARKER

B

EAUTY

D

AWNS

M

ORE

S

LOWLY

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,

but by making the darkness conscious.

CARL JUNG

BECAUSE YOU ARE OPAQUE TO YOURSELF, YOU ARE NEVER FINISHED with yourself: this is the quest for meaning. You never own yourself and stand constantly at new frontiers wondering what lies beyond. There is a beauty in discovery that deeply satisfies us. When you discover something new about yourself, you become more grounded and free. It is delightful when you find out more of your hidden light, when the radiance inside you glimmers through in new, unexpected colours. Without being narcissistic or arrogant, you are quietly nourished by the discovery of the beauty – the diversity – that dwells in you. But discovery can also be difficult. When you begin to excavate the darker beauty of your complexity, you may become startled by your own strangeness.

Framed with our own thought-world, routines and expectations, only rarely do we get a glimpse of how strange we actually are. We usually ignore and avoid the ever-present and curious strangeness that dwells in each individual. Each of us is aware at some time of our own strangeness. At night our dreams throw up peculiar shapes and figures. Sometimes even the most respectable people, the veritable pillars of society, have a fascinating night-life. They are up to things in their night-time dream-world that would not even cross their minds during the day. When they lose their grip on the day and sleep takes them, they become wild other people in their dreams. The ancient Greeks believed that the figures in our dreams were real. They left the body during the night and came out into the world to act out their stories but returned before the person awoke. When you consider where we go and who we become in dream, it is often an achievement to show up for breakfast in the morning!

Strangeness attracts the imagination. It is drawn to the fissures in behaviour where strangeness becomes visible. One of the intriguing areas here is where the failure of another person becomes the occasion for revelation of oneself. Failure becomes a ruthless mirror where the false façade of morality and values is questioned and exposed. Joseph Conrad evoked this dilemma in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and in Lord Jim. The failure of an admired character or mentor subverts the belief system of the key character. Dostoevsky also explored this theme in epic fashion in The Idiot, where a saintly figure and a criminally destructive one are locked in mutual fascination. Sometimes the tame and the strange become very attracted to each other.

Part of the beauty of the act of discovery is the integrity of its desire for wholeness. Your soul will not want to avoid or neglect the regions of your heart that do not fit the expected. When you trust yourself enough to discover and integrate your strangeness, you bestow a gift on yourself. Rather than annulling a complex part of your heart which would continue to haunt you, you have thrown your arms around yourself to embrace who you are. This is at the heart of holiness. Holiness is not complacent refuge in the glasshouse of pale pieties. To be holy is to enter the dense beauty of passionate complexity. In his classic book On the Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto said the experience of the holy is at once ‘tremens et fascinans’, trembling and fascination. And Edgar Allan Poe said: ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some sense of strangeness in its proportions.’

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF AN

I

DEAL

:

A C

ALL TO

Y

OUR

D

EEPEST

C

REATIVITY

For with a wound I must be cur’d.

SHAKESPEARE

WHEN YOU BECOME VULNERABLE, ANY IDEAL OR PERFECT IMAGE you may have had of yourself falls away. Many people are addicted to perfection and in their pursuit of the ideal they have no patience with vulnerability. They close off anything that might leave them open to the risk of hurt. An ideal is certainly a beautiful thing and part of the crisis in Western culture is due to the erosion of ideals. With the revelation of corruption in so many political and religious domains, our perception of ideals has become tinged with cynicism. Yet no society can endure without the sense of honour, dignity and transcendence enshrined in its set of ideals. Also in one’s individual life the sense of excellence in the ideal encourages you to realize what is best in you, to reach beyond your limitations to a level where something new and surprising emerges. Every poet would love to write the ideal poem. Though they never achieve this, sometimes it glimmers through their best work. Ironically, the very beyondness of the idea is often the touch of presence that renders the work luminous. The beauty of the ideal awakens a passion and urgency that brings out the best in the person and calls forth the dream of excellence.

The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fall-back. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under a great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one’s own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectation which have blinded one to one’s spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion. Such a glimpse of one’s essence can utterly rejuvenate a life and enable one to find the hidden wisdom in the beauty of the flaw.

Death is the great wound in the universe; it is the ultimate vulnerability that overshadows every footstep.