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: