Behind the darkness of suffering, a subtle brightening often manifests itself. Two lines in a poem by Philippe Jaccottet echo this: “Love, like fire, can only reveal its brightness / on the failure and the beauty of burnt wood.” There is consolation and transfiguration here. The fires of suffering are disclosures of love. It is the nature of the lover to suffer. The marks and wounds that suffering leave on us are eventually places of beauty. This is the deep beauty of soul where limitation and damage, rather than remaining forces that cripple, are revealed as transfiguration.
Sweet Honey from Old Failures
Suffering makes us deeply aware of our own inability. It takes away our power; we lose control. The light of our eyes can see nothing. Now it is only the inner light in the eye of the soul that can help you to travel this sudden, foreign landscape. Here we slowly come to a new understanding of failure. We do not like to fail. We are uncomfortable in looking back on our old failures. Yet failure is often the place where suffering has left the most special gifts. I remember some time ago speaking to a friend who was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He told me that this milestone made him reflect deeply on his life. He was surprised and excited on looking back at his life to discover that much of what he had understood as the successes in his life did not hold their substance under more critical reflection. As against that, what he had always termed his failures now began to seem ever more interesting and substantial. The places of failure had been the real points of change and growth.
This is often true in our own experience. Sometimes a person puts his heart and soul into his career. He makes huge sacrifices, putting his family in second place. Then, when the key position becomes available, someone else walks into it. At the crucial moment, through no fault of his own, he has failed, and the opening will not come again. Initially, this is a devastating experience. Finding understanding and support in the bosom of his family, he slowly begins to see through his life. He is shocked to realize that he hardly knows his family at all; he has been absent so much. As his withdrawal from the drug of career becomes surer, he sees things differently. The failure could not actually have come at a better time. If this had not happened now, his grown-up children would have left home without his really knowing them. This experience of discovery often happens when people retire or are made redundant; they learn to reclaim and enjoy the life they never knew they had lost, until retirement. There is a beautiful verse from Antonio Machado:
Last night I dreamed—blessed illusion—
that I had a beehive here
in my heart
and that
the golden bees were making
white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Translated by Robert Bly
Failure is the place where destiny swings against our intentions. What you wanted and worked for never came. Your energy and effort were not enough. Failure also happens in the inner world, the times when your own smallness and limitation ruined things; you reached deep into yourself for something kind or creative and caught only smallness. Failure often gnaws most deeply in the territory of relationships. Times when you have caused damage. Failure also includes personal weakness. This is often a subject that evokes great feeling in literature. This was a theme that haunted Joseph Conrad’s characters in the novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Conrad explores failure in the challenging area of affinity. One character sees himself in an other and the other’s failure gnaws at him and threatens to unravel a life built on standards and achievement. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow only catches glimpses of Kurtz, but he already has foreknowledge of his own failure. Failure is then often the place where you suffered unintentionally. Reflection on our failures brings home to us the hidden secrets of our nature. Failure is the place where longing is unexpectedly thwarted. This often brings interesting discovery and reintegration.
Unconscious Suffering
Below the surface in the night-side of your inner world, there is suffering happening. Given that suffering usually causes pain, it sounds strange to suggest that you might actually be suffering without knowing it. Yet there seems to be something in this idea the more one thinks about it. There is a vast area of the human soul that is totally unknown to us. Let us not equate it simply with the subconscious. This holds us too firmly within the idiom of psychoanalysis. In that unknown region, many things happen of which you are afforded no glimpse. It is probable that quite a lot of suffering happens there that never ascends to the surface of your mind. Quietly in the night of our souls, everyone suffers. This suffering can be quietly at work, refining, tempering, and balancing your presence here in the world. Patiently it turns the charred icon of your falsity into the luminous icon of real presence.
Perhaps this perspective can open a little window into the dark mystery of how children suffer. There is the awful reality of children who are suffering horribly in the world through abuse, poverty, and wars. Yet there is also the fact that in some way all children suffer. Behind the playful world of every child there is some unconscious darkness deciphering itself and working itself through. Every child carries even in its innocence some of the burden of the pain of the world. This is akin to the unknown suffering in which every adult also participates. Something in the very nature of suffering loves the darkness of the unknown and hurts us and lessens us even without our being fully conscious of it.
Suffering in the Animal Kingdom
There are different forms of suffering. There is also much suffering in the world that humans are too unrefined to carry. This is where our more ancient sisters and brothers, the animals, come in to carry part of the world’s pain. This pain for which our minds are as yet too coarse. Sometimes when you look into an animal’s face, you see great pain. This is not pain brought about by the consciousness negatively targeting itself. Animal consciousness is more lyrical and free. An animal does not burden itself in the way a human can.
Many of our burdens are false. Animals do not spend years inventing and constructing burdens for themselves. You do not walk into a field and encounter a cow who is seriously self-analysing and in deep turmoil, because she is failing to connect with her inner calf! It is highly improbable that you will ever meet a cow who is seriously swamped by the fact that her project of self-improvement has unleashed this huge ancestral cow thing in her life, and now she can hardly walk because she knows she is carrying all the cow karma of her ancestry! Neither will you find a cow who is fatally depressed because she has discovered that on the night she was born the astrological structure of her destiny was negatively set, and she is just reluctantly grazing in the sweet grass knowing that soon the very fields will rise up against her! As far as we know, cows are not burdened in this manner by ultimate questions. Nevertheless, you often encounter such loneliness in animal presence; animals seem to receive it from elsewhere. It belongs somehow to the intimate pain of the world. An animal’s face can often be an icon of profound lonesomeness. It is said that Nietzsche, before one of his major breakdowns, was walking down a street in Turin. Coming up the street in the opposite direction was a horse and cart. He looked deeply into the horse’s face and went up and put his arms around its neck and embraced it. The sadness in the old horse’s face was a perfect mirror of his own torture. Every form of life participates in the light of soul and also in the darkness of suffering. A kind of voluntary kinship is made possible through suffering.