Sickness Unto Death, Part I

notes for a talk I gave on Kiergegaard's Sickness Unto Death once.

Despair

Self: "The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God... the progress of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not" (30).
Definition: "Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself" (15).
Universality: "Just as a physician might say that very likely there is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows [hu]mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself..." (22).
Types of Despair

Defined by Consciousness: "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair" (42)
Spiritlessness: in despair, not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strictest sense)
This is "the despair that is ignorant of being despair, or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self" (42)
"If a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as it is said, it murders his happiness... he is too sensate to have to courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (43).
"Every human existence that is not conscious of itself... before God as spirit... that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests and merges in some abstract universality... or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source... is... despair" (46).
Weakness: in despair, not to will to be oneself, or the will to do away with oneself: typical (though not definitive) feminine despair
immediacy/despairing over the earthly: "He turns away completely from the inward way along which he should have advanced in order to truly become a self. In a deeper sense, the whole question of the self becomes a kind of false door with nothing behind it in the background of his soul. He appropriates what he in his language calls his self, that is, whatever capacities, talents, etc he may have; all these he appropriates but in an outward-bound direction, toward life, as they say, toward the real, the active life" (55-56).
despairing over the eternal or himself: a man who wishes to be Caesar cannot bear to be himself (ex), yet he cannot get rid of himself; he despairs over himself. he "becomes more clearly conscious of his despair, that he despairs of the eternal that he despairs over himself, over being so weak that he attributes such great significance to the earthly, which now becomes for him the despairing sign that he has lost the eternal and himself" (61). this creates inclosing reserve, and can lead to suicide.
Defiance: in despair, to will to be oneself, : typical (though not definitive) masculine despair
"Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act" (67).
"The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic" (71-72).
"And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be, severing the self from any relation to a power that has established it, or severing it from the idea that there is such a power...instead, the self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself, which is supposed to bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises..." (68-69).
"The devil's despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse. Therefore, his despair is the most absolute defiance" (42).
"Rather than to seek help, he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell" (71).
"In so far as the self in its despairing striving to be itself works itself into the very opposite, it really becomes no self... at no moment is it... eternally steadfast" (69).
The Remedy?
Despair as a state of perpetuated continuity: "If a person is truly not to be in despair, he must at every moment destroy the possibility" (15), for "[our despair] does not continue as a matter of course; if the misrelation continues, it is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself" (16). the continuity of sin vs "the essential continuity of the eternal through being before God in faith" (105)
Solution: "The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it." (14)
Inwardness: resting transparently in the power that established you. "If there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change... the time never comes when a man has grown away from it, or has become older -- than the Eternal. If there is, then, something eternal in a man the discussion of it must have a different ring. It must be said that there is something that shall always have its time, something that a man shall always do, just as one Apostle says that we should always give thanks to God... The Eternal will not have its time, but will fashion time to its own desire, and then give its consent that the temporal should also be given its time" (36-37).
The Unspeakable in Nature: "And the sea, like a wise man, is sufficient unto itself. Whether it lies like a child and amuses itself with its soft ripples as a child that plays with its mouth, or at noon lies like a drowsy thinker in carefree enjoyment and allows its gaze to wander over all, or in the night ponders deeply over its own being; whether in order to see what is going on, it cunningly conceals itself as though it no longer existed, or whether it rages in its own passion: the sea has a deep ground, it knows well enough what it knows. That which has a deep ground always knows this; but there is no sharing of this knowledge." (48-49) This description of the unspeakable-- it is different with 'one who confesses' -- or who is before God, transparent, who prays ---
The Unspeakable in Man: "For when hate, and anger, and revenge, and despondency, and melancholy, and despair, and fear of the future, and reliance on the world, and trust in oneself, and pride that infuses itself even into sympathy, and envy that even mingles itself with friendship, and that inclination that may have changed but not for the better: when these dwell in a man --- when was it without the deceptive excuse of ignorance? And when a man remained ignorant of them, was it not precisely because he at the same time remained ignorant of the fact that there is an all-knowing One." (51-52)
The way inward, into transparency and rest is silence.

When You Can Endure ~Hafiz
When
The words stop
And you can endure the silence
That reveals your heart's
Pain Of emptiness
Or that great wrenching sweet longing,
That is the time to try and listen
To what the Beloved's
Eyes
Most want
To Say.

A Still Cup ~Hafiz
For
God
To make love,
For the divine alchemy to work,
The Pitcher needs a still cup.
Why
Ask Hafiz to say
Anything more about
Your most
Vital
Requirement?

*All Quotes from Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death, except those noted 'POH', from Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing


The Diary of an Old Soul (excerpts),

by George MacDonald

Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
Oh, thou who knowest! save thy child forlorn.

...Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;
Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;
My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think,--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.

Elie Wiesel and Theodicy ~ a few years ago, working through ideas. . .

Elie Wiesel and Theodicy

A reflection paper

note: I now would like to edit this paper more directly and specifically within the context of God's sovereignty, including more scripture and testing whether this view fits within that context or wanders out of it unacceptably.

This paper will respond to Elie Wiesel’s Night, The Trial of God, and his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, probing into why evil is allowed to exist in the world and whether we have the right to blame God for it—or at least whether we have to right to blame Him for not intervening. It will examine various methods of justifying God’s ways in this matter, as set forth by several of the characters in Wiesel’s works (most notably Berish, Mendel, Sam, and the Priest. Finally, the paper will point out where Wiesel seems to settle, which appears to be where I settle as well, and challenges us to remember the Thou in our dialogue, not forgetting that we are in relationship with God and that our stance toward Him (whatever it is) ought to hold in heart the knowledge that it is intimate in character: a family member’s tie.

~*~**~*~

Night is the stunning account of a fifteen year old boy who tows us back in time to witness the hell of the Holocaust through his own eyes. Elie Wiesel's powerful writing strikes terror, sorrow, remorse, and compassion by turn in readers as they encounter the unimaginably cruel and inhumane things he was forced to endure during World War II. I was as blown away by this story as I always was before; I've read it three or four times now, and every time it leaves me breathlessly racing with heart-felt thought. Babies thrown carelessly—even laughingly—into scorching flames, bodies of all sizes piled sky-high, crematories scattering the ashes of former friends and family like rain, cruel beatings and passionless killings without number . . . what are we to make of evil made so solidly manifest we can barely keep our food down or remember to desire Life? This terrible sickness drains me, sucks me dry somehow, and I truly feel the need to find real sackcloth and ashes to cry out to God in mourning. Obviously to mourn these horrors is not enough. But my first instinct is to shed tears of revolt and helplessness against the evil and plead with God that it be different. Brought to witness horrors like these, I find myself ever more desperately wanting to know why they are allowed to exist in a universe ruled by a supremely good and all-powerful Being!!! What is the explanation for suffering such as this? How can a supremely good ruler look it in the face and remain whole and Holy?

Theodicy is coined from a Greek word meaning ‘justice’, as well as from the word for God, and was thus originally used to designate attempts to justify God’s ways, or goodness. Now it is more common to see it used when directly speaking of evil and ways of trying to explain our undeniable experiences of it. Theodicies abound as they always have; all religions have one form or another, whether pantheistic, monotheistic, or what-have-you. This is because most everyone accedes that perceived evils must find an ordered place on the shelves of the belief system. Everyone seems to feel that they experience evil, so it must either be explained away or fit into the desired structure. Mostly it is safe to say no one fully succeeds. Christianity has a very complete picture in the end, if not entirely so, and we’ll see why even Elie Wiesel appears to allude to the key it contains for all this thought later.
In his works, Wiesel considers various common theodicies from several points of view and ends up rejecting them for one reason and another in favor of a theodicy pieced together from his past, in view of his present, and looking toward the entirely unknowable future, in which he makes room for the mysterious Being of God within his own memory-full existence while still allowing himself to wade through everything that his experience hands him. In Night, the protagonist initially wonders if all of the suffering is because of committed sins, and then alternately sees the whole experience as something which must be submitted to or as a test although he’s sort of in limbo about the whole thing by then. Near the end of his imprisonment the boy rebels inside, and what broke in him that first day when God died, comes back together with the rest of his being in deliberate defiance and protest. Many in the camps see the suffering as a test, but most of those lose heart and strength—like the one with the deep, heart-breaking voice who (essentially) volunteered for death. In The Trial of God, Berish is most definitely the central character of protest, and probably the one to whom Wiesel feels the most definitively drawn. Mendel the beggar seems to advocate a theodicy of suffering as a test/soul-making—and yet he is strongly drawn to many aspects of the theodicy of submission to the mystery of God’s sovereignty as well (which Sam will endorse, minus the awe and feeling that properly go along with such a response). This is how Mendel is brought to idolatry; his internal drive for knowledge overcomes the heart that has been growing in him, the heart Sam so easily deceives him into thinking that he possesses as well. Mendel falls into the comparative ease of rationalism, finally declaring, “Your love of God: I wish I had one measure of it. Your piety: I wish it were mine. Your faith: mine is less profound, less intact than yours. Who are you?” (p. 158, 168). In this way Mendel loses himself to the stranger, who still refuses to tell him who he is. We find in the end that the stranger is ‘intact’ because all he does is talk, and he feels no qualms about lying with truths. The Priest, on the other hand, has a very traditional (and lamentably very fallen) take on suffering as punishment for sin. Unfortunately this in no way causes him to wish to sin any less. He drinks too much, and he wants to sleep with Maria. He talks about hell, he says, because he always does, and because it’s easy to talk about (TToG, p.93). It is often to his advantage to do so as well. He seems to be internally rifling though a hand of cards every time we see him, desperately searching for the one that will help him win. A very uncourageous soul (but aren’t we all just a bit like that… isn’t it a fair representation of the Church, in a way?).

It is frightening, but easily understandable that in Night, the protagonist’s young faith, innocence and love are aborted in the midst of the shockingly personal suffering and death in the concentration camps. The scars that remain in the man to this day are obvious in his memoirs. And yet, somehow this tested faith—a faith that has wrestled with God and continually comes through still firmly opposing God’s enemies and affirming His all-powerful existence (as Wiesel attests in his memoirs, All Rivers Run To The Sea)—is fuller, deeper, and wider than most. He is faithful in as many senses of the word as one can think of, acknowledging and keeping a hold of all the things he’s experienced, not ignoring anything, and struggling to remain whole in the center of it all. It is his acceptance of two propositions especially that make this a possible quest for him: That it is alright to be angry at God, and that God is to be looked upon with compassion and pity.

The first proposition is that it is alright to be angry at God—it is, in fact, our duty to confidently protest who we think He is within the context of our relationship to Him. As Wiesel says,
“But if Nietsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot. I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it. . . Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Rebbe Levi-Yitzhak of Berdichev teach us that it is permissible for man to accuse God, provided it is done in the name of faith in God” (ARRttS, p.84).

We must always remember to address the real God in our defiance, however. No matter how hot the burning fire within us is, first we have to know exactly why we are angry and realize that we are defending something— standing up to God for His own creation, which he has given into our care. Then we have to purposefully extinguish our puny, limited caricatures of Who He is, to the best of our ability, and acknowledge the Unknown reaches of the mind of God. (Who has known the mind of the Lord?...) C. S. Lewis wrote a poem expressing the underlying, foundational posture we ought to adopt, acknowledging that “Where God is concerned, all is mystery” (ARRttS, p. 104).
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

We're all in the same boat, really: without the mercy of God our voices would never be directed properly... but it’s true that we must be faithful witnesses to what we’ve been given. We have to work with the whole of our lives, because that's what he's given us. Sometimes that calls for keening and wailing, sometimes it calls for gritted teeth and strength, and sometimes (yes) it calls for the fiery anger and defiance of Wiesel’s innkeeper Berish from The Trial of God.
In that same play, Sam (the unknown character whom everyone seems to have seen before in places of tragedy and who turns out to be Satan in the end) asks the judges of the Purimschpiel court who are putting God on trial if they will judge without preconceived ideas. They respond in the positive. Will they judge without prejudice? Yes, they reply again. And without passion? Thoughtful Mendel immediately says “No. With passion” (TToG, p.136). I think this is extremely significant in separating one of the things that sets Sam apart from the rest of the cast. As Maria says when she first denounces him as evil, “He has no heart, no soul, no feeling! He’s Satan, I’m telling you!” (TToG, p. 116). Passion, evidently, is important to a human response to God. This is another part of what legitimates our being angry towards God.
The second proposition Wiesel accepts that allows him to strive at keeping the faith is that God is to be looked upon with compassion and pity, as the father of countless children who war with each other and sin against one another constantly. God sheds tears at the suffering of his children; He shares in their pain and grief. This seems to be something extremely significant that Christianity and Judaism have in common. Wiesel is right when he references the Zohar—“No space is devoid of God. God is everywhere, even in suffering and in the very heart of punishment” (ARRttS, p.103). Right and true, but how exactly is God present in every space? As Himself. As Life-giver, Love-source, Powerful Redeemer, and so many many other things. “Israel’s sadness,” Wiesel states, “is bound to that of the divine presence, the She’hina: together they await deliverance. The waiting of the one constitutes the other’s secret dimension. Just as the distress of the She’hina seems unbearable to the children of Israel, so Israel’s torments rend the heart of the She’hina” (ARRttS, p.103). This sounds strikingly similar to Christian thought on the matter where we are, together with God, suffering and awaiting deliverance:
“God’s work to release himself from his sufferings is his work to deliver the world from its agony; our struggle for joy and justice is out struggle to relieve God’s sorrow. . . Until justice and peace embrace, God’s dance of joy is delayed. The bells for the feast of divine joy are the bells for the shalom of the world” (LfaS, p. 91).

Christ blesses mourners in the Sermon on the Mount, saying that they will be comforted. We must realize that our anger at and protest against a seemingly disengaged, impotent, or merciless, unjust God are actually mourning which lacks a foundation to rest on, which looks Mystery in the face, sees nothing recognizable, and loses its faith that dialogue is happening. Assuming that a Mystery characterized by love would not communicate with us is just that: an assumption. From what we are given to know, God does dialogue with us, and we must rest in that with confidence—when we mourn and when we are angry (or when we communicate with Him in any other way).

Who are the mourners, really? Nicholas Wolterstorff addresses this in his moving book, Lament for a Son.

“The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for that day’s coming, and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence. . . mourners are aching visionaries. . . The stoics of antiquity said: Be calm. Disengage yourself. Neither laugh nor weep. Jesus says: Be open to the wounds of the world. Mourn humanity’s mourning, weep over humanity’s weeping, be wounded by humanity’s wounds, be in agony over humanity’s agony” (LfaS, p.85-86).


And why does Jesus say this? Because He Himself was open in just this way: because through Christ’s suffering on Earth, our God mourns with us! Again Wolterstorff expresses this admirably, saying “To those who mourn the absence of that day is disclosed already the heart of God. Upon entering the company of the suffering, they discern the anguish of God. . . they hear the sobs and see the tears of God. By these they are consoled” (LfaS, p.88, emphasis added).
Wiesel seems to point to Christianity in a forgiving and positive manner in several places in his writing. For example, when the Priest is dumping on the Jewish faith, Mendel says an amazing thing. He says, “I speak not of Christ, but of those who betray Him. They invoke His teaching to justify their murderous deeds. His true disciples would behave differently; there are no more around. There are no more Christians in this Christian land” (TToG, p.99). The Priest responds, “Is it His fault? Why blame Him? If what you say is true, then feel sorry for Him. If Christ is alone and abandoned—then it’s up to you, His brethren, to comfort Him” (TToG, p.99). Mendel assures Him that one day they would.
In the foreword to Night, Wiesel speaks of another young man with hopeless eyes full of death and torment who comes to visit him, wanting to share asking for an answer to it all. Wiesel says,
“And I, who believe that God is love,… what did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Jew, his brother, who may have resembled him—the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? … We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping” (Night, p.x-xi).

God has actually done both these things for us. Sadly, we miss them all too often.
Remember to have pity on God. Recall in faith that we suffer with Him.

Bibliography
Livingston, James C. Anatomy of the Sacred: Chapter 10. New York: MacMillan, 1993.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.
Wiesel, Elie. The Trial of God. New York: Schocken, 1979.
Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1995.

about endings/ .enduring.

Shroud

*i.

The backs of the leaves are bowed
under the weight of an orphan snow. Steadily
steadily, this forlorn blanket hides
the greens and grays of a summer-like April night,
blustering about
clean yellow tulips and gracing sun-kissed surfaces
with abrasive white
garments: acidic. And I,
watching the decay of a burgeoning beauty Spring, see
Snow
caressing tree-trunks,
seductive, consuming, unwilling to be
abandoned,
forgotten,
alone.

the weight of this icy frost slows my heart;
its death-shroud touch darkens my sight
with a slow sorrow that aches like the End
of what promised to be a
beautiful
new
beginning...

*ii.

Saw a brittle, brown flower, bent: soul-spent.
Realized: what froze my breath, murdering
the newly-born buds of hope in my heart
made him rejoice; this alien April's
winter whiteness was to him
a child's snowy playground: unspeakable
comfort in the dead of night.

I stand
to command:
be still, my aching heart!
Have silence, my raving soul! Take trust,
put patience, like a balm over your wounds;
All shall be well.

and yet--
MaNiaCAL mOuRnINg:
frosted leaves are
Burnt
by the cold, my face
by these tears, pouring
pouring like the rain that should have come
to nourish the green beauty of new
Life
in this place...


*iii.

Wish i'd Never grown
above the earth
to taste this awful plague.
Whitened, Silent,
a tomb:

Welcoming the destroyer of
Spring.

~marykathryn huffman
first committed to paper:
5/23/05
edit 7/19/05
edit ii: 2.28.06 5.03 pm london
edit iii: 4/03/06 11.49 pm london,
because i want to be done with it.

~*~**~*~

:Fall:

a dusky-green hilltop at midnight,
on my back in prickly grass, gasping for
air and wiping the sparkling sea from my eyes,
find myself among evergreens, sparsely gathered
here by human hands, feeling their needled sharp
buffeted by the same inexplicable
winds of whisperings:
}indecipherable{ as i.
~
the grass shivers in silvery expectation; there
is a single star in the smoggy city sky.
i think we would all ascend above
if we could.
each stem, each leaf
--- struggling ---
for its next breath, to pull nutrients
from a parched and
poisoned earth. . .
~
we must endure here
as we can-- take
joy in each moment of green
each splash of cool
water each
pixie-sparkle of Io-dust-starlight:
stretch out to touch the blessing of
Earth.

~marykathryn 2004?

rain paths

====
Simple things
give me Joy this grey,
grey day:
rain drops
hit
the window)widowed
tears of mine
pass the time
wending their way
down pane
after pane after
pane, allowing
each
other
to join, then separate
once
more,
straight down,
straight down, now
turned aside, made
crooked, path
changed by the presence of
another drop, halt.
and drop, halt.
and --- s t r e a m ---
down toward the long low ledge and
Join
in a pool of growing
sorrow(and in togetherness?
lives Understanding; in unity?
loving
J ~ o ~ y .

11/03/05 11.46 am
edit: 12/27/05 am
===

Poetry and Spring Break; off the cuff

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't
A lof of people think or believe or know they feel---but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling---not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people : but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself---in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else---means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time---and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is : do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world---unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
ee cummings*****From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, October 26, 1955

I travelled North this Spring. I went to Scotland and Ireland for two weeks, and basked in the way my imagination grew into itself there. Here's an excerpt from my journal after I'd drunk in the highlands for almost a week, just about delirious with contentment:

"...I'm so inspired I'm buzzing with impressions and ideas -- I know how I want to write in general better, and I also know that the Scottish highlands will be bleeding out of my heart, through the seams of my eyes (salty-like), and setting up house in my writing. From now on, the colors and textures, shapes, mountains, snow, waterfalls, botany, birds, tree-shapes, sky, clouds, soil, moss (!!!) -- even the weather -- will be an integral part of my writing. I now know that artists are not insane; places like this exist! I never realized a place could be made manifest out of one's own heart like this. I feel that Scotland has been living in me all my life and has just been waiting for the space to jump out and say 'I told you so!' I'll tell you, I know my inner eye isn't crazy now, and I will be giving it all the free reign it wants to create places of its own..." 4/8/06


Jon and I stayed in Fort William at a really cozy little old hostel with lots of character where I was able to take naps on beanbags in front of the fire when I returned from hikes during the day (there was also free tea and coffee and hot chocolate all day in the kitchen). On the second day out Jon and I walked 16 miles and I pulled a muscle in my leg right up at the top-- the one that lifts the leg. I don't know what it's called, but it still hurts like heck sometimes. It slowed me down for the rest of the trip, though I did do a fair amount of hiking anyway.
So I traipsed about like travelers of old, with journal and sketchbook in hand, writing poetry in my head, and looking for the unique beauty of the land and people around me (as opposed to racing around trying to follow the advice of travel experts and take in the biggest&best sights in Europe). A traveler mentality leads you different ways, taking you directly to different kinds of experiences that show you the unique aspects of the place you're in without removing you from yourself, without bringing you into company with those who would part you commercially and otherwise from your own Being. There's real substance that stays with you when you're a traveler, whereas the overall feeling one leaves tourist traps with is something like "the world is a vampire..."(Smashing Pumpkins); I much prefer the first to the second. Touristy-feeling is a darkness in the gut, a strangled lack of oxygen and a sort of inhumanity filled with human bodies, like dying of thirst in the Dead Sea. In traveling, there's still that feeling of not belonging where you are quite, but so many things about the place (aside from the rootedness of the community itself that necessarily excludes you as you are an intruder upon its history) testify to your belonging as a human being in any surroundings you choose -- the birds, the plants, the love, the care people prepare food with, the dogs and cats, the trees, the wind, the moon, and the ocean... You can't feel entirely the stranger when you observe these things embracing you and ushering you into newness and a chance to learn about other people -- both their now and their history.
~*~
Megan and I went to Connemara and took a six mile hike up Sky Road and saw the Atlantic ocean -- that really did my heart good, though my leg hurt me terribly most of that hike. {Meditated on Psalm 23}. At a little bar in Clifden we listened to some more music from some elderly locals. An old lady breezed in on her cane with her daughter and sat down at the reserved musician's table, I suppose just to be near the music, but everyone begged her to sing along to her favorite tunes -- she had a fabulous voice! I felt so honoured to be there... It was precious. The entire mood was different. Galway is known for its music and lots of people go there; it is very touristy. Clifden was a destination as well in a way, but it was still a quiet country village at the same time. Here's an excerpt from my journal at the bar that night:

"... I write stories down. I want folklore to be squeezed into 2D, but no one can quite manage it -- there's an element of human flesh and blood and experience in it deeper than anything that can be nailed down on a page in black and unmoving white. The whole give and response mechanism is truly different. Utterly different. Organic. It cannot be flattened -- it is music. It flies through the air and buries itself in people's hearts, and people's hearts give back. . . the nature of this creating is continual and communal. Vaguely Heideggarean. . . (Ha!)..." 4/11/06

I have been noting the similarities and differences between the written word and lyric mixed with note recently, and this trip helped me to do more of it. When we went to the Burren we stayed in Doolin (Dulainn) there were a couple of traditional music shops where I could sit for hours and just listen to the cds they had there. I took full advantage (one was a cafe with a fireplace and a little garden as well, and another was a dusty little cottage behind all the other shops where I talked for a few hours with the guy behind the desk as he played random instruments) and really enjoyed myself, studying the music and trying to learn all I could and asking questions when they came to me. I made friends with a couple of the people that worked at the cafe, and eventually settled on a couple of purchases for myself and my parents -- a fiddler and a harpist. While staying at Doolin, We saw the Cliffs of Mohr (breathtaking!) and the Arran Islands (I went to the tiny island and walked around the mazes of piled stones, meditated, befriended a little dog who guided me around the island, and then spent some time with a cup of tea and a sandwich in a the single pub, writing).
~*~
I noticed something about the trees in the three different countries I've been to: England's predominant tree seems to be ancient, lone, and singlularly knotted, with boils and rough bark, straight and tall and massive with many small scrabbling branches clutching its surrounds covetously; these trees hide much. Scotland's predominant tree strikes me as being various forms of straight, slim, tall, and proud, both youthful and old, adorned by moss or shivering leaves against a silver trunk, backed by a whisper of complex color winding its way through the masses of them on mountains. Ireland's predominant tree looked to be a slight woman perpetually facing a strong wind, hair blown back as branches and moss, sorrowfully skeletal and delicate-- yet still standing, dotting the green landscape, consenting to be permanently shaped by the violent weather because they have no other choice.
I discovered over the last weeks that the way I want to live in other countries and learn them is possible! That my desire to learn places and people and write about them isn't just a dream, it's a Dream, and I think I can do it, given the chance. Perhaps I shall have to give myself the chance... but I know now, rather than simply believing, that it's just as worthwhile to do that anywhere, even in a small town that has genuinely been my home for years and years. Maybe that is my simple task. We'll have to see. :)