3527. “gigantic broken revelations”
George Eliot
Broken revelations: for the sake of the pain that you find yourself feeling for some hurt, her; a pain more like a continuing illness of the eye than any unenduring dark; more like a simply Given than a single Grief, let’s think of the broken revelation as the dim realization that something you dearly love and wanted to see kept whole has been broken (a heart, a hope; a family or feeling of glass; an endearing, un-enduring sense that the World could never take leave of its senses). You’re old enough now to know she’ll probably be okay, but God, you’re sorry that she has to swim through the strange sea that lies ahead—the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation (G. Eliot). She’ll be confused for a long time: actually, you’re old enough to know that the confusion will go on, one way or another, forever. You wish you could shield her from the blood-dimmed see—the breaking news, the breaking waves—but you know that you can’t. The hits just keep on coming, and you just have to hope that she will learn to see, in the patterns of their breakings, the promise of a pathway home.
1. “Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina” (George Eliot, Middlemarch).
2. “Sólo él sabía […] que su aturdido corazón estaba condenado para siempre a la incertidumbre” (Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad).
After the See-Change, you’ll come home: we’ll leave the lights on for you.
3528. “The secret discipline of imagination”
The secret discipline of imagination is a double burden,
discordant and harmonious: first, its delight in the power
and freedom of art; second, the controlled surrender
whereby it acknowledges the limits of artifice.
Harry Berger Jr., “A Secret Discipline:
The Faerie Queene, Book VI”
I’ve never thought of it that way, and, although I’m always on the lookout for the beautiful concession, I do not believe that I ever will. And this despite the fact that I know as well as I know how sorry that sounds, the sad and well-staged cases that would nullify my faith: there’s that play where the great magician drowns his books; a wish whose fulfillment punctuates and punctures a dream; the brokenhearted novelist whose grief bleeds out in a last-scene confession that all his scenes are in vain—his high-piled charactery, mere puppet shows. What can I say? People lose their nerve all the time. I certainly do. Not as much as I did once, but even now, at this late date, I catch myself second- and un-guessing myself—contriving to “un-send,” or to recur to a less voguish and even antiquated parlance, retract (like a nervous witness before an unfriendly committee), some act of fancy, high enough to fly right over this or that instated fact on the ground.
But then I remember the other side of the story; the side that Mr. Berger’s elegant formula appears to have forgotten: the secret discipline by which the emissaries of fantasy, in the very act of deferring to it, quietly infiltrate the realm of the real:
They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.
Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time. … They went quietly down into the roaring streets inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sun-shine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar. (Dickens, Little Dorrit)
Such comings down root a stable garden of gladness, deep rooted enough for the perennial species of sadness,
Note: “a grief … I remember … when I laugh” (O. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”).
3534. “On pardonne tant que l’on aime”
La Rochefoucauld
Sometimes forgiving can feel like a foreign language or even a whole foreign country. Partly, if you’ve reached my state, that’s because you’ve so expatriated yourself from domestic entanglements that whatever Wrongs you feel you’ve done, or have had done to you, feel as far away as Easter 1916 or Islands in a Stream of Unconsciousness. You feel like you’ve so forgiven your ancient-accented, foreign-familial past that it doesn’t even feel like forgiving—more like just plain old forgetting.
But then I remember the love that (who knows how?) still keeps together that little grass shack called home, and that there’s still a place for me there, whether I think I like it or not, and that place keeps getting bigger even as it’s getting smaller, and somehow according to the same algorithm that proves once and for all that Hamlet is Father to his father, all this means that people are forgiving and being forgiven all the time, and you and me are part of that tidal wave that lifts all craft, whatever the rip of the anger we feel and fear, and anyway it’s true—truer than most things, anyway—the Stuttering Bloom that rises out of Ulysses’s last big stops-all-pulled, bringin’-it-halfway-home donnybrook, somewhere around the Battle of Midway somewhere in Dublin and halfway to Hana that go-round with the half-blind-drunk rageoholic—you remember what the Wandering Jew says, even if you think you don’t and think you never heard it in the first place sure you do I know you do because you and I we’re family and we heard it all together on some same Sinai.
We were at the Bar together when he said It when (last call) he said
Note: “Love … I mean the opposite of hatred” (Joyce, Ulysses).
3540. “(Why is it such agony to meet people—at least sensitive people?)”
Such embarrassment that all you can do is to hold some
phrase in your hands as you go up to them to bridge that
gap—a buffer to take the shock, like the ones you use for boats
coming up to the docks. After the first bump it’s all right.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Or you go up to them empty but openhanded, and with those hands, or some other means of showing without telling that you know that they are sensitive (you do know that: everyone you’ve ever met, or ever will, is sensitive).
Take you: the things that go bump in your day, they blur into ache in your night, the ache of any lost chance to help beckon and beacon the arrival of an unarmed armada slipping silently in amongst the usual flaggings of more defined and defended craft. You’re sorry to be slow at any first sighting, and hope that the one lately spotted will take comfort in knowing that any “state of relatedness” “can be reached only through some kind of suffering and sacrifice … through trial and error.” (Kurt Wolff to Anne Morrow Lindbergh) Sometimes when you’re really late (maybe too late) to take the meeting, as crazy as it sounds, you sort of wish you were sort of like an old town, vested with the broadest powers to receive in style even the quiet citizen, the displaced, unstated person; sometimes when you’re really late (maybe too late) to take the meeting, you sort of wish you were sort of like an old town, an old city, and it was
Note: “as if the city were a human being, a good and dear trusted friend who had come a long way to welcome him” (Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools).