They walk I follow

February 6, 2011

Some art is as trivial and ephemeral as our youth: its willful innocence soon outgrown, and without resentment, but with a kind and condescending turn of heart, to be dismissed as a passing, as a light distraction.

Other pieces are soon discovered: those that remain with us are an artist’s masterwork, which once open our youthful eyes, a door to something larger than we know, larger than we are; and as we age into their beauty and their wisdom they make their way into our hearts along the lines of fracture and remorse we earn through our hard living.

I laid my book down at this late hour - David Copperfield, by Dickens - having been drawn on and wrung out by so many passages, undisguised self-portraits of love and of loss and of… acceptance… penned by a master of observation, of wit and of compassion.

Here the struggle to find contentment, to nourish our love; on another page, learning we are strong enough to defend the weak, instead of preying upon them; the innocence with which we choose our path; the experience which lights our puerile plans as fragile, and yet the best we could have made; the small anguishes (in the span of years, proven small) and the inordinately great feelings of relief, as though it were death itself we had escaped, instead of (once again) our small mindedness. Ingredients of a day, of a week or a year…

Am I grateful that these artists - women and men - have spoken so fluently of our human ways? Or that, in having chosen paths that always opened my world wider (or simply lived, perhaps, into these gains and losses that are a common, human wage?), I understand more of these artists’ writing, more than I would have seen before celebrating this victory, or mourning that failure?

Somewhere in the vicinity of a heart, the smile and the sigh meet. That makes fine harmony of us all: it opens the fist; it softens the hand. It invites the kiss, the one that is deeply received. Because - I know it, so well! - the size of our love will always equal the size of our loss, be it sooner through unskillful living or mischance, or (one can hope) later, through long ripening of love, straight into and directly through all challenges. If I deeply feel the meeting, if I allow her to take shelter in my heart, I must be sensible of departure, and grieve the space that’s left when I find her shelter empties.

Courage.

Embrace the hurts and prove yourself (myself) their equal.

This is what is meant: become a Man, grow to be a Woman. Becoming your hurts’ equal, fear less - be fearless! - to love immoderately, and surrender immensely, that when we’re finally told “Relinquish All!”, the pain should be composed of every color of this living planet, every sound of longing and attainment, every memory of satisfying flavor, of every touch that was generous…

Loss of what we had is softer, then, than recognizing what we lost to time, and never touched, and never held.

I recognize, from Dickens’ passage on the ebbing love of Doctor Strong: hope is at the heart of expressed sadness. Sadness allows approach, sadness says “I am here!” Tears can be wiped away, by one’s own hand, even better by another’s; while the same loss lit by anger slams the door, and locks it, and holds our neighbors out.

Maybe life is long enough its winds make coals of our flames caresses of our fury.