Blessing and Wounding: Longing, loss, pain and transformation

I was transfixed by an article in today's Wall Street Journal - In Praise of the Crackup: A novelist peers through darkness to find glittering gems in writing and art - by Jeanette Winterson, in which she explores "the collision of creativity and mental instability", digging deeper into the way that artists are often able [driven?] to transform personal pain and loss into works that offer great meaning and value to others. I was first struck by her illumination of the connection between blessing and wounding:

The French verb "blesser" means "to wound." Original etymologies from both Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon bind "bless" with a bloodying of some kind—the daubing of the lintel at Passover, the blood smear on the forehead or thigh of a new young warrior or temple initiate. Wounding—real or symbolic—is both mark and marker. It is an opening in the self, painful but transformative.

This notion of wounding as opening resonated with one of my favorite Rumi poems, "Not Here", in which he celebrates the broken-open place:

There's courage involved if you want to become truth.
There is a broken-open place in a lover.
Where are those qualities of bravery and sharp compassion?
What's the use of old and frozen thought?
I want a howling hurt.
This is not a treasury where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change.
Lukewarm won't do.
Halfhearted holding back, well-enough getting by?
Not here.

It also reminded me of other ancient wisdom that I [also] first heard on the audiobook, Your Heart's Prayer, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, a piece by Rabindranath Tagore, of which I do not know the name:

I see a light, but no fire. Is this what my life is to be like?
Better to head for the grave.
A messenger comes, the grief-courier, and the message is that the woman you love is in her house alone, and wants you to come now while it is still night.
Clouds unbroken, rain, all night, all night. I don't understand these wild impulses - what is happening to me?
A lightning flash is followed by deeper melancholy. I stumble around inside looking for the path the night wants me to take.
Light, where is the light? Light the fire, if you have desire!
Thunder, rushing wind, nothingness. Black night, black stone.
Don't let your whole life go by in the dark.
Evidently, the only way to find the path is to set fire to my own life.

And, just to round out a selection of relevant poems shared by Oriah, here's a segment she quotes from Leonard Cohen's song, Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in. 

Returning to the wisdom channeled by Jeanette Winterson, there were a number of other highly resonant insights and experiences, written with such elegance and poignancy that I cannot bring myself to do anything more (or less) than simply excerpt them here:

We know from 100 years of psychoanalytic investigation that an early trauma, often buried or unavailable to consciousness, is the motif that plays through our lives. We meet it again and again in different disguises. We are wounded again in the same place. This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real.

Creativity takes the heavy mass of our lives and transforms it back into available energy. Taking the mundane or the weighted, the overlooked or the too familiar, art is able to re-show us ourselves and ourselves in the world. Art holding up a mirror to life is commonly misunderstood as realism, but in fact it is recognition. We see through our own fakes, our own cover stories, we see things as they are, instead of how they look, or how we'd like them to be.

...

Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place and it meets the wound we each carry.

Even when our lives are going well, there is something that prowls the borders, unseen, unfelt. The existential depression that is becoming a condition of humankind, experienced as loss of meaning, a kind of empty bafflement, is different from the situational depression we all go through from time to time. Job loss, bereavement and catastrophe will throw us into situational depression, but existential depression is different. When life loses all meaning, we cannot live.

...

Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the poems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss, and one has meaning.

[Addendum: While Jeanette Winterson focuses on art and literature, in Wired's recent article on "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All", Amy Wallace describes a transformation of a wound into a blessing in the realm of science:

To understand exactly why [Paul] Offit [inventor of the rotavirus vaccine] became a scientist, you must go back more than half a century, to 1956. That was when doctors in Offit’s hometown of Baltimore operated on one of his legs to correct a club foot, requiring him to spend three weeks recovering in a chronic care facility with 20 other children, all of whom had polio. Parents were allowed to visit just one hour a week, on Sundays. His father, a shirt salesman, came when he could. His mother, who was pregnant with his brother and hospitalized with appendicitis, was unable to visit at all. He was 5 years old. “It was a pretty lonely, isolating experience,” Offit says. “But what was even worse was looking at these other children who were just horribly crippled and disfigured by polio.” That memory, he says, was the first thing that drove him toward a career in pediatric infectious diseases.]

Comments

[Dan]

I am a little surprised no one has commented, Joe. When take together your summary of Winterson and the other references, especially the Tagore piece, form a provocative whole. I'm following the process of your grieving the loss of Strands in Seattle and looking forward to your next reinvention.

"Evidently, the only way to find the path is to set fire to my own life."

The words from this WSJ essay and the poems are all matches ready to be struck. There is, indeed, an art to illumination. You have my appreciation and great respect as you move forward.

[Joe McCarthy]

Dan: I always enjoy comments, especially from good friends, so thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts - and warm words of encouragement.

I've been meaning to hunt down that piece from Tagore for quite some time now, and Winterson's piece helped provide the tipping point to intensify my search. The sentence you picked out was the one that kept resonating with me. In Oriah's description of this and other examples of failed space - and the opportunities they create (if / when we can open up to them) - she emphasizes the difference between self and Self ... a theme I know you've been reflecting on ... and even generating posters about :-).

[Robb]

Kia ora Joe,
As always I come here and find words which cause me to pause and contemplate, and so many I identify with. I understand all to well that "existential depression", and especially when all seems to be going well in my life I feel sometimes the most insecure, that shadow always looming. I guess that is why the mountains have become such a refuge for me, or maybe a place to learn.
I take much as well out the story of Paul Offit which concludes your post. Out of that enormous lonliness and pain comes a great gift to the world. That is beautiful and inspiring, but I still think of that scared lonely little boy in that strange and scary place and I want to hug him.
I think as well of a recent post I read by a New Zealand blogger whom I have met, and is running the Red Cross relief operation in Indonesia around the earth quakes of a few weeks ago - which the worlds media have quickly forgotten. In his writing are encounters with tremendous examples of the human spirit and condition, one man who lie pinned for days, forced finally to cut off his own leg in order to be rescued. His dignity and courage is overwhelming.
Sorry Joe, I do not mean to ramble but you have set off a real thread of thought. My main point is to write I hope you are coping as best is possible, that eventually this loss will lead to much enrichment in your own life, and the lives of others. Kia kaha my friend.
Aroha e hoa,
Robb

[Joe McCarthy]

Robb: I can relate to shadows and insecurities, and I, too, am inspired by the brief summary of the New Zealander who is running the Red Cross relief operation in Indonesia. My sense is that one of the shadows inherent in our ever-increasing global awareness - through the growth of traditional and non-traditional (personal) media "outlets" - is an increase in compassion fatigue. I am reminded of David Whyte writing about the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness ... and am heartened to read about this individual example of wholehearted engagement in the relief of suffering on a massive scale ... a welcome contrast to the disheartening massive obsession - in this country - with the purported suffering of an individual family with a balloon.

[www.tallpenguin.com]

Hello there, I came over to your blog from Oriah's. I enjoy what I've read so far of your writing. Pleased to meet you here in the blogosphere.

Another beautiful and relevant bit of wisdom from Rumi: "Don't turn away, keep your eye on the bandaged place. 
That's where the light enters you."

I wrote my own musings on wounds some time ago. http://www.tallpenguin.com/2008/05/beneath.html

It seems we're tied into much of the same reading. I just finished reading Tagore's "Sadhana". I have loved Tagore's work for many years now. I also stumbled upon the Wired article through the Science-Based Medicine blogs I read. And of course, who doesn't love Rumi? I'm rambling but basically I'm trying to say that it's comforting to find like minds out in the big world.

Cheers,
Anya

[Joe McCarthy]

Anya: thanks for sharing that inspiring piece of Rumi wisdom, and for sharing some of your own wounds. I wish you (and me, and all of us) all the best in the process of transforming the wounds into blessings ... for ourselves and others!