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The question of identity is such a conundrum, to me, in the context of a marriage/intimate relationship. I spent 23 years building libraries and collections and small masterpieces, deciding what I loved and where I loved it most and how I could weave it all into my present living most richly. Before I met Marshall, I had shelves of poetry and fiction, wooden boxes filled with colored broken glass and British pounds, so many albums of requiems and aves and salve reginas. The mysterious blending of our lives over the past two years hasn’t seen the loss of any of these things, like it so easily could have if we had been reckless, but they have shifted and died down in some places in order to shoot up in others. His loves have charged into my heart and I make room. We meet each other’s loves and silently, almost without realizing it, are building a new identity from the two worlds. Who is that person that we are becoming?
I put on my John Rutter collection of sacred choral music this morning and found in it the stillness I’ve been wanting. The kind I used to find every morning before I came back to Knoxville and embarked on the rest of my life. This is as much a part of me as my bones, this need for and love of the still place of this music. And the surprise of this rediscovery isn’t frightening — I’m not afraid that I’m accidentally losing parts of myself as I grow deeper into this relationship — it seems only like another signpost on the road of any relationship. A warning that the road forks, ahead.
Every day I have an opportunity to become more fully myself, or not. Become distracted, stay distracted, live outside of my body. Always seeing, never understanding. Or not: put off anxiety and walk through the curtain. For me, this is dropping my cyclical rhythms of guilt and unassigned fear, opening my hands, and turning up my forearms, to God. It is breathtaking that I am set back more fully into the seat of myself, here. And I’ll add that when I’m talking about “myself,” here, and everywhere, I mean something much less like an ego and much more like an understanding of my purpose and position as a living person. Which, maybe that’s what an ego is. I should know what an ego is. Huh. Well.
At any rate, I find more and more that Rilke’s wisdom is truth. As is Fred Rogers’, but I don’t have any of his books (has he written books?). This is from Letter 7:
“But in this young people err so often and so grievously: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) cast themselves upon each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion….And then what? What is life to do with this heap of half-battered existence which they call their common living and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses the other and many others, that were yet to come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, divining things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty… but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess individuality of their own, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?”
As my and Marshall’s new life is coming up out of the earth or the water, I find as many warnings as I do beautiful things. It’s all barely comprehensible. Which is why I need wisdom, and to sit still in the room of my soul. The push and pull of growing into a new sort of being seems like a mechanism as automatic and unconscious as the simple growth of spring flowers … but no, it has to be tended. The wisdom of Rilke is really the wisdom of Jesus, telling a crowd about the man who built his house on a bed of stone.
I haven’t done a ‘Bible study’ in ages, having developed a strong distaste for them somewhere in my past, but I signed on to a study of John that my mom was doing with two other girls because the title of the study was from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and there were quotes from Beuchner, Rilke, Eliot, Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, L’Engle, and others whose writings I have loved and lived by inside it. It’s been a series of small revelations, just like a study of a gospel must be, and the question we are contemplating this week, “Woman, why are you weeping?” is ringing a nearby bell, so near.
In John, after the resurrection, Peter and “the other disciple” ran to the tomb to see if what Mary saw was right (door wide open, no body inside). After they saw what they came to see, they wandered back and left Mary there, “outside the tomb, weeping.” At some point Jesus is there, having walked around or having gone and come back in the guise of man or light or wind or whatnot else, and looks like the sort of person that lives in backgrounds (gardener). He asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Up to this point, Jesus’ question felt shallow to me, almost like he walked up behind her and said, “Guess who!” A conversation-starter, meant to arouse her curiosity — self-concerned, self-revealing. As I’m reading through all the excerpts and answering all the irritating questions, though, this act & these words are turning from shadow into shades of light. It’s beginning to seem as weighty and selfless as any other word from the mouth of Christ, like the words of Aslan when he was still shrouded in darkness, walking beside an ignorant Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (Lewis): “Tell me your sorrows.”
That a hugely powerful being could concern itself with our language, our opening our mouths to say what’s so terribly the matter, is incredible. Jesus is tortured and killed by a frenzied mob, and comes to meet Mary to ask her to tell him her grief. As if that act were a catalyst for her healing, awakening, richer being. As if that were the point, the primary concern.
As a writer, I spend vast amounts of time considering my own griefs and trying to organize them into some kind of coherence, some kind of orderly expression, something that makes sense. Ever since I read Aslan’s question to Shasta, years ago, I’ve hesitantly come forward with my own sorrows, hoping it was ok, and have met with the kind of grace that I didn’t recognize in the small story of Risen Christ and Mary the prostitute … until now. I don’t know how this all can be true, but it may be. I’m entertaining (wildest) hopes.
“…in childhood we have used up too much strength, too much grown-people’s strength, — that may be true for a whole generation. Or true over and over again for individuals. What shall one say about it? That life has unending possibilities of renewal. Yes, but this too: that the using of strength in a certain sense is always increase of strength also; for fundamentally we have to do only with a wide cycle: all strength that we give away comes, experienced and altered, over us again. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there, truly done, that is not prayer?”
This from a letter of R. M. Rilke’s.
“So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all that you do. You must think that something is taking place in you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any disquietude, any grief, any heaviness of spirit, since you really do not know what these states are doing to you? Why do you want to pursue yourself with the questions whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound? For you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change.”
from Letter 8, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
“I miss the gladness, miss something or other that I should have previously done. A point of departure, some evidence, the passing of a test in my own eyes.” Rilke
Tonight, though, after all.
This morning I freaked out on M and had to go take a walk, at first I thought I was going to where the big trees grow, next to the Federal building, but I kept going and was turning around the corner of St. John’s Episcopal. Of course. A church; and, just like Christ the King, a courtyard.
Christ the King is a church and school that I used to pass all the time, walking or riding my bike down Belmont Boulevard in Nashville. I took Belmont to get downtown and to get groceries at a little neighborhood grocery store across the street from Christ the King’s sports field. One of the first secret places of beauty I discovered in Nashville — still a freshman — I walked up and there was a walkway going back into a memorial garden, with maples surrounding and flowers filling. A fountain had a Thomas Merton quote inscribed on it, if I remember correctly, and I would go and sit there for an hour to regain sanity. A weather-stained statue of Mary and child Jesus stood under a huge, half-dying oak.
I feel as if I’m betraying a secret, talking about these places in such a public place. Secret places are necessary, for me, even if I rarely see them and they are preserved in inaccurate memory. So I think St. John’s courtyard steps into my life in a time when I needed another secret place so much, a still place in the city, with a labyrinth (which I walked, oh it stills the soul) and great bushes of myrtles and bleeding hearts and rosemary.
What Rilke says about solitude is true, that a great function of friendships is to guard each others’ solitude, since solitude is such a powerful place for God to speak. Which brings Kierkegaard to mind, and what he says about the individual having to stand alone before God. Tonight is growing slowly into tomorrow and I had to write these down. Just some thoughts.
“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (28).
…
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them” (33-34).
…
“Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things that were laid upon us; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. … Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, excess upon the other have obscured the distinctness of this necessity, and all the deep, simple urgencies in which life renews itself have become similarly obscured. But the individual…can remind himself that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and desire, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, [but] bending to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding” (34-36).
