The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [19]
It was the prophet who helped me understand that there wasn’t much I could do about my situation, except to wait it out. I watched ice form on the river outside my window one Sunday afternoon and felt a loneliness more intense than any I could remember since childhood. The day had grown incredibly still—I spent much of that fall in solitude—and the silence was so deep it seemed poised at the edge of eternity. When it became too much to bear, words came to me: “the necessary other, a reminder and reproach; the ground of winter, watchful and chill, no longer looking for what is not there.”
I found this image of winter’s encroachment curiously hopeful. Nearly empty, I could not hope to fill myself—certainly not with human companionship, although when it did come that fall even small acts of kindness and hospitality were resplendent—and I began to sense that this was exactly as it should be. God wanted me empty, alone, silent, and watchful. I was suffering from both severe laryngitis and a lame leg, and had to laugh at myself, wondering if I really were so dense that God had to resort to these extremes in order to get me to shut up and be still.
I spent fruitful hours meditating on what it might mean to be a “necessary other.” The phrase seemed to define Jeremiah, and the prophetic role. I also wondered if it might not help to serve to define the otherness of the poet, an otherness that typically emerges in childhood. Jeremiah 13:16—“When you look for light, he turns it into gloom,/and makes it deep darkness”—brought back to me a childhood image of God, which had led to nothing but trouble in my cheery, 1950s Protestant Sunday school. We’d been asked to paint a picture of heaven, and my effort, an image of God’s throne surrounded by clouds, was a dismal failure. The newsprint cracked under all the layers of paint I had applied, in an attempt to get the image dark enough. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Gregory of Nyssa in my mid-thirties that I discovered that my childhood image had a place within the Christian tradition.
Many people experience such otherness in childhood, but those who find their otherness integral to a calling—to religious life, to ministry, to the arts—learn to adjust to it as a permanent condition. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, quotes novelist Alphonse Daudet on the death of his brother: “My father cried out so dramatically: ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old . . . Oh, this terrible second me . . . how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”
When artists discover as children that they have inappropriate responses to events around them, they also find, as they learn to trust those responses, that these oddities are what constitute their value to others. They can make people laugh, or move them to tears. Under such circumstances, the second, mocking self can make the journey to adulthood extremely difficult and lonely, and artists are notorious for not making it, for becoming monsters of ego instead of human beings.
It doesn’t help that others often encourage artists to think of themselves as somehow more special, sensitive, “creative” than other mortals. This is false doctrine. There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do. The gifts of the human imagination that artists employ operate equally in science and scholarship, teaching and philosophy, business and mathematics, ranching, preaching, engineering, mothering and fathering. Still, it can’t be denied that artists interact strongly with their world, and that there is a measure of suffering involved as they come to a mature understanding of their communal role.
The romanticizing of the artist, of course,