I’ve been hard at work on school things and some extra projects, so this blog is continually neglected. But I thought that this reflection, composed for my class on divine silence, might be interesting to you even though it’s not connected to speculative fiction aside from Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which comes in at the end.
I am fascinated by the way that Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone describes humanity’s strange attachment to its pains and limitations. In the introduction, he exactly nails the feelings of many young writers: “When you’re young, if you’re at all ‘artistic,’ despair has an alluring quality. You affect it, deploy it, stroke it gently like a sedated leopard” (3). He speaks of a young writer “attached to” his “toy despair” (57). This description makes me worried that he has seen the emotional, self-absorbed poetry I scratched into a small notebook in my lonely high school years. But Wiman generalizes this beyond just the romantic poets: he claims, “We are our wounds, it seems, and without them will not exist” (29). Quoting Emily Dickinson, he says that “A prison gets to be a friend” (59).
This seems like a strange idea: why would we be attached to something that limits us, that causes us pain? Yet it’s so clearly the way our current culture works. Many young people self-diagnose various mental health issues to find a sense of belonging to an online community of people that is both misunderstood and marginalized. (I myself have been tempted by various videos explaining how female autistics are different and rarely correctly diagnosed, wondering if this could explain why I found it difficult to sustain friendships. I always ultimately decide that I understand people too well for this to be the case.) We seek to excuse our current behavior as something conditioned by past traumas inflicted upon us. The other week, I watched in mild fascination a woman in a YouTube short series who explained all the future behaviors of an adult based on the role they fulfilled in their family of origin. Were you (like me) the oldest child, the one who was responsible and never needed parental support, who became a third parent to the younger children? Then you would inevitably be someone who had trouble being emotionally intimate, who finds partners who need caring for, who never lets yourself have a bad day. Honestly, guilty on all counts, which is why this stuff is so insidious. By finding a prison we can hide within or a wound we can define ourselves by, we absent ourselves from responsibility for our present actions. We negate the ability or need to change. (Is this that different from blaming the devil (or God?) for our actions?)
From this perspective it’s easy to worry that the idea of Christian peace, “the notion that one could make a clean break with the furies of one’s time and mind,” (58-59) is a false optimism, a toxic positivity in the modern vernacular. How can we simply decide not to be affected by all these contexts that clearly affect us? Yet I’m reminded of something someone told me as a young adult which changed how I thought about my own wounds, my own prison: “As soon as we realize that all our problems come from the way we were raised, we become accountable for those problems and can no longer blame them on our parents.” Weren’t Laman and Lemuel raised by the same parents who raised Nephi and Jacob? All of them were dragged away from their home and suffered the privations of eating raw meat in the wilderness. Our experiences affect us, but they are far from being deterministic. Wasn’t Mormon raised in a godless society that seemed to know no accountability for its own actions? His parents certainly don’t make an appearance when he’s taken aside as a ten-year-old by Ammaron and entrusted with the future guardianship of the spiritual records. Were Mormon’s parents absorbed in the spirit of their times? Did they also feel the “sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin?” (Mormon 2:13) How did Mormon choose such a different path from the prevailing circumstances of his time?
Wiman finds some answers to this dilemma in the same place that I also found them: in the writings of CS Lewis. In Wiman’s poem “The Eft,” he references Lewis’s The Great Divorce. He specifically looks at the characters of “the dwarf and the tragedian,” who are actually one character split into two people. The tragedian insists that all of his troubles are caused by a lack of love and acceptance from his wife, while the dwarf becomes emotionally stunted by this refusal to accept responsibility. Wiman calls their state “the pleasure pain becomes when it becomes a thing to wield/a means of extracting meaning from someone else’s heart/when your own has run dry” (258). He resolves the poem by quoting Lewis again, who is in turn relating the words of his own mentor George McDonald in his fictional Virgil-guide form: “Hell is a state of mind—/ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind,/left to itself, every shutting up of the creature/within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell” (259). The only way to escape the prison we create of our own circumstances is to seek a connection with God, for “Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself./All that is fully real is Heavenly” (259). I had much the same realization reading Lewis as a college student: the unique suffering that the artistic youth becomes attached to is an illusion. All sinners are the same. But all saints become more and more themselves by letting go of their small obsessions, their little hurts, and coming fully into relation with God.
