Chemistry of the Soul
Inspired by the movie
The Light Between Oceans
Friday, April 21, 2017, not yet summer
but nearing the end of what the poet T. S. Eliot called the cruelest month of the
year, a dull grey dismal day too cold to sit on the deck to have a tipple or
finish reading my book Paris Without End,
The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, so I asked Penny if she wanted to
watch a movie on Netflix in the cozy comfort of my writing room. She said yes,
and I found a movie called The Light
Between Oceans, starring Michael Fassbender as the lighthouse keeper, whose
portrayal of C. G. Jung in A Dangerous
Method completely won me over, Alicia Vikander as the lighthouse keeper’s
wife, whom I didn’t know, and Rachel Weisz who played the birth mother of the infant
child in this poignant drama, and whom I fell in love with the first time I saw
her starring with Ralph Fiennes in The
Constant Gardner, and we cozied up in our two sofa reading chairs and
watched the movie that so moved me to tears it stirred up the root of an idea
that I’ve had gestating in my unconscious for several years, and that’s the
subject of today’s spiritual musing….
I had unfinished
business with Hemingway since I wrote The
Lion that Swallowed Hemingway three years ago, or I would not have been
called back to Hemingway by my relentless Muse to write the sequel My Writing Life, Reflections On My High
School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway; and all of my new
reading on the iconic writer whose simple prose introduced the modern world to
a new style of writing was giving me a deeper insight into the enantiodromiac process of Hemingway’s conflicted
ego/shadow personality, which was brought to light with spontaneous delight
when Michael Fassbender, who played the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne in The
Light Between Oceans, had to wrestle with a moral dilemma that he knew in
the pit of his stomach would one day come back to haunt him if he did not
choose wisely, just as Hemingway did when he was torn between his deep love for
his wife Hadley and the other woman he had unexpectedly fallen in love with,
Pauline Pfeiffer who ended up becoming his second wife.
“That’s it!” I exclaimed, when the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne chose against his gut feeling to
comfort his grieving wife who had just suffered her second miscarriage, jarring
Penny from her comfort. “That’s the human condition in action! That’s the grinding
of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s the chemistry of the soul!”
Penny was puzzled
by my outburst, but I was excited, as I always am when an idea for a spiritual
musing springs free from my unconscious, and I shot out of my chair and jotted
down the title of today’s spiritual musing in my Indigo Hemingway Notebook that Penny’s sister had given me for
Christmas— “Chemistry of the Soul.”
But what was the lighthouse
keeper’s moral dilemma that set this idea free, a moral dilemma that by
miraculous happenstance was no less soul-wrenching and life-changing than Ernest
Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I was just reading about again in Paris Without End, The True Story of
Hemingway’s First Wife?
First, let me
spell out what I mean by this exciting, gnosis-laden idea “chemistry of the
soul,” and then I will explain how it was set free by the lighthouse keeper’s
moral dilemma that instantly brought to mind Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I
was all-too familiar with and coincidentally just happened to be reading about
again in Gioia Diliberto’s biography Paris
Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.
The phrase
“chemistry of the soul” just came to me out of the clear blue when I made the
connection between the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma and Ernest Hemingway’s
marital dilemma, but this is the phrase that my creative unconscious gave me to
capture my spontaneous insight of what a moral dilemma can do to one’s soul,
because I knew from all the reading I
had done on Ernest Hemingway what his marital dilemma had done to him when he
chose to betray his wife Hadley for his lover Pauline, which gave me the
insight to foresee what the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma would do to him
if he made a decision that went against his gut feeling; that’s why I burst
out: “That’s the human condition in
action! That’s the grinding of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s
the chemistry of the soul!” Because I knew, I simply knew that the lighthouse keeper was going to put his soul through
the grinding mill of life if he chose against his gut feeling, and he was going
to suffer just as Ernest Hemingway suffered for choosing to go against his
better nature when he chose to betray his loving wife for his seductive,
inveigling lover.
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” said Shakespeare;
but why? Why would conscience, man’s moral center and guiding star, make cowards
of us all if not for the onerous responsibility that goes with making a
decision that conscience demands of us?
Hemingway’s
conscience demanded of him the moral imperative to be true to his wife Hadley,
which meant that he would have to fight off his sexual/romantic attraction for
Pauline Pfeiffer; but he couldn’t. He wanted it all, and he was too weak to
fight off his attraction.
That’s what made
the budding young writer, who would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature,
a coward. Ironically, his moral cowardice caused the fatal wound in his soul that
gave him the daemonic fuel for some
of his best stories; that’s what I meant by “chemistry of the soul,” because
Hemingway’s fatal wound ground his soul from lover to lover until he could bear
himself no longer and he killed himself, and I knew that the lighthouse keeper Tom
Sherbourne would put his soul through the same grinding mill if he capitulated
to his grieving wife’s desire to keep the infant child that they found in the
boat with her dead father that had washed up on the shore of Janus Island in
Western Australia where he was the lighthouse keeper; he knew in his gut that
they should seek out the infant child’s birth mother, but they didn’t, and that
decision came back to haunt them. A story that made for a great novel by M. L.
Stedman, which became a great movie by the same title, The Light Between Oceans.
Ernest Hemingway
left his wife for his lover, and that decision haunted him for the rest of his
life, which he sadly owned up to in his bitter-sweet memoir A Moveable Feast that he was still
working on just before taking his own life with his favorite bird shotgun at
his home in Ketchum, Idaho: “When I saw
my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at
the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” He was
reflecting on the decision he made to leave Hadley for Pauline, and he
regretted it so much that he would rather have died had he known what his moral
cowardice would do to him.
I watched The Light Between Oceans with anxious
anticipation, because I knew that
once Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel decided to keep the infant child and
raise it as their own instead of notifying the authorities that one day life would
call them to account for their moral transgression; and that’s what I meant by
“chemistry of the soul,” which is a poetic way of saying that life has a way of
grinding down the moral grist of one’s soul, and I was
no less angry at the lighthouse keeper for not being true to his conscience as
I was for my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway for
betraying his faithful, loving wife Hadley for his calculating, seductive lover
Pauline Pfeiffer. But then, where would we get our great literature from if not
for the moral grinding of our soul?
———
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