The Tremor of Eternity
“Suffering is a special kind of knowledge.”
Svetlana
Alexievich
Svetlana
Alexievich, “historian of the soul,” won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015
for her “polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,”
as the Nobel citation put it; but I could not finish reading her last book Second Hand Time, The Last of the Soviets.
It was too Dostoevskian in its existential density and I had to put it aside.
That was last
year. This year I picked up the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic magazine in Barrie (the day of my auto accident, which
put a damper on my browsing in Chapters), and noticed an article on Svetlana
Alexievich which was prompted by the English translation of the book that
launched her career, The Unwomanly Face
of War. The article was written by Nina Khrushceva, the granddaughter of
the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushcev’s son, and I read something that sparked
the idea for today’s spiritual musing:
Her goal was not
modest: to listen to “specific human beings, living in a specific time and
taking part in specific events,” while remaining ever alert to “the eternally
human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all
times.”
Svetlana
Alexievich’s books transcend journalism. By the magic of creative effort, Svetlana
managed to distill “the eternally human” out of the story of every person that
she interviewed for her oral history of the Soviet people, and the question
that I want to explore in today’s spiritual musing is this: what is this
“tremor of eternity” in the human soul?
Coincidence or not
(I believe it was a coincidence, because whenever I get an idea for a spiritual
musing the merciful law of divine synchronicity
kicks in to flesh in my musing), I just happened to select the movie Fences on Netflix for Penny and I to
watch the other night, staring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and the
existential density of this unbearably poignant story brought to mind
Svetlana’s ambitious literary goal of recording the story of “specific human beings,
living in a specific time and taking part in specific events,” and I could feel
“the tremor of eternity” in the lives of the black people in the movie Fences, specific lives oppressed in
their own specific way no less than the lives of people under Soviet rule that
Svetlana recorded in the oral histories of her books.
The existential
density of the movie Fences strongly suggested
to me that it had been adapted from a play, so I did a Google search and learned
that the screenplay was written by the
playwright August Wilson who had adapted it from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play
Fences, just as I had suspected; but
that didn’t help me resolve the question of “the tremor of eternity” that I saw
in the soul of his characters, and I had to ponder deeply.
I knew with intuitive certainty that this
“tremor of eternity” had to do with existential suffering brought about by the oppressive
conditions of one’s life, whether it be the life of the Soviet people living
under socialism or the life of black people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and I
went back to the article in The Atlantic
and found confirmation in Svetlana’s own words, which reflect the wisdom that
she accrued from recording thousands of stories from specific people living in
a specific time and taking part in specific events:
Sometimes I come
home after these meetings with the thought that suffering is solitude. Total
isolation. At other times, it seems to me that suffering is a special kind of
knowledge. There is something in human life that is impossible to convey and
preserve in any other way, especially among us. That is how the world is made;
that is how we are made.
“That’s it,” I exclaimed to myself, not with the excitement
of a mind-shattering epiphany, but with the quiet calm of unsurprising coincidental
confirmation.
Svetlana had
intuited one of the deepest mysteries of the human condition, that the human
soul is made through pain and suffering—an insight much too deep for tears, as the
poet Wordsworth would say; which was why she found it “impossible to convey.”
But Svetlana did her creative best, which the Nobel Prize committee recognized
as “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as a “history of emotions…a
history of the soul.”
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” said Wordsworth
in his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” but these were thoughts born of the anguished
joy of life and not existential pain and suffering like that of the oppressed
Soviet people in Svetlana books or the oppressed black people in the movie Fences; which confirmed my gnostic
understanding of the growth and individuation of the human soul through the enantiodromiac process of natural
evolution.
This is the core
idea of today’s spiritual musing, then; but like Svetlana Alexievich I find it
impossible to convey the sacred mystery of this idea, and I have to abandon to
my creative unconscious to bring today’s musing to satisfactory resolution...
I pondered deeply.
What did Svetlana Alexievich mean by calling suffering “a special kind of
knowledge”? Listening to thousands of people tell their personal story of
suffering for her oral history of the Soviet people who were conditioned by the
inflexible ideology of socialism, she felt “the tremor of eternity” in each
person’s soul, “that which is human in all of us,” which was why she was called
a historian of the soul in the Nobel Prize citation.
And as I watched
the movie Fences, I also felt “the
tremor of eternity” in the soul of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife
Rose (Viola Davis), and I knew with
gnostic certainty that the “tremor of eternity” that I felt in their anguished
soul was that “special kind of knowledge” that was created out of the enantiodromiac process of soulmaking;
but this is such a deep concept to explain that I have to defer to my twin soul
books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity,
which tell the story of how I came to see in my own journey of self-discovery that
“human suffering is nature’s way of
satisfying the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be.”
This is the
mystery that Svetlana Alexievich caught a glimpse of as she listened to the
Soviet people tell the story of their personal suffering and which I caught a
glimpse of in the movie Fences as I
watched Troy Maxson and his wife Rose suffer the existential anguish of their
life circumstances and marriage, a glimpse into the sacred mystery of suffering
that has puzzled the world since the dawn of man; but without suffering, where
would we be?
Would we have that
“tremor of eternity” in our soul? Would we even be aware of our immortal nature
that Wordsworth caught a glimpse of in his poem “Intimations of Immortality” and
Svetlana Alexievich caught a glimpse of in the soul of the Soviet people and which
I saw more and more clearly in Troy Maxson and his wife Rose? Through suffering
we grow in that “special kind of knowledge,” but is there any other way to grow
in our immortal nature other than through the existential pain and suffering of
the human condition?
The ancient
Gnostics knew that nature will only
evolve us so far, and then we have to take evolution into our own hands to
complete what nature cannot finish; this is the mystery that Svetlana
Alexievich confronted in her quest to record the oral history of the Soviet
People and which Troy Maxson and his wife Rose were up against, and this is the
mystery that I sought to resolve in my lifelong journey of self-discovery.
I felt the “tremor
of eternity” in the soul of the Soviet people that Svetlana Alexievich
creatively recorded in her oral histories, and I felt the “tremor of eternity”
in the soul of Troy Maxson and his wife Rose as I watched them suffer in their
existential anguish, but I also knew
with gnostic certainty through my own journey of self-discovery that there was
a way out of existential suffering; but that’s a subject for another musing…
———
No comments:
Post a Comment