Monday, September 4, 2017

A special musing for my Russian readers: "The Tremor of Eternity."


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… 
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