I once was lost...
and still not (quite) found.
I hope you can pardon my absence. It was a break I could feel coming but couldn’t confront until finally, it confronted me. The following gets a little more personal than I usually allow. But it may help someone out there, and I hope it helps me, too.
I won’t start at the beginning because I have too much respect for all of you to trouble with details and inconsequential nothings. Those are mine to roll around in my brain and keep company the rest of the nuts and bolts that rattle there. But I’ll start with the growing sense, a few years ago, of my meaningless on this earth. I live with it like someone who has learned to live with a broken bone in a foot: healing in such a way to regain function, but certain movements, or maybe shifts of the weather.
This was a broken foot that could no longer be ignored as it had been for a while. If you could imagine the cuniform bones in a foot, the series of bones tightly bound together and functioning as a unit; performing nimbly while supporting the weight of the body, never a thought invested to the inner workings because everything worked. Until it didn’t.
So it was with my mind and what I suspected was the shifting weather fast becoming a devastating storm. It was overwhelming and terrifying and incomprehensible to my mind so used to living an orderly life - if even sometimes by force of will. But this break was not something, like the fracture of a foot, that by isolated rest could heal in short order. No, this was a fracture that consumed the body; it was paralyzing.
For the foot, an injury can usually be traced back to a definite cause: the overuse-induced fracture of an athlete, falling on those icy steps, or dropping the box of books (always heavier than they look!). But the mind can be strange to diagnose as even modern medicine has yet to completely unlock its mysteries.
My voice was a constant shrill reminding me of my worthlessness and inadequacy. The fog enveloping my mind was a weight on my very existence and the burden was too much to bear. There was no urge of physical harm, just an unbearable ache that with each breath seemed to strangle my soul.
The storm has since subsided. It left nothing to prove its existence: no mark of churning waves or wreckage of a lost vessel. Only the misty fog that still obscures the horizon.
And here it sits - or I sit with it. And I don’t know quite what to do except trust that maybe being lost in the morass ad blindly working through the pain and the darkness will better prepare me for the next tempest and give me faith that it can be endured.
I’ll leave this poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a man who could put to paper the etchings hidden on my heart.
To Marie Louise
Not long ago, the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,
Maintained “the power of words”—denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain
Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:
And now, as if in mockery of that boast,
Two words—two foreign soft dissyllables—
Italian tones, made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moonlit “dew
That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,”
Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,
Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,
Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions
Than even seraph harper, Israfel,
(Who has “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures,”)
Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.
The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.
With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee,
I cannot write—I cannot speak or think—
Alas, I cannot feel; for ’tis not feeling,
This standing motionless upon the golden
Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams.
Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,
And thrilling as I see, upon the right,
Upon the left, and all the way along,
Amid empurpled vapours, far away
To where the prospect terminates—thee only.