There are many angles to view a single thing, as many and diverse as the 7 billion+ different faces, each its own lens, on this planet. Here's my singular perspective, written years back as I waded through the messy, uncharted terrain of suffering. They're snapshots of poetry (amateur) and song (ditto), often borrowed (or stolen) from other sources and cobbled together for myself.
I am no purist and will borrow, steal or patch together from diverse sources. Where possible, due credit will be attributed to these influences. (Composers have been known to be called thieves; it can be impossible to determine the origin of original..)
Here my reflections are collected and assembled, ad hoc, before they get swallowed by a dying computer or eaten by fishmoths on their paper scraps. Maybe they will sing to someone else who has undergone their own great loss, or maybe not.
And so, on with the tale of this secret love affair....
It all started when my world fell apart for the second time.
Two things became clear to me quite quickly:
Firstly, I had joined a community of sufferers and was not alone or unique in experiencing devastating loss.
Secondly, I was alone and unique in dealing with my story of devastating loss.
No short cut would circumvent the painful path that I knew was to come. No-one else could experience those depths with me or for me and no messianic knight-in-armour was going to show up to save me. The fact that suffering comes to all people at some point in their lives doesn't make it any easier. I recall saying, sometime just after my 2 young children died tragically, I wanted to go to sleep and skip the following 5 years. No such luck.
This upward flowing came from a downward place, and not a comfortable one. There is nothing pretty or popular about loss; it's not something we wish upon anyone. I didn’t choose it – it found me. That dark path down-and-out I’ve heard described as going into the belly of a whale [http://www.towncreekpoetry.com/FALL08/ALBERGOTTI_THINGS.htm ] or the dark night of the soul, or the path of descent.
When pain and loss is so great, it hits somatically first and foremost. Frozen in horror, physically winded, sledgehammer-punched in the chest, it literally pulls the carpet out from under us, cuts us down to size and more; it is capable of doubling us over with a feeling equivalent to bodily injury. The only place left to go is down. My experience was just this– a messy, agonizing, lonely, visceral, gut-wrenching, downward business that no part of my body could avoid.
I’m intrigued by songs that echo this: themes such as ‘go down’, ‘lay my body down’, ‘going down to the river to wash’, ‘take me down’, ‘down to the ground’. These are especially common refrains in mournful laments and traditional slave songs as they sang their agonies and hopes. Listen to Ara Lee singing Born:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RljKzTkIjCU
This ‘down’ is not the same as depressed or lethargic. This “going down” is the most active, exhausting, all-consuming act, deeply physical in every sense. How low can you go? - that feeling of wanting the ground to swallow my entirety. It can be likened to giving birth, with parallel suggestive words such as altered breathing, writhing, physical pain in the abdomen and deep gut-groaning (keening). An intense energy is focused inwardly on this important work, and the body mirrors this by curling up, naturally protecting itself.
Contrary to our human notion of ‘going somewhere’, following a positive process with a successful outcome, I found the only place to go was where my body took me then and there - down. Being there in the moment, this secret love was ignited and keeps me coming back for more, like any half-decent lover does. Not to take me anywhere, not for any outcome, but just for presence. Whatever it was I needed, I got while being There. Grace swam into this moment of dis-graceful loss.
I'm certain there is no lower place to go in human experience. What I looked like, what I sounded like, what I consumed, what others thought of me ceased to matter. Quite quickly I learnt to find safe, private places to unfold these episodes. These occasions rolled in and out of my days like waves with their own tide-table, and it was all I could do to just wash along with it. Why resist ocean currents? Healing happened as gently as a beach weathers and changes contour over time.
Looking back, I see them as the stepping stones of healing.
They became the secret place where the love affair began. The extravagant agonized groans from the belly in pain (keening) can be likened to the sound of making love to your beloved. Even now, years on, I'll still go back 'down' when summonsed, because there's something I get there and can’t find anywhere else. Grace.
Liz Campbell is the sole writer and composer of all the published material on this blogsite, unless otherwise stated.
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