A Sudden Strangeness
In this piece for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics journal Stravaig Susan Holliday explores the ‘dream power’ of a natural world alive with revelation
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone…
A muffling of snow has fallen overnight. The allotments are transfigured. A light drift of flakes still plays its unhurried way from heaven to earth, lost in its own reverie like an unwatched child. Through this most gentle of alchemies every blade, every branch, rooftop and fencepost is gathered into a single seamless garment. Edges, distinctions and differences soften into an inviolate whole. Looking out from my bedroom window, a tumble of joy fonts inside me, sparkling and splashing its brightness onto my threadbare heart. It is Sunday 24 January 2021. We are in our third pandemic lockdown.
In the street at the front of the house small family groups are already crunching and snowballing their way to the park. Abandoned cars lie still and quiet, rendered into strange and ethereal shapes by the pristine blanket of snow. Instead of their chugging, belching and revving, all I can hear is the sound of children, voices bright as bells in the cleared air.
Through the wrought iron gates of the park I walk into a Breughel painting. A tracery of unclad oaks stand silhouetted against the ice green sky. Clusters of jewel bright jackets, scarves and gloves stud the white wooded slopes. Each group of figures moves across the stage in an unscripted choreography, curling, sliding and hurling. In amongst them snowmen of various sizes spring up like mushrooms, their wonky heads and bodies testament to the exuberant creativity of the moment. The sense of collective joy and wonder is palpable.
In our ever-warming winters snow rarely seems to last long these days, at least in the southern lowlands. By mid-afternoon all that remains of this transfigured world are mounds of sullied slush. Walking home through the disenchanted streets, I feel the deadweight of miscarried promise.
In the days following this snow-graced hiatus, my heart is heavy with a dull ache which feels baffling and unwarranted. I’m surprised to find how intensely these few precious hours stand out in the felt sense of my recollection, like traces of a numinous dream. Something about the spontaneous collective emancipation of the human spirit which flowered on that other-wise morning has left an indelible mark. I am altered, bewildered and strangely bereft. A shepherd on the hillside asking myself ‘what am I to make of this thing which has come to pass?’
At any other time of my life I might have turned straight back to the myriad of distractions which beckon from our endlessly tempting world, but in the quiet of lockdown and with time on my hands, it occurs to me that I could ponder my experience of the snow, dwell on this ‘happening’ as though it were a dream or a poem. Perhaps, I think to myself, there is something here I need to see through.
*
Writing in the seventeenth century, Japanese haiku master Basho revealed that poetry is not just a way of writing about the natural world, it is a way of seeing it. Poetry unveils, lays bare, unfamiliar aspects around and within us, which we might otherwise overlook. Basho’s distilled and enigmatic visions remind us that poetry is the experience of seeing into the heart, into the deep nature, of something. This seeing, he proposed, arises naturally in us when we become intimate with our subject:
“Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one – when you have plunged deep enough into the object
to see something like a glimmering there.
”
Poets articulate this glimmering truth precisely because they stay with the strange and the ineffable long enough for language to emerge from the depth of experience itself. They bear with being tongue-tied. This birthing of articulate vision, as Emerson reminds us, can test us to the core:
“Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering,
hissed and hooted, stand and strive,
until at last rage draw out of the that dream-power
which every night shows thee is thine own.
”
The ‘dream-power’ of which Emerson speaks interests me. Well of course, you might say, I’m a psychotherapist after all. I have spent two decades working with men and women to unveil the glimmering which lies hidden beneath the surface of their lives. The source of numinous experience is not however, it seems to me, located solely in our individual unconscious. Dream-power is not a slight of hand which happens when we ‘lose consciousness’ in sleep, but rather a psychological cosmos which is alive and ever-present in nature as a whole. Basho’s glimmering depth animates the very ground of being. It is more conscious than we can begin to imagine.
This sense of psyche as ‘second nature’ is hard to grasp, for it’s not so much a region in Freud’s topographical sense, or even a dimension, but a vital and sovereign implicate order which exists in and for itself. These chthonic depths are not self-evident. They reveal themselves in response to the quality of our attention, when we see beyond the literal (the names), beneath the concrete certainty of knowing and through the opaqueness of matter.
As a psychotherapist, I have learned to see through the surface of experience from the practice of working with dreams. In his book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’, archetypal psychologist James Hillman cautions that what matters is not so much what is said about a dream, not the interpretation and dissection of its meaning, but ‘the experience of the dream’ during and after its happening. It follows from this that ‘the golden rule in touching any dream is keeping it alive. Dream-work is conservation’. We ponder our dreams (and our numinous experiences) not to unravel them, nor to take them apart, but to gather them into our hearts, to glean the fragments they leave behind into a ragged edged collage. Taking this further still, I suggest that it’s what we make of these visions that potentially transforms everything.
We under-stand nature (both human and more than human) by immersing ourselves in the imaginal and sensate quality of experience. By plunging in we feel as well as see its quality. Cézanne articulates this tender vision when he advocates that the artist perceives through reading the ‘two parallel texts’ of nature. ‘Nature seen and nature felt.’ And so this is how I begin to understand the transfiguration of that winter morning. I start by keeping alive the feelings those few hours have evoked in me. I savour the font of joy which sprang up on first encountering the drifts of snow through my bedroom window, the muffling of all other cares and concerns in a great silencing of internal chatter. I feel the tenderness in my heart on hearing the human intimacy of voices and feet in the street. I sense the radiance of connection which greeted me in the park, when for a few glorious hours every man, woman and child seemed to be woven into a single story. Nature and human nature conjoined. Then, recalling the walk home from the park, I allow myself to feel the dead weight of miscarried promise. I make space in my collage for a deep sadness. The more I attend to the sadness, the more important it feels, as though I have arrived at a doorway to understanding.
Sadness is so often the door we seek to close. We turn our backs on sorrow and rush off in search of gladness. Who among us chooses to stay with sadness, to become acquainted with its deep nature and purpose? In his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ Rilke suggests ‘perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.’ Through the doorway of sorrow an unfamiliar and life-changing presence slips into the heart:
“The future enters us in this way
in order to be transformed in us long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive
when one is sad
”
What moves me about Rilke’s insight is the way he presents sadness as annunciation. He suggests a sorrow that is neither bereavement, nor melancholy, not nostalgia, but a point of conception, an intimation of a deeper reality that seeks to be born. This intimation requires from us a ‘beholding’, a kind of patient attending over time which allows the feeling to gestate and so to bear fruit in our awareness. Without this attending to sadness the change it has seeded in us risks being stillborn.
Rilke’s notion of attending sits in stark contrast to the narcotic numbing and manic distraction which characterise our contemporary response to pretty much any feeling which is not ‘happy’. ‘Attend’ shares its root with the word ‘tender’. Both derive from the Latin ad-tendere, which means to ‘stretch towards’. The idea of tenderness evokes the sense that something stretched becomes thin and so more vulnerable to the impressions of touch. Understood in this way, tender vision is essentially about stretching out beyond our pre-conceptions and leaning in towards the life-giving intelligence of experience. It is about allowing ourselves to become vulnerable so we might be touched by the numen of what is happening.
From the Latin stem tendere, we also find the French ‘attendre’, which gives us the sense of holding the moment of experience open in time. This lends a very different perspective to the notion of being a ‘patient’. No longer the sick and damaged person in need of remedy, but the expectant human, pregnant with the possibility of insight. This art of seeing as gestation is beautifully articulated within the ancient art of Sumi-e. Painting with ink on paper, one brush stroke only is allowed for each mark. Exploratory sketching, revisions and decorations are not permitted. The preparation lies in the quality of looking. Through gestating the subject, sumi-e artists and poets seek to distill the essence of nature.
Sumi-e painting by contemporary artist Rita Bohm
Writing in the eleventh century, Chinese poet and painter Master Sung Tung-Po encapsulated this patient vision, advising ‘before painting bamboo, it is necessary for it to grow in your soul.’
Pondering the unbidden sadness which has weighed heavily in me since that January morning, I realise that the feeling is not new. It has been seeded in my heart over and over again, through the innumerable times in my life that I have walked away from moments of wonder and intimation, allowing myself to be distracted, so that the promise of their conception turns to sullied slush.
It occurs to me that the ‘extinction of experience’ of which Robert Pyle first wrote in 1975, is not just the dislocation of urban communities from nature, but also the fact that we live in a world which consumes nature like fast food. We dip into wildness and then move on quickly to the next fix, the next distraction. We have our snowball fight and then hurry home, faces already turning away from the ice green sky and the melting world, back toward the small blue light of our phones. The revelations which reach towards us from the wild depths of nature do not swell in the belly of our imagination, do not seed in us a change of heart. This failure to ‘make something’ of our experiences of nature contributes perhaps to the contemporary epidemic of ‘depression’. Our deep nature proves itself to be alive within and around us, but through the myopic, literal and impatient condition of our seeing, we forsake the earth’s life-giving poiesis. Our wonder and our sadness do not bear fruit because we do not ponder them in our hearts.
Could it be that the flat surface of our everyday experience is littered with doorways onto this deeper nature, portals which open under the warmth of attention to reveal an intimate, expansive and vital wellspring of creative possibility. Einstein proposed that the nature which we think we see is merely the ‘the tail of the lion’ which ‘cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension’. This unfathomable realm of nature is not just out there in an ‘environment’, it is also in here, in the depths of everyday human experience. The roots of who we are lie hidden below the surface. Psyche is not merely buried in our history, but crowning right here and now, disturbing our equilibrium through wonder and sorrow.
We tend to think of psyche as immaterial, a subtle dimension more mind than matter which lies beyond the reach of our senses. It can be helpful to remember that the word ‘psyche’ originates in the Greek noun psukhé, meaning ‘breath’, and the verb psykhein, meaning ‘to blow’. Like the wind, which we discern through the rustle of leaves, or the ripple of water, psyche is revealed through the ways in which it touches and moves us. We register these currents through that most subtle of sensory organs, the ‘felt sense’ and we reveal them through the poetic language of likeness. ‘What does this feel like?’ I ask of my sadness, for every sadness has its own indigenous character and purpose. Plunging deep into its distinctive quality, I begin to understand that the telos of my sorrow has everything to do with this sense of a foundering of promise, an untended conception.
Holding open a space for my snow-seeded sorrow to gestate, I begin to recognise it as the inverse face of all that is most dear to me: the muffled lightness of nature’s grace (the way it offers up to us its promise of renewal without fanfare); the dissolution of the separateness of things so that each of us is gathered into one inviolate whole; the gloriously unselfconscious creativity that nature seeds within and around us. This perhaps is the gift of sorrow, that it illuminates what is of greatest worth. My responsibility to this ever-present glimmer of inner ground is above all to pause; to dwell; to glean, gather and heed; to understand - and so to cherish.
*
Harrowed through sorrow, our senses awaken to all that is budding, fledgling, sprouting and swelling moment to moment. These nascent dimensions of experience have yet to be bottle or labelled. If they are to surface into the light of our understanding, we must first learn to bear with blindness. We move from the solid ground of knowing and naming into a more tentative state characterised by faith in the unforseen. There is an intensity to this un-knowing. For it’s precisely when we are lost that we become most fully present. Untethered from signposts, charts and familiar landmarks, wits sharpen, instincts stir, senses begin to sniff for the scent of new horizons. We wander and we wonder. In this fissure of experience we don’t even know what we are looking for. Our sole and solemn responsibility is to ponder ‘this thing which has come to pass’, to remain open to what our sorrow may unearth. This wondering is grounded in vulnerability and a willingness to encounter inconvenient truths. Perhaps this is why the word ‘wonder’ shares its roots with the German Wunde, meaning ‘wound’.
Remembering the muffled stillness which greeted me from the allotments that morning, I recall some lines from Neruda’s poignant poem ‘Keeping Quiet’, in which he suggests what might happen if we were to ‘stop for once on the face of the earth’ and ‘not move our arms so much.’
“Perhaps a huge silence
Might interrupt this sadness
Of never understanding ourselves
And of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive
”
Perhaps the earth can teach us. Yes. Could it be that the deep earth, with its seasonal cycles of plenty and of dearth, has everything to teach us. To heed its glimmering intelligence, we may need to ‘not move our arms so much’. For once, we may need to do nothing but ‘stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering’, until we actually feel the swelling in us of nature’s geopoesis.
“It would be an exotic moment
Without rush, without engines,
We would all be together
In a sudden strangeness
”
My favourite of all Christmas carols, In the Bleak Midwinter, draws us into a time when ‘earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone’, a time when ‘snow had fallen snow on snow’. Like many of us confronting climate change on our doorstep, I ask myself ‘what can I do?’ The carol poses a similar question: ‘what can I give Him, poor as I am. If I were a Shepherd I would bring a lamb, if I were a Wise Man I would do my part’. I am neither shepherd nor wise man. As a psychotherapist committed to the rewilding of human nature, my offering to the earth in this moment of its desolation is simply this: to hold a creative space in which men and women of all backgrounds can safely ponder the ‘sudden strangeness’ of their sorrow and their wonder. Twenty years of tender encounter have convinced me that these two essentially human experiences are both doorways onto the glimmering depths of a second nature which is both human and more than human.
Essay written by © Susan Holliday for Stravaig, the online journal for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, published July 2022.
Geopoetics is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.
