bellascribe

Used to be every year when this day rolled around, I’d wish I’d scheduled a party or created some small ceremony to celebrate the coming return of the light. This year intention manifested. There was poetry read by candlelight, on the theme of Wendell Berry’s poem “To Know the Dark”:

To go to the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

I didn’t read my barely-begun aspiration but was glad to have made one. Someone read to the accompaniment of the handlebars — bicycle handlebars — check the video linked to see and hear, and get the guy’s explanation for how its done. Haunting, beautiful sound that was just right for the dark, the candlelight, the poem.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

-Henry James (Roderick Hudson)

Spending some time in Switzerland last month would fall under that category (of absorbing errand). First Neuchâtel and staying on its lake’s edge, seeing from the room’s windows down through its clearest of waters, green stones. The crooked, winding streets, lined with cafes, some leading to the castle. Then Zürich. Another city on the water — very clean water — the city prides itself on its sustainability and clean water initiatives. The architecture. The chocolate — Sprüngli! The fondue, fondue, fondue was perhaps a little wearying.

But happiness it was not to be there (the Ugly American?) when the Sarah Palin nomination burst onto the scene. Humiliation was one of the feelings. How to explain that one? Matt Taibbi gives it a shot.

(Then there was the grief of David Wallace’s suicide.) I write this in parentheses as if to make the sorrow somehow lesser.

I’m doing a bad job of keeping up with this blog. But writing so much. And that’s happiness.

I’m fascinated by Isabel Allende’s turning to ayahuasca to overcome writer’s block. Is this something you would do?

 ’It was the most intense, out-of-my-mind experience that I have ever had. It was very revealing and very important and opened up a lot of spaces inside me. But I don’t ever want to do it again.’

Isabel Allende is describing the time she experimented with a powerful hallucinogen in an attempt to punch through the writer’s block that was preventing her from completing a trilogy of adventure books she had promised her three grandchildren. It was a few years ago, and the Chilean novelist, now 65, decided to travel to South America with her second husband to ’subject myself to the shamanic experience of ayahuasca’, a potent vision-inducing potion made from jungle vines by Amazon Indians.

But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had ‘lost his wife to the world of spirits’. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.

‘I think I went through an experience of death at a certain point, when I was no longer a body or a soul or a spirit or anything,’ Allende says matter-of-factly. ‘There was just a total, absolute void that you cannot even describe because you are not. And I think that’s death.’