Anam Cara

NOWADAYS EVERYONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEIR OWN STORY. PEOPLE identify themselves with their stories. The story is rarely presented for what it is: a selective version. Rather the version is taken for fact and the fact takes on a mechanical and repetitive life of its own. Often when confronted with this kind of self-presentation, one has the difficulty of trying to correlate a fairly banal, predictable biographical script with an individual who seems infinitely more interesting and complex. Literature is the domain where story belongs. In good literature a story is always working on several levels at once; it holds within it a suggestiveness of the other stories that it is not; it has an irony and ambivalence about its own identity and posture and immunizes itself against take-over by any definitive reading or interpretation. From this perspective, it seems that much of what passes for story in contemporary spirituality and psychology is more reminiscent of tabloid pastiche than real story. Even the pre-literary tradition of oral culture had complex tapestries of story that left the most subtle openings into the resonance fields of myth and mystery.

A human life is the most complex narrative of all; it has many layers of events which embrace outside behaviour and actions, the inner stream of the mind, the underworld of the unconscious, the soul, fantasy, dream and imagination. There is no account of a life which can ever mirror or tell all of this. When telling her story all a person can offer is a sample of this complexity. The best stories suggest what they cannot name or describe. They deepen respect for the mystery of the events through which identity unfolds. Consequently, respect for oneself should mean that if one wants to tell one’s story, it should be worthy of telling. Since story is now widely used in psychology, spirituality and sociology, a deepening of the mystery of what a story is would serve to illuminate the beauty that dwells deep in the individual life. As the Jewish writer and human rights campaigner Elie Wiesel once said, God created man because he loved stories.

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A REAL NARRATIVE IS A WEB OF ALTERNATING POSSIBILITIES. THE imagination is capable of kindness that the mind often lacks because it works naturally from the world of Between; it does not engage things in a cold, clear-cut way but always searches for the hidden worlds that wait at the edge of things. The mind tends to see things in a singularly simple, divided way: there is good and bad, ugly and beautiful. The imagination, in contrast, extends a greater hospitality to whatever is awkward, paradoxical or contradictory. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, in an interview shortly before his death last year, said: ‘The integrity of a society demonstrates itself in how that society engages with contradiction.’ The imagination is both fascinated and stimulated by the presences that cluster within a contradiction. It does not perceive contradiction as the enemy of truth; rather it sees here an interesting intensity. The imagination is always more loyal to the deeper unity of everything. It has patience with contradiction because there it glimpses new possibilities. And the imagination is the great friend of possibility. It always sees beyond facts and situations, to the cluster of possibilities in which each thing is shrouded. In a sense, this is what beauty is: possibility that enlarges and delights the heart. Nothing opens up the mind like the glimpse of new possibility. When everything has become locked inside a dead perspective and the consensus is that a cul-de-sac has been reached, new possibility is an igniting spark. This dead identification is made frequently every day in all kinds of situations. For example, the love and affinity between two people becomes sidelined into a repetitive and wearying pattern. They become stuck in a helpless symmetry of conflict. In a company boardroom a project that had great potential becomes suddenly frozen around some unforeseen impossibility. Or something happens to a person that is devastating; or some failure occurs that draws judgement and shame. In all of these instances, the rational mind would devote itself to direct engagement with the situation and soon find itself overwhelmed by inevitability. All of its efforts at direct analysis and understanding, even its efforts to directly loosen the context or break free from it, would only serve to further entangle it.