Anam Cara

EACH SHAPE OF VULNERABILITY HAS A DIFFERENT ORIGIN. WHEN I was in priestly ministry I once came to know a woman who had just got news that she was soon going to die of cancer. We worked together for about a month. She was a woman in late middle age. She had a very caring husband and four grown-up children who adored her. It is a privilege to be invited to inhabit such a threshold with a person in the last weeks of their life. Time takes on a huge urgency. Superficial façades drop aside. There is nothing left to lose or protect. Some of my friends often say they would love to die quickly. They would fear the loneliness of a long, lingering departure: so much better to die without knowing it. Yet this can be such a precious time. The blur of distraction and defensive pretension can give way to real conversation and true encounter. It can become a time for the essence of a person to shine through. As illness wears out the covering of the body, the soul shines forth. As this woman came to trust me, I discovered that she had not really talked to anyone for over thirty years. Early on in her marriage, something had broken down irreparably between herself and her husband. She simply lost what she had with him and could not get it back. There she was inside this home, the mother and the heart of it. She learned to go through all the external motions and she became an utterly convincing domestic actress. But inside she was lost. Gradually she began to accept that there was no path outwards. Then she made a decision to live her intimate life inwardly. She undertook the journey. She went inwards as far as she could and over the years she managed to build some kind of hermit cell within her own heart. And that was where she really dwelt. When she began to talk about herself, it was clear that she spoke from a refined interiority. In a sense, she was not a mother living in a suburban house with husband and children. She was someone who had long since departed to an interior monastery that nobody had discovered. And when death began to focus more clearly around her, she was not afraid. Death was no stranger to her. Having had to build a sanctuary where no-one ever visited, she had come to know the mind of death. She was not thrown by the cold clarity of death’s stare or the unravelling force of its singular eye. Nor was there any bitterness in her. She had allowed as much transfiguration as she could. Against the hidden pathos of her life’s distance, she had no resistance. She had garnered a fragile beauty from isolation.

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WHILE VULNERABILITY MAY BE THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THE beauty of a work of art emerges, the work of art itself inevitably has some vulnerability in its form. There is an old Irish proverb, ‘Níl saoi gan locht’ – there is no craftsman without a flaw. Though every work of art dreams of being perfect, there is always some flaw and one rarely meets an artist who is happy with her work. This restless and divine dissatisfaction is imagined by the novelist Hermann Broch, who portrays Virgil’s dissatisfaction with his Aeneid; he wants to destroy it. I once had the unexpected privilege of spending an afternoon with one of the greatest poets writing in English, R.S. Thomas. During our conversation he was talking about his life as a priest among his people and of his love of being outside in the landscape. At one point he said that if he had been able to stay inside more and remain at his desk, he might have become a great poet. As he was a very serious man, there was no trace of irony or space to counter the claim. But I was amazed that such bleak self-critique could dwell alongside such magnificent and accomplished work. In the end every artist is haunted by a few central themes. Again and again, they return to the threshold of that disturbance and endeavour to excavate something new. This is the magnetic draw at the heart of the wound, the secret force of a silent hunger whose infinite longing is to find its unique voice. When the heart of that force finds its true form, a masterpiece emerges. Elaine Scarry says, ‘The beautiful thing seems – is – incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of being without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “newbornness” of the entire world.’

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I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.

AGHA SHAHID ALI, ‘Farewell’