Anam Cara

THE FLAW SEEMS TO BE THE POINT OF FIXED OR CONSTANT vulnerability, the place where the hope of order is fractured. The revelation of someone’s flaw startles and fascinates the social world for it is usually viewed as a helpless, fateful exception to an otherwise ordered life. Yet when viewed against the mystery of the strange and unknown world within, the flaw invites our understanding and compassion. Amidst the infinite diversity of creation, no thing stands out like the human being. Nothing else here is quite as surprising and strange. Because we belong to the human fold we become prisoners of our own familiarity. There is nothing in the world as intense as a human person: each one of us is inevitably and helplessly intense. An individual is a creature in whom difference has come alive. In him difference is everything. Unlike a stone or a tree, it is as if the individual has an inner mirror where he can gather and glimpse himself. This inner mirror is cast at an angle to the mind. It is a small mirror which for the most part remains blurred. When the inner mirror clears, it is but for a millisecond. No-one achieves a full, direct view of himself, only the merest glimpse as swift as a thought. Yet this glimpse grounds everything about your life and illuminates your work, friendships, destiny and identity. All are secretly dependent on that concealed splinter of mirror. It makes everything that happens to you yours; without it, you would simply be an empty receptacle for experiences. You would have no home within you, no place where your life gathered, no source and no centre. The loss of the mirror would reduce you to a sequence of perception, an assembly of qualities. Its absence would make you anonymous.

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NKNOWN

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WELLS IN

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ECESSES

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UMAN

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EART

THE DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE OF OUR TALK ABOUT OURSELVES AND who we are is feeble. Listening to much of the language of contemporary psychology and religion, you could not be blamed for imagining that some analyst had actually managed to turn the mind inside out and had decoded it. Most talk about the self disappoints because it presents not the deep, autonomous and unknown inner world, but cipher figures that are easily recognizable as members of some psychological syndrome. Psychology tends to over-identify the flaw with deficiency. The unknown is not simply out there, outside us. The unknown dwells in the recesses of the human heart and becomes especially explicit in our flaws; consequently the true language of the self is hesitant, shadowed and poetic. There is no direct, analytical description of a soul. Even all the epic poetics of a language would not be large or deft enough to embrace the mystery of one human soul. ‘I Am Not I’ by Jiménez expresses this clearly:

I A

M

N

OT

I

I am not I.

I am this one

Walking beside me whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And whom at other times I forget;

The one who remains silent when I talk,

The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

The one who takes a walk where I am not,

The one who will remain standing when I die.

(translated by Robert Bly)

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THERS

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OULD

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EE INTO

Y

OU

?

THE IMAGINATION SENSES THE COMPLEX DEPTHS THAT LIE concealed beneath the surface persona. From this perspective, it becomes clear that in many of our interactions with others, we are barely there. One becomes deeply aware of this in time of trouble. Though racked by emotional torment, you can still continue to function. Sometimes indeed this very façade is what enables us to endure and overcome troubles. Shakespeare wrote: ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. It is a wonderful grace to be shielded and covered from the world, especially in difficult times.