Anam Cara

Imagine how impossible it would be if the inner life were visible. When you came into the office, everyone would look up and be able to read exactly what was in your heart as though your skin were transparent. If our inner wounds were visible to the curious eyes of strangers, we would never achieve healing. Put simply, if interiority were directly visible, society as we know it would be impossible. The conventions we observe would lose their authority and confrontations with others would become the norm. People-watching would take on a new and disturbing significance. Gossip would emerge from the nether region of surmise and exaggeration to achieve the status of fact. The standard of the normal person could never be employed again. Without the restraint of body-covering, raw individuality would leak into the social matrix from every corner. Were the threshold between the inner and outer world to disappear, the life of each person would become a permanent, external theatre and the façade of the exterior would become very fragile. This breakdown would call a new kind of society into being. No facts about yourself and none of your thoughts or feelings could be concealed. Yet the meaning of what was now visible could be complex and hidden. Such transparency would be terrifying – an inner life lived out in the open before everyone’s eyes. In such a world the idea of friendship would certainly be different. Perhaps this transparent world is where the pre-born and the dead live.

T

HE

D

ARKER

B

EAUTY

D

AWNS

M

ORE

S

LOWLY

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,

but by making the darkness conscious.

CARL JUNG

BECAUSE YOU ARE OPAQUE TO YOURSELF, YOU ARE NEVER FINISHED with yourself: this is the quest for meaning. You never own yourself and stand constantly at new frontiers wondering what lies beyond. There is a beauty in discovery that deeply satisfies us. When you discover something new about yourself, you become more grounded and free. It is delightful when you find out more of your hidden light, when the radiance inside you glimmers through in new, unexpected colours. Without being narcissistic or arrogant, you are quietly nourished by the discovery of the beauty – the diversity – that dwells in you. But discovery can also be difficult. When you begin to excavate the darker beauty of your complexity, you may become startled by your own strangeness.

Framed with our own thought-world, routines and expectations, only rarely do we get a glimpse of how strange we actually are. We usually ignore and avoid the ever-present and curious strangeness that dwells in each individual. Each of us is aware at some time of our own strangeness. At night our dreams throw up peculiar shapes and figures. Sometimes even the most respectable people, the veritable pillars of society, have a fascinating night-life. They are up to things in their night-time dream-world that would not even cross their minds during the day. When they lose their grip on the day and sleep takes them, they become wild other people in their dreams. The ancient Greeks believed that the figures in our dreams were real. They left the body during the night and came out into the world to act out their stories but returned before the person awoke. When you consider where we go and who we become in dream, it is often an achievement to show up for breakfast in the morning!

Strangeness attracts the imagination. It is drawn to the fissures in behaviour where strangeness becomes visible. One of the intriguing areas here is where the failure of another person becomes the occasion for revelation of oneself. Failure becomes a ruthless mirror where the false façade of morality and values is questioned and exposed. Joseph Conrad evoked this dilemma in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and in Lord Jim. The failure of an admired character or mentor subverts the belief system of the key character. Dostoevsky also explored this theme in epic fashion in The Idiot, where a saintly figure and a criminally destructive one are locked in mutual fascination. Sometimes the tame and the strange become very attracted to each other.