Anam Cara

No life is without its broken, empty spaces. In the West of Ireland almost each village has some story of a haunted room in a house. This is a room where the strain of an otherworldly, ghostly presence is felt and there is always a narrative to sustain such an appearance, some story of woundedness or loss. That haunted room somehow stands outside time; it holds a memory that never lessens with the passage of years. The memory remains a wounded presence. Somewhere in every life there is such a haunted room. Like cursed treasure, all the losses of one’s life seem to gather there. Pathos arises when something in the sequence of present experience brings us into direct contact with the burn of past loss. Socially the surface of our culture is fascinated with the break-up of relationships and the glamour of new partnerships. But the camera eye has loyalty only to the moment and always moves on. Little true attention is given to the secret, private death which the end of a relationship can bring. The deeper radiation of intimate tissue is concealed. Externally, an impression is given that one has already ‘moved on’, as the signal phrase has it. The truth is slower, more painful; when you have truly loved, it can take a long time to ‘move on’. Pathos can awaken when, for instance, you unintentionally find yourself back in the same place or landscape where you shared a special time with your beloved. You may hear a piece of music which immediately turns your thoughts to one previous moment of love. Old loss rekindles as you know this time, this place; this joy can never be recaptured.

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If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

JOHN DONNE, ‘The Good-morrow’

PATHOS IS ESPECIALLY PRESENT IN GRIEF. WHEN SOMEONE YOU love has died, it takes a long time to learn the art of inhabiting the loss. One of the loneliest times in this journey is when you have to clear the person’s wardrobe and decide what to do with their personal effects. When you see again the objects of their affection, the clothes they never again will wear, these things become receptacles of your sense of loss for they are link-objects still connecting you to the departed. In this sense they become ‘sacred objects’. There is some corner of the heart that remains faithful to all that we have loved. Even years after a loss, the sight or scent of something associated with the departed can still quicken the heart. The tragedy is, the longer you live, the more friends you lose. As the world grows older, the ruins of loss multiply and the textures of pathos deepen. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, has a powerful passage in his Letters and Papers from Prison about being faithful to the vacancy of loss:

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Nothing can fill the gap

When we are away from those we love and it would be

Wrong to try to find anything

Since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between

Us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap.

He does not fill it but keeps it empty, so that our communion

With another may be kept alive even at the cost of pain.

The beauty of pathos is tenderness, a testimony to affection and care and recognition that love is always vulnerable. Pathos is the enduring witness to where our hearts have dwelt. This is evident in our relationship to our home. A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one’s soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds its warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there. Conversely, the most ornate, the grandest homes can have an empty centre. The beauty of a home is ultimately determined by the nature of its atmosphere, by the texture and spirit of those who dwell there. A house is like a psyche in the patterns of spirit it absorbs and holds. The art of memory is its secret weaving, how it weaves together forgotten joy and endured sorrow.

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I find my bearings where I become lost.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS