This is the question he received on the Red Hand Files:
When you reach midlife and are made to truly pause, frozen in horror by a tidal wave of grief of lives ended, personal loss and our Earth relentlessly harmed….when you look inside for surety and solace and all you see is a multitude of selves… how do you know who you are?
The response of my favourite living existentialist:
Rebecca, it appears you are stuck in the middle of your life, shocked by loss, sad for the world, and not knowing who you are. I have spoken about this many times, but I experienced a similar spiritual reckoning when my son died, although the more I think about it, the more I see that the spider cracks of change were already spreading through my life. Back then, I was a half-formed thing waiting to be shattered in order to be remade. You seem to be in that place now – where you are presented with the opportunity to become a human being.
Our humanness is not given to us. Instead, it requires our participation in its construction and realisation, which often comes about through collapse or calamity. We rummage through the chaos of our inner worlds, through our multitude of selves, to discover what we are, what we wish to be, and our authentic relationship with the world. This process requires a kind of winnowing of those selves and the dispensing of any that are no longer of service to the work of becoming fully human. We must separate the wheat from the chaff. This is a necessary but painful form of spiritual renovation – to discard those ancient and destructive versions of oneself and become an actual person, unique among other people. We must do this lest we be frozen in a stasis of the soul. It seems, Rebecca, that this unkind moment you are inhabiting is the stunned intake of breath before the work and the winnowing begins. I wish you the best in this most essential endeavour.
It’s left me wanting to reread Faith, Hope and Carnage. I read it initially at such a low point in my life, while stuck on that “stunned intake of breath” unsure of how I could possibly move forward, that I can’t shake the feeling it might not resonate to the same extent a year and a half later. But I maintain there is real and profound wisdom in that book. As there is in Ghosteen, which moved me more profoundly than any album ever has, though again with the caveat that it might have been situational:
The bright horses have broken free from the fields
They are horses of love, their manes full of fire
They are parting the cities, those bright burning horses
And everyone is hiding and no one makes a sound
And I'm by your side and I'm holding your hand
Bright horses of wonder springing from your burning hand
And everyone has a heart and it's calling for something
And we're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are
The horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire
The fields are just fields and there ain't no Lord
And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel
There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
Is just a wish that time can't dissolve at all
Mark Carrigan 