The 'Dark Night of the Soul'

It is a very old expression suffused with almost too much significance to bear and yet no one uses it now in the 'Age of Prozac'.  They dubbed the States 'Prozac Nation' a couple of decades ago and although Prozac appears to have lost some of its glitter, the general population still relies upon anti-depressants for the most part instead of examining and dealing with root causes.

Well, I am deep into the dark night of the soul myself now.  It has been a gradual decline from light to darkness, brought on by accelerated pain issues for the most part but partly as well by a recognition of my physical limitations and inability to take matters into my own hands to improve my life at this point.

The 'Dark Night of the Soul' is not something that is restricted to a small unsung group of people.  Almost every Saint has dealt with it.  They called it 'wrestling with demons' I believe.  I once thought in a vague sort of way that those bouts of physical conflict with the dark powers had something to do with sex.  After all, most 'religious' in Roman Catholic houses devoted to faith take vows of chastity. 

That point of view was exacerbated by Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and his tales of monks who insisted that the 'devil' aka the 'male member' needed to be 'put into hell', aka a nun's private and inviolate sanctuary... well, let us call as apade a spade, her cunt.  (Shakespeare used that word often and I think it actually needs to be rehabilitated a little.  It was a NICE word once upon a time, I do believe but now has become the worst insult possible.)

My own current Dark Night of the Soul is a little different from those suffered in my youth.  In those days, I would wrestle with the idea of God and why we had to suffer so much if He truly were merciful and loving and so on.  Oddly enough, I don't think about that at all.  I accept suffering as an integral and fundamental part of existence in the same way that maggots and beetles and rot and compost are part and parcel of the magical business of rebirth and resurrection of life.  I furthermore do not perceive the Daity is a parochial figure.  Although I consider myself a Roman Catholic for the most part, I refuse to accept any of the Judaic claptrap that has been gathered into the Christian lexicon.  No true Deity would choose a murderous nomadic group as 'His chosen people' or place a seal of approval on a dedicated campaign of genocide and destruction.  It simply does not wash in any way, shape or form in terms of a Being who is infinite and omnipotent and beyond the constraints of 'Good' and 'Evil' in human terms.

All the Creation myths from every civilisation and culture as well as those that were born of a single individual's creativty (such as Tolkien's Silmarillion) are tales that depict some aspect of Creation or Life or Death or the workings of the Universe.  They cannot possibly encompass the business of a truly Divine Being.

Suffering simply is part of the balance of existence in the same way that Death is.  One of the best analogies comes from the old Norse poems and the need to bang away at metal in a forge in order to strengthen and purity it and remove the slag.  If we are to improve or progress, suffering is a necessity.  We may not like it.  We may wish for the 'cup to pass' from us, but ultimately, if we have any desire whatsoever to improve or gain a measure of enlightenment, we must accept it rather than whinging endlessly or railing against the supposed 'injustice' of it.

Suffering has nothing whatsoever to do with justice or injustice.  Full stop.  That old chestnut of 'Why do bad things happen to good people?' is a question that is not even deserving of a response because it is tantamount to the use of metric measurements to define the state of Death.  'Bad' is a matter of perception in any case.  Things that HURT may not be bad in actual fact.  They are undesirable.  They are difficult, sometimes even impossible but I do not believe that one can give a moral character to them.

'Good people' is a matter of perception as well, although there is no doubt that some people are far better than others in their thoughts and actions and how they affect others and the Earth itself.  Even so, the suffering they endure is NOT a punishment nor is it sent by God in a specific fashion.  It simply is part of the business of Life and Death and Rebirth.

Suffering and Pain therefore should not have any effect on Faith.  A Divine Being definitely exists in my opinion.  Our Universe is not random ab initio, although that Being does not have a hand on the tiller of our own lives.  I therefore do not rail against God for the Dark Night of the Soul that I currently am experiencing.

What is the 'Dark Night of the Soul?'  Specifically, to me, it is a place and 'status' if one borrows Facebook terms where light cannot penetrate to any appreciable degree.  It is a state of being devoid of Hope.  They say that 'Hope springs eternal' and that is true but in the Dark Night of the Soul, one cannot find that source.  One cannot SEE any exit, unless Death is considered an Exit.

It actually is not Pain itself that has brought me here but a feeling of utter impotence.  When my life was unendurable in the past, I changed it.  Whether or not I made the right changes was kind of irrelevant.  The entire business of making significant changes fully occupied my days and nights and I had no opportunity to go back into the Dark Night of the Soul.  It had become a luxury I could not afford if I intended to survive.

I had a friend named Sam Roach when I lived in Los Angeles.  He was one of the first individuals I ever met from New Jersey and I found his humour very appealing, although now I realise that it is very much a sort of humour that comes almost naturally to New Yorkers and people from certain parts of New Jersey.  He had gone to Vietnam as a volunteer, unbelievably, as a Marine.  He returned, like so many veterans of that despicable military adventure addicted to heroin.

He was very bright, but had no inclination to DO anything with his life.   The reason I mention him at all is because he said something once that I never have forgotten.  He had a habit of putting himself into the Veteran's Hospital (psychiatric wing, I think) every month or so for a week.  He did it as a sort of holiday.  'Four squares and a bed' he would say about that.   I think a lot of guys deliberately commit crimes to be sent to prison for the same reason.  It is a blessed end to worry about the business of day to day survival and it does take one off the streets.

That was not the main thing about Sam that I remember however, although it is part of the same general philosophy he espoused.  He told me more than once that he almost preferred to be homeless because then he could not afford the luxury of THINKING about the reason for existence or anything else beyond the need to find shelter and food.  He said in a way he was happiest when he was homeless.  (He tried to live in a car belonging to one of his friends once in pursuit of that basic happiness but that did not work out as he resented the fact that she actually used the car to go places he had neither reason nor desire to visit.  This bothered him so much that ultimately he had to abandon that domicile!)

I had a childhood friend who told me when he reached early adulthood that he refused to have any friends who weren't 'going somewhere' in life.  When I look at the list of friends I have had over the decades, I realise that this guy would not have given most of them the time of day on that basis.  And yet, my friends all have been interesting people.  They all had something to offer, even if they were adject failures in terms of society's view.

Even Sam Roach, apart from offering that little window into the mindset of the homeless, had something valuable to give, which was a recommendation to read his favourite book, 'A Confederacy of Dunces'.  Wonderful book.  The 'reasonable man' of legal fiction, looking at Sam Roach and his life, might have mistaken him for a person without any intellectual gifts but that definitely was not the case.  I often wish I had kept a journal of some of our conversations.  He could be witty and incisive.  He could have written his own 'Confederacy of Dunces' actually.

The other introduction he made was to the music of Tom Waits.  I still do not LIKE Tom Waits but he certainly is an interesting songwriter and musician.  It isn't my sort of thing, in the same way that I never can warm to jazz, despite the fact that almost every friend I have from the Arab Nation adores that genre of music.  I understand the intellectual appeal of it but I do not LIKE it.

As for Heroin, although I do not believe that it makes people more interesting, I certainly have known a lot of extremely interesting, sensitive and unique individuals who were addicted to it.  I do agree with Baudelaire that 'the man with the mind of an Ox on hashish will have the dreams of an Ox' but the heroin addicts I encountered for the most part had rather extraodrinary minds and dreams.  What they all had in common, however, was the fact that they were 'broken' in some very fundamental way.    In many cases, they lacked any protective colouration or veneer to prevent themselves from suffering every tiny cut or bruise or unkindness of humanity.  Heroin therefore provided them with some measure of emotional protection, without which they could not endure Life.  That is the simple, unadulterated truth.  They were not going for the experience of Ecstacy so much as dulling the Pain that Life brought in its wake on a constant basis.

I think that is why so many artists have been addicted to drugs as well.  Obviously, it is better to address the root cause and attempt to create some sort of natural protection but in the absence of that, the addiction usually continues.  Suicide is another option of course, and many heroin addicts have committed suicide, half-deliberately in most cases, because they knew deep down in their souls, that they never would be able to cope.

To return to the topic of the 'Dark Night of the Soul', if I am to be honest, it is not the physical pain nor even the idea that I never will be free of it that has cast me down so low but rather the fact that I have no one in my circle who appreciates anything I do or shares any of my loves or interests.  I always had a wide circle of friends who appreciated me and shared many of my loves, even if they were not close geographically all the time.

At present, I am surrounded by people who dislike, even HATE Cats and basically treat me with a measure of contempt.  This is entirely unacceptable.  I realise intellectually that is is partly jealousy that motivates this, the idea that I could love and pay attention to something other than THEM but intellectual comprehension does not lessen the hurt and the sheer weight of depression that this is generating.  Month after month after month... when I lived in the centre of town, there were people everywhere but now I live in virtual isolation, totally dependent on one person essentially for transport.  I vowed I never would allow myself to be in this situation after an abusive marriage but here I am.  For the sake of my Cats and my daughter, I have put up with appalling behaviour and still do.  It is taking a toll and the saddest part of it is that I hold MYSELF in some contempt for not pulling up my socks as it were to get out of here, even though I know that my physical limitations present much action in any direction.

As my daughter begins to resemble her father (and my own mother) more and more in his negative aspects, my sense of despair deepens.  I thought she would be a compassionate being.  I tried to teach her to be one but she is beginning to exhibit the same passive-aggressive negative behaviour towards the Cats (and me) that her father shows.  In a three day visit, she refused to go with me to 'Le Salon des Miroirs' where the Putti live for even the briefest of visits.  What shames me here is that every one asks why she is not willing to help me with the litter boxes but she will not even take the trouble to descend a flight of stairs to visit them with me.  She waxes sentimental about photographs of other cats and animals but will not show an ounce of compassion or love for her own Cats.  Beauty is HER Cat, after all.  She begged for an Orange Cat and I found Beauty for her years ago.

As for the Chinchillas, they are hers, given by her best friend Kait but she does not spend a moment with them either when she visits.  I understand that they are not as absorbing as her old high school friends and so on but this is MY life, for better or worse and by shunning everything that occupies my days, she is making a statement about me.

Is it my perception that is at fault here?  Is it possible she is not aping her father's behaviour but simply is exhibiting normal young adult selfishness?  I wish I could convince myself of that, but there are too many other signs that she will go out of her way NOT to share any activities with me.  She will not watch any films with me any longer, although her childhood was spent watching films and comedies with me in the 'Cinema de Conde'...  She will not go shopping with me, even knowing that I am housebound to an awful degree.  Instead, she tells me she can do it a lot faster without me, even though she is not pressed for time in any way or has a full calendar when she is here.

I dislike writing about personal matters such as these, but I doubt I am the first or last mother to experience this sort of hurt and, after all, ultimately I can write about philosophy but life really consists of trivial facts all all philosophical views probably are generated by personal experience in the end.  Part of me believes I ought to 'call her out' on this because if I fail to do so, I fail to make any effort as a mother to caution her against selfishness.  If she had behaved this way towards some one else, I would have spoken immediately.  As it is, however, I doubt the purity of my motives as it is MY hurt here.

I suppose I should count myself fortunate that my daughter and I never have experienced outright hostility and emnity towards one another but my life has become so circumscribed that I actually need some positive interactions rather than being ignored.