A Comforter in the Storm

© D. Curtin

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

To say we live in chaotic, disquieting, and sinister times is undeniable. Its truthfulness is revealed in the great sense of foreboding evident among the population of the United States. Everyone I know feels it. The forces of history and chance, always powerful although often ignored as people pursue private happiness, at times gather into a great and obvious storm that sets people back on their heels. It becomes impossible to discount. Now is such a time. Everything seems to be falling apart at once.

Sometimes the memory of a work of art resonates with reality; seems to conspire with nature to rattle the mind.

In the opening pages of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago – a story set in Russia during the Russian Revolutionary period – the eponymous main character, Dr. Yurii Andreievich Zhivago (called Yura as a child,) is ten years-old and distraught. He has just attended his mother’s funeral where he stood on her grave weeping and is spending the night with his uncle in the local monastery. The night brings a ferocious snowstorm that awakens Yura and brings him to tears for the second time that day.

 Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow. It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him.

The boy fears his mother will sink deeper and deeper into the earth.

Pasternak, a symbolist poet of deep spirituality, uncannily wrote a large and ambitious novel near the end of his life. It is a book that is deeply rooted in the real world, beginning with the boy’s mother’s death and ending with that of the grown Yurii. Bookends of endings that leave the reader’s spirit uncaged and oddly rhapsodic.

Sad it is, but not depressing, for it is a love story filled with radiance and resurrection, especially fitting now when to distinguish between the real and the apparent world is so problematic and hope is so hard to find in such a dark time.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul – / And sings the tune without the words – / And never stops – at all -,” wrote Emily Dickinson.

Hope, like America, as the great peace warrior poet Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. used to say, is hard to find. Not impossible, just hard. Perhaps it is better to say it must be created through action. Action rooted in faith. But from whence comes faith?

I was reminded of this scene the other night as I looked out my New England window at the blizzard burying everything in sight. It was bitter cold and the wind was howling. Lucky to have a warm abode and far from being a child, it wasn’t the blizzard that frightened me. It was its message. Chaos coming, madness in the saddle, people losing their minds, leaders drunk on power, war, hatred, murder in the streets. Lost souls. Lost, lost souls.

Such sentiments have been uttered before, so I don’t want to exaggerate. Yet I feel certain we have entered a new “reality,” one based on phantoms and methods, a digital world spun out of the nineteenth century’s so-called “death of God,” or God’s murder. The murder of God also meant the suicide of man, with both finally resulting in rule by algorithm and artificial intelligence and our time when everything has become unsettled, doubtful, and frighteningly farcical, all a deadly parody – in Nietzsche’s prescient words: “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.”

But then there was this as well in the night, brief as it was. Strangely, the storm cracked its shell at one point, the clouds parted serenely for a brief glimpse of what seemed like a few stars, and I could see the snow settling softly on the ground like a diaphanous large bird with its wings a massive white comforter. The menace turned to tranquility, a sense of peace entered my heart, and just as quickly the storm roared back with the air smoking with snow and the ephemeral vision of hope gone.

So I went back to bed, got under the comforter, and wondered myself back to sleep. And I dreamed.

And as usual I dreamed of birds, numerous dreams and numerous birds, as has happened throughout my life. All my significant dreams – and for some reason I remember almost all my dreams in detail – have been about birds. Not only do I encounter rare birds of flamboyant plumage in these night visions, but I fly with them. Gravity with its grave and somber implications no longer holds me down. I don’t talk about these encounters, except to my wife, and I will not go into details here. Let me just say they are real for me – deep experiences – like for Emily Dickinson, a source of hope in my soul. Like Percy Shelley in his poem “To A Skylark,” I too confess to my birds, What thou art I know not, for knowing is overrated. When one magnificent huge multi-colored bird fluttered its wings so I could feel its edges, I was reluctant to do so for fear of hurting the bird, but it assured me I wouldn’t because they were my wings also. Winged words, doves of the spirit, birds released from these sentences to release a transcendent vision from the aviary of my mind.

Yurii Zhivago is not only a medical doctor but a poet. In both roles he has a special gift for diagnosis. The book is a glowing example of Pasternak’s reverence for the wholeness of life, how our ends are in our beginnings and our beginnings in our ends, how patterns circulate through all our lives in ways we often know nothing of until a visionary experience or a work of art reveals them to us. Patterns across history, society, and families. This is exemplified by the uncanny crisscrossing parallels that occur from the beginning to the end of Dr. Zhivago. Life (zhivago in Russian = life, living, alive), after all, not us, is in control.

My adult son has an uncanny affinity for birds, not because I taught him about them or recounted my dreams to him. He can spot the smallest or most camouflaged, identify them all by sound and sight, point them out on the wing no matter how fast their flight, and draw them into his orbit as mystical friends. His wild garden is an aviary and a temple for imaginative dreaming. His communion with birds is a source of wonder to me and his mother.

[ You might find this hard to believe, but just as I had started to write about him, hope, and birds, he dropped by our house for a few minutes and I heard him in the kitchen mention to his mother his friend named Hope and bird wings. It seemed unreal but wasn’t.]

Recently, in the middle of winter but before the heavy snows covered the farmer’s fields, he had seen some small-eared owls soaring at twilight. He invited his mother, lady, sister with family, and me to come to see them one late afternoon, but none appeared. Along the country road we traversed, we passed a half-dozen men standing in wait in the crepuscular light, sentinels guarding some hoped-for vision that would lift their winter spirits. It seemed to me the old adage pertained: He who has eyes to see, let him see. Only certain people are gifted with the clairvoyance that can conjure up not just such an owl, but the bird of paradise. These men were searching for a comforter who appears on its own schedule; but at least they were searching and open to an epiphany.

I said to my son, why don’t you write about your relationship with birds? He immediately demurred, giving no reason. I took it to mean that for him his relationship with birds, like the mountain running that he does, filled his heart and lungs with the spirit of life (his zhivago), and that was enough. It was then that I connected my “dream” life to his “real” life, my writer’s life to his active life. Hope takes many forms. And “the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

“Sitting still,” said Nietzsche, “ is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.”

For not flying is a way of lying, but art is a letting go.

Ah, no wings of the body could compare
To wings of the spirit!
It is in each of us inborn:
That feeling that arises and ascends
When in the blue heavens overhead
The lark calls out in thrilling song.
–  Goethe, Faust