Beauty In The Heart Of Darkness
Like so many others, I’ve been lately introduced to the world of teleconferencing technology, with all the attendant vagaries and benefits. I was on a zoom call recently and the initiator of the call had one of those forty five minute free introductory calls.
We all knew the time was running out, but we kept talking about this and that and all of a sudden WHAM! the call ended. No preamble, no warning, no see you later, dudes. Just over, quicker than the way the Red Sox seasons ended with the Bucky Dent (1978) or Aaron Boone (2003)home runs. Quicker than when I was dumped by one of the young women in whom I was interested right after my divorce. Quicker than that last drop of anesthesia that put me out in a couple of different surgeries. Unceremonious and irrevocable.
More like a severed head dropping into a basket in 17th century France after a guillotine drop.
Or that shower I took in a filling station in Talkeetna, Alaska after coming down from three weeks climbing Denali. There actually were showers in this place, probably mostly for climbers, where we all hustled, practically dropping mountain trou as we did. It was coin operated and you put in quarters for however long you were going to use it and I’ll tell you what– the absolute second your money ran out, the water turned cold and I mean icy bitchin’ cold. There was no transition, no margin for error, no thirty-day period to pay before service was shut off.
There was a good deal of screaming and yelling and oh shit in every stall as we dealt unexpectedly with the shock after luxuriating in the first hot shower for many days. This is after not changing our polypro underwear the whole time and using a pee bottle in the dark in your sleeping bag and, well, you get the idea. One of the less romantic parts of big mountain expeditions for sure.
I refer to my experience climbing Denali in 1986 a lot in these posts. Clearly it cast a long shadow worthy of North America’s tallest peak. A shadow thirty four years long with no signs of diminishing. I think there’s a reason for that–mountains are a strong symbol of an inner quest.
One lesson from Joseph Campbell is that in the earliest mythologies the emergence out of the sea of life is in the form of a mountain. The upper half is male and the lower half female. Then it separates and the upper half becomes the sky and the goddess is the mountain. Everest means “Goddess Mother of the World” in the local language. The descent of the clouds is the joining of heaven and earth which, he said, is the joining of the phenomenological side of life, the living in the world with its spiritual import and juncture of the two.
That is why ascending the mountains is a standard theme for a spiritual quest and ascent. Moses goes to the top of the mountain and God delivers the law to him, for example. There is no end of mountain themes.
And we are all climbing one right now, with no summit yet in sight. We need perspective and deep wisdom. His friend Phil Cousineau wrote this in an introduction to a book of interviews with Campbell–
It is the healing vision of order underlying apparent chaos, the seizure of life-affirming Beauty in the heart of darkness. If “snatching the eternal out of the ever-fleeting is one of the great tricks of human existence,” as Tennessee Williams said, then those who can experience eternity now, from Campbell’s challenging perspective, become our tricksters, our spiritual guides.
