The garden each night now is splashed with moonlight and when I go out and stnd there the scent of the moonflower, Datura or Bruggmansia, makes me dizzy.
A friend is sending me a copy of the newly published Letters of Samuel Beckett and I am longing to read Beckett again, that austere bracing truthfulness. I often think of him as a young man, gaunt and directionless, always an exile, only able to express himself in laguages other than English — going to see another young ’shellshocked’ exile, Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock in London. Before the square was bombed in World War II. And Bion somehow helped Beckett to accept his innermost dread and irrational fears, Bion who wrote in his memoirs: ‘I died in 1918′. With Bion’s help, Beckett in turn was able to write of the mother who appalled and paralysed him: ‘Her devouring love has made me what I am.’
This is not misogyny and only in part to do with that real historical mother: it is a statement about the internalised figures and projective identifications that haunt and obsess us. The snake-locked Medusa, the blinded Oedipus, the chained Prometheus who has his liver pecked out on the rock, interminable torture. Internalised images of parental monsters and siblings and ingrate children. The stuff of nightmare.
These days I battle to sleep and I have always slept so easily, rolling over and closing my eyes, tumbling at once into oblivion. Now I lie awake and dry-eyed, staring up at the old dark beams of the ceiling high above me, listening to frogs and night birds in the garden. A time of reckoning perhaps, these hours of living with the old ogres of dreams past. But it is also curiously a rich and fruitful time: stories spill from my fingertips all day long, scenes and dialogue and entire fictional lives unfolding as if by themselves. The Unconscious is a richly upturned earth, a flowering graveyard within.
And the more I surrender to unknowing, and to the recognition of archetypes and scenes from a masque performed by caped players, the more fertile the imagination becomes. But too overwhelming — I need to ground more firmly and steadily.
So I am wondering if I should do another vipassana retreat again.
That last retreat was an agony of discomfort and boredom but I had to confront my own resentment and disappointment and insufficiency at a depth unreachable to me in my daily life. I came back honed as a shining blade. So perhaps the surrender to sitting practice in a small zendo hall on the bleached and burning veld is in order. Sleeping on a slatted bed with only a blanket, cold and infrequent showers, unbroken silence and bowls of watery split-pea gruel twice a day — well, not even that – may result in deeper transformation.
The prospect dismays and entices. O paradox!
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