The Return of the Light into the Darkness
Musings on the Solstice
As December begins, we travel our orbit path toward the Winter Solstice. My unconscious brings me images of the vanishing and return of the light. This week, I had an aha moment about my memoir structure. I realized that it was about exile and returning to my rightful place. This insight prompts a rewrite of the opening. Instead of telling the story chronologically, I think a different structure works better.
For those who have read Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, she uses the structure I have in mind. She begins with the scene of losing her hiking boots as she’s walking the Pacific Crest Trail. We don’t return to that scene until much later in the book. In my manuscript, if I start my story in exile, I can loop back to explain how I came to be in that situation.
The images of vanishing and returning light are also bubbling up when I facilitate the writing for others. For a recent workshop, I chose two poems intuitively, without knowing exactly why I thought they went together. The first poem was “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski. The poem ends with the lines:
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
I gave a prompt to write about finding the beautiful in the scarred and ugly.
Writing time was followed by a poem by Jin Cordaro titled “After We Buried the Dog in the Dark.” The poem opens:
He came back. I saw him
in the grass, the white of him
glowing in the floodlight,
the wind turning it off
and on again.
I didn’t pick these two poems to be related. I picked them because I knew that both led to strong writing when given as prompts. I didn’t plan which poem I would read first. But I presented them in this order, with the image of light going away and coming back linking them end-to-beginning. The prompt for the second write was another line from Cordaro’s poem.
Love wants to be fed.
It will return
again and again
Love will return again and again, just like the light always returns following the Winter Solstice. In the depth of the longest night of the year, the light begins to grow.
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Thanks for reading,
Deborah
Hi Harry, I know you meant this facetiously, but it got me thinking about my epigenetics and what unknown generations before me might have shared with me. It's another layer to the complexity of trauma. Thanks for your thought-provoking comment!
Thinking about the experience of exile Jewishly, I wonder if you can have the depth of emotion about this comparable to Jewish writers who epigenetically have known this sense of having been in exile from their homeland for thousands of years he asks somewhat facetiously.