The Mystic Friend as Transitional Space
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
EMILY DICKINSON
In the mystic resonance between Thoreau and Gilpin we can see two distinct outcomes that are typical of these mystic connections—outcomes that we will examine in more depth in this chapter: First, the resonance with a greater mind always moves our own mind toward more complexity. And second, the resonance with a greater mind always pushes us more deeply into the expression our unique selves.
Let’s begin by looking at the question of complexity.
If you examine your own increasing capacity for mystic resonance, you’ll notice something that in retrospect will appear utterly obvious. It is simply this: as our capacity to “use” love objects matures, there unfolds a new and more subtle reiteration of all the earlier mechanisms of object relationship. That is to say: each step in human development involves new and more complex forms of containment, of twinship, adversity, and mirroring.
If you pause for a moment to think about it, it will probably become apparent that mystic resonance is a new and higher form of twinship—pushing twinship’s experience of “sameness,” and “alikeness” into more expansive realms. After all, there is clearly, in mystic resonance, a profound new sense of joining, which is of course the very essence of twinship. Joining, yes, but at some altogether new level. It seems clear that once we have the mature “capacity to join,” we can join on a new, more wholly symbolic level.
But what’s particularly interesting to me (and far less obvious) about the increasing complexities evinced in mystic resonance is the way in which this subtler form of human connection also offers a more complex form of containment. Can you see that your inspiring new mystic Soul Friend—your Annie Dillard, say, or your Reverend Gilpin—is, among other things, a new kind of container for you?
Let’s look more deeply at this.
It will help, here, to review our earlier description of the fundamentals of containment itself. Remember? The baby is merely a collection of parts. A belly joined to a head and limbs. It is only through actual holding that the baby has an experience of being gathered together. We are gathered together in the arms of our loved one. We are held. And held together. It is through holding that we have an embodied experience of feeling unified. Put together.
Guess what? The adult is a collection of parts, too. Subtler parts, now. More complex parts. Psychic parts. Soul parts. Parts that exist only as sublime possibilities.
And just as when we were infants, certain special persons, certain special love objects—selfobjects—hold and gather together these bits and pieces more effectively than anyone else. These special people create a container in which we can marinate in an entirely new sense of wholeness.
As we mature, we are held together, contained, and most importantly, unified through this new kind of love object—a new, bigger mind, and a consciousness that is more developed than our own. We are now held not by flesh and blood, but by subtler bonds, by finer filaments. We now are capable of having spiritual parents. Beethoven would certainly have described Bach as a spiritual father; Gilpin was a spiritual father to Thoreau; and Dillard, without question, is a spiritual mother to me.
Remember that Dr. Winnicott describes the mother as “an environment” in which the baby thrives? Well, now we have a new kind of environment: the mind of Dillard, of Bach, Goethe, Gilpin. We swim in this new environment, this new mind, like a baby swims in the rich environment of the womb, and later in the holding environment of the mother’s arms. Now—as more complex beings—we marinate in symbolic amniotic fluid.
Within Dillard’s mind—through her words and the very consciousness they emanate—I am giving birth to a new part of me. Why do I feel soothed, held, and calmed by that stack of Dillard’s books next to my bed? Why did I find—during my year of Dillard—that I must read her? Remember the sense of urgency the baby had for the mother? The need for proximity? Well, with these new, subtler objects, there is also a strongly felt need for proximity.
This new mind—Dillard’s mind, or Gilpin’s mind—holds and gathers us together. In its environment, more of us is evoked. Vaguely felt parts are made clear. Undreamed of possibilities begin to emerge. We rise to this new voice as we rise to the voice of the mother, over and over again every morning.
Annie Dillard knows this. She knows that the words themselves have real power to transform. She knows that her very own brilliance was evoked through the mystic resonance she had at varying times with her own mature containers: with Thoreau (Dillard’s master’s thesis, by the way, was written on Henry David Thoreau) and with Emerson and Henry James and Emily Dickinson. Dillard understands the power of her words to hold, to evoke, to sustain. And she knows how much the world needs this holding and evoking. As a writer, she feels the responsibility keenly. And so she rises to the occasion. She brings every ounce of her human greatness to her writing.
Remember Rilke’s lesson, quoted earlier in the chapters on adversity: A man grows by being confronted by greater and greater beings. And in precisely the same fashion: A man grows by being contained by greater and greater minds.
2
Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber is a master in the study of human development. In his classic text, Transformations of Consciousness, Wilber (with co-authors Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown) studies the nine stages in the development of “the fully alive human being.” He notices something important that we discussed briefly in an earlier chapter of this book: at each stage of development, the new self—that new part of the self that is trying to be born—is always experienced as somehow “deeper in.” He says: these new parts are somehow emerging from inside the old self. Wow! Yes!
Have you had this experience? We hear our new self calling to us as if from deep inside. It’s a still, small voice. We long to get quiet so we can hear that voice. And, as it turns out, there are some very few and very particular voices “out there” (Gilpin, Dillard) that guide us to our own internal voice “in here”—new voices that seem to be doorways into this magic internal world of us. External voices that reverberate deep inside.
I remember watching my grandfather, Oliver Frisbie Crothers—Armeda’s husband, as you will recall—sitting for hours in his brown wing-backed chair in the big living room at 2800 East Main Street. The room was hushed. He was rereading his favorite book: Northwest Passage.
(Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage was one of the great adventure stories of the 1930s—though it appears to be surprisingly little known today. It’s a vivid story about the early rangers of the French and Indian War, and the hardships and challenges they endured on the frontier and in battle—a story of life in the wilderness, and of men at their self-sacrificing best.)
Gramp was completely still and quiet as he read Roberts’s tale. Anyone could see that he was somehow living in the world of that book. He was riveted. He was joined to a new world. What was it that fascinated him? What was it that called him inward so deeply? Who was it that he recognized there? There is only one possible answer: He recognized himself. The biggest version of himself. The version of himself that he had partly lived into as an intelligence officer in the First World War so many decades earlier. In reading Roberts’s novel, he was joined to his possible self—the self that he vaguely knew and longed to touch again and again.
My brother, Randy, took after my grandfather. He read for hours on end in his bed. Quiet. Still. Concentrated. Randy and I shared a room. I watched him from my bed. Where was he when he was thus absorbed? Mom used to say to me, “Don’t bother him when he’s reading, dear. Randy is in his own world.”
Randy was in his own world? Really? No. Not quite. Not solely his own world. He was in a commingled world. He was merged on some level with the mind of whatever adventure author he was reading: The Guns of Navarone, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Three Musketeers. Merged. Commingled.
I wasn’t a reader as a kid. But in later life I came to understand Randy and Gramp being in thrall to books. Indeed, this is just how I related to Dillard for a couple of years. Merged. Commingled. Dillard’s world and my world had come together. Our minds had reached out to one another and had discovered some essential kinship.
When Gramp and Randy and I were immersed in our books, we were inhabiting some important, productive, creative inner space. There is a name for this inner space, the space in which the self gets commingled with something greater, something bigger. Donald Winnicott has called it “transitional space” (or “potential space”), and the objects around which this transitional space is organized he has called “transitional objects.”
3
Let’s dig deeper.
We have already seen that during the process of development, certain people become highly charged with meaning, and become central players in the co-creation of a new self. (We have, with Dr. Kohut, called these “selfobjects.”) And we’ve seen that this process happens through a commingling of self and other. In my own development, as you’ve seen, just this kind of commingling happened with Armeda, with Seth, with Helen Compton, and with John Purnell. For a while, I lived in each of them. I marinated in their energy, their minds. I experienced that transfer of energy and information that we’ve talked about at length. (Remember Dr. Siegel’s description of the mechanism of change during this marination process: we establish an interpersonal relationship that helps the immature brain of the infant to use the mature functions of the parent’s brain to organize its own processes. Now this process is happening with much more complexity.)
This marination process is a wonderful mystery. I have found it helpful—and fascinating—to understand the exact nature of this commingling of self and other. It’s somewhat complex.
To start with, it might be useful here to examine one of the most common early experiences of commingling of self and object—an early experience of blurring the boundaries between self and object in a way that finally leaves “self” much bigger, and more complex. It’s an experience that many of us have had as children: I refer to the possession of a classic transitional object. A blanket, for example. A stuffed animal. Or a favorite pillow.
Did you have such a transitional object?
Many of us did. And this simple experience with physical objects will help us to understand the much more complicated process with human love objects.
See if you can relate to this: When I was four years old, I had a soft, blue-and-white checkered blanket with which I slept and cuddled. I desperately needed to cling to this tattered flannel friend, to hold it and suck it at difficult moments when I needed to feel soothed. The blanket was, strangely, an important building block of my development at that moment. Here’s why: it was helping me to bear the age-appropriate but terrifying discovery that I was a separate human being, and that others in my environment were not just emotional extensions of me, but were separate too.
Let’s expand upon this. Up until that time, everyone and everything else in the world had still been, emotionally speaking, “me.” The blanket partook of this magical world of emotional fusion, because it was also, at times, just an extension of me. We were merged, commingled. One. The blanket went everywhere with me—especially into my mouth.
But it was more complex than that. The blanket became, for me, a transitional object par excellence because, though it was often “me,” sometimes—presto change-o!—in the blink of an eye it could also be “not me.” At times, I could experiment with letting it be just a blanket, utterly separate. There were moments when I forgot about the blanket. (Not for long, mind you.) The blanket therefore occupied a wonderful intermediate realm between emotional fusion and emotional separateness. The blanket was both “me” and “not me.” That little blanket to which I clung, and from which I eventually parted, was an integral part of my process of growing up.
It turns out that as we mature, we use people—we use our love objects, our selfobjects—in exactly the same way.
Annie Dillard, when I am immersed in her mind, is “me” and “not me.” Is it her world or my world that I am inhabiting? At times I cannot tell. It does not matter. I hold to her like a blanket. I drag her around with me. Me or not me? It takes quite a bit of sorting out. That sorting out will happen—eventually. But not yet. For now, let them commingle. Let the confusion begin. Let me touch and merge. Sometimes I’m Dillard; sometimes I am me. Sometimes both.
At every age—I say again, at every age—growth begins in an intermediate space between “me” and “not me.” It is absolutely fine to be in this intermediate space. Actually, it is essential. This intermediate space has some magic ingredients. Here’s the most important ingredient: in this space, there are no rigid lines between objects the way there are in the external world of action and responsibility.
So: The external world of reality—what we call, without any irony whatsoever, “real life”—is full of demands and responsibilities. In this so-called real world, there is a need for clear boundaries. For sharp edges. But in contrast to this very real world, we all know, too, that there is a parallel and somewhat more fluid and dreamy inner world—a world that is perhaps just the opposite of real. Its nature is liquid; it has no hard edges. It is a world in which everything can merge for a time with everything else. Anything can happen here. It is the inner world of dreams. Of fantasies. Of fantastic voyages. Of nightmares.
But now something exciting: between the stark, clear-light-of-day world of external reality, and the internal world of fantasy and so-called primary process (or dream thinking) lies a third area—a transitional space. In this magic transitional realm, we can move back and forth between the internal and external. We can drift in our own internal experience while also being able at any moment to touch the external, real world. This is what D. W. Winnicott so beautifully calls “potential space.”
Potential space is the area of play par excellence. It is the transitional realm where the infant, the child—and later, the adult—can innovate with experiences of “self” and “other,” can experience himself in altogether new ways, can experience a vast sense of expansive possibilities, can experience small moments of risk taking. In this potential space, infants learn to play, to relax, and to create psychic objects or symbols (blankets, say) in order to soothe the self and to compensate for brief periods of frustration. And all the while they can keep one foot in the real, hard-edged world, as well.
Later on, guess what? Adults do very much the same thing.
4
Winnicott’s “potential space” is, as I have said, the space of play—of playing with objects. In this potential space, we can take objects (love objects, and “self”) apart, and put them back together again in perhaps new ways. In this potential space, we can imagine new ways of being and acting. We can try them on. For Gramp, it was the space of Roberts’s rangers—of living in the wild with his younger self. For Randy, it was the space of finding himself for a few hours a man of action, of adventure, and, perhaps, of romance.
As we mature, this potential space continues to be the container in which we grow and transform. It is creative space. We use objects from “the real world,” to be sure, but we put them together in new ways. We reimagine them, transforming their meaning. Clearly, this is a world where many things are possible.
There is no greater master of potential space than Emily Dickinson. Indeed, she writes about it often: “I dwell in Possibility,” she writes. Possibility! It is, after all, she says, “A fairer House than Prose”! Possibility here, of course, means poetry. Dickinson is describing her private-but-public realm of poetry, which is potential space par excellence. It is, she continues, “More numerous of Windows – superior – for Doors.”
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
Potential space is where dreaming and creative living find their home together, a home close enough to “reality” to have real impact on it. It is where we first intuit the potential fulfillment of our human possibilities. Thoreau’s cabin was only a short walk from the many hard realities of small-town Concord, Massachusetts. But thankfully, too, it was just far enough away. Thoreau’s cabin was quintessential potential space. And it was in that very womb of a cabin that the great writer in Thoreau—the possible writer—was born.
Dickinson’s writing was, for her, potential space. Her poetry was exalted play. At her small desk in her upstairs bedroom, she rather intentionally entered into this space. Before she wrote, Emily Dickinson famously darkened her room, and went into a kind of meditation, or trance. When she was ready, the poetry poured forth. About this process, she wrote: I fit for them – / I seek the Dark till I am thorough fit. In other words, “I prepare for them. I seek the dark to prepare myself to enter into this new sphere.” She enters into potential space.
In this space, Dickinson found that there was more and more of herself available. She could risk inhabiting this more expanded part of herself precisely because she felt held together by the container of her poetry. Through her art, as she says in the poem quoted above, she touched Paradise. Poetry was her transitional object—just as any art form can be. Any creative endeavor offers a container in which we can live in expanded form.
For some of us, indeed, this is how we live. Scholars all agree that Dickinson both wrote to live, and lived to write. It was how she managed to live an exultant life within the confines of her small room. Dillard, too. In fact, Annie Dillard once wrote a book entitled Living by Fiction. She had discovered that her writing was magical potential space: life, for her, was at its most intense, most alive, when she was writing.
5
Winnicott describes another interesting aspect of transitional objects. He observes, importantly, that the transitional object is always found by the child himself. By definition, then, the child chooses the object. It cannot be imposed upon him.
It cannot be imposed on him by any outside force whatsoever! Here is the key: It is the particular object that has meaning. And it is chosen only by you for characteristics that only you understand. (To tell the truth, even you do not understand these characteristics. The object you choose is a complex symbol. A key. And only a very few keys fit this lock—this lock to the room of your own potential, your own mind.)
So, I had found Dillard. She—her mind—was a precise fit for me, for my potential. Why? I would only learn later. But I had found her, and this was essential. I was living in her and through her for a while. My friends just rolled their eyes. More Dillard? Really?
I tried to share her—tried to share my new “found object”—with my friends. Please, read this book, I said to them. Read An American Childhood. It will change your life. Read Teaching a Stone to Talk. It will blow your mind. Only one in twenty of my friends bit on this impassioned invitation. How many times have you offered to a friend the most sacred item on your altar—only to receive a blank stare?
Right. Your found object is not going to be someone else’s found object.
Certainly you have watched a child play with his very own “found object.” You are at the beach, and your child finds a strangely shaped piece of driftwood. It’s a piece of driftwood just like any other, but it is one that your child has chosen himself. It has special meaning. He is fascinated, for a while, by it and only it. You can watch him as he tries all manner of games with his new found object. Wow! That little piece of driftwood can fly. It can crawl. It can explode. It can burrow. It can pounce on Mom and surprise her. It’s alive.
We play with our more adult “found objects” in much the same way—including our objects of mystic resonance. We take them out for a spin. We ride them. We enter their world as fully as we can. And we let them enter ours.
For a couple of years, I played with Annie Dillard like any magic stick of driftwood. I tried to write like her. I copied out her sentences. I tried to find the very rhythm of her mind. I quoted her endlessly. If I look back now at the book I was writing during the “year of Dillard” I can see her everywhere. I quoted her in the epigraph to that particular book. I felt her in my body. Her rhythms lit me up. (But wait! Was it her rhythm or mine? Or some new combination of our commingled minds?)
So: we try this new mind on. We immerse ourselves in it. We slip into it like a new suit of clothes. We sleep with our piece of driftwood for a time. Did you know that Beethoven wrote like Bach for several years? He tried him on. For many months, at one point in his development, Beethoven wrote distinctly Bach-like fugues. His later fugues—once he came out of the merger with Bach—were, you see, more Beethoven-like.
The English romantic poet John Keats actually tried dressing like his hero, Lord Byron. For a while he mimicked Byron’s special look almost exactly: soft, relaxed clothing; a big, loose, white bow at the neck. We have already seen that Thoreau, for a time, tried to imitate Gilpin in his writing and sketching. Indeed, while Thoreau was in his “season of Gilpin,” he tinted and washed his sketches just exactly as Gilpin did. It was something he’d never done before his discovery of Gilpin.
The great nineteenth-century yogic saint Ramakrishna had a mystic love affair with a female Hindu deity. For several years he dressed like this goddess. He actually gussied himself up in goddess garb—identifying with her, trying to feel into her mind state. This particular kind of imitation—this kind of God play—is a noble tradition in the Eastern contemplative traditions, by the way. It is called “deity yoga.” How does it work? Well, you identify with the deity. You dress like the deity. You speak like the deity. And what do you suppose happens? You become the deity you already are. You call forth the very DNA of the deity. This phenomenon exists in the Christian tradition, as well, of course—particularly in books such as Thomas à Kempis’s classic, The Imitation of Christ.
Back to Winnicott. He insists that we grow by learning to effectively use potential space. And he exhorts: Learn how to use your found objects. Learn how to use other minds. Make this process explicit. Use love objects—even objects at a great distance of time and space—to give birth to your greater self. Allow yourself to marinate in great minds, great music, great scientific discoveries, and to identify with those minds. Try them on, imitate them, live in and through them for a while.
6
Okay, I was using Dillard. But what was I using her for, exactly? What was I learning from her? What precisely?
It took me quite awhile to understand what I was learning from Ms. Dillard. Yes, there was a precise fit between her mind and mine for a reason. I was astonished when I finally understood the fit. It was this, simply: Dillard was teaching me how to use words to investigate the truth.
I’ve already told you. I had lived in a distinctly delusional family, one that was perhaps overly fond of “let’s pretend” and all too averse to facing difficult truth. (The proof: It took all of my siblings and me until we were well into our fifties and sixties to come to grips with reality. The habit of delusion is hard to break.)
Remember Winnicott’s dictum: It is essential to growth that we live right in the center of the tension arc between hard reality and the vast subjective inner world. To live exclusively on one side or the other is to have stumbled off the slippery slope. Yes, of course, to live exclusively in fantasy or exclusively in hard-edged “reality” will be necessary at times. But the most productive, creative space turns out to be that magic intermediate realm.
My own particular tribe—my family—seemed to have slipped off on the side called fantasy. (The Buddha called it “delusion.” “All men are quite deluded,” he taught.) Curiously, I did come from a family of writers. But, strangely, these were writers who often used words to obscure the truth—to create perhaps too much of a fantasy world, to embellish, to pretty it up.
Mom—God love her—wrote poetry and books. But she desperately wanted the truth to be prettier than it was. She left too much out; her work sounded too sentimental. This makes perfect sense, because the very definition of sentimental is being able to see only the light side, not the dark. One writing teacher told me: The most important stuff is the stuff you are tempted to—or actually do—leave out.
How do you begin to tell the hard truth? This is where Dillard is brilliant: Where does truth lie? she asks. In your own experience. In your own backyard. Dillard says: Investigate what only you love. Begin with what fascinates you.
“People love pretty much the same things best,” Dillard writes, in A Writing Life:
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures beset us. Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum . . . Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin.
Dillard is fascinated with the real world. This was a hugely important corrective for me. This is why her best-loved genre—and now mine—is the personal essay. It is an examination of reality.
Dillard writes:
The real world arguably exerts a greater fascination on people than any fictional one; many people, at least, spend their whole lives there apparently by choice. The essayist does what we do with our lives; the essayist thinks about actual things. He can make sense of them analytically or artistically. In either case he renders the real world coherent and meaningful, even if only bits of it, and even if that coherence and meaning reside only inside small texts.
For Dillard, it’s all about seeing more and more clearly, and more and more fully. This is what she teaches me. What does one do with a moment, a day, a life? asks Dillard. “I open my eyes,” she writes. “We are here to witness,” she offers, and her work, she says, “praises the world by seeing it.” Says one observer: “Dillard dazzlingly and fearsomely expresses what most people never pause to notice. That facility with language and capacity for sitting still and remaining awake to detail constitute her great gift.”
Now I understand why Dillard has been precisely the right container for me. She has indeed been another mother: A mother who is vitally interested in the world as it is. A mother who praises the world by seeing it. Who is interested in the earth, the ground. Who is interested in the inchworm living its dimwit life.
7
Now, here’s an interesting query: How, precisely, was Henry David Thoreau using William Gilpin—his very own “found object”? Well, actually, in pretty much the same way I was using Dillard: to learn to see more clearly.
The difference? Thoreau realized this immediately. Upon first discovery of Gilpin in the Harvard library, he realized that Gilpin simply saw more! He saw shades and effects that Thoreau had not yet seen; he saw meaning where Thoreau saw none. Gilpin had learned how to connect the inner soul of nature to the outer world of man. Thoreau’s connection to Gilpin caused the scales to fall from his eyes. Thoreau was St. Paul on the road to Damascus. After Gilpin, he discovered, and exclaimed, as St. Paul did: I can see! I can see more deeply!
Through the potential space provided him by Gilpin, Thoreau’s very act of seeing the real had been transformed—both the actual seeing, and the making meaning of what he saw. Gilpin showed him how to live in the center of that tension arc between the real and the inner subjective world.
It was during his most intense Gilpin phase—while he was trying him on, by copying his prose, living through him—that Thoreau had one of the most mystical experiences of his life. He observed what he called “the andromeda phenomenon.” He saw a phenomenon in nature that had never been commented upon in all the books he had read. What he observed one day, and then over and over again, was a particular color emanating from the small plant we now call “leatherleaf” (and that Thoreau called variously “dwarf andromeda,” or “Cassandra”).
Thoreau repeatedly describes the phenomenon, and his own wonder at it, in his journals. Biographer Richardson describes it: “A patch of dwarf andromeda,” he writes, “seen in mid-April, from most angles seemed grayish brown, the light being reflected from the leaves. But seen with the sun opposite, and the light shining through the leaves, the whole appeared lit [now in Thoreau’s words] by ‘a charming, warm, what I call Indian red color,—the mellowest, the ripest, red imbrowned color.’” Thoreau was astonished. He came back to the andromeda again and again. How had he—and everyone else—missed this phenomenon? He beheld a wonder: “a warm rich red tinge, surpassing cathedral windows.”
Thoreau wrote in his journal: “The thing that pleases me most within these three days is the discovery of the andromeda phenomenon.” Thoreau was seeing freshly. Seeing deeply. His perceptual bandwidth had been extended. What else had he not yet seen? He realized that this new awareness had happened somehow within his “relationship” with Gilpin—in the “potential space” created by his new mentor. He felt gratitude. And excitement.
As I have said, Annie Dillard wrote her master’s thesis on Thoreau. Her effort in this work was to show how Walden Pond functioned as the central image and focal point for Thoreau’s narrative movement between “heaven and earth”—inner and outer.
One of the greatest of Thoreau’s descriptions of this movement—between Heaven and earth, between inside and outside—comes in a description in Walden.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired [Thoreau wrote, in one of his first drafts of Walden], I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight . . . At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
Annie Dillard loves to quote the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on this very issue: the commingling of inner and outer. “Purity does not lie in separation from, but in deeper penetration into the universe,” says Teilhard de Chardin.
9
There is one final part of the mystery of potential space upon which Winnicott comments extensively: potential space provides us with a safe container in which we can “fall apart.” The paradox of potential space is that we are so held together by our new container—this new, subtle container that we trust—that we can even risk falling apart. Inside this container, we can take things—ourselves—apart for a time and try putting them back together in a new way.
It turns out that we cannot really discover the whole truth of life without the flexibility to take ourselves apart and put them back together again in new ways. This is of course the very truth upon which the English poet John Keats stumbled, with his discovery of what he called “negative capability.” Keats defined negative capability thus: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, negative capability is the creative power of living in the unknown, in the realm of mystery. Keats had independently discovered potential space, and he realized it was the true source of his genius.
Winnicott describes this mystery beautifully, but gives it a new slant. In potential space, we move back and forth between the experience of unintegrated parts and integrated parts in what he calls an “undefined drift of experience.” He exhorts: It’s okay to feel unintegrated. We can, as he says, learn to trust in our “going on being” even while falling apart.
So, our new, subtle containers allow us, as one author says, to “go to pieces without falling apart.” This is gold. “Through artistic expression,” writes Winnicott, “we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane.” (Go ahead: Let yourself be mildly insane for brief stretches within this safe container.)
Potential space is characterized by a kind of rhythmic movement back and forth from states of unintegration to states of integration. The great American poet Robert Bly has one instruction for the aspiring poet: “When writing a poem, open your mind,” he says. “Whatever wants to come in, let it come in to your writing. Always be aware of what you may not have let come in!” (We cannot help but notice that this is essentially Freud’s instruction as well, and the basis of the genius of free association: Pay particular attention to whatever you are censoring. That’s where the juice is.)
And, as it turns out, the inchworm, the very inchworm with which we began this section—the inchworm “leading its dimwit life”—is for Dillard a symbol of the writer’s process. The writer, like the inchworm, lives in the dark space of mystery and of potential. The wretched inchworm, feeling its way along in the dark, is living, precisely, in potential space.
“The sensation of writing a book,” writes Annie Dillard in an essay for The New York Times, “is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling at the level of the sentence.”
10
While I was deeply contained in Dillard’s mind, while I was marinating in her work, I imagined that my romance with her would go on forever.
Do these romances go on forever? Sometimes. Most, however, do not. Thoreau did, in fact, finish with Gilpin, as it turns out. He integrated the lessons he learned in his great commingling with the Mystic Reverend, and he moved on. (As far as I can tell, indeed, the only minds Thoreau never really finished with were Goethe and Carlisle, two of the greatest minds with whom he fell in love.)
But my romance with Annie Dillard has lasted a good twenty years, and I still love her and reread at least one of her books every year.
How do we understand the endings of the most intense aspects of mystic resonance? Well, simple. We devour, we use up, we incorporate the object. And then we move on.
What emerges after a mystic romance? What emerges after we’ve allowed the “found object” to call forth what it wants to within us? What emerges is a newly embodied experience of the self as a separate person, a person with his own deep inner life, who can fantasize, think, feel, play, and engage the world. What emerges is a newly complex and individuated self: Beethoven’s fugues begin to have their own voice; my prose begins to sound precisely like me; Thoreau’s nature writing begins to sound quintessentially Thoreauvian.
As I mentioned, a couple of years ago, I sat behind Annie Dillard in church, in Florida. Is it her? I wondered. She was older. She looked very real, very ordinary. Yes, ordinary: just like me. It didn’t matter so much then. By that time, she had already become a part of me. She had slowly become a pillar of my personal narrative. I could let her be “just her”—ordinary—not a projective object with a huge charge.
Usually, when we’re commingled, we do not have any perspective on our impending separation and individuation. Indeed, perspective arises only when we come out the other side, out of the merger—as we usually do. I realize that when I came out the other side of my year of Dillard, I was not the same person. Not the same writer. Not the same thinker.
12
As I’ve already noted, I once wrote a book which required me to study a whole series of great lives for almost four years. Something struck me about these so-called great lives: Each one of these great personages had been struck dumb by a mystic resonance. Each of my many subjects in that book—Robert Frost, Jane Goodall, Susan B. Anthony, Camille Corot, John Keats, Mahatma Gandhi, Harriet Tubman—had discovered one or two life-changing mystic resonances. One or two keys that fit just right. One or two keys that fit the lock so very well that they never wore out.
Susan B. Anthony was held and contained by the mind and work of Charlotte Brontë throughout her long life. She kept a picture of Brontë over her desk. And there it was—that selfsame picture of Brontë—hanging over her casket at her wake. Susan B. Anthony never met Charlotte Brontë, but she had been touched and held and contained and inspired by her mind to the very end of her days.
So, in whose mind did Dillard marinate? She tells us, and it’s a surprise. Strangely, she does not list Thoreau or Emerson. (Perhaps because they’re so fully integrated into her own mind at this point.) She frequently mentions, rather, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Ernest Hemingway.
I have a picture of Annie Dillard hanging over my writing desk, along with some of her words. Here are the words I have put in a small brown frame next to her picture:
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That, after all, is the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
We can only really write about the love affair after it’s over, can’t we? We may feel a little sad, like we do with an early twinship affair. We may feel wistful. There may be some longing for the early thrall of the object. But we also feel full. We feel grateful.
We feel grateful because after “the affair” has burned through us, we are more ourselves. We have discovered more of our idiosyncratic genius. That which was not us has been peeled further away. The true seed has been exposed. We are closer to our True Nature.
And as Thoreau taught us, it is only through becoming fully ourselves—our idiosyncratic selves, our particular selves—that we connect to the Universal. Thoreau said it in Walden: “A man tracks himself through life. One should always be on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to The Divine.”
In my own view, this is Thoreau’s greatest theme: the direct connection between the particular and the Universal. We only touch the Divine through the full and complete expression of our own idiosyncratic self. Thoreau’s corollary to this is his understanding of the deep connection between the inner and the outer. Indeed, Thoreau sees rightly that true creativity lives in the tension arc between the inner and the outer—and we have seen in this chapter precisely how this tension arc requires the kind of relationship that Thoreau had with Gilpin. Mature selfhood ultimately requires the capacity for mystic resonance.
We never forget those Soul Friends who bring us closer to ourselves. For me, Annie Dillard is still there. Still inside in every way that matters. Wrote the great Japanese poet-monk Ryokan Taigu about this mystery: “If we gain something, it was there from the beginning. If we lose anything, it is hidden nearby.”
things to ponder: mystic resonance