The Stillness of a Brooding Soul

The year, tossed about by turmoil and the changing seasons of the heart, is on its last leg, like the rickety, murmuring steamboat approaching shore after a journey down the inscrutable stretch of an impulsive river. Just as a man is cloistered in year-end thoughts, so he must enter the stillness of his brooding soul. “And the stillness of life does not in the least resemble a peace. It is a stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention,” Joseph Conrad’s words (from Heart of Darkness) reverberate in the hollow clasp of his mind. Soon the implacable force moves him into the birth of a new year, with renewed hopes and perfect intentions, with a curiosity of impulses, motives, capabilities, and weaknesses forming the pondering props of a fresh play – and this year he promises to do all the things he sets out to do, unless he is frustrated once more by the excuse of his inexorable physical necessity.

But for now, a Marley’s ghost rattles the exasperating chains of flashing scenes, the what-could-have-been’s: the kindness that he could have shown to strangers or otherwise, the grace he could have granted to those weaker than himself by not judging them, the words of encouragement that he could have spoken to his own children and friends, the courage he could have demonstrated by speaking for the broken and the dispossessed, and the work that he could have done for the Gospel that sits unattended, cobwebbed and unlived. Of course, the mind’s defence is only too eloquent in justifying the many escape routes he has taken instead. “I am tired.” “I have too much to handle.” “I’m not qualified.” “I have given enough.” “Someone better will come along to do the job.” Rebellion has many faces; outright defiance is just one of them; the others are: compliance (“OK, if I have to I will,” but underneath it he is still a rebel), impotence (“I am unable to do it because I don’t have the power” – a kind of false humility), and negligence (“Oh, I forgot.”). He is the new Simon of Cyrene (Lk 23:26) who refuses, although politely, to carry the cross; he is on his way to the country and his burden is many. He just doesn’t remember that carrying each other’s cross is to fulfill the law of Christ (Gal 6:2). The tragedy is not that he cannot see but that he chooses blindness deliberately, with the brutality of a farmer who only sows weed. He probably thinks nothing of Nelson Algren’s verity, “… the court jester got laughs simply by sniffing the troubled air, implying that the stink of the herring begins in its head. In times like our own, it isn’t surprising to find men and women crowding the night clubs in hope of seeing someone sniff the air. In such times, clowns become witnesses.”

His mind is a sepulchre in the blind whiteness of fog, of memories decayed and imprecise, which play back now and then – actions and deeds, the perfect Kodak moments of the paperback hero dispensing tender mercies along life’s path. Joy, sorrow, fear, valour, rage and desire provide the bewildering luminance of his career, effecting the final illusion that everything is coming up roses. There is no shame in this type of prevarication; after all no one is hurt. Principles are less than chaff in the wind. Today, he is just brooding and soon the tabula rasa that is his mind will greet him with the new year bell. He is ready to board the steamboat bound for next year’s river, and his right to passage, merely this: that he has lived through last year.

At year-end, we gather our thoughts, sort them in the warmth of our mind’s barn, probe them, and make our obligatory resolutions. Next year it must be better. Next year, we must put our name down for this cause or other. Next year, we must help with this or that committee. Next year.

And that man with the sepulchral mind, who is he anyhow? I sometimes think he is me…

(first written, December 1995)