EXPLORING THE UNFATHOMABLE HEART
I suspect I was drawn to be a writer to explore the unfathomable complexities and contradictions of every human being, beginning with myself.
Plato wrote that good men only behave as badly in dreams as bad men do when awake. If only people were that easy to read.
Long ago, on a train from New York to Miami, I met a prim, petite, silver-haired lady. Though we never exchanged names, she revealed to me a story that Sigmund Freud might have shed light on or, more likely, Proust. In those days I was a priest, wearing a clerical collar, and strangers often opened up to me.
Years before, a night of madness with her husband’s business partner led to the break-up of her marriage and estrangement from her three children whom she never saw again.
Did she love her husband? Completely. The other man? Loathed him. Was she simply confused? Never more lucid. Did she not see the danger? She saw it as vividly as if she’d strayed onto a railroad in the path of a freight train.
Did she regret it? How, she countered, can you regret the inevitable? It was something she had to do to be complete, as if her whole life had led her to do one unrespectable thing and wallow in the mire. Like the worst kind of gambler, she’d staked her all on a prize she least wanted.
Was she mentally disturbed? Was she telling me fibs? Did she repeat this yarn to everyone she met casually on her journeys for the fun of it?
I’d just made up my mind it was make-believe when it hit me that it echoed the Bible’s first and most complex story.
The Man and Woman who come immaculate from the hand of God commit the greatest evil. Eden, God’s masterpiece, did not satisfy. They exchanged it for the incomparable joy of sinning. What fun to wield the hammer of destruction for destruction’s sake!
Where did the snake in Genesis come from but the snake pit of unblemished hearts? And, in heaven’s name, what is a snake with the guile of Shakespeare’s Iago doing in a Paradise garden?
What hope is there for us? You often hear it said he or she is the last person you’d expect to do such a thing. Far from being unusual, maybe my fellow traveller’s story is Everyman’s and Everywoman’s.
We’re not content to be content. Glorious creatures we may be but we’re light-years from being rational. Diogenes, a Greek philosopher famous for living in a barrel, said most of us are within a finger’s breadth of being mad. This is undeniably true of many writers.
Okay. Next time, let’s explore our madness together.