The thin veil of August

While it is still August I must say something about the thin veil, the permeable membrane.

I had not been thinking about it this year so much because my life is very much in the everyday ordinary run of the mill category right now, much more practical than mystic. I am not dreaming. No miracles in sight. Not much evidence of Sprit at work or at play in my neighborhood. And I was not feeling much need for any of that, or so I thought, until I noticed that I have been reading and watching movies incessantly, which, besides being a sign that I have too much time on my hands (what a sinful admission that is in our workaholic culture), is also a sign that I am trying to fill a void, or trying to refuse something.

I just now lay awake thinking about all this reading and movie watching, having spent a Sunday afternoon and evening on it, and felt old, old guilt but something else, too, a longing. Something stirred by the reading I have been doing. First a wonderful memoir called One Day I Will Write aboutThis Place by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. About an incessant reader who finally finds that he really wants to write and writing is the only thing that saves him from his inner void, his chaos. I finished that this afternoon, watched a movie and some bad TV and then started reading an essay by the poet Jane Hirshfield on Basho, the 17^th century Japanese poet who turned haiku from a party game into an art form.

She starts with a quote from Basho’s memoir and here’s the thing. In both this quote and the Kenyan writer’s description of his own shy confusion about the world which he wards off by devouring stories, I felt I was reading about myself:

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another.

And here is the other thing about this passage. He calls this spirit of his “a thin drapery,” which is almost exactly the term I have applied to this time of the year since my mother’s death on August 3, 1989. And events thereafter, in this time period. This is a time when my soul has experienced permeability, when the other world seeps through in events and dreams, when people close to me die and are born and mysteries abound. A time when the veil is thin.

Not this year, nothing like that has happened, it’s been all practical and no mystic until . . . until the reading I am doing to fill the void pierced the thin veil and I was moved, again, to write.