Pilgrim's Progress for Mind, Body & Soul

There seem to be different kinds of pilgrims. The three Magi were the kind that waited until various signs were in place before they started out. They needed certainty first. They also had a clear idea of what they expected to find when they arrived at a no-doubt-about-it destination— a glowing and beatific Messenger of the Divine. Their story appears to have a neat and tidy beginning, middle and end, complete with lovely depictions and rhyming hymns. Yet we know that appearances are often misleading, and the middle is never tidy.

For instance, things get ghastly when the star leads the three to King Herod, who reacts to their private debrief of messianic prophecies with an order of infanticide in the city of Bethlehem. These wise men were even planning to return to Herod after finding the Baby, but instead, heeded a brick-falling-on-the-head warning in a dream to steer clear. Some guiding star. I’m glad their slumbering, receptive bodies were as reliable as a celestial body. 

Even if this frightful part of the story could be explained away with several contortions of logic, what purpose does it serve as an element of a pilgrimage? I believe it serves as a general reminder that even when an action seems like a solution with purpose and a predicted outcome, there are many forces and wills at work, some seen and fortuitous and some unseen and unsavory. Calendars, maps, interpretations and forecasts can be wrong.

The Three Kings by bmosig.jpg

Here is also a reminder that desperate acts of destruction, on the part of Herod and the soldiers, cannot guarantee a desired result. By his parents’ flight to Egypt, the messiah begins his own pilgrimage toward bodily salvation. Even the Savior must be saved, from people and by people. So where does that leave the rest of us? We're not often caught up in a cosmic religious drama between forces of good and evil that include signs and wonders. We usually have just our own small dramas with small obscure signs and little to wonder at. And what if we don't even recognize that we are on a pilgrimage because we feel caught in one of those traffic roundabouts when people forget to yield? 

One way we can know where we’re trying to go and what we’re trying to do is to simply observe our movements. Are we periodically making a break or a run for it, even if— unlike the Magi—we don’t yet know why we're going nor what will be there when we arrive? Do we just keep leaving or feeling compelled to leave a central point, but the radius is the only thing that changes? The break isn’t made and the run is halted. Do we just keep tilting but never quite falling completely out of time and space, only to be thrown back in it?

If this is the case, then the stagnant central point is the problem and the impulse to flee it is actually a supreme act of survival toward completing our full course on earth. It’s important to recognize this, because whatever destruction we run toward may not be what we want at all. If the primary urge to live and live fully keeps on being replaced by unwanted secondary and tertiary gains, then there isn’t much point in chasing after flickering exit signs. Also, we may not want to break from every aspect of the central point. All we know is that nothing is working, we’re stuck in a circle around a drain, and efforts to recruit people for help aren’t effective. There’s a reason why hell is described as a funnel of cantos. The chaotic reality of the territory never changes and the descent becomes increasingly constricted and frozen.

Map of Hell by Sandro Botticelli. The blue semi-sphere at the bottom is where Satan is bound in ice as a prisoner and not a ruler.

If there is one thing that I have learned about the circumference of the spirit, it is that an expansion of the spirit can’t happen without the cooperation of the body. The body will move with or against a mental plan every single time until it senses that the mind has come into agreement with the spirit. The spirit keeps insisting that its sacred central point is both within and therefore everywhere, and it wants our mind to have our body act accordingly. If that sounds like transcendental “woo”, I assure you it couldn’t possibly be any more grounded in material and measurable results. 

So here is a tale of one pilgrim’s progress: in 2006, I met an acquaintance who told me of a time in his life when he was extremely ill as part of a local viral outbreak. His doctors didn’t know why he wasn’t getting better, and they had little help or hope to offer. Inexplicably, one of these “healers” found it necessary to tell him that he was at the point where some of his other patients had committed suicide. So with the inception of this idea planted firmly in his guilt-racked mind, he felt a sort of permission, and perhaps even an obligation, to follow through with this idea of bringing about his own end. Hadn’t others done this before him? His central point was now attached to this doctor’s words and how others had acted. As if a dark star had risen, he now had certainty and a destination.

He was so sick that he could barely walk, but his mind forced his body into his truck. The body complied. His mind had a plan for how to end the body, and his body complied by gathering up the paraphernalia of the plan. His mind said, “I must leave here,” and the body said, “Sure, okay, I’m with you, let’s go.” The body agreed that he needed to get out from where he was stuck. He drove to a remote area in the wilderness, when normally he was too exhausted to drive into town. His body didn’t put up a fight. He crawled outside of his truck, depleted, to rest and to prepare himself for what his mind had decided to do. And then his story, as if by magic, jumps up and out from what sounds like a carousel of despair, featuring many go-rounds of doctors, frustrated family, and buried hopes.

At the part of the story when his body is lying on the ground, seemingly spent, he says, “Suddenly, I didn’t feel like I wanted to kill myself anymore.” The body spoke to the other parts of his splintered being and caught their attention. It wasn’t his mind that said, “I don’t feel”, it was his body that said “I don’t feel”; the same body that was suffering the excruciating symptoms only hours before. He didn’t feel his usual state of wired but exhausted, anxious, inflamed, winded, confused, despairing and limp. His illness didn’t disappear, but the symptoms of it diminished enough so that his mind was able to hear his body assert, “I don’t feel like carrying out your plan.” The body resisted a calamitous end to this pilgrimage, changed his mind, and his spirit came knocking. The Three Magi were back together.

Gradually, his mind, in this remote terrain, was clear enough to try a new tack in service of his well-being. He decided to notice and then assess what was present or not present in his current environment versus the environment he had just left. He began to let his body advise him that brief shots of anxiety and depression were his allies, communicating that he was near something toxic and unhealthy to him. He didn’t know which way to go in this unchartered territory, but he began to rely further on his intuition, rather than a limited understanding, toward the good and away from the bad. “Good and bad” for him were not choices regarding morality; they were directions away from self-destruction and toward survival; away from situations that inflamed his suffering and stagnation; toward situations that cooled down his symptoms and allowed him to function with increasing levels of determination. 

While making allowances that various sensations might be hard to interpret, he nevertheless honed the skill of perception. Being highly perceptive meant that he learned how to never miss a trick. But can we be tricked by our own imagination? All the time. Can other people trick us? King Herod tried to fool the wise men with all of his military might. However, an image of reality is not the same as an experience of it. There is nothing imaginary about someone progressing from crawling on the floor of their apartment, desperately sick, to climbing a mountain six months later. That is the definition of materially and measurably better. 

Illustration by John Muir. Ex Libris
getting out of the stories that have been written for us

When imagination fails us, perceptions can kick in and offer a clue. This devastated man’s image of himself on a mountaintop didn’t exist in his mind while he drove his truck to what he believed would be his doom. He had the opposite of encouragement from the pessimistic doctor. He endured social persecution from those who couldn’t tolerate suffering people. He didn’t use daily visualization and affirmations or tightly controlled thoughts to short-circuit his way out with positivism. Wouldn’t it be nice if he had? Because then we could be relieved that all we need is imagination, high-fives, and deep breathing. 

If that sounds counterproductive to all we've been taught, then consider which is more valuable to life and limb— to hopefully believe that a bomb is not ticking, or to rightfully perceive that a bomb is ticking? If I can’t perceive, then I can only believe, and my beliefs haven’t always been correct. My perceptions aren’t fully informed with incontrovertible evidence either, but they offer me something beyond false beliefs I cling to, or a paid subscription to someone else’s point of view. My perceptions can tell me what I truly value instead of what someone else tells me I should value. I can think of many times when my imagination scared the wits out of me, but I can’t think of a time when the full-body knowledge of intuition hasn’t brought their return. My center can hold.

Where does the spirit come in, for this severely tested man, whose center was being pulled between mind and body? I imagine that it came in moments of joy, acceptance, and knowledge that he was still on earth because earth hadn’t rejected him. I imagine it came in waves of assurance that although his mind and body weren’t perfect meters of “the good”, they were more trustworthy than he had previously given them credit for.

"This hill though high I covent ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way of life lies here,
Come, pluck up heart; let's neither faint nor fear."
–John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

The modern pilgrim of this story is a living example of someone who purposely meant to lose his whole world so that he could gain his soul. Yet, the canny body was looking out for his soul, waiting for its chance, until his mind could follow; to keep them all in one piece until death would no longer be untimely. By regaining his soul, he found his place in the world. Not my place, not your place, but his own. He also lost a great deal in the process, but many of those losses he had intended to let go of, anyway.

That was over thirty years ago, and he’s literally still climbing mountains. And yet, he doesn’t always live on the mountain. He also never completely abandons the former central point of where he lived and where he fell so ill. He just limits his time there until he gets the warning signals that he’s losing altitude and a crash is coming that will burn those around him. Some of his family and friends (not all) love him enough to accept his limitations, rather than demand an unattainable perfection that suits them. 

By keeping his body in the clear air, he trained his mind how to perceive those very helpful limits, so that healthy interactions and relationships are even possible. The body is usually heard the most clearly in the wilderness— the mountain top, the deep forest, the deserted beach, the briny waves, away from the loud kudzu minds of others. In this state of aloneness, the person stops disappearing into oblivion and the true self emerges. This state of a chosen and conscious be-wilderment is the opposite of isolation in a dark room with racing thoughts and bad dreams, sensitive to light and voices. This state of retreat brings us back to our senses that can feel pleasure alongside of pain.

It has been ten years since I first heard his story, and it has been one of the most compelling and instructive in my own progress that I have had the privilege to hear. When I am in the wilderness, I can feel the Magi’s whispering guidance. But I leave off with a caveat: the wilderness is wild, and like any untamed thing, it promises us nothing and owes us nothing.

Roman fresco of The Three Graces from Pompeii

Exceptional Excerpts: Mystics and Sages

"Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity — a total embrace of the entire Kosmos — a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?"

         ~ Ken Wilber, author, The Theory of Everything

The Three Magi, consulting the heavens to ascertain the Mystery of prophecies
from the Basillica of St. Apollinarius in Ravenna, Italy

"Mysticism" is derived from the Greek μυω, meaning "I conceal", and its derivative μυστικός, "mystikos" meaning 'an initiate'. The verb μυώ has received a quite different meaning in the Greek language, where it is still in use. The primary meanings it has are "induct" and "initiate". Secondary meanings include "introduce", "make someone aware of something", "train", "familiarize", "give first experience of something".

O Magnum Mysterium

Unholy Holidays

The holidays are upon us, but it seems like many are involved in holy wars over what feels sacred and nonnegotiable. Some are trying to just get through the holidays that bring added expectations, and the war plays itself out between the folds of a wallet opening and closing.

When holiday music gets piped into the stores, it’s not a song by Amy Winehouse. She’s dark, wounded and tragic. But during one of her hopeful moments she considered the idea of being her "own best friend". I like the way she describes her idea of what such a friend would be like in a song about her “man”. She's all in. Yet she switches pronouns between “him” “you” and “we”, which suggests to me that she’s not sure, even with millions of fans, if anyone is listening to her declaration of dedication, and if it matters to anyone but her. I wish she could have given this kind of fiercely loyal friendship to herself, because she might have lived to write more about what she held sacred. She only got a running start before she was overtaken, but I imagine she knew what we all need to remember during these uncertain times:

"The main thing is to be moved, to love, 

to hope, to tremble, and to live"

~ Auguste Rodin, sculptor

We all need a friend to be able to do the main thing. Treasure the ones you have, for they are more precious than the Internet of Things. And so are you, your own best friend, who stays with you, not to the year’s end, or the bitter end, but beyond any ending you could dream up.

 "The Thinker"

If my man was fighting

Some unholy war

I would be behind him

Straight shook up beside him

With strength he didn't know

It's you I'm fighting for

He can't lose with me in tow

I refuse to let him go

At his side and drunk on pride

When we wait for the blow

Put it in writing

But who you writing for?

Just us on kitchen floor

Justice done reciting
My stomach standing still

Like you're reading my will

He still stands in spite of what his scars say

I'll battle till this bitter finale

Just me, my dignity, and this guitar case, whoa, whoa

If, if my man is fighting some unholy war

And I will stand beside you

But who you dying for?

B, I would have died too

I'd have liked to

If my man was fighting

Some unholy war

If my man was fighting

A union found in hands "Cathedral" by Auguste Rodin, 19th Century

A Supermoon and a Space Oddity

With everything going on in the world, many people may want to leave the country of their birth or even the planet altogether. Some are forced to leave because of oppression, war, or illness. 

Please never forget all of the places you have inhabited by way of your heart. Your feet need not be planted on them for them to remember you. Their borders, and yours, can't be seen from space. All the nations of your soul can't be taken, so they can't be taken back again.

Let's let Bowie sing it better:

Ground Control to Major Tom

Ground Control to Major Tom

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, six)

Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three)

Check ignition and may God's love be with you (two, one, liftoff)

This is Ground Control to Major Tom

You've really made the grade

And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear

Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

November Supermoon over Seattle Space Needle photo credit: Quyhn Ton, National Geographic Editor's Pick

This is Major Tom to Ground Control

I'm stepping through the door

And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today

For here

Am I sitting in a tin can

Far above the world

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles

I'm feeling very still

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go

Tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom

Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you Here am I floating 'round my tin can

Far above the moon

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do

To all the Major Toms: Stay tethered to what you know to be true. Let us hear from you wherever you find yourself.

Day of the Dead: Wuthering Heights part 2

Wuthering Heights: A Ghost Story part 1

The Bronte sisters had a man problem in Heathcliff. Considering how Charlotte overstepped her role as an executor of Emily's work and became its editor, the curtain on her relationship with Emily is pulled back and the importance of the Nelly, the narrating witness, emerges. The watchfulness of Nelly, the all-seeing housekeeper, may have been seeded in the intrusiveness of Charlotte, the boundary-crossing sister. At a young age, Charlotte had stolen among Emily's papers and read her poetry and short stories without permission. Emily forgave her, because Charlotte became her champion when it came to her writing. Charlotte not only encouraged her, but insisted upon the need to have Wuthering Heights published.

Sister Charlotte, getting a bit carried away with moral dilemmas in fiction

It seems to me that the complex structure of Wuthering Heights is due to Emily's complex relationship with Charlotte. To begin with, many readers and critics have complained that the frame story--a first person narrative by the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood, relaying the history of Wuthering Heights as told by Nelly--renders Heathcliff and Cathy too distant, and blocks the immediacy of their characters. It is a peculiar and aloof stance toward the two, but seems to point to an authorial personality that perhaps found itself at odds with and at arm's length from immediate kin, and who actually felt oppressed or at least stifled by them. 

Not all of that can be laid at the feet of Charlotte, because we know that their brother, Branwell, terrorized the family with his addictions and constant drain on their finances. But Emily's home atmosphere may possibly be reflected in Heathcliff's taut frustration over his dependent circumstances, and how his loyalty to Cathy, who is both his family and his beloved, binds him to daily compromises and degradation.

I now think that Emily struggled with how to present Heathcliff and Cathy realistically and mercilessly with all of their flaws laid bare, to a Charlotte-esque readership that would be closer to the horrified and scandalized Mr. Lockwood, who would identify with the moral and practical sensibilities found in Nelly. Perhaps this is why she pairs these witnesses together as the story's initial editorialists, to tip us off that she knows exactly what sort of reaction to the novel's monstrous characters she expected to receive. Yet she also challenges the reader to soften harsh judgment by emulating the sadder but wiser example set by Nelly.

In a similar way that Charlotte attempted to temper the extremes in Heathcliff's character, all of the novel's extreme action is tempered by solid and steady Nelly. She is the character who has a mind that knows itself, and isn't completely consumed by the events of the others' making. She must work alongside them, and is emotionally impacted by them, but she is not fully formed by Wuthering Heights, herself. She relates sympathetically to Mr. Lockwood--a stand-in for the reader--as he listens along with us to her account of both the natural and supernatural beings of Heathcliff and Cathy, the offspring of the "wily and windy moor". 

The two wild lovers are bound to it, even in death, and their sorrow is bound to us as we change from the bewildered and fascinated Mr. Lockwood into the empathetic yet even-handed Nelly.

Their sorrow is also bound to us through the transformational life of this novel within Western culture. Like an oracle, Nelly is the only one capable of bearing the burden of telling this tragic tale because she isn't under its spell. 

The clear-eyed distance she provides between the reader and the moorland characters allows them to be presented as they would in Greek drama or Shakespeare--raw creatures that spring out of Mother Earth to battle with the gods or play tricks on human heroes. As such, many of the characters that people Wuthering Heights are types. They cannot exist apart from the place, and events that happen beyond its borders "offstage" are recounted to us at a remove. These types are like the Wyrrd sisters assigned to set the scene of Macbeth, the Caliban and Ariel of the Tempest who must act at the bidding of their master, and the Friar of Romeo and Juliet, who must take on the role of intercessor and go-between. They each put on a frayed semblance of society, in order to fulfill the machinations of the plot, but then recede or return to their natural states when the principal action takes over.

Emily also uses types to contrast the natural element from its civilized appearance, to lay them before Charlotte as proof of her case that this distinction must be made. Hindley, the spiteful heir of Wuthering Heights has been sent away to school to be trained as a gentleman, but he violently brings out the whip against Heathcliff in front of polite company, the Lintons, who he wishes to impress. He can't control his baser instinct in spite of his wish to fit in. Cathy is turned into a protege and pet by the Lintons, but her body can't withstand their aristocratic impregnation of her. Once robust and running about, she weakens and dies under their scrupulous care and constant watchfulness. Her nature can't withstand the new frivolous and constraining mold she has squeezed herself into. Edgar Linton is pure societal form with no real substance. His feelings stem mostly from sentiment, offended pride and wounded vanity. He hates and avoids Heathcliff, not because Heathcliff has done anything directly against him, but because Heathcliff does not like him. That is offense enough.

In Heathcliff, himself, Emily produces a character that is fully sprung from Nature who later mimics the part of a gentleman, but only at the service of his elemental natural self. Nature simply does what nature will do, dispassionately and without reverence for its creatures. To accept this as just and inevitable may have proved so scandalous to Charlotte's beliefs and judgments that she took a heavy hand to force Wuthering Heights into submission.

In the scene after Heathcliff leaves the moor for the city, when Cathy makes her infamous "I am Heathcliff" speech to Nelly, it's as if Emily is pleading with Charlotte to understand that there are some people who are closer to the elements of nature than of heaven. This kind derives their strength from the heath and its cliffs and streams, and even the best ideals of religion can't save or satisfy them. While Charlotte presents salvation as controlling one's passions by way of virtue and sacrifice, Emily presents salvation as liberating the soul by way of throwing off societal roles and unnatural restraint.

Cut of the same cloth as Heathcliff, Catherine tells him that she dreamt of getting herself expelled from the comforts of heaven because she wanted to be at Wuthering Heights and nowhere else. I wonder if Heathcliff noticed that she didn't say that she wanted to always be at his side and nowhere else. However, she affirms that they both belong there and with each other in spite of how often they might stray. I recall an English professor who clasped her hands and said she wished the two would have run away to America together. But Emily's plotting instincts instruct us that they would ultimately cease to exist apart from the landscape. 

All of the action takes place on the moor between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and, after all, the novel is titled after the place and not the people. The Lintons and their home are like heaven, where everything is perfect and safe, but contains none of what Cathy needs to stay alive and vital. She betrayed not only Heathcliff, but the heath itself, by leaving it for the finishing school the Lintons have spoiled her with.

Emily, the wild one, contained in a moment by the release of her mind

By contrast, Charlotte Bronte portrays the moorlands in her own novels as a dangerous, dividing  territory between lovers, blocking their union. The rough landscape is not to be trusted because it is not cultivated like Jane Eyre's Thornfield Hall. But for Emily, the heath/moor exists apart from morality, desire or human will.

In this same sense, Heathcliff exists apart from the moral code of society, without a sense of ethics, and he connives without a conscience. He's a force of nature that emerged outside of marriage, an amoral waif that becomes a beloved favorite with his own set of values based on loyalty, betrayal, exploitation and vengeance. When he returns to the streets of society to make his fortune and win back Wuthering Heights, he fulfills his scheme by taking on the guise of a fine gentleman, betraying himself as well. What was once just wild in him becomes depraved, in the way that wild things can, when caged.

The story of Cathy as an element is a ghost story, and her ghost torments Heathcliff, pointing to the possible reality of an afterlife of punishing separation, whether parted from him by her own choosing or by death. Heathcliff is deprived of any peace by her flickering memory. His fury and revenge turn the landscape into a horror show of doomed allegiances and ill health. There is only hope that the two can find their way back to the moor and each other to find that peace.

By the end of the novel, it seems as if Emily tried to reconcile her own feelings about having produced all of this fictional furor with Charlotte's more stoical views and governess-like pragmatism, by giving the innocent offspring of this cast of monsters, Hareton and Catherine, a purified bliss while still on earth. We can perhaps see them as the redeemers of their families and the land that they will inherit. And yet, it is the lost and wild ghosts of the story that we remember.

An All Hallow's Eve Ghost Story: Wuthering Heights

This book has been assigned to several generations, filling classrooms and book club living rooms around the world. 

It was written by a young woman who kept hardly any society beyond her immediate family, and even they found her aloof and inaccessible. The book also has a nearly inaccessible narrative structure: a visiting tenant is told a tale second-hand by a housekeeper, who is looking back over thirty years at the main characters of Heathcliff and Cathy, whom she no longer lives with. The housekeeper recounts all of it with dread and distaste, and most readers seem to feel the same way. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti referred to it as "A fiend of a book–an incredible monster...The action is laid in hell–only it seems places and people have English names there."

Yet this branded “unfilmable” story has not only been filmed, but translated and remade several times in various languages, and still others are currently under production. Although the critics hated the book upon publication, it has has never been out of print since 1854. 

In the second half of the 19th century, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was considered the best of the Brontë works, but following later re-evaluation, critics began to argue that Wuthering Heights was superior. The book has inspired adaptations, including film, radio and television dramatizations, a musical, a ballet, operas, a role-playing game, and a 1978 hit song by English pop star Kate Bush.

So why does the slog of Wuthering Heights suck us in and stay with us?

Wood engraving by Fritz Eichenberg

Its staying power comes from the challenge presented by the nature of Heathcliff to our notions of humanity and redemption. People keep creating new ways of interpreting this challenge, because it refuses to settle itself, like the ghosts that roam across the moor.

It's not a likable story, with likable characters. The setting is off-putting and bleak. The events are over the top, even for a Gothic novel. The happy ending isn't really all that happy, but only provides a little bit of relief. So, why haven't we, as a culture, rejected this book, just like the angels rejected Cathy out of heaven, flinging her back to the top of Wuthering Heights? Why did it not live and die within the confines of its own time and place? How did this story worm its way into our consciousness and remain there, even when it is somewhat repulsive?

Let's have a little mood music before we begin the challenge of Heathcliff. Here is the song by Kate Bush, covered by Pat Benatar, the rock queen of the Eighties. She had classical training in opera, and you can hear her hit those high notes like a proper diva.

Out on the wiley, windy moors

we’d roll and fall in green

You had a temper like my jealousy

too hot, too greedy

How could you leave me

when I needed to possess you?

I hated you, I loved you, too

Bad dreams in the night

they told me I was going to lose the fight

Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering

Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

I've come home, I'm so cold!

Let me in-a-your window

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

I've come home, I'm so cold!

Let me in-a-your window

Ooo, it gets dark, it gets lonely

on the other side from you

I pine a lot, I find the lot

falls through without you

I'm coming back, love

Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream

My only master

Too long I roam in the night

I'm coming back to his side, to put it right

I'm coming home to wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

I've come home, I'm so cold!

Let me in-a-your window

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

I've come home, I'm so cold!

Let me in-a-your window

Ooo, let me have it!
Let me grab your soul away
Ooo, let me have it!
Let me grab your soul away
You know it's me, Cathy!

Coming Back to the Heathcliff Challenge: A few years ago, I read that Charlotte Brontë, after Emily's death at age thirty, revised Wuthering Heights because she felt that Heathcliff was too immoral and couldn't attain a Christian salvation. He had not been redeemed before his death, and in Charlotte's mind, eternal condemnation couldn't sit on the head of a protagonist. I don't know what changes were made, but the original way that Emily had written it was soon restored by the publisher and it became a monolith in English Literature.

I think that Charlotte's mistake was in seeing Heathcliff as a protagonist or a hero, or even a lovable anti-hero, or any of the forms of a male character that Charlotte was familiar with. Although Heathcliff is the pivot of the events surrounding Wuthering Heights, I don't believe he was meant to be the book's exemplar. I believe that Nelly the housekeeper, who lived and witnessed everything at Wuthering Heights, and who was part of it before Heathcliff appeared as a foundling, is a type of Charlotte; but a Charlotte who doesn't change the story from how it happened. Emily seems to be putting her hope and faith in Nelly as more than a faithful servant to a fictional family, but as a faithful witness of Emily's heart, one who doesn't miss a trick or a beat.

So why are these two sisters fighting over a fictional man? Go to part 2

Exceptional Excerpts: Isak Dinesen's Shadows on the Grass

The memoirs of Karen Blixen are familiar to us as recounted in her book Out of Africa. Yet, she also wrote a slim volume of tales long after she left the continent in 1961 at the age of 76. Here, she gives a long description of the person with whom she felt the greatest partnership, whom she was forever separated from, in the midst of her other great losses. It is not about her lover Denys Finch-Hatton, but rather Farah Aden, the one who oversaw the running of her farm, while keeping his own household and family thriving as well.

She calls this simply, "Portrait of a Gentleman":

As here, after twenty-five years, I again take up episodes of my life in Africa, one figure, straight, candid, and very fine to look at, stands as doorkeeper of all of them: my Somali servant Farah Aden. Were any reader to object that I might choose a character of greater importance, I should answer him that that would not be possible.

Farah came to meet me in Aden in 1913, before the First World War. For almost eighteen years he ran my house, my stables and safaris. I talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew of all that I did or thought. Farah, by the time I had had to give up the farm and was leaving Africa, saw me off in Mombasa. And as I watched his dark immovable figure on the quay growing smaller and at last disappear, I felt as if I were losing a part of myself, as if I were having my right hand set off, and from now on would never again ride a horse or shoot with a rifle, nor be able to write otherwise than with my left hand. Neither have I since then ridden or shot.

The introduction into my life of another race, essentially different from mine, in Africa became to me a mysterious expansion of my world. My own voice and song in life there had a second set to it and grew fuller and richer in the duet.

As if her literary talents in portraiture weren't enough, here are examples of Karen Blixen's visual talents: this is of a Somali boy, who may be Farah's son, Saufe. The other two are of an unidentified Kikuyu girl and young man. Before emigrating to Africa, Blixen attended art schools in Copenhagen, Paris and Rome.

The Somali are very handsome people, slim and erect as all East African tribes, with sombre, haughty eyes, straight legs and teeth like wolves. They are vain and have knowledge of fine clothes. When not dressed as Europeans— for many of them would wear discarded suits of their masters’ from the first London tailors and would look very well in them— they had on long robes of raw silk, with sleeveless black waistcoats elaborately embroidered in gold. They always wore the turbans of the orthodox Mohammedans in exquisite many-coloured cashmeres; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca might wear a green turban.

For Farah, although gravely posing as a highly respectable major-domo, Malvolio himself, was a wild animal, and nothing in the world would ever stand between him and God. Unfailingly loyal, he was still at heart… a cheetah noiselessly following me about at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding on to my finger with strong talons and turning his head right and left. 

When Farah first took service in my house, or first took my house into possession— for from that day he spoke of “our house” “our horses” “our guests”— it was not a common contract which was set up, but a covenant established between him and me ad majored domus gloria, to the ever greater glory of the house. My well-being was not his concern, and was hardly of real importance to him, but for my good name and prestige he did, I believe, hold himself responsible before God.

Farah strictly saw to it that our Native servants groomed the horses and polished the silver of the house till they shone. He drove my old Ford car as if it had been a Rothschild’s Rolls-Royce. And he expected from me a corresponding loyalty to the paragraphs of our covenant. As a consequence of this attitude he was a highly expensive functionary in the house, not only because his salary was disproportionately larger than that of my other servants, but because he did without mercy demand my house to be run in grand style.

Then came the hard times on the farm, and my certainty that I could not keep it. And then began my ever-repeated travels to Nairobi with such sorry aims as keeping my creditors quiet, obtaining a better price for the farm and, at the very end, after I had in reality lost the farm and become, so to say a tenant in my own house, securing for my squatters the piece of land in the Reserve where according to their wish they could remain together. It took a long time before I could make the Government consent to my scheme. On these expeditions Farah was always with me.

And now it happened that he unlocked and opened chests of which till then I had not known, and displayed a truly royal splendour. He brought out silk robes, gold-embroidered waistcoats, and turbans in glowing and burning reds and blues, or all white— which is a rare thing to see and must be the gala head-dress of the Somali— heavy gold rings and knives in silver and ivory mounted sheaths, with a riding whip of giraffe hide inlaid with gold, and in these things he looked like the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid’s own bodyguard. He followed me, very erect, at a distance of five feet where I walked, in my old slacks and patched up shoes, up and down Nairobi streets. There he and I became a true Unity, as picturesque, I believe, as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. There he lifted me and himself to a classical plane…

When I had sold all the contents of my house, my paneled rooms became sounding boards. If I sat down on one of the packing cases containing things to be sent off, which were now my only furniture, voices and tunes of old rang through the nobly aired room intensified, clear. When during these months a visitor came to the farm, Farah stood forth, holding open the door to the empty rooms as if he had been doorkeeper to an imperial palace.

No friend, brother or lover, no nabob suddenly presenting me with the amount of money needed to keep the farm, could have done for me what Farah then did. Even if I had got nothing else for which to be grateful to him— but that I have got, and more than I can set down here— I should still for the sake of these months, now thirty years after, and as long as I live, be in debt to him.