In my previous essay about Cheryl Strayed’s excellent book Wild, I took as my theme the nature of the experience Strayed had, a truly transformational one which ultimately changed her perspective on almost all the issues of importance. Tranformation of perspective like this is called in Greek metanoia, a wonderful word which implies both alteration (meta) and transcendence (meta) of the way we think (noia, from noeo, to think). The word is used as the one-word slogan of Jesus’s ministry: “Metanoiete,” he says over and over again, “change/transcend your thinking.” The word is almost always translated – horribly, as the word most emphatically cannot be restricted to this translation – “repent.” Strayed shows in her own story an excellent example of the way this process actually works.
But I left the previous essay acknowledging another problem, which is this: the transformed person, who has gained some new perspective from her experience, ultimately returns to the world. This ends up being very nearly as horrible as it ever was: “a vale of tears,” as the hymn goes. We live in the world more comfortably after a transformative experience, but there is still something that is not acceptable about it – that is, in fact, still quite horrible. There is a gap between the vision we have seen, and the way things are.
This is one of the ultimate problems of our existence, and none of the solutions are obviously and immediately satisfactory, but I think Strayed herself is an example of the one solution which makes sense to me. And that is: a transformation of the way you live. The things you have seen simultaneously make joy possible and complacency impossible. You attempt, for the rest of your life, to work out the implications of your experience. This requires effort, but the tension between the vision and the world produces energy, which enables us to work: it gives us motive and purpose. Ultimately, what we pour into the gap between vision and reality is our life, indeed our selves, specifically our complete self, functioning undividedly, conscious and unconscious, mind and womb both. It is impossible to read the book and not feel that Strayed has access to that: and that not only does that make her “safe in this world,” but it has changed her as a person: I have no doubt she has come from being a bad mother (she had an abortion) and bad wife (she cheated on her husband numerous times) to a good mother and good wife. What I have heard of her later life suggests, also, the goodness I would expect, and generosity and maturity. She has worked as a counselor – wonderful – written an advice column – wonderful – and written this testament to her experience which now has gone around the world – wonderful. She shows all the signs of having repaired much of the torn fabric of her own life, and also worked to help others do the same. The hope of all religions, with all their pilgrimages, confessionals, meditations, prayers, good works, and everything else, lies in this.
Let us get down to details. Strayed herself was not in the business to draw such conclusions, which is probably good for her book: lessons drawn from experience, to people without the experience, are not as interesting or necessary as the simple encouragement to go have the experience. And that is what Strayed does. But for people who have had the experience, there is nothing more interesting and important than to meditate on the consequences of what you know and have seen. The fruit of experience ripens in the sunlight of reflection.
The first thing which takes on a different aspect is death. Death is wounding; death is horrible; death brings grief; but it is part of the pattern and ultimately inevitable. And it is terrible to see how much pain Cheryl comes to, and inflicts on others around her – at terrible cost – because she was utterly unprepared to deal with death. In Sleeper, Woody Allen is cryogenically frozen and awoken after 200 years, and when told his friends are all dead he says, “But they were all vegetarians! How could this be?” That’s supposed to be a joke, but Strayed is – terrifyingly – not far from it.
As I accompanied my mother and stepfather, Eddie, from floor to floor of the Mayo Clinic while my mother went from one test to another, a prayer marched through my head, though prayer is not the right word to describe that march. I wasn’t humble before God. My prayer was not: Please, God, take mercy on us.
I was not going to ask for mercy. I didn’t need to. My mother was forty-five. She looked fine. For a good number of years she’d mostly been a vegetarian. She’d planted marigolds around her garden to keep bugs away instead of using pesticides. My siblings and I had been made to swallow raw cloves of garlic when we had colds. People like my mother did not get cancer. The tests at the Mayo Clinic would prove that, refuting what the doctors in Duluth had said. I was certain of this. Who were those doctors in Duluth anyway? What was Duluth? Duluth! Duluth was a freezing hick town where doctors who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about told forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish, garlic-eating, natural-remedy-using nonsmokers that they had late-stage lung cancer, that’s what.
Fuck them.
That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem. (10)
Her anger intrigues me here, and reminds me of my earlier writing on this topic, that anger is a social emotion. She appears to be presuming that there is a social solution to death: she can go to someone higher up in the primate hierarchy (who lives in a more important place than Duluth, apparently), and he’ll fix the death problem (there must be a fairy tale about this, about someone who is troubled by death and then goes through the kingdom and finds that everyone, even the king, is under this capital sentence – my oh my how our children need the old fairy tales rather than whatever they seem to be reading). So she gets angry at having to deal with the low-totem-pole people who don’t even have enough status and power to fix this whole dumb death thing.
She then – I am not making this up – imagines that her vagina might be usefully employed to solve the death problem, and in a way this is a good instinct, but she just wants to use it to get attention, which will not suffice, I don’t think:
One afternoon, a doctor I’d never seen came into the room and explained that my mother was actively dying.
“But it’s only been a month,” I said indignantly. “The other doctor told us a year.”
He made no reply. He was young, perhaps thirty. He stood next to my mother, a gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in bed. “From this point on, our only concern is that she’s comfortable.”
Comfortable, and yet the nurses tried to give her as little morphine as they could. One of the nurses was a man, and I could see the outline of his penis through his tight white nurse’s trousers. I wanted desperately to pull him into the small bathroom beyond the foot of my mother’s bed and offer myself up to him, to do anything at all if he would help us. And also I wanted to take pleasure from him, to feel the weight of his body against me, to feel his mouth in my hair and hear him say my name to me over and over again, to force him to acknowledge me, to make this matter to him, to crush his heart with mercy for us. (21)
Again, this is clearly an attempt to use the social goods she has access to to get her way. Death is of course a cosmic problem, not a social problem, and only an adequate cosmology will defuse its hold on us. (I have in my mind an essay on what I think is a broader modern problem here, namely that human society has grown so massive that almost all of our experiences are social, and we are losing the awareness of truly cosmic things).
And in fact an adequate cosmology appeared to be pushing itself on Strayed in the form of her dreams – again, a sign of that kind of inner womb-knowledge I wrote about in my earlier essay which is superior to consciousness and modern rationalistic-materialistic culture:
I dreamed of her incessantly. In the dreams I was always with her when she died. It was me who would kill her. Again and again and again. She commanded me to do it, and each time I would get down on my knees and cry, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent, and each time, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured gasoline over her head, then lit her on fire. I made her run down a dirt road that passed by the house we’d built and then ran her over with my truck. I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it, slow and hard and sad. I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in plain, ordinary light. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas.
I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away.
Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. (27)
Strayed does not interpret this, but it looks like a classic compensatory dream. Strayed’s waking mind refused death; she held on to her mother (it is a highly suggestive fact that she kept vigil at her mother’s bedside for weeks, and then her mother died almost the very moment she left the room: it was as if Strayed were keeping her back). The dream provides a counter-image, in which she becomes the agent of death, the bringer of it. It is compensation: the waking mind is so far off the path, that the subconscious produces an opposite image to create balance. The proper stance, dreams of this sort indicate, is in the middle: neither conscious refusal nor subconscious promotion: acceptance. Her mother’s death was a wound, no doubt, but the wounds always end up being the most important things. New life out of death, strength out of wounding, is the Paschal Mystery, and Christianity has almost no content but this. It is the same lesson as the woods, the same process I watch every autumn as the leaves fall and the wildflowers bloom out of them the following spring. “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” The poet Adrienne Rich, whose works she brings with her on her hike, said it explicitly, about Marie Curie who died (of radiation poisoning), “denying that her wounds came from the same source as her power.” Strayed has a beautiful image of it as she starts her trip: “I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away” (38). It is only when the flower disintegrates that the fruit begins to grow.
When I first visited Rome, I had the gnawing but ultimately impressive feeling that the entire city, with all its art, all its religion, all its hedonism, all its fame-seeking, all its sport and politics and everything else, was merely an outgrowth of man’s discomfort with death. So there is hardly one proper view of death, and no matter what the perspective one may have, the uncertainty and discomfort of it will always remain. (I am personally convinced that bad Christianity is always indicated by a pathologic aversion to death, because Christian spiritual practice demands the daily acceptance of life coming out of death, but that is another essay). But I am convinced that Strayed’s inability to deal with death was in part the result of her unfamiliarity with it, which is a cultural problem. A friend of mine disagreed, saying simply, “Death messes us up,” maintaining that anyone who loses their mother at age twenty-three will be similarly messed up. But I don’t think that’s true. A hundred years ago almost every human being was born in a large family, where death was a constant presence just as birth was, and those deaths did not consistently produce infidelity, divorce, drug use, depression, and abortions. Death poses a problem, but adequate cultures offer adequate guidance on the most basic problems of life. Awareness and acceptance of death needs to be transmitted to the next generation in order to build any kind of wisdom-culture in our society. The alternative is for each generation to be blindsided by it and suffer through it and hope for the best, as Strayed did.
I can say from my own experience that good parenting can offer some of this wisdom, and forestall some of these problems. But many people have no cultural equipment for dealing with death at all. Strayed notes that her mother’s death created an impassable emotional rift with her husband, because he had, himself, no experience of loss:
My husband, Paul, did everything he could to make me feel less alone. He was still the kind and tender man I’d fallen for a few years before, the one I’d loved so fiercely I’d shocked everyone by marrying just shy of twenty, but once my mother started dying, something inside of me was dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. Still, I called him each day from the pay phone in the hospital during the long afternoons, or back at my mom and Eddie’s house in the evenings. We’d have long conversations during which I’d weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn’t hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything? His parents were still alive and happily married to each other. (22)
Wise cultures train people for such moments. They do not leave young married couples to figure it out on their own. If medical school contained no courses on surgery and anatomy but consisted entirely of learning to fold clothes, then of course a surgeon who just came back from his first week on the actual job would be unable to relate to the problems of the medical students, in their classes busily competing against each other to be the best clothes-folder, completely unaware of what was coming. When I was a child I was taught to pray each night with the following words:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
This at least alerts the child to the existence of the phenomenon. Now, not surprisingly, some people have rewritten the prayer to leave the death part out, because mentioning death might distress the children. I know other parents who similarly have made up elaborate fictions to explain the vanishing of the family pet (to me very nearly the point of having a family pet is the way its death exposes the child to reality). These children are in danger of becoming like Strayed, and going completely haywire when death shows up (Strayed started cheating on her husband seven days after her mother’s death), or her husband, who had nothing beyond general niceness to offer someone going through a death-watch. My mother used to tell me to “pray for a good death,” telling me about my grandfather, who died before I was born: he used to go to mass every morning, buy a copy of the Daily News on his way home, sit in his favorite chair, read the paper, and then fall asleep. One morning he never woke up from his nap. “Pray for a good death,” she repeated. The implication, of course, was that there were deaths which were not so good. This was not trauma or child abuse: this was reality. I remember my mother mocking – often – one of the neighbors (now dead) because he said “If I die” rather than “when I die.” These insights, like the words of that prayer, were not my mother’s inventions: they were traditions that she was merely passing on, and whose wisdom had been proved by generations of experience. Strayed’s grandmother probably prayed with the same words I used, but in two generations much of that cultural wisdom has washed away. Strayed’s mother, a former Catholic who wanted nothing to do with the church, apparently thought she would live if she drank lots of wheatgrass juice. She drank barrels of the stuff as her death approached. I think much of Strayed’s anger against her mother, which surfaces in various places in the book, can be linked at least subconsciously to the fact that her mother really did her a disservice by raising her without any training for death. In the end, we pay a price for every lie we believe, and sometimes, as with our modern blindness to death, a terrible price, and if there is debt left over, our children will have to pay it.
Another ingredient of wholeness is uncoupling love and entitlement. When you go off into the wild, one of the first things you notice is the simple fact that no one goes after you: you were not the center of their worlds, after all. We come to love with so many expectations about the love we “deserve” to have; but in the end you cannot see love as something you or anyone else “deserves.” You don’t even deserve it from your father or your mother. You live off of whatever love you can get: it is never enough; but you must fight against the temptation to feel aggrieved by the defects of your lovers. Strayed comes to this realization twice, once when thinking about her father – the passage quoted in the previous essay – and again when thinking about her stepfather, who was excellent to her. She offers a brief but beautiful image of the way he played with her and her siblings, which really does pinpoint something different about the way a man loves children:
He chased us and caught us and held us upside down and shook us to see if any coins would fall from our pockets; if they did, he would take them from the grass and run, and we would run after him, shrieking with a particular joy that had been denied us all our lives because we’d never been loved right by a man. He tickled us and watched as we performed dance routines and cartwheels. He taught us whimsical songs and complicated hand jives. He stole our noses and ears and then showed them to us with his thumb tucked between his fingers, eventually giving them back while we laughed. By the time my mother called us in to dinner, I was so besotted with him that I’d lost my appetite. (152)
After Cheryl’s mother died, he married another woman with children and forgot about his stepchildren from his previous marriage. But Strayed noted how he had trained her to love camping and hiking and the outdoors, and so he really had been the stepfather, so to speak, of her whole trip on the Pacific Crest Trail:
There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered. (304)
Maturity makes you realize how difficult it is even to do that much: to love someone well when it matters. One way or another, the people who have loved you are the ones who have given you everything that has mattered to you: that they could have loved you better, you realize, is a useless truism. Entitlement poisons love. To take any kind of love for granted is a sin.
The third ingredient is a more mature attitude toward sex. Strayed is certainly not repentant about the disposability of her prior lovers – “what if I’d wanted to fuck every one of those men?” – but it’s also clear that she was moving away from the kind of mindset that made lovers not much more than single-use disposable dicks (with lips and hands attached). She makes use of one such disposable dick on the trail (she reports regretting going on a trip to the beach with him, as, she says, “my interest in Jonathan was waning” – after just a few hours). But apparently the encounter was not truly satisfying:
“Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it. (259-60)
That is an emotion I would ruthlessly interrogate – “what is it I want that I’m not getting? Why am I missing the mark here?” – though she leaves it as a vague, almost unexpected dissatisfaction. That’s a good beginning, I suppose. Later she has a crush on another man – in fact she seems to kind of have a crush on every good-looking man on the trail – but she doesn’t have sex with him. She interprets this as progress:
For once it was finally enough for me to simply lie there in a restrained and chaste rapture beside a sweet, strong, sexy, smart, good man who was probably never meant to be anything but my friend. For once I didn’t ache for a companion. For once the phrase the woman with a hole in her heart didn’t thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn’t even live for me anymore. (299)
She has a dream with sexual overtones on the trip, which I will quote. It may not, in fact, be about sex, but it is an intriguing message from the subconscious:
I woke up a half hour later with a startled gasp, creeped out by a dream – the same dream I’d had the night before. In it, Bigfoot had kidnapped me. He’d done it in a fairly mannerly fashion, approaching to pull me by the hand deep into the woods, where an entire village of other Bigfoots lived. In the dream I was both astonished and frightened at the sight of them. “How have you hid from humans so long?” I’d asked my Bigfoot captor, but he only grunted. As I looked at him, I realized that he was not a Bigfoot at all but a man wearing a mask and a hairy suit. I could see his pale human flesh beneath the edge of the mask, which terrified me. (223)
My initial read is to say that it is an image of trail life in general, which really is only partially “wild”: on the trail you carry just enough civilization to get you to your next civilization station, where you fill up again. It looks like Bigfoot, but it is just a mask and a hairy suit on what is fundamentally a civilized pursuit. But I will note that it could apply to sex as well: superficial, disposable-partner sexuality is largely (though certainly not entirely) a technical creation: I’m sure there are millions of sexual encounters throughout the world each year that get cut short for lack of a handy condom. Nothing makes an irresistible face so instantly resistible as the threat of further implications. It’s not very wild, in the end, and not very natural. I’m not saying this to attack birth control per se: birth control is like any other kind of technology. The morality is in the way it is used. For every person using birth control to go deeper into a relationship with another person, there seem to be ten using it to avoid any kind of depth at all. In the end, Bigfoot is neither satisfyingly and truly wild, nor fully human (being reduced in the dream to inarticulate grunts). Whatever the interpretation might be, it is an interesting image produced by the subconscious. Strayed seems to be moving away from this version of sexuality: one which she describes as like a vacation, an escape, something detached. And she seems to be moving toward something different. What would sexuality look like if it were the opposite of that – the real task of one’s life, a going deeper, integrated into everything else? What if we loved each other, and treated each other as just as indispensable and important, as we love and treat ourselves?
This brings me to the fourth ingredient I noticed in the book: one’s relationship to escapism. When she approaches the end of her trip, she thinks about re-entering normal life in Portland:
Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn’t want it. Maybe I never really had. I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close. (290)
She had talked earlier of “planet heroin,” this other world she could go to, to escape her life. But the experience of her trip had changed her into something else. Now she wanted her life: to go deeper into it. Escapism becomes one of the uninteresting things. And hence heroin became one of the uninteresting things. This is the kind of shift that can seep into everything. Strayed’s phrasing serves as a good way to think about sexuality as well: how would your sex life change if it was not a brief way out, but a way in?
The last ingredient of maturity I want to talk about is a changed relationship to desire itself, of all kinds. We notice this in spiritually developed people: the peacefulness, the stability, the way they can deal with adversity, rejection, rebuffing, tragedy. You feel they can handle anything. One of the important lessons of wilderness is the fact that in the wilderness there is nothing for you to do. You are not in control: you don’t have any power. When you see a tree that is dying, you let it die: you don’t try to prune it back to life or fertilize it or water it or anything else. You just walk on. It doesn’t need you to play messiah to it, the way Strayed tried to play messiah to her mother. The tree will die: fine. The birds of the air will nest in its rotting cavities. Wilderness is a place where you aren’t being constantly roasted in your desires to change everything, because there such desires don’t mean anything. This is one of the differences between living in the woods and living in a house, a tension I constantly have to manage. In the woods you can just be an observer of the life that is there; but in your house you are constantly wrestling with your ambitions, because everyone has ambitions for their own house. In the true wilderness your ambitions don’t mean anything. Life is precious in itself, without any value needing to be added to it. It doesn’t even need the value of human goodness – it can be good even if people go on being evil to one another and marring everything they touch. This is the ultimate religious affirmation, though religions are always caught in the tension (as is Strayed and everyone else) between affirmation of the whole and affirmation of the ethical ideal which a reverence for the whole naturally produces. We achieve this paradoxical bipartite affirmation only in the face of our own desires to control everything, to re-write the script of the world and make it conform to our own expectations. To live constantly with this unfulfilled desire is suffering:
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my way out of the woods. (27)
You can live in the world without associating yourself entirely with your desires for its betterment. Those desires don’t go away, but they take their place among the other things. And this insight is one of the things which distinguishes the person who has had a real experience from the person who grabs onto a religious ideal for self-aggrandizement: the latter person often becomes a dangerous zealot. The person with the real experience knows her place is small, and everything worthwhile will require work. Which is fine. You realize you might not be so good at running the world anyway. You realize how sacred it is that everyone else gets to make their choices as well. You try to help them get to the other side – to that place Strayed describes, the end of the trail, the Bridge of the Gods – knowing that there is no more beautiful thing than that, but you know you cannot do it by airlifting them to the end, any more than you can ripen an apple by throwing it into the fire. You burn with desire, but don’t need to claw desperately at the things you want anymore. Patience becomes possible. Even with the people you love. Even with yourself.
It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be. (311)
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