Ever since I traveled solo to
Russia this past summer, I have struggled to assign language to the experience.
When people would ask about my trip, I tried to relate to them my dichotomous
experience. There was an incredible ebb and flow of extreme emotion during
those 10 days – at times, a spiraling down into the depths of darkness and at
other times, a soaring to elevated heights of joy.
But, if I am completely honest,
the sense of grief disseminated from the darkness was so overwhelming I tended
to fixate on the negative power of loneliness to all who asked about the trip. Maybe,
just maybe, depending on if I still had their attention after I clothed them in
my melancholy, I would share the beauty I encountered in the art, people, and
culture. Maybe.
Even now, seven months later, I am
still focusing on the darkness. Since I am not much of a story teller, I’m
going to boil down the root of the darkness as such: loneliness predicated from
the fact almost everyone one I crossed paths with spoke little to no English.
I was alone for ten days
surrounded by millions of people. I was isolated in an unfamiliar crowd.
The darkness oppressed me in
Russia. What darkness doesn’t oppress? But as I become farther and farther
removed from the Russian darkness, my memory of the trip has evolved. In my
sleep, I dream of the beauty of Russia; I speak to my students about the people
I met and the effect they had on my soul; I changed my desktop photo on my
school computer to Maurice de Vlaminck’s “View of the Seine” from the Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg. Every reflection, seven months from the trip, does
not explicitly point to the darkness of the actual moment.
Why is that? Why, even though
there is a remnant of darkness remaining in my heart, a remnant which will probably
remain forever, does a light seem to expose something which wasn’t even experienced
in the actual moment?
Ruthie, in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, speaks of memory and its
power as such:
“Memory is the sense of loss, and
loss pulls us after it…There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote,
a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every
word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill
itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the
perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and
stroke our hair what dreaming habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us
waiting long.”
Memory of an event, an experience,
a person, recreates those moments/people into the hope, the expectation, of who
or what you wished them to actually be. While you lose the particular moment or
person in actuality, you pick up the pieces and recreate it into something
else, always hoping, rationally or irrationally, this recreation will return in
its new, beautified form. Yet, the very hope or expectation of this
construction, is a very real thing in your consciousness. Its nature resides in
your very real imagination.
I hopped on the plane to Russia
with the expectation, with the hope, I would tangibly experience the culture
which has shaped my view of God and man. I expected for, I hoped for, a
mystical experience where the Holy Spirit provided the peace of Christ to a
parched soul, further validating the life I feel called to and the faith I
embody. There were moments in which it occurred, but the light faded quickly
and eventually yielded to the asphyxiating darkness.
Now, it’s as if my memory has
given me that experience I expected but seven months later. It’s as if the
darkness wasn’t even with me in Moscow and St. Petersburg; that it actually didn’t
throw me into the deepest despair of my life. It’s as if I predominately
experienced the light.
Maybe, just maybe, then, darkness
is actually the catalyst for the light of memory. Maybe my conception of
darkness and its role in my life is too narrow…
This life if full of darkness. The
darkness seems to overwhelm the light. But, it’s not as if the light isn’t
there; and it’s not as if the light takes precedent over the darkness, or the
darkness takes precedent over the light, for one does not exist without the
other.
Yet, the darkness. It saturates.
It envelops. I tend to set it up against the light in opposition to one
another. Rightfully so. Christ is the light of man; sin, the flesh, evil is the
seed of darkness. Nothing good happens after midnight they say…
In the dark, man and woman become
one. In the dark, man is shaped and molded into the physical imago dei. In the
dark, man finds rest for his weary soul.
Darkness, then, is a purification
of sorts, allowing us to be who we were intended to be. Purifying to a point in
which the light becomes essential and a natural consequent.
The film, sitting, stewing,
stirring, waiting, wishing, wondering when the light will expose the glimpses. Solitary
glimpses, seemingly isolated from its past and future. A moment in time only
revealed by the light. What is seen represents what once was, yet flickers the
imagination to know that its present intimate participation in the glossiness is
a light in and of itself – its white and blacks contrasting, not clashing,
working together to reveal what the darkness intended to purify.
Darkness does not necessarily
equate to sin, as light does not necessarily equate to Christ. For the Word
experienced darkness so that the world could be the light. His terrifying
darkness consistently and unceasingly purifying, provides momentary glimpses to
be remembered, dwelled upon, and praised.
These moments of darkness memory
reveals to be moments of light; stories of darkness that expose the Light of man.
The darkness of Russia veiling the light of the purpose of unveiling it in the
reconstructed memory of the transfiguring soul.
Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t
have reflected on the trip with grief, but an opportunity for memory and
darkness to purify.
“When one looks inside at a
lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself
in a lighted room, the image of oneself among tree and sky – the deception is
obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the
light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and
that.” – Ruthie, Housekeeping
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