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Sadness is not a punishment. Although it is sometimes impossible to find anything positive in a misfortunate situation, your "Sea of Misery" can also be a blessing in disguise. Your own personal hell, your rock bottom can be a sacred place where the truth and reality of your enigma can be revealed. Both Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold show how a person can reach clarity through the dark silence of depression.
I believe that we are all on our own journey
to find that sacred place where truths can be seen, heard, and felt. In
"Hap", Hardy's reality of his journey is that the rest of the world looks
at his status as being lost and in pain because he is not searching for
someone, or something to take responsibility for the terrible things in
his life. He has no answers, so he is lost. "And dicing time for gladness
casts a moan..." He is not gambling away his precious time only to gain
a false sense of happiness or hope that will only bring him pain, like
most of the world does. We search for happiness instead of the truth, creating
an illusion of reality that best suits our situation. It would be easy
to say that some "vengeful god" is responsible for all of our misery, but
he is not taking the mindless, easy way out. Are we not all responsible
for our own actions? It is as if he laughs at others (me) for the ignorant
beliefs we have come to depend on.
In Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold sparks
these ideas for me in much the same way. The way he relates these emotions
of melancholy to the sea and the waves makes so much sense to me. Sorrow
can be as powerful as the sea, pulling us in and dragging us around only
to spit us out and crash us onto the gravel shore. This feeling of hopelessness
has brought him to the peak of clarity. He is able to doubt his fears,
and misery because, what is it for? The lines, "for the world, which seems
to lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath nether joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help
for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain", tell me that the
world has no answers for us. The world cannot make us happy. Isn't the
world what corrupted us with these thoughts of desperation by setting goals,
making rules, and posting on billboards what is right and what is wrong?
How can we expect to find the truth if our reality is made up by our peers, our parents, our teachers? When sadness takes over your mind, body, and spirit to the point of illness you become completely separated from others. You are alone. Alone to think. You may even be separated from yourself and that is when the light bulb shines bright; "the light affixes it's beam". What is real then? Nothing matters at this moment and one is able to see without using those rose colored glasses.
Both of these poets come across to me as separated and alone in their journey. They realize that neither the world, nor God, holds security or support for their well-being. Everything that is, just is. Like, "Let be be the finale of seem", they say that you hold the only answer to your question. I used to think that being alone was a bad thing. It was scary to me to think that there was no one to talk to, or at, and no one to occupy the extra space in the room. Now, I realize that being alone is lucid. It is very revealing to work out your problems in your head, or on paper, without watching what you say and letting other's opinions influence your perception of the truth. Being afraid of the judgments of others, the "Doomsters", can keep you from accepting and expressing the deeply rooted weeds of fear that have been planted in your mind. These weeds must be pulled to clear your mind for acceptance of reality for what it is.
Fear is our opponent in the battle of truth. Most
of us are afraid to search for the truth of who we are, where we came from,
and why our lives turn out the way they do. We say we want the truth, but
we really only want the "made for television" version that the whole family
can watch. If I would not have spent so much of my time denying the truth
of my past by making excuses for my actions and the actions of the ones
that caused me pain, maybe I could have addressed the fears of my
future that held me back for so long. If I would not have spent so much
time dreading my own predictions of my future, maybe I might not have needed
to deny or block out my past. I've spent so much time fighting the past
and fighting the future because of fear. This battle leaves no time for
consideration of the "here and now". But I never really have been here,
my thoughts have always brought me to the past or to the predicted future.
These two poems sent my mind traveling back to the summer
that I realized that my depression and self loathing caused a breakthrough
into consciousness. This was when I realized, like Hardy, that God was
not playing a cruel joke on me. God was not responsible for my suffering.
I was half blind and dwelling in my misery, praying for happiness, hoping
for answers, but never searching for truth. I did something that Hopkins
suggests in God's Grandeur, I put my bare feet in the sand, and like Arnold
I listened to the voices in the waves of the ocean. There I was able to
see through my minds projections. I was able to look within and relax into
my own deepest truth.
A family vacation became a solitary retreat
for me that summer. The explanation of what Arnold heard in the waves,
"Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back,
and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then
again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of
sadness in," reminds me of listening to the rhythmic flow of the ocean
and soaking up my sadness with each breath of salty air that filled my
lungs. Sinking my feet into the earth's shore was the only thing that was
real to me at that moment. The beach is a place my family had brought me
to every year rinse I was born. Every year, all year, I anticipated that
first step onto the sand. This year I actually didn't want to go. I remember
telling my sister that it was bad timing and that running away from my
problems would only make them worse.
While I was on that vacation those problems did get worse. They needed to get worse in order for me to notice the synchronistic events happening in my life that were telling me to make a change. I received a phone call from my boyfriend telling me that he was in the hospital. He and his brother were house sitting for their mother and decided to take her nice, fast car on a little joy ride after they had been drinking all day. I went home early to give him support, thinking that his near death experience would cause him to reconsider his ways. As I had done before, I was putting someone else's in front of my own, taking on someone else's reality instead of facing my own. But, is that really what I was doing? Did he need me to be there to push him towards the reality that I thought he should face? I was projecting my own judgments of myself onto him and I was holding him responsible for putting my head under the water that was already drowning me.
I recalled the feeling that I had alone on the beach just a few weeks before. By this time I was standing on the very edge of my "darkling plain." As Arnold explains , I was "Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night." There was a war taking place in my mind. Finally, I decided to step out of my mind and dive into my consciousness. Outside of the fog in my mind, I could see the truth of my situation. Without the programming that my mind was soiled with and without the fears that I was taught, I was able to look inside. The fear of failing, The fear of our love "not being true", the fear of settling so that I would not be alone disappeared. I was able to stare into the faces of the fears that kept me from leaving him and laugh. I laughed like Hardy laughs at our tired world.
I had been trapped in my illusions and the sleepiness of my old habits and patterns. I am not fully awake now, or unplugged like in The Matrix , but I have only begun my journey for truth. I am not yet innocent, spontaneous and true to my being. Thankfully, I am not still sleepy, dull, and delusional. I am somewhere in the middle. I am in the rebellious stage, realizing that I have been missing life and open to see my true existence for what it is. For all of this, I have sadness to thank. My "unblooming hope", my "Sea of Misery" was a blessing without which I would still be in a coma.