Keeping the story open: A St. Oran’s Day meditation

“Humans of dust, you are nothing but a story” – St. Columba

Today (the start of this post, at least) is the feast day of St. Oran, a monk who traveled with St. Columba to Iona when the abbey was founded in 563 A.D. More on his story later – suffice here to say that this post takes shape over the 3-day interim between his feast day and the eve of the Celtic New Year, a time which traditionally seen as between the times, “when the veil is thin.” And odd but fitting period for the mood in which I write …

***

Narrative comes packed in the evolutionary suitcase our species has traveled with these three million years: we are storytellers and myth-makers, finding guidance and entertainment and solace in the turns of a tale. The story helps us see pattern and intention in the evident chaos of our lives. Alwyn and Brinsley Rees write in Celtic Heritage:

The old Welsh word for “story,” cyfarwyddyd, means “guidance,” “direction,” “instruction,” “knowledge,” “skill,” or “prescription.” Its stem, arwydd, means “sign,” “symbol,” “manifestation,” “omen,” “miracle,” and derives from a root meaning “to see.” The storyteller (cyfarwdd) was originally a seer and a teacher, who guided the souls of his hearers through the world of “mystery.”

We don’t have much of those tales anymore; the old myths have been replaced by religion and literature, which have, in our age, morphed in large part into psychology and the entertainments of TV and movies and video games.

If the times seem uncertain, perhaps we’re missing enough of the story to see our way by. Without sufficient narrative, we flounder in an element too wild and wet for steady steps, much less firm ground to stand upon. Lack of story may be our dilemma: we are unsteady, grappling for a purchase on truths which seem less and less substantial. No wonder on one end of the culture there is a fierce attempt to hold on to the vestiges of the last place the myths were known to root into (the church), while on the other end work those who are searching for an older newer one. Or was that a newer older one?

(Now who could I be talking about, Mom, Dad? …)

* * *

Timm in many ways was both a victim and transcender of history; of his story. Born at the midpoint of the 20th Century, Timm lived just far enough into the next one to see his culture transformed by technology. Look at his affects -- laptop, digital camera, CDs of music he’d downloaded from the Internet – all attest to this new age. Yet his place was also stuffed with old-school enthusiasms -- snowshoes and candles, truck and guitar, handwritten journals.

Timm carried around a lot of stuff from both ages – his apartment was packed with both --- but the real freight of past and future was inside him. For years Timm saw himself as an exile from his childhood, banished from innocence by events which kept him on the run from himself. The victim of a bad story, he was in many ways trapped in that narrative, doomed to find the going exceedingly difficult.

The remedies he eventually sought for that bad story were traditional – the church, therapy, AA. In the main all of these greatly helped Timm, but reading through his journals I wonder if the newer narratives he sought to superimpose were equally oppressive. Timm went deeply—even obsessively--into the narrative of cure. He was a devoted participant in the recovery movement, attending AA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Overcomers (a Church-based 12-step movement) and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. He saw numerous counselors over the years for therapies dealing with abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder (as well as relationship counseling) and took numerous medications for depression, nerves, inattention and blood pressure. He was devout in his prayers for deliverance from his sexual urges.

Deliverance from his deep nature: Timm, grappling to address his history, placed himself on a rack therapies, so much so that I wonder today if his true problem was an excessively told story. In the end, Timm’s healing --- and I do believe he experienced a large measure of it before he passed away – may have really taken root when he forgave the narrative. All that recovery and therapy, I believe, made Timm’s insides settle down, thus changing his story. And as his story improved, he didn’t need the harsher narratives of cure any more. Or less and less. The Timm of 1994-2000, at least in his journals, is a far rougher, more turbulent man than that Timm of his last years. He’d found a groove, a way to proceed; he’d made peace with his story.

* * *

Of my various histories, one of them has to do with migraines, an affliction which has been bothering me for over a decade now. It is a story which I learn I must pay attention to if I am to one day avoid its ravages.

I woke up today with a banger (I still have it on the second day of creating this post), and know, from past history, that changes in the weather, especially the advent of a cool front like the one that blew down over Central Florida last night, can be the cause. I also know that certain foods can be problematic, like last night’s fried polenta. My neurologist says he knows of no smoking gun when it comes to migraines; cause and treatments are highly individual. I’ve tried a number of medications to act as a prophylactic against onset (e.g., Toprol and Torpramax), but none of them have seemed to work. I’ve tried many meds for the symptoms, and currently use Maxalt, but sometimes, like today, nothing stops them from getting worse. Research says that vitamins and minerals can help, too – Vitamin B and magnesium; Mom has me on an herb called Butterbur which has shown some success. (But not today.) There are many food triggers – aged cheese, nuts, avocadoes, red wine (no problem there), chocolate: but individual response to these triggers also varies. It is suggested to keep a food diary, a narrative of meals and the results they produced and thus receive guidance about which foods to avoid.

Yet my migraine story is discontinuous: it has mysteries which obscure the reading. Sometimes a cool front will launch a banger and sometimes it won’t; sometimes pork or peanuts or sugars will result in a migraine and sometimes they don’t. There may be other things in the narrative I can’t or won’t quite yet read, such as lack of sleep or emotional stresses or cat dander (and good Lord we have plenty of that). What if there are other psychopharmakons (or their lack) at work which science has yet to understand and bring to the narrative? The latest research suggests that migraines begin in the brainstem and sprawl up in a flourish into the brain, some firing sequence which overloads the brain and creates the pain. Migraine intensities vary; mine are much better than the migraines which send some to bed for days, unable to deal with light and sounds, who become so nauseous they can’t stop throwing up; when my wife comes down with her worst she has to go back to bed midday. Yet three migraines a week – my average – is considered unacceptable to the medical community, which says that once a month is enough for a migraine. I can’t even get enough Maxalt – a drug which costs, retail, about $10 a pill – to last for the three-month prescription, and end up begging for samples from my neurologist to last out the final couple of weeks.

As with my seizure disorder which is now mostly controlled by Tegretol (or its generics), I suspect my migraine disorder has a narrative curve which will ebb over time. I’ll understand its story much better as I age through it. I was once told that my seizure disorder would follow an arc without treatment, arcing in my late 40s and slowly ebbing in my sixth and seventh decades. Did my migraine history wax in the ebbings of the seizure disorder? Someday I may understand its nature, maybe even look back on all those suffering days as a chapter in my greater history. In the meanwhile, days like these I just have to suffer the doldrums of pain. It’s going to be a long day.

But let me add that migraines produce surprising benefits. I’m usually more creative when I have a migraine; maybe the pain up from the brainstem is like a wave which carries a richness in its tide, fertile and inspirational. I wrote one of my best series of poems back in 2005 as a sort of shamanic attempt to witch the disorder with poems, going into my history’s well to name and claim and let go the old wounds. The migraines didn’t go away, but I did come to see them as an odd genus and generator of creativity. It would be comforting to know all the yet-hidden truths of my migraine disorder, perhaps so one day I could live without them, but for now I live with them comforted by Rilke’s words back when he refused psychoanalysis: “If you purge all my devils I will lose my angels as well.” Like a difficult teacher, I may remember these migraines as my thorniest ally.

The stubborn refusal of my migraine history to fit a sensible story leads me to keep my view wide-open. I’m always open to suggestions. There’s always something new to try.
Pain keeps one humble and honest. And growing. The story is coming to me, year after year, slowly being excavated from the foundations of my life.

Oddly, the strange and indecipherable path of my migraine story has me wondering, on this cool, breezy, crescent-mooned and migrained Saint Oran’s feast day, about my grief for Timm. It drones goes on and on, a repetitious as these migraines, as equally evasive of physic. Dad suggests it is time to end this memorial, but I have no sense of conclusion. Besides, if there still is pain, there are perhaps more lessons to learn.

What strikes me today is the general timelessness of the mood. My grief seems to defy the traditional narrative wheel of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance; time just hasn’t spun that way for me since Timm’s death last April. I’m no closer to letting him go than I was six months ago. Maybe I’m just stuck in denial, unwilling to go through the necessary work of those stages. Maybe I’ve used Timm’s death as a creative wellspring in a time when my own work has seemed to dry up, and as such it hasn’t truly been grief but a form of communion with the dead, an activity I seem to relish more the older I get. (A communion, I believe, which is a ritual bath in the mystery of history, conversing with the dead through the medium of writing. It’s not Ouija but there’s something mythical to the function.)

That’s not to say that I haven’t suffered wet hours for Timm. The emptiness, the tears, the melancholy washes of missing his living presence are all too real. All of the posts here, the meditations and poems, the silent awe in his gallery of photos, the oceanic mass which is somewhere in my heart as I remember Timm: very real, a substantial thing in me, my feelings and thoughts. Maybe it’s been so close I haven’t been able to read the narrative, the denial and anger and bargaining and depression and acceptance washing over me, from some upper league, or so closely I can’t distinguish them in the volume and magnitude.

Dunno: Suffice to say today that I feel deeply outside the pattern; the model just doesn’t fit. Perhaps And I’ll stay stuck here until enough narrative emerges, a story I can hang my hat on. Timm is gone; his relics fade; I’ve been through all the available remainders of his life that were brought back from Oregon; there’s nothing left to discover; more images will come from my father-in-law’s slide scans, bringing fresh sights perhaps but the vistas and close-ups will forever remain my lost brother’s, something to inherit though lost at the same time, a singing absence. Twins separated by years and continents, Timm’s insides glom onto mine as I have tried to remember him, in some weird reverse of the way I was passed on to him, through our shared genes, through some mitochondrial essence of me that was still in the womb water and walls Timm grew to term in.

And if Timm is inside me, then how will I ever be able to let him go? Must there be a different narrative for so cloistered a truth? Are that denial and anger and bargaining, depression and acceptance five coins for passage from a realm I’m not fated to leave? Must I remain forever in this no-time, no-place of free-floating grief? As I said earlier, Dad has suggested a number of times that this work here is finished – that it’s time to move on – and I agree, somewhat, that this tale of my dead brother must somehow conclude for the living to go on. Yet I think immediately of the Saint Oran Bell Tower at Columcille, thirty feet of round walls which have no roof, can never conclude, being roofless, open to the elements, refusing a final name. Can such work ever conclude, in the round of stone, in this heart?

I take solace from a recent essay in Scientific American where Michael Shermer questions the traditional “stage-theory” of grief recovery, proposed back in the ‘60s by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: Anyone who’s had to do any depth work on their grief is surely familiar with this stage-model of grief recovery. The problem, writes Shermer, is that such theories miss the experience of perhaps more people than it fits. He quotes Russell P. Friedman in The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins 1998): “No study has ever established that stages of grief acutally exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss …No mater how much people want to create simple, bullet-proof guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are not stages of grief that fit any two people.”

The evidence which contradicts Ross’ grief stage-theory comes from numerous sources. There are competing models of equal validity; Freud and Erikson and Kohlberg all proposed life-stages which make solid sense. How could they differ, unless there is a multiplicity of psyche, or equally valid ways of looking within, the way the old pantheon was filled with many constellations of gods? Modern life has perhaps imposed such varying experiences that our culture has become discontinuous, so that my life story so varies from yours that it’s hard to find a common enough narrative. Changing social and economic conditions have greatly eroded the predictiability of our lives – and our once-traditional, singular narrative.

Not surprisingly (given the location of his pulpit), Shermer distinguishes the tradition of story with the “narrative of science,” a far more difficult, exacting, and challenging road. As knowledge brings into question cherished beliefs, the quest then is to come up with a more-inclusive and comprehensive picture of both psyche and cosmos.

In order to do so, we must let go – a least a little bit – of what we cherish and believe most. Science tirelessly updates its narrative with new information, leading to endlessly new propositions; consider the multiplicity of competing theories now about the origin of the universe or its ends – string theory, black matter, curved time, entropy, all of these models are affecting our narrative of the universe.

Unfortunately, a lot of doubt comes in with the quest. Anyone who’s experienced the endless uncertainty in medical testing and diagnosis may wonder if the cure is far harsher than the malaise.

What we may have to keep our minds open to – and scientists may find this hardest to do – is that science as a road may not provide real enough answers for the ills of our culture. Technology, like the fire of Prometheus, brings as many ills with its benefits, and in the end we may be no better off than we were singing the forebear of Psalms in the dark.

One day, migraines will be like smallpox and malaria, eradicable, treatable, manageable; its story of cause and effect will be known, as will other current evils like HIV and cancer. Science may one day provide the right narrative; it may not (or be centuries off from that tale). Until then, we have to live with the uncertainty. It becomes a central part of the tale, the way that Saint Brendan made of the whale a place to celebrate Easter every year he peregrinated on the salt marge.

As for grief, take solace in the narrative arc of the grieving process if that helps; and if that isn’t working for you, then know that a model is only that. Open-ended is equally valid. There is nothing wrong with not feeling what a model says I should be going through.

The St. Oran Chapel before the Abbey proper at Iona; the abbey graveyard is in the foreground.

Since this is Saint Oran’s feast day, it would be good to introduce that story here. It plays a weird role in both the origin of the Iona in 563 AD as well as my current malaise.

Columba is exiled from Ireland for attempting to copy a psalter in secret and then refusing to relinquish the copy (one of the first copyright litigations). He goes to battle over the book, and though his side wins the day, he is excommunicated from the Church til he agrees to leave Ireland. He sails out from his homeland with twelve fellow monks, settling on Iona off the coast of Scotland, the first bit of land he reaches where he can’t see Ireland on the horizon.

For a time, no work on the abbey construction can proceed, for every night the day’s work is blown over. Columba receives a prophesy that a man must be buried standing up in the footers to appease an entity who had been disturbed with the cutting of the sward. Oran volunteers for the task and consents to be interred.

An odd, pagan practice for a Christian saint, but remember this is in the first or second generation of Christianity in the British Isles In a sense, Columba was burying one story so that a newer one could proceed, the old, pagan oral culture soon to be replaced by a literate, Christian one. Yet something in Columba can’t quite proceed; after three days and nights helongs to look on the face of his dead friend. Surely he wishes a fond backward glance on his pagan roots, but grief for his brother is even more harrowing and prescient. He bids his monks dig up the earth over Oran.

But then something utterly surprising happens: When his head has been interred, Oran’s eyes fly open and his mouth widens, hurling forth words the Saint is astonished to hear: “All you know of heaven and earth and God and man are wrong! In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all!”

Columba has his monks in haste hurl mud over Oran’s mouth that “he blab no more” and the tale formally ends, allowing Columba to go on to finish his abbey and begin his work of copying sacredl texts and carrying the Christian message to the Scots.

But some damage – or physic? -- had been done. There was no way for Columba’s story to proceed without this strange installment in its footers squirming about. We don’t hear about from his hagriographer Adomnan, who wrote the Life of Columba some years later, but the tale remained so doggedly in the oral tradition of Iona that fifteen centuries later the British writer Fiona MacLeod heard it from local crofters in the Hebrides and would write it in his book on Iona.

My grief for Timm is like that odd tale, outside the abbey proper, defying the orthodox reading for something wilder and wetter, more real perhaps in the lowest third of the heart, the third isle of the voyage. A hard place to name, perhaps, but itt suggests a saltier history, deeper and perhaps more intimate with the divine, like the seal-folk of MacOdrum of Uist who cry out from the marge, “we, too, are sons and daughters of God.” There is a place for this grief in the larger tale, albeit it is offshore and may remain forever there.

The southern shores of Iona.

If my grief for Timm is timeless in that element, raw and burning with salt, it is deep with mineral truths I may never fully excavate. In a sense, my grief for Timm isn’t really mine at all but belongs instead to the Lord of Grief who rules the extra-historical depths of my soul the way Oran was named tuletary saint of the Iona abbey, warden of the royal dead. (Iona was prophesied to survive the final flood, and so remains of numerous Irish and Scots kings – Duncan and MacBeth’s bones are among that colloquy -- were sent to be interred there over the centuries). And like Oran’s spirit, my grief for Timm is the hermanaut who voyages toward him in the Land of the North deep down the well of the soul. Such grief is a permanent saga of the heart, timeless yet timely, offering consolation to my suffering heart and aching mind by reminding me that we are only creatures of dust with a story to tell – one which is part our own and part of the tribe’s now three million years down the dream-tide.

Like the Oran tale that is older yet somehow seems fresher fifteen hundred years after Columba built his abbey, there is something discontinuous about my grief for Timm: I have no sense of time since he passed away; the grief seems just as raw and hard when the next brimming bucket comes up from the heart; there is no sense that I’ve come some distance in it or from it. I can’t say this is like the experience of anyone else, but it does seem to defy any reading using the stage-theory lens.

A time out of time: the old Celts believed there was such a time – no-time, they called it, the period between the old and the new year when “the veil was thin” and the past streamed into the present. Oran’s 3-day harrow in the footers of the St. Columba abbey repeats this old mythologem; All-Hallows is the eve of Samhuin, the Celtic New Year, and is still celebrated today (by some of us) on Hallowe’en. Oddly, during no-time all times are present, a plurality (some might say screeching colloquy) of voices and characters. How can there be a narrative of something so shapeless, teeming with everything and nothing at all?

Grief is a door to so many things, and its current narrative in me has more worldly affinities. My writing seems to be on hold, no new poems coming for a couple of months now while this open-ended grief for Timm grinds on. My career is in flux – I’m not sure which step next to take, but it does seem, at age 51, that I am getting ready for a large one. My industry is greatly in flux, newspapers taking a shellacking in the market; the Internet has all but disemboweled their former prominence. The global economy heads for transformation; here it is most clear that the old models fit least, and it may be true that its worst suffering may be due to a bad model (Allen Greenspan’s faltering faith in it notwithstanding). Our own country heads into a period of decline and change which may preface painful, truthful, healing reckoning.

Hard not to read all this in the narrative of Columba and Oran, in the need to plant something strange and wild into the footers of a coming age. As sure as grief and migraines, pain is the touchstone of all wet work; without sacrifice nothing proceeds. That olds story I find comforting these days, endlessly fascinating, resonant: surprise and wonder in the very footers. A surpressed tale which won’t – like this post -- shut up; is freest in the fluid underground or otherworld, in the timeless tides of mystery which surround our history like the sea.

Maybe “grief” isn’t the word at all for what I feel about Timm, the way “migraine” is the most impoverished way to describe what happens inside my head on days like this, the way “economy” has so little to do with well-being, “belief” and “knowledge” such antipathies when they are really alternating faces of the same coin and “politics” such an ineffectual manner of getting anything of real substance done. Maybe a new name can erect over those older ones and the narrative can go on, freed from one time to enter the next room of its dream. At least, it keeps me writing …

I don’t know if anything changed in the duration of this post, but as I conclude these remarks, my migraine is ebbed back, thank God. It’s now 5:15 a.m. Wednesday and the morning is so chill we have the windows closed and the heat on. Hugo snoozes wrapped in a colorful red blanket next to this laptop, Belle curls on the chair across from me. The blanket was found in the piano bench we sold along with our piano a few weeks ago; we were surprised to find it there with the cheat books and Mozart sheet music Beth never quite got around to playing in the dozen or so years we used the piano for a place to display family pictures. Timm gave the blanket to us after his return from Bolivia five years ago, en route back to Oregon. An odd relic of him, something traditional which was all about a future Timm was striving for. (One career move that didn’t quite evolve was to do photography and marketing for Doctors Without Borders, allowing him to travel the world; instead he ended up settling down.)

How odd to receive comfort from Timm this way. How strange the windings of grief. How fitting an end to this odd post, a tale told from the depths of St. Oran’s harrows in 2008 going on 563 AD.