that we are still searching for a way to understand it, deal with it, learn from it, grow with it. The emphasis on entertainment and escape is an avoidance of the descent and confrontation with mortality that our soul longs for. What the great wisdom tells us is not to fear suffering, but to be afraid of meaningless suffering.
“Although the world is full of suffering,” Helen Keller said, “it is full also of the overcoming of it.” The Buddhists say, “When the heart is big enough, it will absorb (and eliminate) suffering as a river absorbs salt.”
To understand how, it helps to look at the dark with new light.
The Mystery of Duende
In 1938, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca delivered a spellbinding lecture in Havana. His topic was the ancient gypsy idea of duende, the mysterious dark spirit of the Earth that he believed infused the souls of poets, imbued the hearts of bullfighters with courage, and injected the “black sounds” of the very ground of Spain into the flying fingers of guitar players. At the heart of his talk was an unforgettable image.
Years ago, an eighty-year-old flamenco woman won first place at a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists supple as water, but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor. In that gathering of muses and angels—beautiful forms and beautiful smiles—who could have won but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives.
Once. The old flamenco dancer stamped her foot once on the dance floor. But she stamped with the authority of the lived life. She had lived through dark times and she had loved and she had survived. “A mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains,” as Goethe described the core of Paganini's genius.
The image resounds.
The mythic imagination is an “endarkenment,” bringing us down from our inflations and flights of ego, connecting us, like duende, to the dark and nourishing powers of the Earth and our own souls. Myths are the original soul stories, showing us, as my mentor Joseph Campbell used to say, how to live “with joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
The Ultimate Struggle
During World War II the Austrian psychologist Viktor E. Frankl and his wife were imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Like all incarcerated couples they were separated the moment they entered the grounds. For the entire four years of his imprisonment Frankl did not know his wife's fate, but he thought about her constantly, fantasized and dreamed about her, talked to her and wrote imaginary letters to her. He writes in his ambrosial memoir, Man's Search for Meaning,
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us…. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment…. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny….
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden…. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
One morning, Frankl was assigned to work in a trench. Something happened that helped him endure what he called the “ghastly moments” of camp life. We never know when and where the epiphany will come.
The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in the distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet”—and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
As Northrop Frye noted in The Educated Imagination, “There's nothing new in literature that isn't the old reshaped.” I see in Frankl's account of his descent into hell of Nazi internment a modern parallel with the ancient story of Sisyphus, not in the literal plot or depth of horror, but in the richness of psychological insight. With courage and clarity, Frankl describes not only what happened “on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp,” but what happens, from one generation to the next, from the slaughtering fields of Troy to the burning villages of Kosovo. Like the unknown authors behind the original myth of Sisyphus, Frankl shows us that the will to transcend one's circumstances can be the difference between life and death, literally and symbolically, and in so doing creates the terrible beauty of a modern myth.
Instead of ennobling suffering, ancient and modern myths illuminate struggle by telling stories about the mysteries of change. This distinction needs to be made in every generation, or there can be tragic confusion between the two. It came home to me in dramatic fashion in the winter of 1988, at the end of a long day in an editing room. My close friend Yasha Aginsky and the director Judy Montelle and I were watching the rough cut of her film about the surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. For the umpteenth time we were searching for the “through line”—the dramatic thread that would help us finish, and maybe even give us a title we had been looking for for months.
The spools of film wound around the old editing table. When we reached the interview with Ruth Davidow, a nurse during the war, she said something that suddenly revealed the soul of our film. Speaking of her involvement in the war with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, after being involved in so many other fights against fascism, Ruth looked heavenward, as if pleading with the gods, and asked plaintively, “I said, here we go again. Someone up there don't like me! But then I thought, wait, life is a constant struggle. There is no other way.”
Ruth smiled mischievously and we knew at that moment we had our through line and eventually our title: Forever Activists: Stories from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
A few years later, I was watching Hasten Slowly, a stirring documentary about one of my favorite author-adventurers, Laurens van der Post, whom I had long admired for bringing worldwide attention to the plight of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. I was so struck by something he said I had to pause the VCR and rewind it.
“The Bushmen storytellers talk about two kinds of hunger,” van der Post remarked. “They say there
