Eternal truths sometimes are found in dark, inhospitable places

 

Tolstoy, in one of his incarnations just past midlife, described his own as “the philosophy of the swamp.” A philosophy of real, tangible, practical things. So earthly a philosophy as to get one dirty. So thick and deep as to frighten. Maybe so gassy and decomposed as to be repugnant.

What was the purpose of such a philosophy? I suppose it was the same as for his short fiction and novels, for his treatises and polemics, or his allegories and fables and folklore, for his school texts and gospels. To express essential eternal truths.

In Camelot there was King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. At the outset of the quest for the Holy Grail (symbol of Christ, redemption, salvation, whatever), each of the knights, individually, left Camelot (the safe castle, but surrounded by dark woods) and started into the woods at that point which seemed darkest for him.

That is all I need to say about King Arthur and the Holy Grail: the journey took each knight into the darkest, loneliest, most frightening place he saw.

I had a babysitter when I was nine or so. I was very bad to her. I caused her grief. One thing was that I didn’t like to go to bed, or to sleep, when I was supposed to. The truth is I liked her very much.

One night I insisted she tell me a bedtime story before I would consider turning out the lights. A funny story. Or a secret. So, she told me the story about once when she was up at the cabin when she was a girl. And she had to use the outhouse. She went to the outhouse and while she was sitting on the plank seat she was playing with the ring on her finger, and she accidentally dropped the ring in between her legs into the outhouse hole. I felt squeamish. She said that she liked that ring so much, it was so important to her, that she crawled down into the outhouse hole to get it. It was a deep hole. You can imagine. You’ve used outhouses. Of course, she couldn’t get back up, so she had to yell for help, and she was eventually pulled out – filthy with you-know-what, (she used the “s word” [what word could she use?]). But she got her ring.

Not only did she tell me the story calmly, I felt that she had gone through the whole ordeal calmly.

Hemingway had it wrong at the end of “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II.” His character Nick Adams, his alter ego, fishes well down the river until he arrives at the beginning of a deep, dark cedar swamp. He feels the fishing in there would be tragic. For him. Or the fish. “Nick did not want it…There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.”

But the things of greatest significance – one’s needs and wants and desires and joys – are beyond where one least wishes to go. Beyond nightmares, beyond tragedy and pain.

“In sterquiliniis inventur.”

In filth (or in cesspools) it will be found.