Hinge

The old man said to Baizhang, “A student asked me, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘someone like that doesn’t fall under the law of cause and effect.’ Because of this, I’ve been reborn 500 times as a fox. Please, will you say a turning word for me?”
Baizhang said, “You don’t cut the chains of cause and effect.”
Gateless Gate, Case 2 & Book of Serenity, Case 8

 

On this day C. G. Jung talked about his mother. Since early childhood and again during significant phases of his adulthood he had been aware of two personalities in her. The usually visible one was a warm-hearted, conventional and affable woman but at decisive moments a second voice with powerful, unassailable authority could emerge. Aniela Jaffé, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung

For sixteen of the first twenty days of the month, the island is raked by gales. Each day, and some nights, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, everything thrashes and roars. Grasses and leaves are combed hard one way, and polished by the force of the flow. The skin of the polytunnel, already many years old, strains and bucks like an airship about to take off, but miraculously it holds. Towards the end of a particularly fierce all-day storm when at last the wind begins to quiet, I realise that the blackbirds have been singing all through it.

And it continues to rain. For the first time in years, the ground seems properly saturated, but not as a return to some ‘normal.’ These days, rain like this might come one year in ten – nobody knows, except to say that the water table seems to be shifting. All up and down the hillsides throughout the district, stands of eucalypts have died where they’ve grown on thin soil over rock. When they sprouted, there was enough water running through from patches of deeper soil to keep them alive, but not any more – at least that’s the story I construct.

Towards the end of the month, I look out and see snow falling – proper flakes, though they don’t settle because the ground is wet. The old people used to say that a fall of snow at this time of year marks the end of wild equinoctial weather, but now all bets are off. The Bureau of Meteorology is more and more cautious about offering long-term predictions like the ones they used to publish, based on previous years – for regional rainfall or the tropical cyclone season, for instance – what has gone before is no longer a gauge of what’s to come.

But the snow is, in fact, followed by days of absolute quiet and sun. Morning light ripples in, watery, through the old cylinder-blown glass of windows we salvaged in the 1980s from demolished buildings. Some came from a shop, some from a church, some from an art deco office block that was being gutted and refurbished in plastic and particle board. Here and there a broken pane has been replaced with modern float glass, smooth and regular, through which the light projects precise shadows of leaves and the exploratory tips of vines and the silhouettes of the pardalotes as they come and go from their nest, feeding young ones.

With the sun, the light is a festival of new greengold under the deciduous trees, and redgold through growing leaf tips on the stringybark eucalypts. Clematis and blue love creeper twine through the forest understorey. In the paddock on top of the hill, swathes of narcissus flower where the old house was. Pear blossom finishes and apple orchards come into bloom. Elderflower and hawthorn begin to shine in the hedges, and along the ridge, the windbreak pines release their incense. First roses. First bushfires.

And with a truly warm bright day, the snakes are out. We watch one make its way past the house door and along beside the garden beds where a nesting wattlebird sees it and lands, pouncing, pecking. The snake curls defensively on itself and waits out the attack, then makes its way to the little pond-birdbath at the front window. There it stops and drinks for long minutes, its whole jaw working to draw sweet water in – perhaps its first drink after the torpor of the cold months.

Thinking about how it is that we learn to say something in response to the world. How do we find a way to speak, knowing the constraints of language – its physics that structure the stories we inherit and tell. What does it take to find a turning word, a hinge that opens inwards and outwards onto the vastness?

I was born into a family culture of magical thinking around language. There was terror about giving voice to darkness and difficulty, because to do so was to make it real, and to remain silent was to keep it at bay, and so the capacity to speak about half of life was sealed away. I remember my childhood as a time when many true words were withheld, or acknowledged only obliquely, disguised as prayer or song whose potency could be felt but not owned.

My mother usually spoke in what Jung would have called her number one voice – carefully positive, conflict-avoidant. But every now and then at some literal or metaphorical midnight, when she felt that she had no other choice, her second voice made itself known. It was terrifying, elemental – like a lightning strike, both devastating and thrilling. Though it meant trouble, I always felt enormous relief when I heard it, because at last some piece of lived experience was being said.

What she gave voice to at such times was her truth of thought or emotion, powerful, heterodox, but because it had crouched in her, hidden until it leapt from some unknown place, she couldn’t recognise it as her own. I think it seemed to her to be the truth. That’s how she presented it, anyway. Still her words in those midnight hours were turning words for me, challenging the given and the known, reaching for release.

As we move through the Days of the Dead, I think of this gift she gave me, of the hinged moment, in which speech and silence are both acts from which the world appears, rippling, clear. Trouble and happiness emerge together – the wild wind and the song all through it, not to be solved or severed. The cold days, the warm days pass through me. I drink, long and slow, and lift my head in the new light. I look around.

References

Baizhang’s wild fox. Pacific Zen Institute, https://www.pacificzen.org/library

Aniela Jaffé. Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung. By Aniela Jaffé from conversations with Jung. Trans. Caitlin Stephens, with commentary by Elena Fischli. Daimon Verlag, 2023, p. 20.