“Go to hell…”
Go to hell
“Michael, goddammit! Stand up for your family!”
The words—burning, scarring, searing, searching—like claws from the abyss—squeezed my chest and pinched my perspective into a tiny slit that no longer discerned darkness from light. The voice tore at me, ripped at my insecurities, and disregarded me and my experience already overwhelmed by anxiety, hope, and financial debt.
Death, it seemed, was sneaking up on me from every direction. A sickening dread that I may not make it through this season of life.
This was Shame 2.0. A brazen juggernaut embossed with flesh that needed fresh blood and hate and killing. It could turn my world upside down like Seneca Crane rearranging his gladiatorial playing field for sick eyes staring out of sick skulls controlled by sick souls. What had been up was down; what was East was now West.
My goal was to get lost, to leave my house with a backpack, climbing rope, and water bottle and head for the nearest forest that I knew the least of in Iowa City. Getting there took me through Oakland Cemetery, past the Black Angel standing guard at the gate to the forest where I could undo the mismatch between what I felt and where I was. Being at home felt too dissonant, too at odds with the lostness I felt within, and since changing how I felt was out of the question, I changed my location, walked past her, and entered the wood.
Yet another midlife man playing out Dante’s opening lines, “Halfway along our journey to life’s end, I found myself astray in a dark wood.” It’s cliche now, but my life felt cliche: a cis-gender white male, divorced with five kids, owner of a minivan.
Sitcoms were made with me as the punchline.
I wasn’t thinking about Dante but rather Rebecca Solnit:“Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.” Which is why I was now standing beneath a canopy of black walnuts, oaks, and hickory trees. Feeling lost in a wood was more at home than the lostness I felt in my own house.
Keep moving
Go to hell.
Solnit’s voice pulsed at a whisper.
Go to hell.
Hell is the first stop on the way to paradise, an unforgiving space offering the greatest sense of congruity for the lost. I realized in that moment that as much as Dante expressed his horror and dread at each new level, there’s the perceptible sense of belonging that he must go through his hell to get to his heaven with Virgil guiding him. Solnit’s voice was my Virgil, holding my hand as I pressed deeper, kept moving, crossing streams without ferrymen, and looked for darker places, an unforeseen grotto, a deer path disappearing into oak groves.
I got lost, and suddenly understood Solnit’s awareness that this word has two uses: the regular sense of having something one instance and not having it the next; and the second, an inability to recognize what I was experiencing. Both spoke to me in the darkness.
I had lost much, and the reality of what I had lost kept deepening. Divorced and unemployed in the same summer, I had lost my wife and my vocation within months of each other. How it all had happened made little difference now that the feeling of loss had set in. Empty. Forgotten. Pushed out and aside.
I was no victim. I played my part in my marriage’s ruin. I had an affair, and no amount of severing myself from the woman, moving 1,100 miles back to Iowa City, or two years of therapy could save it. This hell was my reality. And the woods painted the feeling at its fiercest, the rawness that grief brings us again and again. The rawness that we must acknowledge.The rawness that, even a year later, my therapist would tell me I had yet to finish processing. I had to “tap into this grief,” she said, as if I were a maple syrup farmer driving metal pipes into the trees of pain that would harvest the grief as an elixir for my suffering.
My life felt lost. No memory could let me say, “You are here. You know where you are.” If I had ever experienced lostness of this magnitude, it had melted away like a wax figure in summer.
Once you get there…
I felt “disoriented.”
It’s a funny word. We no longer remember its mythological connections; we relegate it simply “confused.” Two Latin words disconnected within one word: dis + orient. "Orient" comes from oriens, orientis meaning “rising” or “east”; “dis” from “rich,” a direct translation of the Greek Πλοῦτον (Pluto) that refers to the deity from the underworld.
"Underworld East" is the most accurate transliteration.
Dis has no sun with which to "orient" its citizens. No north star to get our bearings. Just Dis-information, Dis-traction, Dis-topia. Dis-connection at its most dangerous. You’re left looking for a sun rising in the east in the morning and setting in the west to give life meaning, location, origin. But this was hell–my hell–and the reality is that life had flipped itself on its axes, and left me to figure out where I was and where I was going.
In the woods of Hickory Hill Park, I could no longer see the sun, which allowed a surrogate form of disorientation. The dark woods, the little direction, an occasional hiker. I stumbled on looking to come out the other side simply because I kept moving. I expected my effort to match the disorientation of my internal and external worlds would usher in a moral nihilism that would crush me. Perhaps I’d see Satan, or some replica standing next to a pathway to tempt me further or take my soul from me. But I didn’t. In fact, I gradually felt a mounting sense of hope that grew with my movement, directly proportional to the level of lostness I was achieving.
This is perhaps the most disorienting side of my current experience. Lost. Disoriented. And hopeful. Why? Because the lostness I’m experiencing now is more hopeful than the un-lostness of my previous 44 years.
Hell has its own charm.
Come out the other side
Solnit’s last directive is to “come out the other side.” If she has Dante in mind, this makes sense: the poet goes completely through hell and comes out the other side. His journey didn’t take him around hell, over hell, or under hell. He had to go through it like the children’s story We’re Going on a Bear Hunt when the dad and kids encounter the mud, the grass, the forest, the snowstorm, etc.
Come out the other side.
But as a directive for life–remove the parabolic, metaphorical language–what does it mean? How does it help me in this moment when I’m lost in midlife and feeling the lostness of what hell at its most primal sense involves? What would it mean to come out the other side? Would I be different? Would I know I was different? Would I know when I had come out the other side?
I have several thoughts. In one sense there is the hope that going to hell and continuing on promises that there is a leaving, a coming out at some undisclosed moment. Escape is not the correct word, not any more than the butterfly escapes the chrysalis: hell is just as necessary for our transformation as the chrysalis is for the rotting caterpillar. This realization reminds me that our fascination with the end leaves little room for us to love the process.
That is one thought. The other thought is better understood in terms of Plato’s theory of recognition that he presents in the Theaetetus that I’ll try to the best of my ability to summarize as clearly as possible here. Socrates proposes that “knowledge” is the process by which we match our memory images with our current experience, but he finally concludes that the theory is insufficient. For example, when we see someone in the distance and we believe that the person in the distance is–say, Michael Jordan–how do we know that it’s him? We could possibly be mistaking someone else for him and make a mistake, or we could properly identify him, and when we’re closer to him receive some sort of verification that this tall, black man is indeed the Hall of Fame basketball superstar. But would really know Michael Jordan? Recognizing him correctly is not the same as winning six NBA titles with him, spending hours on flights or on buses with him as perhaps Scottie Pippen did. And even then a person carries a mystery about who they really are no matter how much time you spend with him. Who is Michael Jordan really? Knowing him is certainly more than our ability to recognize him.
A similar deception occurs with auto-location. The environment we find ourselves in may be familiar to the point that we are able to say, “I know where I am,” or “I’m in Iowa City,” which is where I currently am while writing this essay. But this really says little more than “I am un-lost.” Both of these statements are based on our ability to see ourselves in relation to our familiar surroundings only. “I know where I am” says little about the actual place. The “here.” Or the “now.” Trauma has this uncanny ability to rip off the apparition–i.e., the false equivalent that recognition equals knowledge–and letting us see the nakedness of our humanity in all its fragility and tenderness. For me that was the work of the divorce, an event that forced me to realize that the auto-locating I had relied on up to this point did nothing to help me understand what my location–my “here”–actually meant. Yes, I understood that I was no longer married, that I was still a man, that I was a son and father and brother to incredible people.
But who was I? Who am I? That is the lostness I am seeking to embrace.
