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Come spirit... help us sing the story of our land
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Every time I watch Terrence Malick's The New World I'm captivated by the way
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Pocahontas and her tribe of Native Americans live in harmony with nature, but I also can't help being left with a feeling of melancholy
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Knowing that he arrival of the English ships in the opening scene will lead to the eventual destruction of most of these tribal cultures.
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It's a sense of sorrow that I was unable to really articulate until I read The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller.
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Without romanticizing tribal cultures, he points out how we and our modern
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society did lose a part of our roots; of our essence. One that we don't really acknowledge or talk about,
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when in fact, according to Francis Weller, the appropriate response to any loss should be grief, because:
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"it is our unexpressed sorrows the congested stories of loss that when left unattended
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block our access to the soul. Francis: "I consider grief a threshold emotion. In other words,
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when we step across that threshold and enter the room of grief, it has a way of opening up the rest of our life.
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We enter that the hall then of community, joy. Even Blake, William Blake, said: the deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.
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When we...
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...compress the terrain of grief...
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...we also compress the territory of joy, and we end up living in a flatline culture, which is where we are right now.
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He explains that although it is important to be alone with your melancholy from time to time,
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grief has always been a communal practice. An experience shared and worked upon, through togetherness. Which of course is a...
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...characterizing quality of tribal cultures. John Smith discovers this as he gets to know...
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...Pocahontas' tribe and...
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reconnects with the essence of a way of life that is lost to him, just as it is lost to many of us.
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Francis Weller conceptualizes this vague, yet intimate, sense of sorrow in various Gates of Grief, which, as he puts it...
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...are the different ways in which sorrow carves riverbeds into our souls, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives.
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One source of grief arises from places that have never known love, that are repressed in our culture.
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We see this in the freedom of expression that...
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Pocahontas and the other natives enjoy. A freedom that we tend to hold with judgment, and shame.
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Francis: We are raised in cultures that really narrow down the parameter of how much we get to inhabit of our own life.
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So in my family..
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I was not allowed to keep possession of my anger, my joy...
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my sensuality, even my exuberance was cut out. So we we cleave parts of our psyche...
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...leave parts of our soul out of our lives,
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and that's a loss to the integrity of our psyche, to the integrity of our soul.
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And the proper response to that loss should be grief, but we typically hold these parts of us with judgment,
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...and contempt. And we cannot grieve for something that we hold with judgment.
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The Sorrows of The World are another source of grief.
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These are the daily reminders of the diminishing of species, habitats, and cultures, that consciously and unconsciously...
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...affect our psyche. This builds on Carl Jung's idea that we live inside of psyche; that we are enveloped in a field of consciousness.
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Tribal cultures recognize this and had a respect for the planet that our modern world seems to have lost.
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Instead of living in harmony with nature. We control and dominate it. Deplete it's resources for personal gain.
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Psychiatrist R.D. Laing reminds us that we come into this world as stone age children,
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...expecting a lifelong engagement with the natural world, only to find ourselves
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separated in an artificial one, suffering from what eco-philosopher Richard Louv calls a 'nature deficit disorder'.
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Here we find another source of grief, the loss we feel around what we expected and did not receive.
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Francis: We are wired for the full experience and encounter that our deep time ancestors had, which was namely
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tribal or village life on a consistent basis. Participation with nature on a consistent basis. Rituals to deal with the
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movement and transitions of life. The losses, the gratitudes, the healing, that's what we expected and almost none of that materialized.
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So we feel kind of this aching echo in our bodies, of what it is that we don't even know the name,
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but is not there. All of this comes down to what can be called...
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...ancestral grief...
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...which has to do with the fact that our ancestors were once part of an intact tribal community, and that at some point there was
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a severance with that connection. We see this image of the disconnected modern man in John Smith,
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...who wanders to globe without a real place to call home
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...spending a lifetime with an emptiness, that was only briefly filled in the forest with Pocahontas.
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Pocahontas too becomes separated from her tribal roots when she is abducted by the English about halfway in the film.
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I think here the general focus of the film changes, from exploring the essence of our being that was lost, to showing our
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inability to process the sorrow in what truly is the new world. A modern people
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...starving in a land of plenty. For Francis Weller the modern world is one without room for communal grief, and one that places an enormous...
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...pressure on the individual to always be improving...
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...feeling good, and rising above problems. Anything short of happiness therefore feels as a failure, as having done something wrong.
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This contrast becomes painfully clear when Pocahontas is told that John Smith has drowned. Francis Weller...
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notes that the loss of someone - or something - we love, is about the only form of grief we recognize in our culture.
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But even here we do so but grudgingly. We see this as Pocahontas reaches out to her new community...
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...but finds there really is no one to share her sorrow with, and is therefore...
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...forced to suffer alone, to carry her grief for years to come.
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Pretending to be happy in a society that won't recognize anything else
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I suppose... I must be happy.
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When Pocahontas and John Smith finally meet again in England, we see, or rather...
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...we feel, the climax of all this accumulated sorrow.
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Did you find your Indies John?
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I may have sailed past them.
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And yet there is something cathartic about this brief expression of grief. Francis Weller...
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...emphasizes that grief is not a problem to be solved: it's a presence waiting for witnessing. It's the solitary journey...
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...we cannot do alone, that needs to be shared. Only then can there a response, a protection, and a restoration
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...of that which has been damaged.
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Only then, as Terry Tempest Williams would say, can we dare to love once more. Francis: so part of what our grief is waiting for is...
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...the village to show up. And the village can be small. It can only... - you know - if we have two or three people gathered...
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to sit down and say: tonight... tonight
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I want to tell you about my sorrow, and I want to hear all about your sorrow, and there's nothing broken...
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...nothing needs fixing. What we mainly need is to have someone listen deeply to my sorrow...
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...and say: it matters.
