You think you know your life.
You know the gateways, the walls and windows, the trapdoors.
Maybe it’s truer to say that you know about your life what you can afford at any given time to know.
The rest will make itself known. “Ready or not”, it says. Not a threat. A vow.
There’s good news and bad, and then there’s hard news, the kind that goes out beyond the yes/no of life, that obeys the passing of time. The most faithful news there is. The kind that won’t go away. The kind that Changes Everything.
It’s not as ominous as it is awesome.
You find out then where you’ve kept your treasure.
I kept mine in health, and in the stand and deliver of my public life. I kept mine in the frisson of an eveready mind, and in the love of language.
I’ve found that there’s my mind, and then there’s a kind of ‘me’, and a kind of on-demand alertness that is fond of answering the bell. When one is in disorder or compromise, the others begin to wonder about where the next meal is coming from, and what’s to be done. That disorder is upon me.
*I’ve written a book prompted by that compromise. It was forced upon me when my life became unrecognizable to me. It is called Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse. I wrote it because I couldn’t, strange as that sounds. It is, frankly, a necklace of switchblades, forged and conceived in a crucible of psychic suffering so acute that in its early going it made cinders of sentences. I wrote it because I was told that my mind was dying. Not ‘going to die’ – a given. No, it had already begun to die. Without me.
And then, a year into the maelstrom, mercy came round. Not reprieve or pardon or parole, not a commuted sentence. Instead, all that suffering, plus a kind of working lucidity that rendered it into something like an Old Hurt, the kind that loves being alive. I was visited by Beckett’s shade: “You’ll go on now, not being able to”, it said.
This book is a sequence of bewilderings, a molten set of reckonings, a schemeless affirmation of life’s stranger days and nights. And there’s a glossary of ‘called for words’ in the back, where, having come to the limits of the usual semantic choices, I just went around them.
*I’ve rarely recommended anything I’ve written to people.That’s part humility, part recognition that there’s plenty of fine literature already at hand.
But there’ll very likely come a time in your life, or in that of one you care deeply for, that will beggar your way of doing your life’s business, and make you wonder if anything of you will make it through, or if you’re wise to do so. I’d recommend Trembling Still for that time.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
