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