By JP
Malig
I READ about a Persian
creation story, in which the first thing God made was Intellect, a being of
light, which was endowed with knowledge of God, knowledge of itself, and
knowledge of its transcience.
Knowledge of God, manifested itself in Beauty,
knowledge of the self in Love, and knowledge of the transcience in
Sadness.
Love always looking at Beauty. But when Beauty
smiled, Love felt overwhelmed and wished to run away. The youngest, Sadness,
held on to Love and from their embrace were born heaven and
earth.
There is an undercurrent sadness in everything,
but especially in our experience of the beautiful. A good story, whether told in
a book or film, leaves us both joyful and sad -- joyful for having known each
other, a warmer and more coherent world, and sad over its having to
end.
The same is true of a piece of music, say a Bach
fugue or Chopin prelude, as it is of a visit to a place of sanctuary and
solitude.
The sadness that underlies joy corresponds to the
shadows that make light, and life more dramatic and
meaningful.
A Japanese writer once wrote an essay in praise of
shadows, and eulogizes the world before electricity, when the nights are lighted
with candles and gas lamps.
He values jade, "that strange lump of stone with
its faintly muddy light," more than crystal, and dark miso soup for being "the
muddy claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a
candle."
He laments that we no longer are acquainted with
the intimate world of half-lit things, in which people stay in the shadows and
talk of whispers or low voices. Life has become too bright and too clearly
demarcated.
"We live at great speed in perpetual glare,"
someone wrote. We need to slow down, come together, value silence, to be
attentive to the heart and be acquainted with the worlds beyond life and
death.
Why must beauty and joy be always accompanied with
sadness? The German poet-philosopher Novalis calls it "this indescribably
beloved pain -- this sadness and memory -- this brave
longing..."
Because it is only when sadness is woven into joy,
when the day is full of the play of light and shade that we are brought to a
knowledge of greater reality.
That knowledge comes from feeling the sadness "in
the spaces, the voids, between things, and at the edges between appearance and
disappearance, something and nothing, sound and silence, where we become
subliminally aware of the world's continuous creation" (Christopher Bumford,
Burnished Gold).
Once we know this sadness, we are able to love
more purely.
29 March
1998