Three words which have been looping through my mind for a long time now. It's an evocative sentence. Simple and clear of meaning, it nonetheless conjours up an abundance of images and emotions in the reader which unlike the sentence itself are unclear and difficult to grasp hold of. The words are strong, vaguely ominous, neither a threat nor a promise, but also somehow both.
I first encountered these words, at least on a conscious level, about a year ago, when they appeared in a book I was reading: 'The Ice Queen' by Alice Hoffman. I adore Alice Hoffman. Her books are like a languorous, sensual waltz into the inner and outer worlds of people and places we know and recognise as real, but there is a strange fairytale thread weaving through their stories and suddenly the everyday meets the magical and everything seems possible.
The Ice Queen is a reworking of the classic tale by Hans Christian Anderson, but instead of the little boy with a splinter of ice in his heart, here we have a woman who, after surviving a lightning strike which leaves her with a scar on her heart, can no longer feel love or recognise the colour red. Consequently, when her cat brings in a dead mouse, the trail of blood on the floor appears as snow. She meets a man whose own experience of surviving a lightning strike has left him with a body temperature so hot that his breath can set paper napkins on fire, and a body covered in 'shadow' tattoos from the moment he was struck. Their fantastical, strange, both healing and hollowing love affair, forms the basis of the story.
The passage which resonated so deeply with me appears towards the end of the story when the central character returns home, both healed and destroyed by the ending of the affair. I had been playing around in my sketchbook with images of butterflies as symbols of strength and fragility, metamorphosis and emotional freedom and I took the words of Alice Hoffman, twisting them slightly for my own purposes and overlaying them onto one of these images, focusing on key phrases which stood out to me at a particular time in my life.
This was the result ...
The words, if they're not clear, read:
'I drove home, if that's what my rented cottage could be called. I let the cats out and drank a tall glass of whiskey and fell asleep on the couch. The quiet was overwhelming. I liked to be alone, or so I'd always thought. I fell asleep quickly: I was drunk, I suppose, exhausted in some deep way. I dreamed I was a butterfly. I dreamed my grandmother was sweeping the floor. I dreamed I reached into a pail of water and fish swam through my fingers.
That's the way truth always surfaces in fairytales, written in glass, in snow, in blood. As I came to consciousness I had a feeling of dread. You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.'
But the sentence which truly stayed with me was this one:
'This would be the moment I would never let go of, even though it caused me the greatest pain. When I was old, when I couldn't walk or talk or see, I would still have this'.
When I first read this book, this page, this passage, I was in quite a different place to the one I found myself in when I read it again, more recently. This vague, butterfly idea of truth, of freedom and of pain all fits together now in ways I never really understood back then. You can bury things as deep as you like, you can lock them away into the dusty, dark recesses of your heart and never look at them again. You can go through your days, hiding your truths, avoiding the agony, never confronting the person you are or showing your true face to the world. We are all fragile beings, driven by ego and guilt and pride. Why would we risk ridicule, pain, rejection and worse by opening ourselves up to freedom and to love when it will most likely end with us collapsing drunk on a sofa, both betrayer and betrayed? The answer, when I look around me at all the people living their lives in one form of confusion or another, is this: Is it worth living one life when the life inside your head is something quite different? Is it worth reaching the end of your life and wondering what might have been? Or is it better, like the woman in the story, to risk it all now? To travel that terrible journey towards the truth of who you are? Because Truth, whether now or in the future, really does always surface, and one day, if I'm lucky enough to live to be old and infirm and blind, I will be glad it surfaced now, that I forced it up out of its black hiding place on its quivering and fragile butterfly wings and gave it a chance to fly.
