When Heaven and Earth Part

SOPHIE MADLIN

Dear Alex,
      In the fragile silence we have been moving through - our shared heart like a disconsolate summer leaking a grey sort of rain - your new words intruded like pieces of carved granite. They had weight, and were immoveable. And though I had known they would eventually come, they were so concrete in comparison with the surreal landscape they had entered that I called you the next day to be sure I had heard correctly. "I no longer want to be married to you," you repeated. "I can't imagine that I will ever stop loving you, but I no longer want to be married. It hurts too much."

I dreamed we were looking at a map. We had no idea which road to take. No idea, even, which direction we were headed.

That night, although nothing had been said, the younger of our two daughters wept in the darkened room she where she slept with me. "I don't want you and Daddy to get a divorce. It seems like my life will be over if you do." A little later she spoke of her dilemma:  if the house were to catch on fire, should she go back to save her beloved bedfellow, a stuffed gorilla named Bibi. or should she try to save the cats? The cats might find their own way out, but then again they might not. Bibi, on the other hand, depended entirely on her. The thought that Bibi might die alone in the fire filled her with grief. She couldn't imagine life without him.

Her sense that her life would be over were we to divorce has the ominous ring of mythic truth. The divorce of the parents is the divorce of the primal pair, of heaven and earth, whose pulling apart means the end to all that lives.

You tell me that you have gone over and over the events of the last year and a half, trying to decipher a chronology that will make some sense. "I wake and you're not there," you say, "and I don't know how we got here. I feel like a kid in grade school who has just discovered that the person he thought was his best friend isn't."

We were walking together in my dream, talking in bittersweet tones of our separation, when suddenly, in the middle of the bridge, anger burst through a crack in some inner dam and you, who rarely yell, screamed at the universe, "Unbelievable!" and again, louder, "UNBELIEVABLE!"  I placed my hands over my ears and shrank away, feeling ashamed.

There is no chronology for this that makes sense in the day world. The straight lines of time and of road maps cannot describe the ways of soul, which meander and turn back, turning over and over to the place of beginnings before leaning forward again, like the arm of a spiral galaxy, to be drawn into the current from the future. If "what the dream says is just so," are we standing in the middle of a bridge, and not at the dead-end we imagine? Is there crazy wisdom in your ourburst? Is is truly not to be believed that our marriage is over, but that we are suspended, instead between an old marriage and a new one?

Two years ago, I dreamed we were walking together down a long path in the open country, having recently made the decision to marry. It felt like a formality that had simply been overlooked, for we certainly seemed married. But unseen elders let us know that now that you had finished graduate school - 15 years behind you in waking life - we could truly be married. Neither of us knew it yet, but all hell was short months away from breaking loose in our lives. Wiser than we if only for their longer view, the elders must have known what was coming. Invisible presences, they stepped angel-like into our path to say: it is time for a new marriage, one possible only now that you are done with old ways of knowing.

Months later, Aretha Franklin appears in your dream, chained to a rocket ship you straddle like that character from Dr. Strangelove, as it blasts through the roof of your childhood home. When it comes time for the second stage of the rocket to disengage from the first, the Queen of Soul has doubts about continuing. Then again later, there is a shark and you are its prey. It toys with its food - a bite here, a bite there - torturing you until, in agonizing despair, you turn the soft belly you have been struggling to protect to the shark's mouth. Better to submit to your death than to continue the piecemeal agony. You pull the dream into the upperworld and say: "I love you, but I cannot be married to you."

When I was wondering about leaving, women whom I recognized as Quakers appeared to me in a dream. With affection and sincerity, they served me a meal of sharkmeat. I pulled back in horror. I do not eat shark in waking for the same reason I want to avoid it now: you are what you eat. But these soul servants are Friends with a capital F. What does it mean?

What does it mean that, at this point in our mapless journey through the dark underside of our brightly lit lives, as second stage disengages from the first, soul demands that I be predator and you be prey? What does it mean that only now are we ready for the true marriage to begin?

Continued, Part II