Attraction to the Wound
We secured an essential upstate item this week, a mint green Prius that’s been around the sun more times than the children she will ferry, Agnes, she’s been named, for Zivar’s grandmother whose house was painted the same mint green. And there was a trip to the ER. We were getting ready to fire up the woodstove for afternoon Smores, I was chopping kindling with the fine Japanese blade Sam had gifted me for my birthday, and whether it was a slip of mind or a beginner’s lesson in country living, the blade nicked my finger. At triage the doctor stopped in to express his love of stitches. No matter my ambivalence, this guy loved the accouterments of the wound.
In Judaic mythology, Isaac, the second of the trio of forefathers, is the carrier of the archetype of woundedness. How old was he when his father took him up the mountain to offer him as a sacrifice, seven years, thirty years, when he saw the edge of life, the knife raised above him? They say he looked past his father into the faces of the angels that gathered in the heavens above him, and the tears that fell from their eyes fell into his eyes, when he came down from the mountain he was blind. The wounds of youth inhibit our vision all the rest of our days, how we love, how we trust, how we ask, how we give, all diminished until the charms of healing are released.
Afterward, Isaac goes out to the fields each evening at twilight, beside the cave where his mother is buried the herbs of the field release their scent at the sound of his prayer and it smells like Eden. His beloved approaches on camelback and sees him for the first time like this, by the light of sunset, wounded, at prayer. And her heart goes out to him.
There is a strange attraction to woundedness. I know it from my own family. When my mother and father met, my father had just lost his first wife Ellie in a car accident. My mom was playing the bride in the dybbuk, he was moving through the first days of grief, trauma, brokenness. What is it in the eyes of a beloved that sees beauty, feels attraction, to the wounds of another? The heart goes out, compassion and love run together, something of the vulnerability, the tenderness, the softening of the flesh gives a sign that the wounded will be a good lover.
They go into his tent and light the candles of his dead mother. They create a life in which they pray together, face to face they sit in the sanctuary of prayer. Not each on their own mountaintop, the place of vulnerability, partiality, need, they learn to be there alone together.
I’ll remove the bandages tonight and play the chords that don’t require me to stretch the digit beyond its encumbered limitation. The wounds of mind, heart, limbs and bones are inseparable, the physical retaining the stories the mind wishes to forget, the heart yearning for blood that flows, because in the wound is the opportunity for repair, turning into the humility of being incomplete, open to being made whole not by oneself but in the love of another. The fates have readied all the boo-boos of all the generations to come, and they have readied their charms.