Back To Suffering School

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

It is back to school time and that means a new year in Suffering School.

In normal schools students progress from one level to the next, learning whatever is appropriate for their grade level. But this is not how it goes in Suffering School. The first thing to realize is there are no lessons to be learned in Suffering School, those are the things that are taught in the School of Hard Knocks which everyone, no matter who you are, attends.

Suffering School is different. It does not deal in lessons, or the fallout from not learning the lessons. Like, you can’t fail out of Suffering School, nor can you age out. All of that belongs to the “normal” plane-- the flat, linear plane that the world orients itself around.

In Suffering School we don’t progress in a straight line. The word progress—coming from the Latin: pro=forward+gradi=walk, means an advance. Which is good if you want to get from point A to point B, but Suffering School doesn’t trade in the world of progress and end results.

If any knowledge is to be gained in Suffering School it is not from advancing forward, but rather from increasing scope, somewhat like the adjusting of a lens, to apprehend more-- more of what has always been there, just not seen or noticed. Oddly, a lens’ ability to see more happens by shortening the focal length, rather than expanding it. And that is the entirety of what I know about lenses, but it doesn’t matter, what matters is the pattern and flow of Suffering School is not measurable in straight lines or progress.

Do you know anyone who has zero self-awareness? This person I will make an example of to illustrate what typically happens when one, for whatever reason, ends up in the branch of Suffering School reserved for those, like myself, who have structured their own suffering. I don’t say caused. We wouldn’t assign a word like that to the mystery of suffering. In fact, there are no firm conclusions about anyone’s suffering. The jury is still out! as our teachers like to say.

So, imagine this person who has no self-awareness walking dully along, like in Auden’s poem; a person mostly unaware of something that is happening right there. This is quite normal. But then there are some, like those Old Masters, who see what normal people don’t see:

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And that is the natural way for most but not here in Suffering School, which will challenge its students to see more. And most students will at some point, but only if they become less self-aware.

The reason for this is quite simple— a typical self-aware person, before entering Suffering School, is only aware of self and not really aware of all the other selves out there who are also walking dully along. So, the “learning” if you want to call it that, is in the forgetting of self—which is a funny paradox. Think of the lens of a camera: in order to take in a wider view, it must shorten, and in order for it to see greater distances it must narrow.

Likewise, in order to be truly self-aware, one must shrink awareness of self, and expand awareness of the other selves out there.

How is this done, you may wonder?

Well, Suffering School is the exact place to learn about unlearning and there are tons of teachers happy to help out.

The school curriculum, unlike normal schools does not follow a normal trajectory toward an end goal, like graduation. Instead, our curriculum, if it had a shape, would look like a helix rather than a straight line. We don’t go forward, and we don’t go straight up or down, we go along in a spiral, moving along the surface of a Möbius strip.

Do you know what a Möbius strip is? You do if you are on one!

Photo by SIMON LEE on Unsplash

On it, we move up and then down, back and then forth, facing one direction and then the other. As we move we turn and see different things, things that we weren’t looking at before, just like the ploughman in Auden’s poem who wasn’t looking at Icarus falling from the sky.

While the Mobius strip is a good example of the shape of our learning it does not encompass the expansion that is also happening. For that, we need to refer to the Fibonacci Sequence, in which a series of, say, numbers, create the pattern when the sum of two elements that proceed are added i.e. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…….you get it. This explains better the widening that happens to us.

For a visual, think of a Nautilus Shell.

Or think of Venus standing in a shell in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—not the shell, not Venus herself, rather, the whole painting.

What you see is the golden ratio. But you don’t know that you see it because it’s baked in. But whether you know about the golden ratio or not, is not the important thing, the important thing is that you notice.

Seeing, attention, focus, whatever and however we try to describe it, is the work of Suffering School. To be attentive.

What does Kafka say?

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Can you see the helix shape in his words?

Remain, sit, listen, wait, quiet, still— are turning then turn into freely, offer, unmasked, roll, ecstasy.

One leads to the other.

And we are led, because we want to see more, not more ugly things, but more beautiful things. “Look!” our teachers say, and Gerard Manley Hopkins says:

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize

In this way of looking, perhaps we will see that our suffering, our lives in fact, can be beautiful when viewed through the kind of lens that shows this strange logic with its own pattern and harmony.

And in this view, taken quiet and still,

we too might realize that all is a prize.