Where Salvation Happens
There's a lot to say about book clubs and even more about mental health, but some things resist direct expression. Just as theologians of old found the divine via negativa, poets excise the fruits of their tongue until what remains—at least—can bear the weight of what's subtracted.
In the sunlit warmth of a May afternoon and under the purview of 'mental health,' our breakaway group reviewed a book about wabi-sabi, poured over Chicken Soup for the Soul, and dipped our toe in Leigh Brasington's Dependent Origination, which I brought. Meanwhile, some other groups inside Foreword featured Esme's The Collected Schizophrenias, Why Men Love Bitches, Kurniawan's Mencuci Piring, and Looks Like Daylight.
Like a mobius strip or a prism, discussing their content made those books reflect, refract, and merge with each other.
Did we discuss wabi-sabi through the lens of mental health, or mental health through the lens of wabi-sabi? Is mental health about being functional, or of spirituality? Each book, then, is both lens and subject. Extending that thought, an act of reading might change the text and the reader both.
It's also like that six blind men and an elephant story, but the elephant is a transcendental Nth-dimensional object roughly referred to as 'mental health,' and the six blind men are those of us who channel different facets of that irreducibly complex phenomenon through a reflection of a reflection: Language, which imperfectly reflects sensory experience, which imperfectly reflects reality. Still, maybe this entanglement and complexity is what draws people to book clubs or textual sanctuaries in general. The familiarity of people who read, who think that capital-T Truth could be dissected through mere semantics, who sublimate their sorrow and triumph in the expanse between pages. People who contain and are contained by the worlds that are in between, inside, and formed through books. I know a thing or two about that—those secondhand bookshops in the alleys of Kwitang, Barel, and Jogja witnessed a lonely kid that hungered for companionships that he couldn't yet fathom at that time, much less verbalize.
And here we were, a crowd in a room, having discussed something without conclusively agreeing on what it means, and yet somehow arrived at an understanding, or salvation, or even catharsis. A remembrance of those medieval scholars who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, not because they expected a definitive answer, but because the very act of communication created its own kind of truth.
We all have our own little tragedies. But tragedies, as per the books that we've read, are sometimes solvable. Wasn't that why we're here?
I saw someone's book containing dried flowers that might have been bookmarks, or might have been prayers. Another had annotated theirs with precise marginalia that the comments became a parallel text, perhaps more crucial than the original. Those, to me, are truthful. There might be no salvation in things-in-themselves but there are spaces, conditions, people, and actions where salvation happens. Borges' Al-Mu'tasim story comes to mind where each seeker's understanding of the divine is necessarily and unavoidably incomplete, yet somehow more true for its incompleteness, as if saying that each part, each seeker, is (already and will always be) a true rendition of the indivisible whole.
As if saying: Each of us is already divine, is already free. Sometimes, the easiest thing is to have faith.