ORIGIN OF LIGHT by Mary Kudenov
The phoenix lives in Arabia near a deep, cool well. Each morning, as dawn turns the early sky pink and gold, it bathes in the clear water and sings so mellifluously that the sun-god stops to listen and weeps. Only one phoenix can exist at a time.
When the well dries, when the dawn brings only charged clouds, when the horizon vibrates with thunder and the phoenix feels death approaching, it builds a nest of aromatic wood and sets itself on fire. I had to stop worrying about you for a little while, Seth. I didn’t know what could happen.
A new phoenix will spring from the pyre and embalm the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh. The new phoenix will be strong. It will carry the burden of its body into the City of the Sun.
* * *
A scrap of paper fell from a student’s display board as she walked out of the Learning Resource Center, distracting me from the conversation at hand. I leaned against the payphone outside of the university’s writing center where I tutored, listening to my mom talk about the weather back home. If there was more relevant news she would save it for the end of the conversation or not share it at all. I wanted to talk about my brother until I understood what happened. I called my mom almost every day. I told myself it was to check up on her, remind her that she still had two living children, but the truth is I was running out of people who could bear the guilt I wallowed in. The real conversations burned inside me: the guilt, the guilt, Mom –
My mother could avoid guilt. She took refuge behind the facts: Seth had struggled with depression; he was a logger who had lost his leg at age 24 and during that same colossally horrible job one member of the crew, a woman he cared for, died of propane poisoning; Seth was exposed to the same gas, and afterward resembled Lennie Small; he felt responsible. He lost the lawsuit and declared bankruptcy. He spent the last 14 years of his life in a scat-encrusted shack, terrified of losing more.
Anyone listening in on our pleasant conversation would never guess my brother had killed himself three weeks earlier. My mom chattered about Whip and Judy, the blacksmith and his wife, who lived at mile 22. They’d been visiting her just about every day. It was a little like talking to a person from a different era, or maybe a character from historical fiction. She lived in a small, rural town and her friends had occupations like “knife-maker” and “railroad worker” and Postmistress Martha kept everyone abreast of the latest gossip.
I listened to her for a while and tried to contain my own bad mood. The strip of paper that had fallen from the student’s display board caught my attention again. It was a little scrap about the length of a finger, pastel and distinct on the sea of beige Berber. It held a command written in the round, bubbly penmanship that I associated with missionaries and elementary school teachers. It said, “Be the light.” I imagined the kind of person who could write a sentence like that, someone who ran marathons and held intangibles like “bliss” or “serenity” as daily goals.
I picked it up and considered the hideous weight of that single imperative sentence. As I said goodbye and started back toward the writing center, another wave of students passed the payphone, vibrating with laughter and enthusiastic conversation, pulling books from their bags without ever stopping or slowing down.
I was barely there, I knew that much. I watched them as if from a great distance.
* * *
Towakoni Jim, the Wichita chief, says that Man-Never-Known-on-Earth created Man-with-the-Power-to‑Carry-Light and Bright-Shining-Woman. The man and woman dreamed of everything that they needed and it was there when they awoke. The radiant woman received an ear of corn and knew that it would be the food of generations to come.
But how? The darkness was unending.
Without knowing why, Man-with-the-Power-to‑Carry-Light journeyed east, pushing steadily through the night. Bright-Shining-Woman stayed behind.
* * *
In most cases it’s the family who cleans up the mess, the bits of hair and teeth. My living brother and I removed the sofa, but a family friend, Becky, spared us the worst of it. Still, decisions must be made and quickly.
Mary Beth, what should I do with the brain? Becky asked. The paramedics took the body, but a large piece of the brain had fallen behind the couch.
I don’t know, Becky. I can’t think about it right now. Can you just do something with it?
Maybe I should have buried it, or something. Becky whispered to me at the wake. The brain, I mean. I wrapped it in a plastic bag and I put it in the trash can.
I can’t think about it right now, Becky.
For months I didn’t drink. I exercised and took care not to abuse my body. I sought counseling. Yet grief stripped my memory of day-to‑day details and I recall little, with the exception of an undergraduate poetry workshop.
The small class sat at a round table. I faced a 19‑year-old Cure fan – thin, dyed-black hair, tall boots, tight, tight jeans. He read aloud in rhyming couplets of feeling hollow inside, of ravens swooping, falling,”announcing” the corpse. Black roses and Armageddon every Thursday night that semester. I could indulge in the angst-ridden Sylvia Plath tributes, the insincere fascination with mortality, but some nights that boy wore a white t‑shirt with fake blood around the collar, a theatrical garment, red-glue droplets spilling down his chest. It whispered to me, my head is gone. My head is gone.
* * *
There was a time when everything was still and all of the spirits slept. Australian Aboriginals call it Dreamtime. The planets revolved around the sun and the moons around the planets and the cosmos spiraled outward. The universe moved like a machine but all of its inhabitants were still. The Sun Mother woke first. She came to Earth and walked in all directions and in all the places that she treaded spirits rose. She penetrated caves and crevices with bright light; she glided north, her heat melting the ice, forming the rivers and streams of the world. All living creatures watched her in awe as she moved west across the sky.
I think we were there, Seth. And when she finally disappeared beneath the horizon, we were terrified, thinking she had abandoned us. Some of the others froze in fear, not moving all night, wondering if the end of time had come or if they were having a nightmare. But after only a few hours of darkness, the Sun Mother came from the east, luminous and comforting. The earth’s children learned to expect her coming and going and were no longer afraid.
* * *
In some dreams Seth hangs from the ceiling like a brightly colored piñata. In other dreams he walks in circles like a zombie, his .30‑06 rifle strapped to his back. I must confiscate his gun and make him human again. Sometimes he morphs into my husband or my mother or my best friend, and I have to save them all, but I’m always too late. I’m told this isn’t narcissism, just magical thinking, a manifestation of survivor’s guilt.
The most tragic part about depression-related suicides, one psychologist said, is they are entirely preventable. In most cases properly treated depression will get better eventually. We’ve come a long way with medications. If we can just get the patient to hang on.
* * *
I read of a woman who is terrified of the Los Angeles Vincent Thomas Bridge. The temptation to throw herself off is so great that she moved across the country to gain a safe proximity. I feel that way about darkness. The same empty room, plain with lamplight and white walls, fills with ghosts and bones the minute I flip the switch.
Interest in light is an Alaskan industry; we weigh it like gold, track it like stocks. I had thought winter solstice was the bell curve of suicide death, but actually most suicides occur near the equinoxes, right before winter, right before summer. On average, one percent of people in the United States commit suicide; in Alaska, where Seth and I grew up, the average is double.
Winter mornings I’d swallow vitamin D tablets and sit under a special light meant to ward off Seasonal Affective Disorder. The radio, the news, the daily paper’s weather reports announced highs in the upper thirties, lows in the mid-twenties, and four minutes and fifty-five seconds less daylight.
* * *
My mom’s friend Whip died suddenly of a heart attack that December. Within hours his wife, Judy, drove her car into Kenai Lake, which was just beginning to freeze. The Moose Pass Town Hall filled for their wake and Whip’s best friend, Virgil the knife-maker, read Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” to the stunned residents. It had been almost twenty years since Whip and Judy had moved from Fairbanks to Moose Pass after their own son’s suicide.
After the service a small group of us headed to the lakeshore behind Whip and Judy’s house. Virgil and Judy’s sisters cut open the plastic bags holding the remains and I will never forget this, Seth: Whip’s ashes were black and Judy’s nearly white. Before we left, Virgil threw Whip’s hammer into the water, but I didn’t see it ripple. I was watching all their expressions because they looked so hopeful, like they were expecting the catharsis of ceremony. Except Mom, she was looking for you.
* * *
In the beginning there was only the Holy Darkness.
And it was the Darkness that released the Holy Light. God formed vessels to hold this light but there was a miscalculation – the vessels were not as strong as God had thought. They split and shattered, a cataclysm so devastating that it birthed the suffering universe. Light and ruins and maybe even God Himself tumbled down toward the realm of matter.
Cabbalist mystics say we can help God by freeing the Light, raising the sparks back to their original unity. Tikkun Olam. Restore the broken whole and heal the world.
* * *
Edith, a 67‑year-old white woman from Nebraska, saw the light. She moved through “levels,” where the souls of the living work things out; she only came back because her grandson would have been orphaned at age seven. Edith had never read Dante’s Divine Comedy or the Tibetan Book of the Dead; she’d rarely left the farm. “If it weren’t for the boy,” she wrote, “I’d have stayed in the light.”
Another man coded for one minute and fifty-three seconds. He emerged on a beach, felt grains of sand between his toes, and spotted a thatched hut in the distance. Inside, his deceased parents looked fifty years younger. They touched him. He felt their touch. He was reunited with his best friend. Then the Light came from under a doorway and drew him in.
When I mentioned that the scriptures of my faith did nothing to soothe my grief, a counselor suggested that I research near-death experiences, an activity that comforted her when her own mother committed suicide.
I’ve read hundreds of accounts from people who returned after being pronounced dead and I see two common threads: when the dead see the light they feel as though they are returning to something better; they often express frustration that there is no sufficient way to describe the unity they experienced.
“It is like a chair trying to understand a table,” one woman tried to explain, “or it’s like trying to explain algebra to a chair” – she abandoned the metaphor – “the body just isn’t big enough to hold the knowledge. The brain isn’t adequate.”
The vessels are not as strong as God thought.
* * *
Creation stories have false beginnings. They actually start in the middle, where there was already Word, already God, already forces in motion. Seth called me the night before he killed himself. He sounded confused and spoke in a low rumble, “I messed up real bad. I messed up.” I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t say the right thing. The weeks and months that followed were some of the worst of my life, but they formed me and still form me.
The Book of Job, considered a book of wisdom, opens with God and Satan in dialogue. God claims Job is a perfect servant, and Satan asserts that Job is only faithful because God has given him a blessed life. In the chapters that follow, God reclaims all Job’s blessings – his wife, his children, his possessions – to prove something, the reader assumes. Job is often cited as the Judeo-Christian answer to Suffering.
When He calls down to speak to Job from a “whirlwind,” God doesn’t say why he caused Job to suffer; instead he asks Job a rhetorical question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” as though the answer to suffering is threaded into the act of creation, and part of Job’s ignorance lies in his humanity. Word and Light reside in God, The Book of John explains. God sends the light into the darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it.
* * *
The first children had no memory of light. They knew the world by other senses, heard the trickle of water, felt jagged edges of rock, smelled the minerals of the cavern walls. They tasted the slime and cold of the creatures they ate and they were content.
After a long darkness (long after the first mother disintegrated), after thousands of dreams, so many dreams that he couldn’t determine waking from sleep, the boy sensed something. He tried to tell his sister what he saw. What does it feel like? she asked. Taste like? But there were no words yet for illumination, shape, color. He could only describe how the light filled him with longing. He tried to walk toward it, but he didn’t know where it came from. He grew obsessive looking for its origin.
One night, while sister slept, brother found the source. It seeped from a small crack in his hand. When he pulled his skin taut, the light increased. He nudged and pulled his skin until it split the length of his palm. The cavern’s creatures drew near; he saw their shapes and colors. He rolled back the skin of his hand and forearm to release more. He looked for a while at the cave walls stretching into the darkness, endless as time. How could he know there was anything else?
The boy peeled back skin until his hand lit the cavern like a torch. While the boy worked off his flesh, his sister slept by the bare white bones of their mother. Sinew by sinew he unraveled his muscle, shedding his body in one glorious purge. He was the first to see his own blood and beauty. He was the first to see and to leave the world full of light.
Mary Kudenov’s nonfiction has appeared in Fourth Genre, The Southampton Review, Chautauqua, The Citron Review, and bioStories.