“There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus between the two world wars. There are many kinds of despair – the private despair of bad life and heartache, the social despair we call politics, the existential despair of bearing our past and our utter insignificance in the life of the universe.
In the fall of 1978, Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) faced many forms at once as a terrible disease interrupted her for the first time, and then cemented her work as one of the most personal but important political voices of the last century. “The briefest philosophical statement I have is my life, or the word 'I,'” he wrote in the prime of his life. Now, he came to sharpen his philosophy on the brink of his death.
“Spring is coming, and yet I feel as hopeless as a pale cloud waiting to destroy me,” he wrote at the beginning of what happened. Cancer Journals (public library) — Lorde's attempt, surprisingly successful, “to give form faithfully and accurately to the work of painful faith and love that has been transformed into power at this time of my life.” Like all translation, however, it was hard work, creative work, work that required learning a new language in order to be alive enough to convey the poetry of life in it.
It begins with a stutter of incomprehension that follows the shock of everything: He finds himself “so pessimistic these days, selfishly or otherwise.” But he soon discovers that the only way out of that “meltdown of hope” is to end it.
In line with poet May Sarton's insistence that “sometimes one has to endure a period of depression for what might catch the light if one cannot live with it, pay attention to what is revealed or what one needs,” Lorde comes to see what it's like to allow despair to reach beyond you:
If I can look directly at my life and my death without cursing I know that they will never do anything to me again. I have to be content to see how little I can do and still do it with an open heart… I have to let this pain pass through me and pass. If I resist or try to stop it, it will explode inside me, shattering me, sprinkling pieces of me all over the wall and anyone I touch.
Along the way, busy writing while trying to stay alive, he grapples with the question that plagues all artists: “What are you doing with all this work?” However, when he finishes the novel, he looks back to see that it was a way of life. In what is the shortest, most accurate manifesto for those of us who process our love and loss through writing — or whatever the world sees as our work — he points out:
I don't have to win to know that my dreams are working, I just have to believe in the program I'm a part of. My work has kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In recognizing the presence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that word that is given recognition and name.
Balancing his own suffering against “the greatness of our work, to change the world,” and realizing that despair “means destruction,” he allows his despair – that is, he feels it – and then rejects it – that is, he refuses to act, to live in it:
How do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy? I have found that fighting against hopelessness does not mean closing my eyes to the magnitude of the tasks of making change, or ignoring the power and brutality of the forces that are with us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that fight. It means, for me, to be aware of the enemy outside and the enemy inside, and to know that my work is part of the continuation of the work of women, to restore this world and our power, and to know that this work did not begin with my birth and will not end with my death. And it means knowing that in this continuity, my life and my love and my work have power and purpose… It means fishing for trout in the Misisquoi River in the morning and tasting the green peace, and knowing that this beauty is also mine forever.
