Five of Wands
There are far more than two wolves inside of us. An entire snarling, stalking, yapping pack lives within. The old wisdoms are sometimes true and yet not true enough. I have the Dalai Lama wolf who revels in love, who can see through another’s pain without judgment. And the misanthropic wolf who wants the world to burn. The steadfast and dutiful wolf who will pull any sled—he domesticates himself. The slovenly and dopey-eyed, the moribund and feckless, the calculating strategist, the lone wolf and the litter’s runt. Each of them I have fed in their turn. There are always scraps—often stolen from the others—for the wolf who writes. Come glory or pointlessness, I think I’ll feed him the final crumb.
The wands, they say, represent intuition, creativity, instinct, knowing without knowing. The five-- symbol of the human, his five limbs and his five senses, the five forms of matter that conspire to make him—shows intuition at cross-purposes. This is to be mired in a fundamental paradox. It is a species of fight, but perhaps not bloodshed. The kind of rivalry and conflict that, left unchecked and rudderless, leads not to some violent end but a more quiet failure. A house flimsily assembled, threatened with collapse by every gust of wind.
++
I made sacrifices for art. No one can tell me any different. I didn’t track out into the hinterlands with my typewriter in a bindle, but I did break apart a promising career and tread carelessly over the pieces, walked away from an office on the river and a beautiful town I called home. It didn’t work. Not for long. So be it. Perhaps I did not truly keep the faith. Now though, I have to admit that there is a wolf in me who cannot bear to be useless. Who wants people, at one of these cocktail parties that only happen on film, to raise respectful eyebrows when I say what it is I spend my days doing. To be the expert invited to give a Ted Talk—or at least TedX. To be the guy who can only grant you a minute’s time to talk as I’m charging down the hallway to an important meeting. He wrestles with that other wolf, who cares mostly to seclude in dimly lit rooms and read the books no one else has. To slowly craft a work of arguable genius—just because I can’t doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
++
4:15am the alarm goes off, like most mornings, and 4:30 I’m caffeinated at the keyboard, my prayers prayed, working through this same novel I started now three years ago. In a life remembered like a television show. And it is a kind of epiphanic session, this ninety minutes of sleep deprivation I’ve scraped out like one might scrap the plumbing from their own walls. For a few seconds, I shoot the Divine Electric from my worn-out fingertips. I am Faulkner and I am Stephen King and I am the author of the Bible, all my words sacrosanct. Tomorrow, I will be an inelegant poseur once again.
8:30am I am lowered on a creaky winch down into a hole in the road someone built brick-by-brick a literal century ago. Below is raw and fetid sewage, a congealed world of archaeological filth, no expense spared to keep it out of sight. And this is part of the job I came crawling back to after the academy was done with me. An entry level position I was both overqualified and underqualified for, a picked-cleaned bone the wolves fought over.
They send down my bucket of tools and I trudge upstream. The roof two feet above me and the gray sludge to my calves, the gray flow to my hips. I come to a stretch where the pipe widens, flattens, where I have to kneel and drag myself through the muck with my face inches about the flow, my helmet scraping against a roof encrusted with god-knows-what. Seventy-odd feet to the other side where it opens again. Here I assemble my tools and drill holes in the implacable brick, the bit spinning off chunks of slime like wet scabs that spatter my face. The squeal a dozen claws on a dozen chalkboards. And I am useful, for a moment. The flapping butterfly wings of this tiny hole I drill . . .they matter. That is what I say to myself as I lean into the fourth and last, as I place the tiny gauge that measures the spread of a crack down here. If it were to fail—unlikely as a summer blizzard—then we would lose the road, an acre of our topside world would fall in on itself. I cannot remember a word I have written.
++
There is another wolf—long overlooked, small still and ill-fed. And this one listens, humbles itself to try and understand. What is left over to feed him? What wolf will have to starve for this one to become big and strong, for its fangs to grow long enough to sink through the fur. Jung said a million worthwhile things I plan to one day understand, but one I think I get is that enlightenment comes when all your wands work together. And if he didn’t, he should have. If you bring forth what is unconscious, you will know it to be part of you instead of thinking the place it steers you toward is fate. The card tells us this as clearly as a well-loved teacher.
It is 4:30 am. It is late and it is early. Inside, the struggle is quiet. The words have come to me, not all at once, but in their time. My boots wait beside the door without making a sound.