Asking for Figurative Directions...
A swirl of weather often precipitates a swirl of thoughts, and as Hurricane Milton bids farewell after flowing rather aggressively over Florida, perhaps a larger amount of thoughts occupies the mind.
I have a horrible sense of direction. How I ever functioned without online maps remains a mystery. A casual response on how to get somewhere- “Oh, yes, just head North for about twenty miles, then west,” will sense me into a flurry of existential dread. How on earth do they know where North is? Were it sunrise or sunset, I could give mock confidence to East and West, but North? South? Don’t even get me started on esoteric notions of Northwest or Southeast. I live in the Southeast. I’ll take that as a fact. Anything else is a puzzle.
For twenty four hours, and sometimes longer, however, I become an expert. All Floridians do, I suppose. Rather, we pull up alongside the experts- meteorologists mostly- who are by the minute calculating windspeed, wobbles, cones, and surges. Direction becomes tantamount to breathing. An exactitude occupies the mind. “My goodness,” we gasp with the weatherman’s observations, “It’s wobbled from Southeast to South-Southeast! That means…” and a hushed reality and certainty settles over the mind for a moment, until the next observation by our sage the weatherman.
The storm has passed. I am holding on to the remnants of my vicarious expertise, albeit without WESH 2 Weather News. For, despite my lack of knowledge, direction does matter, both in the realm of the natural and supernatural. So, for those like me, who shudder at looking down a road even in our own neighborhood and confidently declaring it heading North, West, or, heaven forbid, South-Southeast, let’s attend to some of the cardinal points through lens of perspective and story.
North and South, or Up and Down?
The mere substitution of one word for another helped me understand the perspective of the medieval mind, and provided an intake of wonder and realization. In his book introducing medieval and renaissance literature, The Discarded Image, CS Lewis writes the following:
You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement…
Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in trackless forest- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may around terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.
Yes, I realize we are leaving behind the notion of longitude and latitude grid of our globe, and ascending to the heavens, but what a sight! How about this for a reflective thought: do I look up into the night sky and see an endless void, or the arches of a heavenly Gothic Cathedral?
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Lewis’s brief but poignant figurative use of North. In Mere Christianity, he wonders whether or not his two case studies- the imaginary Miss Bates and Dick Durbin- will turn to Christ in the end:
It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this a needle that can choose. It can point to its true North; but it need not…Will it point North? That is the question on which all hangs.
Our own souls have a magnetic North they are drawn to, but it is by free will whether or not we will choose to walk that way.
East and West
Both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien brought the ethereal notions of East and West to our own plane of existence. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan’s country is to the East. This is prophesied by a Dryad who sings to Reepicheep the Mouse when he was quite young:
Where the sky and water meet,
When the waves grow sweet
Doubt not, Reepicheep
To find all you seek
There is the utter east
As Caspian and his crew draw near to Aslan’s country in the East, the ocean water becomes fresh enough to drink and rejuvenates their spirits, white flowers bloom and surround the shore, and mighty mountains, green and beautiful, arise in the distance.
Tolkien pictures the West in much the same way in Lord of the Rings. To the West lay Valinor, the Undying Lands, to which the ring-bearers journey at the end of the epic.
The sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Such thoughts put a direction-challenged mind at ease. I feel like I can go for a walk now, and not worry about the specific compass points road travelled. I’ll just head in the direction of Elf-dwellings and Lions, and gaze up at the Almighty’s arch of Creation.