The Wild Iris: Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering

“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.”

A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the redemption of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then that t...