The Knots in the Necklace: Understanding Our Past
I just finished reading Anita Diamant’s amazing, moving, revelatory book titled The Red Tent. I owe a big thank you to my neighbor and wonderful friend JC who introduced me to the book and the concept of the red tent. I somehow missed both the book’s existence and understanding red tents in the almost 20 years since the book was published. I missed lots. And in one of life’s strange coincidences, the author of this remarkable book lives on Cape Ann, that amazing beautiful place where I live and thrive. JC and I plan to invite her over!
Although tempting, I won’t recount the book and its story. Nor will I share the tales behind the abundance of tears the book made me shed for many many reasons, too personal and still too raw to mention.
But, the book produced an epiphany that I think is worth sharing. I suspect many, with shared backgrounds and experiences, may find it useful.
Here goes.
I have wrestled for decades to understand the trauma of my past. I have tried to comprehend the abusive, unloving and mean spiritedness of adults in positions that should have made them giving and loving — but they weren’t. I have experienced sexual abuse. I have had relationships that can only be characterized as fraught with examples of unmitigated narcissism and meanness by partners who suffered from their own demons. (And you ask why I am so focused on meanness in recent writing?)
My mentally ill biological mother always remarked about not understanding how good things happened to bad people and bad things happened to good people. She thought she was a good person. She wasn’t and that’s for sure. But the very topic that concerned her has confounded me: how does one explain fate? How do we explain the tragedies and traumas that some seem to experience in abundance, in quantities far exceeding those of others? How does one explain my three immensely close friends all dying well before their time — one in 1980’s, one in the 2000’s and one in the 2020’s? (One man — a doctor whom I briefly dated — suggested that I needed to get better friends. Not sure if he thought that was a funny quip but that was the end of him in my life. His words weren’t even vaguely amusing.)
There is a passage in The Red Tent that gave me an explanation through a visual image that helped me understand and get a handle on why many many of us experience so many traumas/tragedies in our respective lives. And if you live long enough, these traumas/tragedies mount, accumulating over life’s decades.
The story’s protagonist Dinah experienced unprecedented horrors throughout her life: losses and sadness so numerous they are hard to fathom. At one point, she says (edited for length and clarity): “The painful things [examples deleted]… seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place.”
Stated another way, we all have beauty in our lives (differently defined), even in the face of horrors. But, to appreciate, see and recognize and absorb the good (those beautiful beads on the necklace of life), we need a contrast — a way to enable us to cherish the good. So, those horrors are the knots that hold the beautiful beads in our lives in place.
I can imagine our life necklaces — with knots and beads together — encircling our respective and collective necks. The image helps me appreciate the bad as it holds the good in place. There’s comfort in knowing that the bad can be put to positive use. And the bad can enable beautiful beads in our lives to be worn with confidence.
I think my necklaces (actual) with their knots between beads will feel differently after reading The Red Tent. I will wear them with vastly greater understanding of my lived life…..one that I hope will continue to hold amazingly new beautiful beads and, yes, these beads will be knotted into place through life’s exigencies.
