Invictus

by Dennis Green

Once again, I have come full circle. For more than a decade, I felt completely at the mercy of the universe, helpless, like a woodchip in the millstream being carried along against my will. And I relished the experience.

I was confident that the fates sweeping me along were loving ones, that this was something, an experience I’d never had before, that I had to learn. After all, so many human beings feel this way their entire lives. How can I pretend to be a writer if I don’t know about this?

It was a whole combination of things. My health, several difficult surgeries and procedures, major life changes as a result, eight years of Bush. It was also a philosophical, or even theological state of mind. In a state of grace, I told myself, there is no need to be in control. I enjoyed letting go of the steering wheel. “Look Ma! No hands!”

So when I came across that old Victorian poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, I found it false and hollow, the egotistical defiant cry of a man who was in fact just another control freak. Take a look.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. William Ernest Henley

And then, I saw an interview with Morgan Freeman on the “Charlie Rose Show.” Freeman has just played Nelson Mandela in the movie Invictus, directed by his old friend Clint Eastwood. And he recited the poem, which he had learned as a schoolboy, from memory.

Wow! And it struck me. Something had changed. Something in my own life, because I liked that poem again. Several weeks ago, I had felt something lifting off my shoulders, and have been on a roll ever since. And what has changed is this: I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul. Once again.

That feeling of helplessness, of being at the mercy of the fates, is gone. And suddenly, as it was when I first read that poem, as a boy in high school in Eureka, Invictus speaks to me, speaks, as all great poetry must, for me. It is, once again, my life. And if Mandela says it got him through many a dark night of the soul, I believe him.

And that’s what makes poetry, art, the movies, the struggle, this life, so incredible.

©2010 Dennis Green