Gimli’s Wound of Light and Joy
“Tell me, Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? …Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting… Alas for Gimli son of Gloin!”
These are the anguished words that Gimli uttered when leaving the Elvin Kingdom of Lothlorien — an unfallen paradise in the heart of Middle Earth, as yet unaffected by the encroaching darkness of Mordor.
Why does the wound “of light and joy” hurt worse than any other? Perhaps because it is such a terrible withholding: we can eventually adjust to bullying and violence and oppression; we can learn survival skills against such hurts; we can fight against tangible enemies such as cancer. But how can we deal with something beautiful being withheld from us?
I first experienced Gimli’s wound when I thought I was falling in love with a cute 15-yr. old Canadian girl next door. I was 17 and had just arrived in LA as an immigrant. But suddenly her family up and left — returning to the frozen wastelands of Canada and leaving me stunned and aching in LA. What just happened? Was I in love? Is this what it felt like?
I had grown up in an all-boys boarding school in South Africa during the “dark ages” of Apartheid and immigrated to LA just a year previously. And this cute Canuck was the first girl I had ever got to know. Before her, all girls were from Venus: an unknown species we as boys had only studied from afar: their anatomy, their magic powers, and their femme fatale. We posted big glossy pictures of them above our beds, dreamed about them as we slept, and yearned for them as exotic, unattainable creatures.
So from 3000 miles away we began writing letters to and fro — from LA to Toronto. And dreamed (at least, I did) of romantic love. But never dared mention it.
And then, after one year, I could not stand it anymore, and bought a Greyhound bus ticket (round-trip)and traveled 6000 miles across North America to see her.
I still remember her squeal of delight at the Toronto Bus Terminal. I remember her red dress as she rushed toward me. And I remember her long, fierce hug. I remember staying up with her late that night and talking. But I remember this too: staring very intently into her eyes, and wondering why I was not — yet — falling deeply in love with her.
I had been dreaming of seeing her for over a year. I had lain in bed night after night, spinning out realms of tender conversations between the two of us. But now, as I examined her from 8 inches away, I, perhaps like Cavalcanti, the medieval poet, sensed some strange slippage between the ideal I was longing for, and this fresh 17-year-old face before me. We talked of intimacy. But neither of us knew what to do about it. Then, 3 days later, I returned to LA.
Without color, cut off from being,
Love dwells in a dark place, and puts out the light.
— Cavalcanti (1290).
I was not expecting the sheer misery which engulfed me. I felt “without color” and utterly “cut off from being.” I had come expecting love, but found myself “in a dark place” with the “lights out.” This was not unrequited love I was feeling. (She had not rejected me). This was unrequitable love — the dark, existential pain of Cavalcantian love; a pain that no 17-year-old girl could ever relieve.
The pain triggered by Love, says Guido Cavalcanti, cannot be cured by a woman, because we have no access to her true Beauty (and perhaps neither does she!). Her Beauty shines through her, rather than from her. And it exposes us — our loneliness, our alienation — rather than fulfilling us.
It is a difficult pain to describe, but perhaps it is like “the wound of light and joy” that Gimli first felt when forced to leave the unfallen beauty of Lothlorien, the Elven Kingdom in Middle Earth, and cried out:
Tell me, Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? …Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting… Alas for Gimli son of Gloin!
The wound I felt upon saying goodbye to this first girl I had ever got to know, was, I think, also a wound “of light and joy.” And I knew deep down that it wasn’t her I really yearned for, but the “light and joy” which she, somehow, pointed to; the possibility of a type of love I had always fantasized over in the dreary confines of boarding school, but never come close to experiencing. And this young girl running towards me in a red dress, hugging me fiercely, was as close as I’d ever come to it.
And like Gimli, Cavalcanti’s despair is also based, ironically, on the indescribable sweetness he sees in the beloved: “In the eyes of my lady I see…a sweetness never known,” he says, and “something happens to me when I am in her presence…a lady so beautiful, the memory cannot hold her…” It is the despair of intense arousal combined with the realization that it will always be “a sweetness never known” and a beloved that “the memory cannot hold.”
When I hugged her goodbye, I returned to LA in the thickest fog of depression I had ever experienced — worse than any misery in five years of boarding school. And with Gimli, I wept: “Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting!”
