My hunchback

  Never talk away the magic.

                                                            Danish saying

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you

because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

                                                        Roald Dahl

Matilda has her sunbird (See Lessons in Sunbirdish 1 - Lessons in Sunbirdish 4), I have my hunchback.

He came mysteriously to life on Sunday September 18, 2011. During a heated argument with Matilda the evening before, I once again became painfully aware of personality traits I am not too proud of. It was made worse by the fact that it wasn’t the first time they surfaced. I was confronted with those issues before, thought I've worked through them, but there they were, seemingly back in all their glory.

Against that background and with a sense of disappointment in myself I entered into the Quiet Day we've set aside for ourselves on that specific Sunday. We were still living on the farm in Gauteng at that stage and early on that morning I walked down to the pasture where our neighbour's sheep were grazing in the oats.

I made myself comfortable close to the sheep and with the morning sun warm on me must have dozed off. When I woke up after a few minutes it was with an image of a hunchback so clear in my mind that everything else faded into the background. I've never had such an experience before or since. And, totally against my usual pattern during our Quiet Days, I knew that this was not something that I was going to write about in my journal after my walk. I had to capture it in the clay Matilda usually had available on the Quiet Days.

  

Sculpture and photograph by George Angus

I immediately walked up to the house and made this little sculpture. Even though I could not explain it exactly, I knew that this image had something to tell or to teach me.

With hunchbacks not being a very common phenomenon (prior to my Quiet Day-experience I haven't seen one in ages) I was under the impression that my experience with one that Sunday – however extraordinary it might have been - was a once-off occurrence. I was wrong. Over the next few months I was to bump into him on a number of unexpected occasions:

·         in Prague, as an ad on the side of a tram and as the main character in one of the stories Rilke wrote about the city;

·         at the annual Arts Festival in Grahamstown where he and some friends attended a lecture with me and sat in the row right in front of me;

·         while reading Shakespeare's Richard III and discovering that many thought and still thinks King Richard III to be a hunchback. Modern consensus seems to point in the direction of severe scoliosis and Shakespeare over-exaggerating, but as a specific glance or nod in my direction it served its purpose.

·         while working in White River, Matilda and I ran into him as a restaurant called Kokopelli, the name given to a flute playing hunchback in some native cultures. A new facet in my hunchback image was introduced in the process. Kokopelli wasn't so much regarded as deformed in these cultures, but he was seen as the bringer of fertility for all life, be it crops, hopes, dreams, or love. The hump on his back depicted the bags of seeds and songs he carried with him to the communities and villages he visited on his travels.

 

Modern Kokopelli

 What was I to learn from my little hunchback and all these gentle little nudges and reminders? What were they all trying to tell me?

On subsequent Quiet Days and in my journal I pondered over these questions. I also read up on Kyphosis or Gibbus, the medical terms for a hunched back. Over time I jotted down some thoughts:

·         The context of its origin in my specific situation suggested that it had to do with my shadow self, that part of me that I do not like to look at, that's not attractive and that has to do with a certain deformity;

·         Kyphosis is described as an idiopathic disease, one where the exact cause is unknown. Even though I might be bent over under the weight of my shortcomings, the wisdom to be mined from that is not to be found in going back and looking for causes. Clever intellectual constructs and formulations won't do the trick in this case;

·         In the best known of the so-called Ebed-Yahweh (Servant of the Lord) passages in Isaiah the Suffering Servant of the Lord is depicted as follows

“Many people were shocked when they saw him; he was so disfigured that he hardly looked human.” (Isaiah 52:14 – Good News Bible)

and

“Who would have believed what we now report? Who could have seen the Lord's hand in this?” (Isaiah 53:1 – Good News Bible)

·         Julian of Norwich said “And God showed me that sin will be no shame, but somehow honour for humanity ..... God's goodness makes the contrariness which is in us very profitable for us.”

·         Somewhere – I cannot remember where – I came across the image of the “imperfect holy man”. I like that.

·         Somehow, the deformity held the potential for new life and growth.

·         When I looked at my little sculpture I was filled with compassion so deep that it was almost impossible to describe it. His deformity did not fill me with disgust at all. Quite the contrary.

All of the above led me to the conclusion that my image and the little sculpture were given to me for a reason and with a great amount of brilliance. On a very tangible level it showed me who and what I am – definitely no personality or spiritual athlete. On those levels I am clumsy, often move with difficulty and easily become short of breath. I am that, not in comparison to others. It is just the way it is with everybody on a journey with God. Call it a spiritual given in the spirituality of imperfection. Or as Richard Rohr puts it, “We come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!” My little statue acted as a wonderful guide to experience on a very deep level the absolute compassion that God has for me when he looks at me in my deformity, softly stroking over the hump on my back, gently leading me to growth and discovery.

I realised that for the time being that conclusion was enough. I just had to look at my sculpture and love it. I knew for a fact that it had a message with many more layers. It was not important that I got to them all at once and right away. By patiently waiting those layers would be revealed at the right time in ways that I was not able to predict.

It has been almost 4 years since I last had a “hunchback experience”.  Even though the image has lingered in my mind and I have continually done the often difficult shadow work where I was confronted with the darker aspects of my personality and my shortcomings, my little statue was still wrapped, stored in a box on the attic after our move here to Barrowfield.

Then, in June this year, at the Arts Ramble in Wakkerstroom where we exhibited some of our work, we came across Kokopelli once again. It was a total surprise to find the 6 table mats depicting the hunchback flute player way down on one of the lower shelves where we were arranging our pieces. After a long absence and silence my hunchback was back!

Back home with our find we asked: “What exactly is the origin of Kokopelli again?” While Matilda sat knitting, I did some Googling. After a few minutes I said to her, “You will not believe this.”

 Of all the images and all the places on the face of the earth and from all the native cultures Kokopelli had his origins about 3000 years ago among the Native American tribes in the deserts of the Southwestern United States. 

Prehistoric rock art of Kokopelli, Southeast Arizona

 When we first met him in 2012, The Living School did not exist and New Mexico was merely an area on the map. But this time around it is totally different. Against so many odds and some might even say against reason we are now part of the 2016 cohort of the Living School and in August on our way to Albuquerque for our first symposium and the beginning of our course.

 

The images in the first rock carvings of him changed over the centuries so that today the broad symbol of this region as a whole, depicted on ball caps, key chains, T-shirts and tattoos, is unmistakably Kokopelli with his feathered head and flute, but mostly without the prominent hump. 

Kokopelli smashed penny, gift shop catalogue, Hotel Albuquerque

 

And so, the image that was born to me in a Gauteng oats field 5 years ago has been waiting for me in the gift shop of Hotel Albuquerque (where our symposium will be held in August) as well. Which just adds other dimensions to our already rich Living School experience. Dimensions where care, guidance, the inevitable and mystery abound.

 

In the meantime I have taken my statue from the attic and have mounted him on a rosewood base.

Obviously, we are not done yet.

George