At the age of twelve, Craig Philip Staufenberg contracted an illness, during which he had a “spiritual experience of complete death, movement through the veil to the nothing beyond nothing.” Staufenberg spent the next twenty-five years being visited by what he calls “bouts of spiritual sickness and regular spiritual experience.” These are the events recounted in CRACKING THE SHELL OF THE EGG: A Memoir of Spiritual Experience. Weighing in at 66 pages, this slim volume hardly counts as conventional memoir; Staufenberg uses prose poetry to convey the variety of experiences he encountered. It’s an odd choice, one that lands this work in the gray area between autobiographical literature and poetry—and it results in some peculiar reading.
This strangeness does not derive from Staufenberg’s experiences, highly unusual though they were. The work is structured thematically, with a brief expository section that’s followed by three further sections: “Illness,” “Experience,” and “Radiance.” Whatever it was that Staufenberg imbues with spiritual significance baffled doctor after doctor, but it gave Staufenberg some evidently remarkable experiences: he writes of monoliths exiting his body, a mountain as liminal place between the “something” and the “nothing beyond nothing,” and—with something approaching regard, if not exactly reverence—an entity (death, perhaps?) “hunched over in pain” that he refers to as “The Adversary.” Gradually, he became aware of a sense of being a “foreigner” in every-day, corporeal existence; transcendence, he writes, felt “like home.”
All of this is valid and interesting, but the text sometimes struggles to match the material in terms of style. Sometimes the reader is arrested by a striking turn of phrase, but other times the verses are merely descriptive, the language humdrum. The best pieces are ones that use poetic devices for rhetorical ends. “This Way, Not The Way” employs anaphora to give it impetus and verve, in contradistinction to pieces such as “Nowhere to Hide,” which advances the narrative but does so without any sort of overt poetic apparatus (its four stanzas notwithstanding). This is perhaps a stylistic choice—a workaday writing style can produce splendid prose poetry—but it does give the sense of material worked up from a prose source. CRACKING THE SHELL OF THE EGG nevertheless contains several interesting insights, and, in its departure from the usual memoir format, offers an unusual intellectual ride for the reader.
Though stylistically uneven, CRACKING THE SHELL OF THE EGG: A Memoir of Spiritual Experience sends readers on an interesting journey through author Craig Philip Staufenberg’s spiritual observations into the “nothing beyond nothing.”
~Craig Jones for IndieReader