On the Death of Terry Pratchett

Sometimes,

They tell you little stories,
  When the good ones die,
Sometimes they're even sweet, or bittersweet,
  But in the end, they are currents in the river.

And, a current is kindly, after all:
  Its a medium for carrying on.
A current could rush you from the rotten moorings
  Could tumble you through the bramble on the banks.

Sometimes,

They roll out anecdotes,
  When the good ones die,
Sometimes they're even wise, or funny,
  But in the end, they are wind on the stream.

And, a wind is kindly, after all:
  It fills the sail and tugs it gently forward.
A wind could carry you over the murky bits,
  Could rush you into the free and open sea.

Sometimes.

But only if you've already a ship,
  And the ship is sound.
And when the good ones die,
  Your ship sails off without you,
And sometimes, after all,
  You need to stand just so,
And feel the aching chill
  Of a still pool,
And not, - just yet - rush forward,

Sometimes.

(Terry Pratchett died today. I did not know him, or his work, really, but I've been listening, and watching some of my friends who loved him dearly. The best to you all, friends)

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Comfort Food

Yes, that is indeed a gigantic Kraft Dinner noodle. Thank you, America

I really, really love Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches.

No, you're smiling right now, I know. You're thinking, "Haha, yeah, me too, PBJ's, that's the life."

Stop that.

This is bigger than camaraderie. I love them. Love. Like, the actual emotion. Like, I have an intense, fraught, passionate relationship with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Look at it. Tell me this doesn't look beautiful.

Macaroni and Cheese is another one. I like the cheap Kraft kind even (though I LOVE it when its gussied up). Macaroni and Cheese, I... oh god. If I could  wake tomorrow, and have a thick, gooey PBJ for lunch and be able to play around with throwing different things in macaroni for dinner, every day, for the rest of my life, I would reconsider my ongoing feud with God.

*weeps, like a passionate art student at the Louvre*

Unquestionably, if I were to describe my affection for these two foods, it would be that they are 'comfort foods'.  Neither of these are the haute cuisine dandies that one is supposed to dream about. Macaroni is not my foie gras. It is, in the film by the same name, my ratatouille, precious because it makes me feel small and safe and simple, in a way adulthood does not.

I loved these foods as a child and I certainly took comfort in them. but it was of a different sort. Having a peanut butter sandwich, on the one hand was simply delicious, but in terms of comfort... well, I don't really remember. I remember desiring them when I was upset, or when I wished to be brave. If I were to guess, I vaguely remember them giving me a feeling of the general predictability of the world. Some things, in a child's world, must be anchors, they must not move. My mother must love me and want the best for me. My mind must be dependable. The trees must always stay there, and there must always be a bed that is mine. And peanut butter sandwiches must always taste and feel just so.

You think Mothers always love you? You sad little fool!

It is different now. Now, I now none of those things are altogether true. I live, adulthood tells me, in a world where there are no anchors (where one moors, if you will, at sea).

Everything in life is the possible subject of catastrophic change. Love can end, children can die, trees can fall, or worse, rot in place, and heaven could very well just be the wishful thinking of someone very long ago. The sea batters at the ship of maturity, and you must sail, though your charts are lost and your compass swings wild.

But.

Peanut butter sandwiches are still the same. And when you eat one, for just a moment, you can curl up inside of it and say, "Yes, I know, I must be a grownup now, and it frightens me, and I don't recognize this thing I've become. But... I AM the same person. I still have a little heart that sat at the diamond-cut wood table that mother bought from the gypsies ( I miss that table) and ate a sandwich that tasted just like this. Just precisely like this. And it is a little less hopeless, a little less frightening.

Thanks macaroni.

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Swan Song

This is my swan song,

Oh, my sweetling, whom I have taken to breast,

Whom I have kissed and petted -

This is my swan song.

I have made it sweet for you,

Soothing and soft,

A lullaby tone.

I want you still, to sleep,

And seldom sleep alone.

Do you know? I never met your father -

Though he did try!

A thousand times he came

To introduce himself,

Each time I would step backwards,

And put marbles in my eyes,

Extend prosthetic flesh,

And let the creeping lipsmile come.

But no, my darling,

I will make it sweet for you,

So gentle it will make you smile in your dreams.

I want you still, to sleep,

And seldom sleep alone.

But, you came of it.

You poured forth from me

In a storm of rose,

You fell from me 

In a hail of gobbets.

I vomited you forth,

And we wept together,

The tears of the empty 

And tears of the suddenly full.

And oh, I shiver to remember! 

You were so warm against me.

I was Adamic:

My true love ripped forth and laid beside me.

What is loneliness when 

There are other lonely eyes to look upon?

But no, my darling,

Do not leave, now, I need you to hear,

I will make my song like honey on your tongue,

I want you still, to sleep,

And seldom sleep alone.

This is my swan song,

Oh, my sweetling, whom I have taken to breast,

Whom I have held to the very last breath -

This is my swan song.

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On Ghosts

I have a soft spot for ghosts, I always have - even the books about other supernatural creatures I've enjoyed in the past, at their base, are ghosts: Carmilla comes to mind, so do, in a different way, the elves in JRR Tolkien (part of why I didn't enjoy the movie version of Fellowship - the only movie I saw - was that the nature of elves as a tragic, only half-present race felt untapped, but that's a story for another day). When I was young, I remember, in fact, imagining up ghosts, playing with the idea of them (another post for another day).

At the same time, I've seldom enjoyed ghost stories - once in a while (and I would LOVE some good recommendations), but often not, enough that I DON'T say I enjoy ghost stories. This month, ghosts have been on my mind a lot, and so the reason for this has been gnawing at my subconscious.

At heart, the problem with the 'typical' ghost story - and by this, I mean, the kind you hear around campfires, let's say - is that there is so little focus on the ghost. Ghosts are made into a sort of depersonalized spirit of horror, in this type of ghost story - something like another genre of fireside story I dislike, the classic "...and the radio said that a madman had escaped from the local prison..." story. This is fine, I'm not saying I'm morally OPPOSED to this sort of ghost story. Just ghosts feel like a rotten way to tell it, because the spirit of terror is usually terrifying because of its 'otherness' - the best example of this sort of ghost story, then, in my mind, wouldn't be a ghost story at all, but rather something more primordially alien. Say, a Cthulhu story, or maybe something like the film 'Alien'. Science Fiction stories are actually often at their BEST when they force us to confront the idea of a thinking entirely alien to our own, telling us metaphorical stories about the unbridgeable, terrifying gaps between different people's psyches (at least to me). But as ghost stories these fall short for me: because the essential tale of the ghost is of something human. Something human distilled down to its essence, and perhaps therefore losing its humanity - but still. Something human. A vampire story is (at some level, in my mind) about the animal in us and all the damage that can do. Ghosts are about the human in us.

When you hear about people's stories of 'real hauntings' (the validity of said haunting I will not take a position on), there is something to this sense of humanity. La Llorona, a popular story here by the Mexico/US border, is a good example of this - a woman who has murdered her own children and then died in the throes of regret over the act is cursed to walk by the river every night, keening for her lost babies, trying to find them again. There is two elements to this that make it powerful in my mind (and my has no one written a La Llorona novel?):

1) The utter impossibility of death. If vampires are about immortality, in a sense, ghosts are about the impossibility of avoiding death - they are not undead. They're just plain old dead. Echoes of life. Ghosts, in many if not most incarnations, are set on impossible tasks. La Llorona CANNOT find her children. Ever. They are gone. They are dead. She can save them no longer. The Bean-Sidhe of Irish myth will never wash the blood from the clothes she is scrubbing against the rocks - there is no substance left for living water to interact with. The ghost ends up telling us something truly horrible and humbling: that a day will come, when we will die, and when we die, there will be things we will never, ever, ever be able to repair. All souls carry sin, or guilt, or fear, or hate, or love, or any of a thousand other, in the end, unshakable fires, and when you die, these desires, unfulfilled, will end, and never, ever be fulfilled. There is no 'eventually' in death, there is no more hope that you'll hit your break.

2) The reduction of the soul to an organism of regret. As I grow older, this becomes more and more powerful to me, because as I age, my regrets become more hopelessly entangled with my life, and my desires become more desperate. At twenty, the desire to write a book, let us say, feels like something that will occur, but will simply take time and circumstance. At thirty, it feels like a desperate foreboding thing, something that is slowly dissolving. Every year it becomes more and more regret and less and less desire. And the trouble with regret is that the impetus behind them does not change, even as time and capacity disappear. At thirty, I can already see how much of my mind is consumed by moments that I would change, or that I would, just, understand. I can imagine, by sixty or seventy, my consciousness being gorged with this feeling. It reminds me of the poem by Emily Dickinson:

WHILE I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
There is a fitting a dismay,
A fitting a despair.
’T is harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.

In a sense, no matter how optimistic we are, if we have things we want to do, marks we want to make, virtues we want to espouse, life becomes a race where we try to run backwards, but can only move forwards. In the end? I can imagine it almost sliding out without noticing, the mind so fixated on the impossible - that was, after all, no more possible, before the moment of the candle-snuffing - forever repeating itself. The events of some great regret replaying endlessly, when the body is no longer present to camouflage the psyche. This is what a ghost is, to me - the whole concept of unfinished business speaks to an essential sickness in the human psyche, a sickness we might call Narrative, or Hope (it perches in the soul, and it perches with, sometimes, very, very sharp claws), a divine, beautiful sickness that leaves those who become ghosts with the worst sort of infection - eternity. 

Ghosts are strange in this way. A story about a ghost, unless it be a story of a human intervening on the ghost's behalf, is a tragic, hopeless story. 

Unless. 

A human DOES intervene. But what does this mean after all, to intervene? This isn't like, say, falling in love with a vampire (common as that trope is). A vampire lives (or unlives?) and has directions, hopes, desires. Living emotions. These can be fulfilled of themselves, because the vampire is NOT dead - they have died but are not dead. A ghost is different - ghost doesn't have desires, they have regrets. Regrets can be transformed into desires only by being taken up by the living. And so a ghost story is, in a sense, the story of a human taking on the identity of the dead - of, at least in a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) sense, being possessed by the dead. 

The Sixth Sense is a perfect example - the child in it has NO desire to slip into the house of someone else and watch video tapes of them being poisoned by their mother with lysol. None whatsoever. That is, in a sense, of his own psyche, frankly the OPPOSITE of his desire. HE wants out, he wants peace, a normal childhood, an end to trauma. Instead, he has to go and take onto himself, the pain of someone ELSE's trauma - someone who has haunted their trauma into him. Resolution doesn't fix him, it only fixes the ghost - the ghost can pass on, presumably, but he is left to live, an eight year old who know has to grapple, alone and in secret, with the fact that mothers poison their own children, and that he may, at any time, be forced to bear witness to the fact. Or other facts, facts he can't even imagine. So, no, he is not literally taken over by the spirit of the dead, the way that, say, Whoopi Goldberg is in 'Ghost'. But, he is fully, entirely possessed by that spirit, forever, he bears its pain on his psyche long after ghost's psyche has been relieved of it.

Now, think that one step further - what happens when he dies? What if he becomes a ghost? How is he going to relieve that ache? The trauma does not disappear, even though the means of resolution have been fulfilled. Or, what if he meets a ghost whose trauma CAN'T be relieved? What if the poisoned girl did NOT have a videotape under her bed? Or her father refused to believe it? The spirit has nothing left but regret, regret that can never, ever be alleviated now. She doesn't really even have the choice to be compassionate anymore, because all she has left is the desire to have someone fix this for her. So what will she do? Sit there and haunt the boy. Forever. Willis, in the end, does not give the boy a solution at all, and the ending has more or less no hope in it at all. Its like finding a child in a war zone, and giving them a gun - they'll likely be shot anyway, and even if they don't, they'll have the weight of that gun, and any shots it fired, on their conscience if they do, miraculously escape.

I don't know. In a way that other stories can't be,  ghost stories have this startling, terrifying power to talk not about death, per se - I don't, after all, know that there is any sort of persistence after death, and if that persistence is anything like a ghost I hope there is NOT persistence after death - but rather to talk about what death means. The dead should not be alien fears, because in a sense, they are our most intimate, secret fear, the fear of impending mortality, of the inescapability of time. The relative impotence of free will.

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Love Song From Time to Space

We two shall Sisters be:
You shall be space, and I shall be time.

Space can exist alone, my love,
Tableau is  a beauty of its own.
But what is time without space?
What is a second, a minute, an hour?
What is a year? An eon?

I am the beast of the empty page,
Who yearns to write you
O'er its thirsty breast.
And I will change tableau to tale.

And as with all space
Once you accept continuum with time,
My love,
I shall one day
Bring unto you
Death.

Sweet tableau,
Push away my insubstantial hands.
Sweet tableau,
Push away my insubstantial hands.
My fingertips may plead to lace with yours,
But listen to my lips:
Push away my insubstantial hands.

(Image from G-Rome)

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Race and Gender in The Hunger Games

Well, everyone else has written about it. I was beginning to feel left out.

Let me begin by saying that I am not the most authoritative speaker on the Hunger Games in the blogging world. I imagine tha twoud be a highly contested title. And I can guarantee I'd lose it. Lawks, I'm not the most authoritative speaker on the Hunger Games IN MY HOUSE. I haven't even read the second and third books.

Yes, there will be spoilers

I mostly only wrote because I finally picked up on something very interesting to me - in District 11, the home district of the much mourned Rue, the citizens are publicly whipped if they are caught stealing bread. And, they're black (to clarify - they usually have very dark skin, and they are geographically located in what is now the deep South - I am interpolating the rest myself, though this seems to be the most common interpretation, and that of the movie).

I don't know why I didn't put this together when I read it, but the I-almost-have-it feeling I got when originally reading the book, with Rue and Thresh, finally clicked, and I realized where I recognized Rue from - "Birmingham Sunday" (I highly recommend the Joan Baez version, if you don't know the song - the song itself begins about 1:00 in). The story behind Birmingham Sunday is a simple one - it retells a real incident, where the black church headed by Martin Luther King was bombed by white extremists. Four people were killed: four young black girls, all around 12 years old.

Now let me tell you what I almost wrote next - "Four young girls, innocent of any of the trouble of their times. So young, so beautiful, and all ended." I stand by that - and I stand by my affection for the emotional power of Baez's performance in the song memorializing them. But the description is troubling in a number of ways - why do I remember this song more than, say, the equally poignant 'Emmet Till'? "Young girls," "Innocent," "Beautiful."

The same words of course could be applied to Rue (or to Katniss's sister, Prim, notably), and her death strikes the same string (I admit it, I cried, in the book and the movie). The formula is a very effective one. Take a little girl, it helps if they're slender and beautiful, tell them to offer up innocent eyes. You'll notice that you never have to watch Rue kill anyone. The closest she comes is to suggest to Katniss how SHE can kill the people who are waiting to murder her (Katniss, too, only kills when forced to, a different, interesting thing to consider. If she had fought for her life by killing, say, Foxface on purpose, even when Foxface made no attempt on her life, how would that change our perception of her?). The story could just have easily have involved Rue cutting down a hornets nest in her OWN tree to save Katniss. But it doesn't.

Because, we want Rue to be pure, when she dies, we want her to be innocent. It is interesting, now, to trace this backwards in the history of American race relations. Rue, yes, in the Hunger Games. Or the girl who is raped and murdered in Grisham's 'A Time to Kill'. Birmingham Sunday. Or go way back - there is Eliza in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. To get sympathetic white people riled up and willing to stick their necks out for their disadvantaged black brethren? Kill a fresh faced young black woman. If there is sex involved, all the better. Now, draw this narrative out to its logical conclusion - when a grown black man is beaten or killed, as a society, it affects us, sure, but not quite so viscerally. And for many of us it doesn't relaly affect us at all. When asked we might say its sad, but the underlying feeling when a black man is killed is that he's just a part of a rash of these murders. Think about the stereotypes of these murder victims - drug dealer, gang banger, petty criminal. These black men (or, older black women who carry their own stereotypes. Or unnatractive or non-docile black children - see 'Topsy' in Uncle Tom's Cabin) are not sufficiently innocent for us to really mourn them, in our collective consciousness as a nation. We mourn them differently. When a newscaster tuts over them the 'what a waste' is looking backward - he could have been so much had he not driven himself to here, instead of 'What a waste, he was so much, and cut off so young,' the way we feel about our Rue-characters.

Keep in mind, for a moment, that Rue clearly had a strong will to live. And so did Katniss. And that, eventually, one would have had to kill the other if noone else had. If Rue, to save herself and feed her family, had in some alternate version of the story, ended the book by pushing Katniss out of a tree, would we hate Rue? We hate, say, Glimmer, after all.

The horror of the Hunger Games, after all, should not be that it kills innocent children. ITs that that it takes innocent children and makes them into monsters. That is one of the things I loved about the movie (that, in Collins' defense, the structure of the book would not have allowed) - that after Rue dies, you see all these men, all these, essentially, slaves, rise up and start to push over their master's edifice of slavery, not from any kind of blind race hatred, the way we portray these actions now (take, say, the LA Riots and our national understanding of them), but rather out of love, and desperation. You love them, you ache for them, as they rip over the grain scales, and get in fistfights with the riot police. That was one of the victories of the movie for me - it doesn't glamourize social upheaval, it doesn't say that those men made any real difference - they didn't. But it tells that anger and frustration, even violently so, is a real, human emotion, with real, human causes, and that its presence as part of our culture, today, is not simply somethign to be tutted over - its a sign that we have promises that need keeping, broken hearts that need mending, love that needs to be given, apologies to offer.

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Sol Invictus

My cold, bare arms, my ragged throat
  Have never summoned you before --
I know, much more, the light no longer
  Holds the tinder that can burn in me.

But for the sake of midnight, sun,

Rise!

Sol Invictus, epithet of gall!
Unconquerable!
Fire-eyed Napoleon, unconquerable:

Rise!

Thy lips of vital fire, strike into me thy revelation:
"Virtue alone is sure!"

But dark is a virtue, oh my beloved,
  For it wants to end.
Sorrow is virtue,
  For it wants to end.
Jealousy and Anger, those two sallow sisters, too,
  Beneath their shifts are naked virtue,
    For they want to end.

Only Hatred,
Hatred and Pride,
  Feed on themselves -- Ouroboros of vice!
    Two circled snakes, a disc of lost eternity.

And now?

'Tis midnight, oh my love, and in the dark
  All pride will waste and wither,
  Hatred, even, needs the light.

Listen close, thou molten resurrection stone:

The morbid hollow of the night,
  Alone
  Stands
  Pure
And cannot cry, but whimpers:

"Oh thou sun, thou long forgot eternity --


Rise!


Rise!


Rise!"


(Photo by schaaflicht)

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The Death of Emily Dickinson

When Emily Dickinson fell into her final illness (Bright's Disease and its complicatons, most scholars think), she spent it in her tiny bed, in her tiny room, a few feet from the desk where she'd say and copied her poems, and pinned them into fascicles and stuffed the drawers with them. There isn't even, really, a day when you can see her illness began. Practical science,  in its current form, has an aversion to the boundless or the gradual. It wishes disease to fit into lab reports. Disease is not always like that - it can bea slow melting towards where death is in its most natural form, more like falling slowly to sleep than being knocked unconscious. There is the period of settling, the period of pondering, going over the day's events, then that strange dreamy half-state where you are half tethered to consciousness, and the tide of it pulls gently, gently, outward into sleep.

Emily had been to a few doctors, over the years. Her eyesight had been failing for a long time, and in fact, she'd been at some risk of going blind earlier in her life, and had had to make an uncomfortable, unsettling trip to the city to stay at a relative's while being treated by an oculist. But, by now, medicine had had its day. She was nursed by her sister, Lavinia. She wrote letter to friends. She slept a great deal. She felt awful. She almost certainly cried, though the record of this sort of thing is understandably scanty, kidney diseases aren't pleasant. She messed her sheets, she sweat a lot, suffered through fevers. And then, one day, in the Spring, she died.

It was in May. Emily loved the springtime, and in Massachussets, May is the crown of spring (though, to be fair, Emily's poetry shows a playful, familiar affection for March). It was warm enough, by then, that the windows would have been opened off and on, probably even more than normal to air the sick room. She would have smelled the dusty florals of the hawthorn hedge at the edge of her property, she would have smelled the rich balsam-pine smells of the trees next door, where her life-long best friend and sister-in-law lived, no doubt anxious to hear the news of her. Its a wet month, there, she may have smelled the rain. She probably, by then, was not seeing a great deal at all. Perhaps the robins came for her, as she'd written about before.

She was dressed in her own bedroom, and a white coffin was brought in to lie her in, set likely on sawhorses downstairs, in the hall. The Dickinson's gardeners, Irish I believe, would likely have been the ones to come and nail it shut.  They took it to the library, where they had a short funeral. Her long-time correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, read a poem by a different Emily: Emily Bronte. Of all those in the room, it is ironically possible that he knew her the least. Her sister-in-law wrote an obituary, that mentioned her legendary skills as a gardener.

She specifically asked that the servants, with whom she had a close, personal relationship, carry her out the back door. They crossed a meadow. The grass in it would have been high by then, flecked with wildflowers, particularly buttercups. She lay in the box, her eyes set shut, her hands gently cradling flowers she had carefully requested before her death: heliotrope, lady's slipper, wild wood violets. The scent of the heliotrope, thick and vanilla probably slipped out the interstices of the wood. The grass would have swished against the walls, the buttercups tumbled pollen onto the wood. When they arrive at her plot, the pallbearers would have had the late leftovers, perhaps, of damp about their boots and trousers.

And that was that, they lowered her down, they dropped sod into the hole, and Emily's tiny limbs and white dress would, slowly, slowly begin to dissolve into the earth. I like to believe that someone sang over her. Perhaps it was just the birds.

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To Frieda Hughes

(Note: This poem is in response to the beautiful poem by Frieda Hughes that Ms Nymeth recently posted, which has been haunting me and reminding me of my own voyeurism, ever since. Sorry Sylia, sorry Frieda. I meant well) Ms Hughes,

I must apologize,
I am one of the cowards,
Of the vultures,
Ever gnawing at the gristle stripped bones.

I am the worm
Imbibing tender flesh.

No pride in that.

We are but humans,
We, the readers,
We are simply mechanisms,
Gnawing forward, forward
Always to the one
Who speaks without
A crankshaft in her throat.

And if the lady non-machine
Lay in the turf
We earthen wind-ups
Shake our jittered spades
We burrow through the sterile earth
To birth our maggots on
The only flesh
That can accept our eggs.

Forgive we little worms,
There's voyeurism in
Our tin-toothed cogging brains.
We mean no harm.
Someone must disconnect the bits of life
And leave behind the loamy soil
Of history digested -
In digestion, death transformed
Into fertility.

Sincerely,

Jason Gignac

(Image from kevincollins123)

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mother, cell, key

every life
is a tiny room
with one door
and one key
and one order:
never turn the key

wait, it sneers
wait,
wait until
the key is turned for you.

(Image by angus mcdiarmid)

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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway were the first books of Woolf's I ever read. I don't remember which came first (I believe it was To the Lighthouse), but I remember the contrast in my experience of them. Mrs Dalloway was dark, far away, it did no seem to wish me to come in. As a book, it was forbidding and self-contained, a fortress of a book, filled I was sure with something beautiful, something which I could smell and hear at times, but which I was forbidden to see, simply because I was not worthy of the experience. (I've since peeked my eyes just over the fortress wall, mind you, but nonetheless...).

To the Lighthouse was none of these things. It was inscrutable perhaps, yes, but not inscrutable in the way that the interior of a fortress is, none of the feeling of being kept out of a thing. To the Lighthouse had the inscrutability of the sea - vast, eminently available, explorable, considerable, but nonetheless, unknowable - even as we know it. I feel about To the Lighthouse the way boys in old books felt about the sea: that it is a place where souls are forged, where experiences are had, a place with a certain home-ness to it. To the Lighthouse, like the sea, was a lover, or a harsh mistress. Mrs. Dalloway was a cloud, eminently arrayed but ever out of reach.

Over the past month, it's come to my attention from different people that this is not the normal way of things - that most people feel the opposite way, in fact. I want to tell you what I see in To the Lighthouse, that makes me feel at home - unavoidably my little essay will fail, because the very reason that the book is inscrutable is because the experience of immensity is supposed to be indescribable. That is, I guess, what makes it immense. But, I will have, at least, made the attempt.

For me, To the Lighthouse is a book about inbetween places and people. The lighthouse itself is a perfect example of this - it is a building that is at once of the sea and the sky, built on land that barely exists. It clings to earth - it is immersed in sea and sky. The house has a similar story, particularly in the second part, when it is invaded by the sand and the wind, and starts to decay - before being put aright again by the servants. Mrs Ramsay herself is, in many ways, the same sort of symbol - at once her hands are in the practical world, of raising children and worrying over molehills, of setting up love matches and entertaining guests, while her mind, at a moments notice, is lost in the immensities of thought, ranging over the great questions of philosophy with an easy authenticity that paints the efforts of her husband, or Charles Tannsley as what they are - gropings, accidental spelunkings obtained in pursuit of other ends. The towers of this novel are immensely tied into this to me, into this balance between the great and sensual sea, and the immensity of the sky.

Of course, I know that sounds like a kind of paragraph of nonsense, but there is a reason, for me, that it isn't. The lighthouse, the house, Mrs Ramsay (for everyone but herself), the sea, the sky, the tidal regions of the beach, all these twilit places would seem to tease an obvious question - what do they mean? OR to solidify the question more - these things are like life, halfway between the heavens and the grave, and inevitably bound for one or the other (or both, depending on your philosophy). Humans are, after all, this strange mixture of the sensual and the spiritual, and for eons, man has over and over asked the question - why? Why are we here? Why are we what we are? What are we, eminent strugglers, supposed to struggle against?

I think, though, in To the Lighthouse, this is a deceptive question: the very central point of the book, for me, is that the answer doesn't really matter. Asking the purpose of life is like asking the purpose of the sea, or the purpose of a painting, or the purpose of a child. They are things that simply are.

This may sound like simple old-fashioned Atheism - in a sense it is. It is and it isn't. The character of Charles Tansley shows this - he is the 'quintessential atheist' of the book (I put this in quotes because I don't mean to imply that atheists are like this, or like that, simply that the literary IDEA of an atheist is like Charles Tansley). Charles doesn't believe in nothing, rather he believes in believing in nothing. He believes there is no God, whereas the novel simply doesn't bother believing there is a God - or that there isn't. It accepts that there is a world, that is is here, that we are here, that we will die, and other people will live, that none of will accomplish immortality, and then gently, gently, ever so gently, whispers to us that we will live in it anyway. Like Mrs Ramsey, sometimes that will terrify us, sometimes it will comfort us. And that's okay, and there is no answer that will resolve it for us. In a world with no particular purpose, we must define our own, and we can never be wrong - and we can never be right. We simply will all live, try to do things we think are good, try not to do what we think is bad, and then, one day, we will die. We will paint, or write, or fix computers, and perhaps we'll be remembered for a very long time, or perhaps barely a moment, but eventually, we'll be forgotten. Our happiness will not last, but we will, in spite of that - or maybe because of that - be happy for our moment.

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople."
"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."

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The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton

I know I don't do a very good job of living up to my ideals, but social justice is a subject dear to my heart. This shows in my reading, I imagine - I love books that struggle with what it means to be a just society, that highlight injustice, that try to show the road to justice - Upton Sinclair, Victor Hugo, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Karl Marx, Anne Bronte : each of these writers stirs me first and foremost as visionaries trying to imagine a world that is more equitable and just. Even in my admittedly humble work (I fix computers, if you didn't know), the thing that get's me to the office every day is the idea that somehow, my little drop labors might free people from the constraints of ugliness and dehumanization that is sadly such a big part of a post-industrial world. I like to dream, and social justice is the grandest, most beautiful of dreams.

In Fruit of the Tree, with the quiet impartiality of Dame Justice herself, Wharton carefully deconstructs what this dream costs, in real, human sorrow. This is not a story of revolution, but it is akin to one, in that it tells the tale of what must be sacrificed at the altars of progress, and how unsure the outcomes of that sacrifice really are. This doesn't make the book reactionary - Wharton really seems to champion the causes that the characters sacrifice for. But it is brutally, calmly realistic. If you cannot understand how the wealthy class in turn of the century America (or any inequitable society) can have be so blind to the misery that they extracted their wealth from, read this book - it opened my eyes, and gave me a new compassion for those who have wealth, but have a conscience at the same time.

**SPOILERS**

This is the story of two very idealized idealists: John Amherst and Justine Brent. Amherst is a socially-conscious engineer, working in the mills owned by the recently widowed Bessie Langhope. At the beginning an accident has befallen one of Amherst's workers, and he is being cared for by the intelligent, sympathetic young nurse, Justine Brent. The accident is due to the terrible conditions of the mill town, and when Bessie comes to visit the mills for the first time, Amherst sees the opportunity to try to change some of the inequities of the system. Beginning simply with the desire to open Bessie's eyes to the inequities, things progress quickly, and the two are married. The marriage is a difficult one, as Amherst comes to realize that he entered it in large part as a means to the end of improving the mills, and as Bessie ceases to be interested in his larger social questions. This leads to a painful series of events, and an ending that I won't ruin for you, even in a spoiler free section. But sufficeth to say, the book grapples with social justice, euthanasia, women's equality, the value of the individual, and the basic questions of what is and is not a moral act.

**END SPOILERS

This was Wharton's third novel, and lacks some of the polish of, for instance, Age of Innocence (a difficult standard to judge against...). The dialogue feels wooden at times, the characters too consistent, if that makes sense (the idealists are ALWAYS idealists, for instance). But the strength of this novel is that each one of the characters has, by the end of the book, a real soul, full of blacks, greys and whites, and deserving of human respect and pity, even at their ugliest moments. You see how someone can take away the chance for basic schooling and medical care for a town full of people, because they want to build a private luxury gymnasium, without just being a soulless monster. You see how a devotion to seeing good done on a social scale, can make someone treat the people closest to them abominably. You see how good people turn wicked, how morally ambiguous people can strice for moments of heroism.

And in a sense, the absolutes of this book - the extreme idealists for instance - are part of the point. While the book is presented as a tragedy, in a sense, it presents an ideal scenario for social change - the perfect idealist, obtains the means to effect change, then gains total freedom to enact his plans, then gets all the help he could ask for, and even succeeds in his aims, making thousands of lives infinitely better. And in the process, still takes away the greatest possible happiness he himself, and those he loves best, could have ever enjoyed. It's a novel that shows that you cannot really change the world simply through self sacrifice - you inevitably, unavaoidably sacrifice the people you love as well, and for that reason idealism itself takes a special sort of callousness and cruelty - even if it is the road to the best of all possible worlds.

And, while Wharton is NOT perfect, the writing IS vintage Wharton - beautiful, overgrown, rich with a deep layering of gorgeous, fragrant language:

There [the marsh] lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet, ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a jewel-like green where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild rose and bay. Sodden earth adn decaying branches gave forth a sweet odour, as of the aromatic essence embalming a dead summer; and the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled fron, pricked the silence with separate points of sound.

And her careful observation of what it is to be human is laced throughout the entire book:

Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in advance the advice she was perpetually seeking.

Fruit of the Tree was out of print for 90 years after it was first published (there is now an off-brand press edition available through Amazon, I believe). Different places on line describe it as a soap opera, and invariably as one of Wharton's lesser works. But, for it's unique comination of an acute eye, a deep knowledge of the upper class, and an earnest desire to understand why the world has so much trouble changing, this book deserves a revival.

(Image from Stitch)

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The Death Book Hour (Episode 2 - BBADW)

If you saw last week's post from Death and Baby Death on book buying over on Zen Leaf, you'll probably run screaming from this one. Death and Baby Death discuss John Ritter, BBAW, and a new theme song...

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Why do we remember Michael Jackson and J.M. Barrie differently?

It's been a decidedly unpleasant day. A big contrast, indeed, between last night, when @amandapalmer tweeted an impromptu vigil and a tribute song to the death of Michael Jackson, and today at work, where I heard any number of truly embarrassing jokes at Mr. Jackson's expense.
I don't write this post to be an apology for Jackson's life - if nothing else, I don't KNOW enough about Michael Jackson to judge the man, thank God. But, as I considered this today, it suddenly reminded me of another figure: J.M. Barrie.
For those unfamiliar with J.M. Barrie (yes, I'm afraid Finding Neverland was not fully acquainted with fact, I'm led to understand), he was, much like Jackson, a very strange man. In ways that at times were endearing, and others were disturbing (Finding Neverland - which was, by the way, a beautiful movie - glosses past this in the scene during the cricket match). The Telegraph published an interesting article on him, here. But, much like Jackson, the facts are murky, and have been quietly covered over the years.
Again, whether or not we ought to indict Barrie or excuse Jackson is, honestly, outside the realm of my question here. Taking out personal judgement, I am more curious as to what the societal difference is - why can society accept Barrie as a child's hero, and not Jackson? After all, can you imagine a film of Finding Neverland Ranch?
I can think of four basic reasons for the difference:

1) There are substantive differences in the two cases. Again, I'm not a historian. Perhaps the fact in Jackson's molestation cases are clearer than the Barrie history. In this case, perhaps it's excusable to assume the best of Barrie. However, as the Guardian article points out - there are some awfully strange things we know about Barrie. Frankly, it's difficult for me to imagine someone writing some of the lines quoted in the article, today, and being encouraged to hang out with small children in bookstores and libraries.
2) The difference is simply that child sex crimes have become more important in our psyche over the last 100 years. I frequently here about how when our parents were children they didn't think about stuff like child molesters. Fair enough. However, the Edwardian period was famously prudish, and far more sexually aware than me now remember it to be. This was the period of yellow journalism, when reporters were not loath to make up sensationalist tales to sell papers. If Pulitzer felt like he had a story about a famous British children's author being a pedophile, it's difficult to imagine he wouldn't throw it into the paper to sell more copies. Think of, for instance, the coverage of the Oscar Wilde trial, who was at least having sex with boys who were of age.
3) Our national character has changed. We like to make monsters in our popular imagination, and Jackson was an easy target. Fair enough, but in what way have we changed? And why?
4) It's just been a longer time since Barrie. OK, but... the Ormond Street Hospital seemed pretty glad to get the rights to Peter Pan, right when he died, and the government got together and made special provision that the copyright on Peter Pan would never expire.. I'm not sure it would be the same story today...
So, there's the question: Why do you think the popular narrative of Jackson and Barrie are so different?

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