The Mystery of Chapter 3

I dreamed last night about rainbows -- or at least, two ends of one. I was distracted in the dream by some drama I can't remember, and suddenly I looked up to see a faint glimmer of watery color off at the distant horizon. Following it with my eye, I saw the bare suggestion of the entire arc across a vast expanse of sky. The two ends were the most distinct part, and there appeared to be a rainbow within a rainbow. I'm not sure what I felt other than a mild frustration at not being able to see the whole thing more completely.

It may be all the stormy weather we've had recently that suggested this image to my sleeping brain. I remember looking at the sky the other day and thinking conditions seemed right for a rainbow, though all I saw were some scraps of clouds. When I lived in Florida as a little girl, I saw a lot of vivid rainbows; I remember one in particular that I happened to see through the rear window of our family car when we were returning home from the grocery store one evening. It was enormous and very bright, and something about the fact that it was behind us, boldly transforming a rainy sky into something breathtaking behind our backs, has made me remember it all this time.

I remember watching the vision slowly fade and feeling very wistful. That's when my mother told me about the pot of gold you would find if you could only get to the end of the rainbow before it disappeared. That story filled me with the pure and intense yearning you only feel for things that are slightly out of reach. Sometime soon after that I found a picture book featuring a group of children who were chasing the rainbow in pursuit of that very same gold. It had lovely illustrations of the ever elusive rainbow and the plucky children, always arriving a little too late.

Years later, I see a similarity between this emotion and the plight of the unfortunates in Dante's Purgatorio who spend their days contemplating ripe, glistening fruit and sparkling water that have been strategically placed just outside their grasp. (These people were being punished for gluttony, according to Dante. If Purgatory turns out to be real, the tree that blocks my path will most likely dangle Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs and Chocolate Ecstasy ice cream cones.)

Come to think of it, this pursuit of the rainbow is also very similar to the story of the Holy Grail, which appears as a sudden, piercingly sweet vision of loveliness floating above the heads of the court at Camelot. It glides about provocatively before disappearing as suddenly as it came, leaving everyone dazed and creating a delicious unrest among the knights, who are now filled with an overpowering longing to seek it to the ends of the earth.

I'm getting ready to work on the third chapter of my dissertation, which deals in part with the Grail Quest as a labyrinthine journey. Dante will be in there, too. Since finishing my proposal in December, I've left the dissertation strictly alone, waiting for the right opening to find my way back in. In the last week or two, I've noticed my energy for the project returning. For some reason, Chapter 3 has seemed daunting, and the whole idea of the labyrinth in the Middle Ages almost too weighty and complex to think about. That's actually a little strange considering how I love the Grail story and am intrigued by Dante's geography. Certainly writing Chapters 1 and 2 depleted my resources, but in all the months since finishing I haven't felt the slightest urge to jump into Chapter 3 -- none at all until now.

It could be that something is slightly off in the way I approached the first two chapters, and I have gotten off the path a little. It could also be that there is something in this chapter that is too difficult tackle head on. I've been approaching this as an intellectual problem when it is of course more than that (every dissertation is, I think). That could be the reason for dreaming about rainbows on the eve of picking things up again.

Ordinarily I don't like to talk about what I'm working on while I'm doing it, so this kind of self revelation is unusual. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to write a dissertation (an idea that probably occurs to very few people, actually), now you know the truth: scholars are often just as clueless as everyone else.

On the other hand, it could be a lot of fun to unravel The Mystery of Chapter 3. If I were writing a Nancy Drew book, that's what I would call this. Maybe Nancy Drew (another favorite from my childhood) is a good model for the duration of the effort. As I recall, she always got her answers, and didn't stop until she did.