Last year I wrote about Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in April; this year, in keeping with that same spirit of spring, I read a prose retelling of the work. My online hours may have been spent keeping up with current events, and my walks may have entailed enjoying the flowers while tuning out modern noise, but my mind was in the Middle Ages. I wasn't sorry to absent myself, at least sporadically, from some of this week's sound and fury. Going medieval isn't always bad.
I think you need to read at least some of the tales as Chaucer wrote them to get the flavor of the language, even if it slows down your comprehension. One of the most memorable experiences I had in an English class was hearing Middle English verse read out loud while we mastered pronunciation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other works. For the first time, I could hear the underlying rhythms of the English language--hear it clearly as music--with the sense of the words taking second place to the sound. However, if I were teaching The Canterbury Tales, I would also have the students read a modern retelling so that they could enjoy the stories as stories.
To fully appreciate them, it's true: you have to read the entire work, or the bulk of it, and that would probably only take place in a course devoted to Middle English poetry. It's an ambitious project to read them all but worth it. It's not just the stories in themselves, but what they say about the people who tell them, and their listeners, that makes the Tales so much fun. You have, among others, the opening story told by a long-winded knight, a series of unflattering and/or bawdy tales told with the purpose of annoying someone else, the unforgettable forthrightness of the Wife of Bath, the stark morality of the Pardoner's tale of the three wastrels, and the folksy humor of the Nun's Priest's tale of the sprightly Chanticleer who outfoxes the fox.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about "Chaucer's Retractions," which comes at the very end. This is Chaucer, still in character as one of the pilgrims, turning aside, just as the company is approaching its goal, to offer a private speech in defense and/or apology for all his works, including the Tales he has just concluded. In spirit, it's a little like the series finale of some long-running TV show in which of one of the characters wakes up, and you find it was all a dream. After so much irreverence, crudity, and satire, Chaucer in effect takes it all back, just in case there was something in there that might have offended God or man. Of course, his failing to do this until the last dirty joke has been told leads you to question his sincerity, but the seriousness of his prayer also seems to hedge his bets. After all, death could come suddenly, and there was no sense taking any chances. If there's humor in this retraction, it's a dark humor, as I read it, laced with a sense of mortality.
A medieval pilgrim stopping in the woods unavoidably makes me think of Dante's pilgrim, who lost his way in a similar place before seeking his salvation. I'm also jumping ahead a couple of centuries to Shakespeare's Prospero, who, having used the magic arts to regain control of his fate, gives them up in the end, saying, "This rough magic I here abjure." Although Chaucer's purpose, to instruct, seems very different from Prospero's, they are both in effect using their creative power to shape things to their will. All of Chaucer's characters are subject to his whim, just as the inhabitants of Prospero's island are subject to his, until they're released. There's an inevitability to this release, but it's also a little sad, a letting go.
April is a great time to read The Canterbury Tales. You can rest your eyes by looking out the window at the trees leafing out and the flowers budding and put yourself in company with the pilgrims setting out on their journey, which, by the way, begins with crossing a stream. (Is The Canterbury Tales, in some sense, an underworld journey? This is a question I would put to my class of imaginary students, who may someday be actual ones.) I let time elide like that the other day at the coffeehouse while finishing the Tales, and it was as if the fourteenth century and the twenty-first blended together and became one, a Frappuccino of centuries. It was as if no time had passed at all since the pilgrims first gathered at Starbu--, I mean, the Tabard Inn.
Showing posts with label dante. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dante. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Friday, November 6, 2015
Three or Four Views of Florence
I spent some time tonight looking up paintings by artists of the Italian Renaissance described by another writer in her memoir of Italy. Whether it was something in her descriptions that moved me or the power of the paintings themselves speaking through her (or both), I'm not sure--but I made a note last night to get online and look for digital versions of the works. Many of the frescoes, paintings, and statues she mentions are familiar to me from a long-ago art class as well as my own brief visit to Florence years ago, but I hadn't thought about them in a while.
One of my clearest memories from my visit is climbing Giotto's Tower on a sunny afternoon and seeing the hilly Tuscan countryside, already resident in my imagination from that undergraduate art class, unroll in full, three-dimensional life from horizon to horizon. I have been trying to think of the word that describes that experience--it wasn't surreal, or even hyperreal, though it was more than a little magical, like any experience in which something beautiful, imagined, and hoped for turns out actually to exist in the material world. Saying that I had a sense of shocked (delighted) recognition probably comes closest to the truth.
While looking tonight at online versions of Fra Angelico's frescoes in the monastery at San Marco, I started to think I was right about a suspicion I began forming last night that this monastery was also a place I'd visited on my trip. I recall being in an ancient and intensely cold thick-walled building, traipsing around from monk's cell to monk's cell with the tips of my fingertips practically blue, looking at some famous art. The author of the memoir I'm reading was obviously not there in November, since she said nothing about cold and was apparently at leisure to contemplate the paintings without brain freeze or actual frostbite entering the picture (in fact, I believe she was there in late spring). Tuscany was beautiful in the sunshine but also turned out to be surprisingly cold, especially in some of those venerable interiors.
I was only in Florence briefly but formed an impression of an elegant and severe beauty softened by the enfolding countryside. The author of the memoir, who knows Florence intimately, writes of the simple happiness she experienced sitting in public squares, visiting shops, observing architecture and people, and partaking in the rituals of daily life. She made me believe that many of the things I only glimpsed in my brief stay would be there waiting for me should I ever chance to make my way back. Dante, Giotto, cappuccino, gelato--what more could you possibly hope for?
It was only on the heels of reading an excellent crime novel set in Florence that I decided to revisit Ms. Harrison's (also beautifully written) memoir. I picked up the novel at the library a few weeks back, thinking it would be interesting to read something set in a city I had visited and found intriguing. I hardly recognized Florence in the novel, which was written from the point of view of an embittered ex-policeman turned private investigator. Though he obviously loved his city, it was a love without illusions, born of long experience as a police officer. He saw it with warts intact, cheap cafes and sketchy riverside districts included. I believe I imagined him as something of a latter-day Dante, with the poet's somewhat embittered love for a place that had turned its back on him.
Contrasting my memories with the points of view of a fictional Italian PI and an Italian-American memoirist has taught me several things: Florence is prone to devastating floods (I must have missed all those historical markers); there is a place called the Boboli Gardens that evidently didn't figure prominently in our guidebook; I didn't spend nearly enough time just sitting in piazzas; and if I ever go to Florence again, it will surely be in the spring. I hadn't even read Dante in a serious way the last time I was there, so that alone is reason to go back. I trust and believe that the Tuscan landscape is still as beautiful and inspiring as it was 26 years ago, and that my own eye, veteran of many more sunsets, sunrises, and hilltop views since then, will appreciate it even more.
One of my clearest memories from my visit is climbing Giotto's Tower on a sunny afternoon and seeing the hilly Tuscan countryside, already resident in my imagination from that undergraduate art class, unroll in full, three-dimensional life from horizon to horizon. I have been trying to think of the word that describes that experience--it wasn't surreal, or even hyperreal, though it was more than a little magical, like any experience in which something beautiful, imagined, and hoped for turns out actually to exist in the material world. Saying that I had a sense of shocked (delighted) recognition probably comes closest to the truth.
While looking tonight at online versions of Fra Angelico's frescoes in the monastery at San Marco, I started to think I was right about a suspicion I began forming last night that this monastery was also a place I'd visited on my trip. I recall being in an ancient and intensely cold thick-walled building, traipsing around from monk's cell to monk's cell with the tips of my fingertips practically blue, looking at some famous art. The author of the memoir I'm reading was obviously not there in November, since she said nothing about cold and was apparently at leisure to contemplate the paintings without brain freeze or actual frostbite entering the picture (in fact, I believe she was there in late spring). Tuscany was beautiful in the sunshine but also turned out to be surprisingly cold, especially in some of those venerable interiors.
I was only in Florence briefly but formed an impression of an elegant and severe beauty softened by the enfolding countryside. The author of the memoir, who knows Florence intimately, writes of the simple happiness she experienced sitting in public squares, visiting shops, observing architecture and people, and partaking in the rituals of daily life. She made me believe that many of the things I only glimpsed in my brief stay would be there waiting for me should I ever chance to make my way back. Dante, Giotto, cappuccino, gelato--what more could you possibly hope for?
It was only on the heels of reading an excellent crime novel set in Florence that I decided to revisit Ms. Harrison's (also beautifully written) memoir. I picked up the novel at the library a few weeks back, thinking it would be interesting to read something set in a city I had visited and found intriguing. I hardly recognized Florence in the novel, which was written from the point of view of an embittered ex-policeman turned private investigator. Though he obviously loved his city, it was a love without illusions, born of long experience as a police officer. He saw it with warts intact, cheap cafes and sketchy riverside districts included. I believe I imagined him as something of a latter-day Dante, with the poet's somewhat embittered love for a place that had turned its back on him.
Contrasting my memories with the points of view of a fictional Italian PI and an Italian-American memoirist has taught me several things: Florence is prone to devastating floods (I must have missed all those historical markers); there is a place called the Boboli Gardens that evidently didn't figure prominently in our guidebook; I didn't spend nearly enough time just sitting in piazzas; and if I ever go to Florence again, it will surely be in the spring. I hadn't even read Dante in a serious way the last time I was there, so that alone is reason to go back. I trust and believe that the Tuscan landscape is still as beautiful and inspiring as it was 26 years ago, and that my own eye, veteran of many more sunsets, sunrises, and hilltop views since then, will appreciate it even more.
Friday, June 21, 2013
A Path, a Compass, a Map
I guess it isn't surprising how often I end up writing about walking, since I do a lot of walking. It's even sort of a professional interest, because of labyrinths. But I read a book this week that doesn't seem to be about either labyrinths or walking, in the everyday sense of walking. I meant to read Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail last year, when it came out, but I got sidetracked. It's probably just as well, since it means more to me now than it would have a year ago.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and the events of an actual life a thousand times more compelling than the best-crafted novel ever written. Such is Wild, a memoir of a woman's solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in sort of a desperate, intuitive belief that something good would come out of it. As Miss Strayed tells it, she was in a Midwestern outdoor store buying a shovel when she picked up a guidebook for walkers of the PCT. She glanced at the book, then put it back, but something about the cover image of mountains and sky spoke to her mysteriously, and while driving to her home in Minneapolis, she was captured by the idea of hiking the trail herself.
It was a somewhat unexpected decision for someone who had never gone backpacking. But at the age of 26, battered by the loss of her mother to cancer, the breakup of her family, a marriage that had come unglued, an unexpected pregnancy, and a mounting sense of turmoil and emptiness, Strayed undertook the journey in a bid to find answers or least have a chance to think things through. As frequently happens, the reality was very different than what she had imagined.
As a novice hiker, Strayed had little idea of how to properly pack and ended up carrying a load that felt like "a Volkswagen Beetle" on her back. Men she met on the trail had trouble even picking up her pack, much less understanding how she managed to walk with it. Her hiking boots blistered her feet and rubbed them raw, a problem that persisted throughout the trip. She had little money, and despite the carefully chosen protein bars and dehydrated food, was always hungry. She learned to use a compass along the way, crossed rockslides and ice fields, edged around rattlesnakes, encountered bears, mastered the intricacies of a wayward water purifier, slept alone in a tent, worried about mountain lions, and occasionally sang to herself.
She had imagined walking along in soothing solitude, breathing in deeply and letting the beauty of the passing scenery heal the broken places. What actually happened was that pushing through the difficulties -- the skin lacerations, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the fears, the dangers, and the mistakes -- healed her. She discovered that she could stand on her own two feet by continuing to put one in front of the other, and the beauty of the wilderness, experienced at unexpected moments in bursts of clarity, was that much sweeter for being attained so dearly.
There are many ways to interpret the story. In one way, it's a tale about learning to mother (and father) oneself. It's also a hero's journey, one that ends with the book itself, the author's "boon" to the rest of us. While it might not be apparent, the PCT, though linear on a map, is experienced as a maze in which choices must often be made. No two hikers ever experience the trail the same way. As Miss Strayed herself seems to invoke Dante early on when she speaks of feeling lost in the woods of her life, I have to tell you that I thought of The Divine Comedy often while reading this story. Like Dante the pilgrim, Miss Strayed found that, paradoxically, the only way out of the woods was the long way, the via dolorosa, through the Inferno.
The author is candid about her struggles and shortcomings and the naivete with which she began her journey. It's borne in upon the reader that it was sheer determination (and luck) that saw her through. There was every possibility for things to end in disaster. Still, events demonstrate that her intuition to undertake a difficult task to find her measure was a good one. I'm tempted to report that, like Ginger Rogers, Miss Strayed did everything a man could do, except backwards and in heels, but that's not really true, except that it is, sort of. Unlike Dante, she didn't have a Virgil constantly beside her in the tough bits, unless you count the guidebooks she carried. She found mentors along the way, but it was up to her to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide for herself what kind of trip it would be.
I doubt that I would ever hike the PCT on my own, but I recognize the impulse that led the author to do it, and I admire it. There are some things you just have to figure out for yourself. I started the book with tears at the descriptions of Miss Strayed's early sorrows and losses and ended it with tears of a different kind, and that's never a bad way to end a story.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and the events of an actual life a thousand times more compelling than the best-crafted novel ever written. Such is Wild, a memoir of a woman's solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in sort of a desperate, intuitive belief that something good would come out of it. As Miss Strayed tells it, she was in a Midwestern outdoor store buying a shovel when she picked up a guidebook for walkers of the PCT. She glanced at the book, then put it back, but something about the cover image of mountains and sky spoke to her mysteriously, and while driving to her home in Minneapolis, she was captured by the idea of hiking the trail herself.
It was a somewhat unexpected decision for someone who had never gone backpacking. But at the age of 26, battered by the loss of her mother to cancer, the breakup of her family, a marriage that had come unglued, an unexpected pregnancy, and a mounting sense of turmoil and emptiness, Strayed undertook the journey in a bid to find answers or least have a chance to think things through. As frequently happens, the reality was very different than what she had imagined.
As a novice hiker, Strayed had little idea of how to properly pack and ended up carrying a load that felt like "a Volkswagen Beetle" on her back. Men she met on the trail had trouble even picking up her pack, much less understanding how she managed to walk with it. Her hiking boots blistered her feet and rubbed them raw, a problem that persisted throughout the trip. She had little money, and despite the carefully chosen protein bars and dehydrated food, was always hungry. She learned to use a compass along the way, crossed rockslides and ice fields, edged around rattlesnakes, encountered bears, mastered the intricacies of a wayward water purifier, slept alone in a tent, worried about mountain lions, and occasionally sang to herself.
She had imagined walking along in soothing solitude, breathing in deeply and letting the beauty of the passing scenery heal the broken places. What actually happened was that pushing through the difficulties -- the skin lacerations, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the fears, the dangers, and the mistakes -- healed her. She discovered that she could stand on her own two feet by continuing to put one in front of the other, and the beauty of the wilderness, experienced at unexpected moments in bursts of clarity, was that much sweeter for being attained so dearly.
There are many ways to interpret the story. In one way, it's a tale about learning to mother (and father) oneself. It's also a hero's journey, one that ends with the book itself, the author's "boon" to the rest of us. While it might not be apparent, the PCT, though linear on a map, is experienced as a maze in which choices must often be made. No two hikers ever experience the trail the same way. As Miss Strayed herself seems to invoke Dante early on when she speaks of feeling lost in the woods of her life, I have to tell you that I thought of The Divine Comedy often while reading this story. Like Dante the pilgrim, Miss Strayed found that, paradoxically, the only way out of the woods was the long way, the via dolorosa, through the Inferno.
The author is candid about her struggles and shortcomings and the naivete with which she began her journey. It's borne in upon the reader that it was sheer determination (and luck) that saw her through. There was every possibility for things to end in disaster. Still, events demonstrate that her intuition to undertake a difficult task to find her measure was a good one. I'm tempted to report that, like Ginger Rogers, Miss Strayed did everything a man could do, except backwards and in heels, but that's not really true, except that it is, sort of. Unlike Dante, she didn't have a Virgil constantly beside her in the tough bits, unless you count the guidebooks she carried. She found mentors along the way, but it was up to her to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide for herself what kind of trip it would be.
I doubt that I would ever hike the PCT on my own, but I recognize the impulse that led the author to do it, and I admire it. There are some things you just have to figure out for yourself. I started the book with tears at the descriptions of Miss Strayed's early sorrows and losses and ended it with tears of a different kind, and that's never a bad way to end a story.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Don't Panic! It's That Fake Synchronicity Again
I cannot explain everything that happens around me, but I can vouch for an uptick in strange occurences and odd synchronicities going back several years now. As a Jungian, I shouldn't be bothered by this, since synchronicity is the stock-in-trade of Jung's philosophy -- except that I don't believe most of it is genuine.
I wrote recently about the car accident I was in back in April. The next week, my cousin sent an email saying that my brother, who lives in another state, had been hit by an SUV driven by someone who was upset with him (my brother isn't saying anything, and neither is anyone else in the family). We haven't been able to verify what happened, which in itself is odd. Did it happen, or didn't it? You wouldn't think establishing the simple truth would be so difficult, but it is.
I've long been accustomed to noticing people hanging about who seem out of place. The first time it happened, I was in an upscale sandwich shop having lunch and reading the life of Buddha for a class. I was so engrossed in the book that I didn't look up for a long time, and when I did, there was a rather thuggish young man sitting directly across from me, engaged in . . . not much of anything, except sitting there looking thuggish. The thought instantly came into my head that there was something unwholesome in his manner and that he just looked wrong. I left a few minutes later, and he didn't bother me, but the incident stuck in my mind. Many odd things were happening at my workplace then, and this item seemed bracketed with them somehow.
He was only the first of many others . . . the man who stared so persistently as I had lunch at yet another sandwich shop and then followed me outside, talking animatedly on his cell phone and staring; the weird guy with the ferret face who tried to engage me in a conversation about pie as I was leaving Gumbo Ya Ya; the slickly handsome but vaguely demonic stranger who arrived at the elevator in the parking garage of my hotel at the same time I did; the oddly abrasive chick who crashed the Jane Austen Book Club and then skulked around the entrance as I was leaving the store; the low-rent Michael Fassbender look-alike who showed up at Starbucks the day after I watched Jane Eyre on video.
That's just life in the city, you say -- you're bound to meet with all kinds of characters. Well, maybe. If it happened once in a while, I'd agree with you, but all the time?
Speaking of look-alikes, I've also noticed, more than once, people who looked remarkably like other people I know. One of the most striking incidents occurred a couple of years ago as I was waiting for a train with two friends in San Francisco. I had been to a performance by Dave Alvin at Slim's a night or two before. When the next train pulled up, a man who looked incredibly similar to Dave, down to his height and facial hair and cowboy hat, got off right in front of us. It was not Dave, but it's hard to believe anyone could look (and dress) that much like him without doing it on purpose (unless it was Dave Alvin night in San Francisco and no one told me). Why would someone do such a thing, you inquire? Don't ask me. It was freaking weird, though.
And then there's the classmate of mine (or her twin), who has popped up in the oddest of places. I might think I was imagining that, since the hair was always different, except for that time in New Mexico at the all-night gas station when the fellow with her looked like the boyfriend she'd introduced me to one time. Well, if it was her, why didn't she acknowledge you, you ask? Why did she speak to you like you were a stranger? I don't know. You might as well ask why her hair was that strange shade of pink.
Then there's my "haunted" apartment. I know it's not really haunted, but there are enough unexplained cracking and pinging noises, sometimes emanating from innocent objects, to make you wonder about poltergeists. The lights blink mysteriously, although they never used to. And strangest of all are the popping and trilling noises in my ears. I've had ringing in my ears for a long time, and I always put it down to congestion or something mechanical like that, but the chirps and trills I hear nowadays are different, like electronic pulses. It's like something out of James Bond, only less fun.
I've lost count of the number of times perfect strangers spoke to me almost as if they knew me. I used to wonder if some of them were trying to tell me something, but I no longer bother. If someone has something to tell me, they'd better just straight up say it.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the tradition of the bardo, a liminal state reached by a person who is in between two earthly lives. In this state, the person encounters all kinds of gods and demons, some of them benign in appearance and some of them hideous, but they are in fact all deceptive. Before death (and while dying), the person is given instructions on how to handle them and is reminded above all of their illusory nature. Some of the people I've encountered remind me of these bardo beings. I'm thinking also of Dante's Inferno, where things get progressively freakier the further Dante and Virgil descend. Before they know it, they've even reversed directions, so that instead of climbing down they're climbing up, emerging into the cave in Purgatory head first. It's all very matrixy, as life in general seems to be these days.
If anything like this has happened to you and you want my advice, the only thing I can say, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, is "Don't Panic!" It's just the bardo, and we assume it will pass. Rest assured there is a logical explanation, and accept no substitutes. I have no idea what's up with all the derring-do, just as I have no idea why the young women in the downtown grocer's seemed to think it was uproarious when the Hall and Oates song "Private Eyes" was playing (at an earsplitting volume) while I was in the store this morning. But store clerks are not the boss of me, just so you know.
I don't remember signing up for a spy caper, although that's what I feel like I'm in. A family member told me the other day that she's scared and doesn't feel safe either at home or in public. I say this so you know I'm not treating this as a joke, even though it sometimes feels like one. Bardo-spy caper-matrix-inferno-whatever -- all things must pass. I may not know the answers, but I know when someone's acting the fool.
I wrote recently about the car accident I was in back in April. The next week, my cousin sent an email saying that my brother, who lives in another state, had been hit by an SUV driven by someone who was upset with him (my brother isn't saying anything, and neither is anyone else in the family). We haven't been able to verify what happened, which in itself is odd. Did it happen, or didn't it? You wouldn't think establishing the simple truth would be so difficult, but it is.
I've long been accustomed to noticing people hanging about who seem out of place. The first time it happened, I was in an upscale sandwich shop having lunch and reading the life of Buddha for a class. I was so engrossed in the book that I didn't look up for a long time, and when I did, there was a rather thuggish young man sitting directly across from me, engaged in . . . not much of anything, except sitting there looking thuggish. The thought instantly came into my head that there was something unwholesome in his manner and that he just looked wrong. I left a few minutes later, and he didn't bother me, but the incident stuck in my mind. Many odd things were happening at my workplace then, and this item seemed bracketed with them somehow.
He was only the first of many others . . . the man who stared so persistently as I had lunch at yet another sandwich shop and then followed me outside, talking animatedly on his cell phone and staring; the weird guy with the ferret face who tried to engage me in a conversation about pie as I was leaving Gumbo Ya Ya; the slickly handsome but vaguely demonic stranger who arrived at the elevator in the parking garage of my hotel at the same time I did; the oddly abrasive chick who crashed the Jane Austen Book Club and then skulked around the entrance as I was leaving the store; the low-rent Michael Fassbender look-alike who showed up at Starbucks the day after I watched Jane Eyre on video.
That's just life in the city, you say -- you're bound to meet with all kinds of characters. Well, maybe. If it happened once in a while, I'd agree with you, but all the time?
Speaking of look-alikes, I've also noticed, more than once, people who looked remarkably like other people I know. One of the most striking incidents occurred a couple of years ago as I was waiting for a train with two friends in San Francisco. I had been to a performance by Dave Alvin at Slim's a night or two before. When the next train pulled up, a man who looked incredibly similar to Dave, down to his height and facial hair and cowboy hat, got off right in front of us. It was not Dave, but it's hard to believe anyone could look (and dress) that much like him without doing it on purpose (unless it was Dave Alvin night in San Francisco and no one told me). Why would someone do such a thing, you inquire? Don't ask me. It was freaking weird, though.
And then there's the classmate of mine (or her twin), who has popped up in the oddest of places. I might think I was imagining that, since the hair was always different, except for that time in New Mexico at the all-night gas station when the fellow with her looked like the boyfriend she'd introduced me to one time. Well, if it was her, why didn't she acknowledge you, you ask? Why did she speak to you like you were a stranger? I don't know. You might as well ask why her hair was that strange shade of pink.
Then there's my "haunted" apartment. I know it's not really haunted, but there are enough unexplained cracking and pinging noises, sometimes emanating from innocent objects, to make you wonder about poltergeists. The lights blink mysteriously, although they never used to. And strangest of all are the popping and trilling noises in my ears. I've had ringing in my ears for a long time, and I always put it down to congestion or something mechanical like that, but the chirps and trills I hear nowadays are different, like electronic pulses. It's like something out of James Bond, only less fun.
I've lost count of the number of times perfect strangers spoke to me almost as if they knew me. I used to wonder if some of them were trying to tell me something, but I no longer bother. If someone has something to tell me, they'd better just straight up say it.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the tradition of the bardo, a liminal state reached by a person who is in between two earthly lives. In this state, the person encounters all kinds of gods and demons, some of them benign in appearance and some of them hideous, but they are in fact all deceptive. Before death (and while dying), the person is given instructions on how to handle them and is reminded above all of their illusory nature. Some of the people I've encountered remind me of these bardo beings. I'm thinking also of Dante's Inferno, where things get progressively freakier the further Dante and Virgil descend. Before they know it, they've even reversed directions, so that instead of climbing down they're climbing up, emerging into the cave in Purgatory head first. It's all very matrixy, as life in general seems to be these days.
If anything like this has happened to you and you want my advice, the only thing I can say, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, is "Don't Panic!" It's just the bardo, and we assume it will pass. Rest assured there is a logical explanation, and accept no substitutes. I have no idea what's up with all the derring-do, just as I have no idea why the young women in the downtown grocer's seemed to think it was uproarious when the Hall and Oates song "Private Eyes" was playing (at an earsplitting volume) while I was in the store this morning. But store clerks are not the boss of me, just so you know.
I don't remember signing up for a spy caper, although that's what I feel like I'm in. A family member told me the other day that she's scared and doesn't feel safe either at home or in public. I say this so you know I'm not treating this as a joke, even though it sometimes feels like one. Bardo-spy caper-matrix-inferno-whatever -- all things must pass. I may not know the answers, but I know when someone's acting the fool.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Earthbound Angels
Two reasons to feel happy: I got an email from a potential reader for my dissertation committee, and I just finished The Divine Comedy, all 100 cantos. Either of these is cause for celebration, so with both, I should be in seventh heaven. Or, as Dante would probably put me, somewhere between the Sphere of Saturn and the Sphere of the Fixed Stars.
The geography in Paradiso is hard to get a grip on, and I've been puzzling over it. Rather than following a path, Dante and Beatrice just seem to float upwards and meet people in the neighborhood, like St. Bonaventure, John the Evangelist, and the angel Gabriel. Some of the passages are beautiful, as when Dante describes the dazzling river of light and the view of the Earth from a great height, but mostly it's hard to visualize, unlike the torrid scenes in Inferno and the less chilling but still vivid episodes in Purgatorio.
Dante recognizes this difficulty, because at the beginning of Paradiso he calls on Apollo, the god of poetry, to help him describe what he acknowledges is beyond the power of words to convey.
If I were to pick the place in Dante's entire landscape where I'd rather be, it would not be Heaven but the Earthly Paradise, at the peak of Mount Purgatory. This is the actual Garden of Eden, and it has flowering trees, scented grass, and clear streams; you can walk around, pick fruit, and feel the breeze on your skin. It seems a more comfortable place, more fleshed out and human, than Paradiso. This is not where Dante wants you to stay, but even he admits that few will be able to follow him when he crosses the border into Heaven.
This whole thing for me goes back to Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the heady intellectual god of astronomy, epic poetry, and mathematics; Dionysus is the god of earthbound pleasures, of wine, song, and the loosening of boundaries. Apollo is more severe; I imagine he has a crew-cut and looks like an airline pilot; Dionysus has long flowing locks and looks like Roger Daltrey. You are more likely to encounter Apollo in a space lab and Dionysus in a blues club. In some circles, Dionysus has a bad reputation, but he has his place in the scheme of things.
Since Apollo is a sky god, it's natural that Dante calls on him. Nowhere do I hear him calling on Dionysus. I think that's part of the problem with Dante's vision, that everything is directed toward the spirit and not enough toward the human world, which includes shadows as well as light. For Heaven to seem real, it should have street buskers in addition to popes. In Paradiso, it's a little top-heavy on fathers of the Church and medieval princes.
I'm thinking about a movie I once saw called Wings of Desire, in which an angel falls in love with a mortal woman, a trapeze artist. In this film, the angels are beautiful, compassionate beings, but their bodiless existence is very lonely. This angel, Damiel, longs to experience the world of the senses the way humans do. He slums at rock concerts and watches Marion, the trapeze girl, tenderly. He is moving in the opposite direction from Dante, trying not to reach the Empyrean, but the Earth. He finally gets his wish and falls from the sky with a clunk, his wings suddenly metallic and heavy. As I remember it, he is overwhelmed by the experience of holding a cup of coffee.
Come to think of it, this movie was directed by Wim Wenders, whose film, "The Soul of a Man," made such an impression on me when it was on PBS as part of The Blues series several years ago. It was eerie and mystical and featured a haunting performance of Blind Willie Johnson's "John the Revelator" that I still have stuck in my head. Apparently Willie Johnson got to a part of Heaven that Dante missed but met some of the same people, just singing different songs.
If it wasn't so late, I'd eat another piece of chocolate.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Dante vs. Bad Blake
I'm watching movie stars walk down the red carpet in the rain outside the Kodak Theatre. That's OK, it was raining the day I was there, too. I took a $20 tour when I was in L.A. and got to practice my own red carpet walk, though what I'll need it for is unclear -- unless they start giving out Oscars to librarians. Well, you never know.
In between bouts of reading The Divine Comedy this weekend, I made it out to see Crazy Heart in an attempt to catch up on Oscar-nominated films. That movie is a sneaky one, in my opinion. It's a quiet character study and doesn't seem to have a lot of fireworks, BUT . . . I walked out of the theater thinking, wow, I didn't see that coming. The song, "The Weary Kind," was in my head all day yesterday. Meanwhile, I finished "Inferno" last night and read the first nine cantos of "Purgatorio" this morning. I've don't usually associate Jeff Bridges with Dante, but that's what happens when you mix genres.
When Dante goes off the path at the start of the poem, he's hopelessly lost until Beatrice sends him a guide. He winds through nine circles of hell and climbs the steep mountain of Purgatory on his way to Paradise with her image always before him.
If not for Beatrice, Dante's downhill slide would have ended badly. Virgil tells Cato, in the first canto of "Purgatorio," "This man had yet to see his final evening; but, through his folly, little time was left before he did--he was so close to it." The nature of Dante's difficulty isn't stated, but it's clear he has lost his compass. He is middle-aged and worn down by personal turmoil -- a lot like country music outlaw Bad Blake in Crazy Heart (this is where Jeff Bridges comes in).
Bad Blake is something like the character in Chris Smither's song, "Don't Call Me Stranger," who says, "I'm not evil, I'm just bad." He's a sympathetic character in many ways, with a wry sense of humor and an affable nature. His main problem is whiskey. Nevertheless, despite being too drunk to stand in one scene, he remembers to dedicate a song to the stranger who befriended him earlier that day; he remembers the man's name, and his wife's name. I knew that whether he remembered or forgot to do this would say a lot about him, and it did.
Bad is wandering in his own dark wood. This really becomes an issue when he meets Jean, a smart and pretty music writer. Suddenly, he's caught. "I wanna talk about how bad you make this room look. I never knew what a dump it was until you came in here" is Bad's version of Dante's "Her eyes surpassed the splendor of the star's," etc. Bad and Jean begin a love affair, and Bad shows a softer side. His songs start to sound different, too.
Unfortunately, Bad's addiction to alcohol is at least as strong as his growing love for Jean. When he loses sight of her little boy one day while drinking, she puts an end to things. Despite the sympathy Bad engenders, it's obvious she can't do anything else. This event shocks Bad into confronting his alcoholism and inaugurates a new phase in his life. Eventually, even his musical fortunes improve as one of his new songs becomes a hit and a moneymaker.
Jean is behind all this, even though she has refused to see Bad again. Months pass before they meet, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert!). To Bad's surprise (and mine) she is now married to someone else. However, Bad has grown up; he accepts the news gracefully and grants Jean the interview she asks for. They walk off together as the camera pans to take in the wider landscape. It's all very noble -- and heartbreaking!
In a way, Crazy Heart is not a tragedy; Bad has a lot more going for him at the end than he did at the beginning. Like Dante, he's back on the path. But it's a bittersweet victory because it comes too late to save his romance with Jean, the thing that started it all. I sometimes complain about movies being too "Hollywood," but I wanted the Hollywood ending on this one.
Actually, Dante has nothing on Bad in the romance department. He didn't get a Hollywood ending either, because Beatrice was already dead by the time he got lost in the wood. It's her spirit that guides him. Although, like Bad, he has a reunion with his lost love, it's only temporary, and he must eventually continue without her. Like Bad, Dante derives artistic inspiration from his beloved, who acts as a kind of Muse. But I wonder if Dante would have traded The Divine Comedy for another crack at Beatrice. Maybe, and maybe not, since his poetic stature obviously meant a lot to him (he modestly mentions his own greatness in the poem). And, after all, he did get a Masterpiece of World Literature out of it.
This is where I think Bad Blake, an earthier kind of guy, differs from Dante. His only tour of hell, heaven, and points in between is the one he has in the here and now, and it's enough for him. I'm pretty sure he would have traded the song and the success to have Jean back. I'm with him.
Sorry, Dante, I love you, and you're in my dissertation, but Bad trumps you on that one.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Popcorn and Apocalypse
I started reading Borges' Labyrinths this week, in the midst of a spell of bitter cold weather and gray days. Borges is no Jimmy Buffett. He's not the guy to cajole you out of the January blues, but his book has been staring at me accusingly for some time from the top of a stack of dissertation reading. The silent reproach only got worse after January 1, so on Monday, I dutifully picked the book up and began reading on my lunch hour. The stories are clever and intriguing but usually quite dark. Yikes, just the thing for a vitamin D deficiency.
Last night I did a smart thing and watched Kenneth Branaugh's version of As You Like It, which had the Forest of Arden set in Japan, for some reason. It didn't matter, since the cast was charming and all the lovers ended up with the right people at the finale. A great antidote to the winter blahs.
This morning, I decided to get my reading and chores done early so I could go out to a movie and maybe take a walk. It worked out fine, except that the movie I chose to see was The Road. I had a feeling it was going to be rough going, and it was. It's well-made and well-acted but very, very harrowing. I realized toward the end that I was sitting a little twisted in my seat, as if unable to face it head-on. Popcorn and a cherry coke seemed totally beside the point; it was an underworld journey from beginning to end, and I escaped into daylight feeling extremely somber.
Some people have compared this story to a Homeric odyssey, but I think it's closer in tone to Dante's Inferno, crossed perhaps with Childe Roland. The end reminded me of the last scene in Inferno, where Dante has gone as low as he can go, only to find himself -- without changing direction -- climbing out and up, and seeing the stars.
The same thing happened to me when I walked out of the theater into bright sunlight. I decided that a walk was more important than ever since I needed the illumination in more ways than one. I was muffled up in warm attire, and 19 degrees didn't seem so bad under patches of blue sky (and without cannibals chasing me). I thought about the film's post-apocalyptic vision and was just happy to see the familiar neighborhood quiet under the snow, to smell woodsmoke, and to see my own path down a westward running street glowing with reflected light as I walked straight toward the sun.
I appreciate the working of myth in art and life and the mirroring that takes place, but enough is enough with the minotaurs and dark descents for one week. I came home, fixed pot roast with vegetables, danced to the Blasters in my living room, and ate some dark chocolate with ginger. When I turned the radio on, the song playing was "California Dreamin.' " Right now, I'm listening to Italian pop music on the Putumayo World Music Hour and thinking about how this morning was the last eight o'clock sunrise for this winter. Tomorrow, sunrise comes at 7:59, and since the sunsets have already started coming later, it won't be long before the days are noticeably longer.
It's always darkest before the light, but next week, I'm going to see a comedy.
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