Wordplay Indulges in Broad Generalizations. You’re Welcome.

With last week’s post, I thought I had gotten Aphrodite and Eros and desserts and all out of my system, but that does not seem to be the case. I know this because I keep finding myself looking up pictures of the most elegant desserts I can find on the Internet. Of course, you cool kids know that when we speak of Aphrodite, we are speaking of more than romantic love. Aphrodite encompasses luxuries and indulgences of all types: fine wines, beauty, fashion, flowers, and, of course, desserts. If you’re not sure how this works, or what the goddess of love has to do with any of this, think of it this way: Aphrodite encompasses romance, and all of the above are considered enhancements or accompaniments to romance. And certainly, it is quite all right—healthy, actually—to fall in love with yourself and to treat yourself with appropriate indulgences as needed.

I know that my readers understand this because reductionism is a kind of sin in depth psychology, and if you follow this blog, that means you have some appreciation for the nuances of the soul. In mythology, too, it’s unusual for simple mathematics to rear its head: rarely does “this” equal “that” in any kind of neatly delineated way. Aphrodite and Eros reign over an entire class of experiences, not just sensual love, and that includes a group of things we might categorize as “the finer things in life.” Most people realize that life is made up of not just one or two but a variety of different types of experiences. “To everything, there is a season,” as Ecclesiastes tells us.

Nevertheless, just as people often have one or two qualities predominating in their makeup, so do places. L.A., for instance, is one of the most Aphrodite places I’ve ever seen, and Lexington, KY, (where I live now) is one of the least. There’s nothing unusual about a place or a person having a dominant cast to it, but it’s also true that whatever is undervalued or outside the comfort zone tends to go into the shadow. Thus many people have the perception that L.A. is an anti-intellectual place and that Kentucky is a very hearth, home, and family type of place. I’ve spent enough time in Kentucky to know that there’s a lot of truth in this perception and also to feel that people here have a suspicion of “Aphrodite.” It’s not that they don’t feel it, it’s that they’re not quite at home with it. It seems like frippery, perhaps, or something that might lead you astray, away from the things that really matter: hearth, home, family, and God. Of course, if it weren’t for Aphrodite, there wouldn’t be children or families, but somehow Aphrodite seems to get divorced from the rest of the process, as if she had nothing to do with it at all, and Demeter rules the roost.

My current preoccupation with Aphrodite springs, I’m certain, from my current experiences. If you ever find yourself living in your car and getting by from paycheck to paycheck, you may discover, as I have, that a healthy person eventually rebels against all that cheapism and tries to seek balance as best it can. You throw a chocolate bar into the grocery cart once in a while or check into a hotel to experience cool sheets, pillows, and air conditioning. A person who lives in his or her intellect much of the time (Athena/Apollo) will, at the best of times, seek out sensory enjoyment just to stay in balance, and if you’re living in very reduced circumstances, it doesn’t become less important but rather more. Certainly, it’s possible to have too much Aphrodite in one’s life, which amounts to overindulgence; it’s also quite possible to have too little, which amounts to poverty.

So it was that, being off work today and still thinking about dessert, no matter how hard I tried to find other “more important” things to read about, I decided to set myself a task: to discover an Internet photo of the most luxurious fall dessert not involving pumpkin that was out there to be found. This was how I made what was, to me, an interesting observation. The majority of fall desserts that don’t involve pumpkin contain apples, and no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find an apple dessert that seemed luxurious in the same way a profiterole or chocolate mousse is. (An exception might be a galette, simply because the French have a deft way of putting Aphrodite into their food that does not seem to come as easily to most Americans.) Vast quantities of cinnamon, sugar, butter, and cream notwithstanding, all the apple desserts I saw, as delicious and appealing as they looked, seemed wholesome rather than gourmet, and I think this has to do with the apple itself. Introduce an apple into a dessert, and you’re suddenly speaking of harvest, Grandma’s kitchen, and the farm rather than of luxury.

So, here’s my contribution to world peace: 1. Aphrodite, so often either overvalued, maligned, or misunderstood, is probably most to be feared when overvalued, maligned, or misunderstood. 2. American culture has a Puritan cast to it that gives Aphrodite sort of a bad name here, but this possibly diminishes the further you get from New England. 3. If you require an indulgent dessert with apples in it, you might have to go as far as France. 4. Kentuckians are great at getting in the harvest but suck at experiencing (or creating) sensory delight. 5. People in L.A. fear being ugly or wearing their pants too loose as much as the rest of us would fear the plague. 6. It often costs more to make things beautiful, but the payoff in psychological well-being is probably vastly underrated.

Shadows and Mirrors

I saw an article online a while ago that, in honor of Shakespeare's birthday, listed his Top Ten insults. Apparently, there's a tradition of doing this every year, since I found similar lists in various publications from years past. That started me thinking about what Shakespeare means to me and whether I could compile a list of my own--Favorite Shakespearean Moments, or something like that.

I remember someone saying to me once that she wondered if people pretended to like Shakespeare more than they do because it seemed to be expected of them. Maybe that happens sometimes, but I think the Shakespearean allure is very real and due to a variety of factors, including the fun of costume drama, the power of his language (which sometimes catches people unaware), and the appeal of his sense of humor.

I can recall many hours spent in a local park on warm summer nights as the annual Shakespeare festival played to a large audience of people of all ages. Gathered together in the humid dark, with trees framing the stage and crickets trilling in the background, everyone seemed to fall into the spirit of things, willingly entering Shakespeare's world for an evening, despite the time, distance, and nuances of language separating us from him. These evenings were always festive; even children seemed to respond to the pratfalls and physical comedy though they may not necessarily have understood the plots.

As with many people, the first Shakespeare play I ever read was Romeo and Juliet, which I still enjoy. Of the other tragedies, I like Hamlet best; of the comedies, it's hard to pick just one, but maybe A Midsummer Night's Dream would do for a favorite. In high school, I once had to memorize and recite Hamlet's soliloquy, and, on another occasion, enact the witches' scene from Macbeth, along with three other students and a cooking pot borrowed from my mother (dressed in black crepe to stand in for the cauldron).

I was entranced by Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V and captivated by a filmed version of The Tempest from Stratford, Ontario, that starred Christopher Plummer. (To date, I haven't seen a version of The Tempest that I didn't like.) I finally appreciated Othello when Mr. Branagh's Iago reminded me of some Machiavellian workplace politics I had experienced, and A Midsummer Night's Dream ended up in my dissertation when I remembered that mazes are mentioned in the play, giving my fourth chapter a welcome buoyancy.

But my favorite Shakespearean moment is the evening I spent watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing on a London stage years ago. I'd probably read the play but had never seen it performed, and that production remains for me the most magical Shakespearean experience of all. The play starred Derek Jacobi, and, I believe, Sinead Cusack, as Benedick and Beatrice. What made the production memorable was the staging, the brilliant use of a deceptively simple set of angled mirrors on a dark stage, lit from the front, so that all the action took place in a circumscribed area, a pool of light in a sea of black. The characters appeared out of darkness, enacted their scenes in front of the mirrors, and disappeared into shadows, so that the entire proceeding seemed to take place at night, giving an urgency, intimacy, and hectic, dreamlike quality to the quarrels, jests, complications, and ultimate reconciliation of the lovers. The acting was outstanding, and the characters, in contrast to the dimness and confusion of their reflected images, seemed very much alive.

If I could recommend only one Shakespearean production, this would be it. I see myself, wide-eyed and probably open-mouthed, 25 years old, sitting in that darkened theater, the same girl who had recited "To be or not to be" word for word and played a somewhat clueless Macbeth (my main dramatic contribution to that scene being, quite honestly, the soup pot). This may have been the first time I actually got it, the first time I entered Shakespeare emotionally. Every now and then, I can still see Beatrice, still feel the sadness beneath her witty one-liners and her yearning for authenticity in the midst of so much surface show. The happy ending was all the more poignant for complications narrowly averted, and I feel certain everyone left the theater happy that night.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare, and thanks for the memories.

A Visit to Earthsea

I spent the last few days re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy. I first read A Wizard of Earthsea years ago for an undergraduate Psychology and Literature class and was really taken with not only the story but the prose. Ms. LeGuin's style in these books is low-key but elegant. Her hero, Ged, is homespun and unprepossessing; in the beginning, he's not even that likeable, having rather a large chip on his shoulder and a need to constantly prove himself. Of course, as they say, pride goeth before a fall, and Ged's flaw leads him to the edge of darkness, where he struggles to undo the damage he has done and mend the dangerous hole he has created in the fabric of the world.

How to describe the charm of LeGuin's EarthSea? It's no country you recognize, although her world of islands, surrounded by an ocean whose outer boundaries are unknown, is a little reminiscent of Europe before Columbus. It's a world beyond time, with villages, castles, goatherds, wizards, sailing ships, and dragons (and these dragons speak, but you have to know the language). Each island is a different land, with its own customs and peculiarities. Osskil, in the North, is cold and strangely inhospitable; Roke, in the Inmost Sea, is famous for its wizards; Havnor is known for its beautiful city of white towers. Karego-At, in the East, is the home of a Viking-like people who raid and plunder; Wathort, in the South, is the island of Hort town, a place of ill repute. The little-known Western lands, on the very edge of imagination, are remote and vague; dragons live there.

EarthSea is a world in miniature, which may explain part of its inimitable appeal. It's almost like a child's imaginary world, with everything scaled down to an almost cozy dimension. Only the ocean suggests great distances. The countries are pint-sized but together constitute a prosperous, various world full of people and animals we recognize, though dusted with a peculiar magic, and all the usual virtues and vices. There is also a matter-of-fact darkness running through the stories, very like the age-old darkness we recognize from fairy tales and folk tales.

Ged is a marvelous anti-hero hero. He is not handsome and not even tall. As a boy, he's brash and foolish, if clever; as a man, he is taciturn and scarred, yet inspires great love. In the midst of LeGuin's childlike world, he is complex and very adult, wild and ungovernable as a boy and silent and self-contained when grown. He grows from an impetuous child with a gift he does not understand but is impatient to use to a thoughtful man who uses his considerable power only rarely. He comes to understand that a wizard's powers, glamorous and alluring to an outsider, appear very different to one who has attained them and understands the true costs of things.

When I first read A Wizard of Earthsea, it was in the context of a discussion of Jung and the shadow. As an apprentice wizard, Ged unleashes, through an unauthorized use of a dangerous spell, a dark creature, who emerges from a rent in the fabric of things. Ged spends most of the book in atonement for his error, which takes the form of tracking down this darkness and putting it back where it belongs. One of the most memorable scenes has Ged tracking the creature across the sea in his little boat, as it walks, formless but terrible, on the waves. As he follows it further and further south, rumor reaches him of its passing, and he begins to realize for the first time, as people shun him, how much this shadow actually resembles him.

What Ged has created has emerged from his own darkness, the shadow of his own nature. Coming to terms with this makes him whole again.

A Wizard of Earthsea, the matchless beginning, is my favorite book in the trilogy; the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, is dark and almost painful to read. I think this is because the anti-hero heroine of that tale, while outwardly a powerful priestess, is in reality the victim of a cruel deception. The last book, The Farthest Shore, seems much longer than it is, somehow enfolding a feeling of great time and distance into a modest number of pages, bringing to a conclusion the theme of the balancing of light and dark introduced in the first novel.

The Earthsea trilogy encompasses many mythic themes in its simple, unassuming tales. Reading the stories at this juncture, I found myself occasionally catching a glimpse of a familiar landscape, though remote in place and time from LeGuin's Earthsea. The school of wizardry on Roke, of course, bears a slender resemblance to Harry Potter's Hogwarts. As Tenar and Ged groped their way through the fearsome underground passage beneath Atuan's tombstones, I was suddenly with Ariadne and Theseus, looking over my shoulder for the Minotaur. As Ged and Arren sought the source of the opening that was siphoning light and magic out of the world, I thought of Mordor; when they stepped through the faint doorway into the bleak, monotonous land of death, I thought of Childe Roland. When Ged, worn and exhausted, asked Kalessin to carry him to Gont, at which point he disappeared into the world of legend, I thought of King Arthur, spirited away and healed on the Isle of Apples.

LeGuin's books echo the themes of other timeless myths while creating a memorable and original world of their own, which is worth revisiting from time to time. I think it must be marvelous to be the creator of such a wonderful work of fantasy, but LeGuin would no doubt tell me that this kind of wizardry has both costs and benefits. Most things do.

Remembering the Brontes

I finished reading a novel about the life of Charlotte Bronte, Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Bronte, this weekend. Although Jane Eyre is a favorite of mine, I didn't know a lot about Charlotte Bronte except that she and her siblings were all writers, that they lived in Yorkshire, and that their father was a minister. I pictured a strict household with few creature comforts set in a bleak, stormy landscape, where the only luxury was that of imagination. According to Miss Gael, that seems to have been close to the truth, although she paints a sensitive, nuanced portrait of the place and the people that lets you understand how such remarkable writing could have been produced under such difficult circumstances.

The author does a wonderful job of making Charlotte come alive, and I considered her as a real person for the first time while reading this novel. Gael based her book on extensive research, so that the main outline of the story is firmly grounded in real events. I never knew anything about Charlotte's love life, but she did eventually marry and seems to have found her soulmate after several stillborn romances. It seemed at first that she was doomed never to find what she needed in a single man, but love finally found her when it almost seemed too late.

The Bronte sisters became a literary sensation with the publication of their first novels, but their pseudonyms caused some confusion. Since some people initially believed Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell to be a single person, not only did Charlotte get notoriety for the (some said) scandalous nature of Jane Eyre, but she also took some heat for Wuthering Heights (her sister Emily's book). Since Wuthering Heights was even wilder and less conventional than Jane Eyre, Charlotte became quite a celebrity without anyone knowing who she really was.

When, in the novel, Charlotte and her sister Anne show up in London, Charlotte's publisher can hardly believe from her plain appearance and demure demeanor that she is the creator of the passionate Jane and her moody employer, Mr. Rochester. We as readers have been given a look at her inner life and past, so we know that the emotional content of her novel is taken directly from experience. Emily, likewise, is a genuine product of her environment and calls things as she sees them. Heathcliff and Cathy spring directly from the soil and rocks of the moors, and their raw, tempestuous qualities reflect the harsh elements, the wind, the weather, and the dirt, that Emily knew intimately and loved.

What is very striking in Romancing Miss Bronte is the way in which the setting, the impoverished village of Haworth (so unpromising and seemingly inhospitable in the opening scenes) proves to be such a rich resource for the sensitive imaginations of the sisters and their brother, Branwell. Like true Romantics, Charlotte and Emily elevate feeling and the power of nature, but the result is not castles in the air but unvarnished portraits of the human condition. It isn't hard to see the moor as a metaphor for the unconscious, where all of the shadow elements -- adulterous love, primitive passion, and violence, those things deemed improper to acknowledge in polite society -- roam about unfettered.

The poet John Keats, another favorite of mine and also a Romantic, was already dead when the Brontes were small children, and, like them, was a consumptive. I am wondering how he would have stood up against the personalities of these sisters had they ever met. I somehow imagine Charlotte and Emily, at least, as Maenads who could have easily torn poor Keats apart.

I am still waiting for a film production of Jane Eyre that does it complete justice. I have seen three or four productions, and they either get Jane right and Rochester wrong, or vice versa. I have seen a production of Wuthering Heights on PBS that scared the crap out of me and was probably closer to what Emily had in mind than any version ever made. I'd watch it with the lights on, if I were you. Come to think of it, I'd watch Jane Eyre the same way. These women cut things pretty close to the bone.

Greetings from the Night Garden

A strange thing happened while I was writing this post, and it's never happened before since I've started the blog. I had most of the post written and was in editing mode when I noticed that the first two thirds of my essay had disappeared. Ouch! Horror! Fire! Calamity! No amount of hitting the back button has brought it back, so I have to conclude that all that Beautifully Constructed Prose is gone for good. I don't know exactly what happened, but of course word processors can be tricky. Trickster-y, too.

I was writing about the mysterious dark thing I thought I saw outside my window at work a week or so ago. Something fluttered by, and I only caught it out of the corner of my eye. I kept watching for it all week and kept seeing other things -- a leaf one day, a moth the next -- but I never saw what I thought I had seen the first time. Though only half-glimpsed, it had seemed bigger, darker, and more exotic somehow than a moth, like a creature from a night garden. What I really thought I had seen was a large black butterfly.

Since the butterfly is a symbol of psyche, and a black one carries implications of the shadow, the undeveloped part of our being that holds so much potential, this was a sighting guaranteed to spark the imagination of a Jungian. It might not be as exciting as the scarab beetle that bumped against the window of Jung's consulting room right after his client had dreamed about just such a beetle, but it was a break in the routine all the same. I was sitting there working, probably looking at news databases in Lexis-Nexis or doing something equally prosaic, when all of a sudden this creature appeared, hovering just on the edge of my vision and disappearing before I could get a good look.

But had I really seen it or had I seen something else, like that humble brown moth I spotted a few days later, and had my imagination turned it into something grander? That was the question.

I had somehow connected this to Jungian psychology, the quaternity, and the three men who appeared in my dream last night and dumped a yellow couch in my living room, but all of that has disappeared into the ether of Blogger's text editor. So maybe I should just say what actually happened.

On Friday afternoon, I was finishing up loose ends at my desk when something flew by my window, and I was quick enough to get a good look this time. It was a black butterfly, and an unusually large one, with big bold wings. I'm not sure where it came from, or even if it's the same one I saw a week ago. Now, the practical, rational side of me says, OK, a butterfly, you've seen one like it in the Arboretum. That's true. But my poetic side likes the contrast of midnight wings and bright sunlight, and the fact that it was flying so far from the ground.