Rachel's Literary Personal Essay: "Drawing Parallels with Prufrock"

[Please note:  this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Rachel's work.  Rachel is seventeen years old; thus, both she and her father have given permission for her work and picture to appear here.]

For a large part of my life I’ve felt awkward and unlucky. Growing up watching perfect TV lives where everything happens for a reason and a misstep can easily become the best decision of a person’s life, I developed the expectation that everything I did, no matter how it felt in the moment, would have a positive outcome. I failed to take into account that my life was not a scripted sit-com, though the absence of a laugh-track tipped me off eventually. As I grew older and this result continued to elude me, I became less and less sure of myself and my actions, becoming more withdrawn with my decisions. I began — and continue — to second-guess my actions before performing them, much like the narrator of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Like him, I start with the idea of what I want to do, but slowly convince myself the course of action either is not for the best or will be detrimental to my mental health. Also like our dear narrator, I am scared.

          I suppose this could be seen as a cycle of sorts. Prufrock starts full of a kind of confidence, the sort one has when he/she first arrives at an idea and makes a sweeping gesture such as “Let us go, you and I,” showing his belief in himself. His initial action reminds me of me: I’ll begin with a thought such as “Okay, Rachel, it’s time to do ___! You know you should go talk to ___,” and I list all the reasons why I’m right and imagine exactly how the conversation is going to go. I’ll plan every moment, exploring every possible contingency, making sure I’m prepared for anything. As soon as the plan is formed, I begin to attempt to put it in motion.  

But this is where the second part of the cycle commences. Like Prufrock, I begin a series of claims much like his “there will be time, there will be time…time for you and time for me” that allow me to procrastinate, for I will have ages to do it, it’s not the right time, or it’s much too awkward just then to commit to my action. Like Prufrock, I stall and lie to myself for the sake of my nerves.

*I don’t acknowledge the real problem until stage three of the cycle. At this point, Prufrock starts to list his worries, which are rooted in an understandable fear of rejection. He’s afraid that if he tells his companion his true feelings for her, all his planning will fall flat. “In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions and decisions to reverse,” expresses Prufrock’s fear of having everything he’s planned go astray. At this point, he imagines the humiliating position his failure would place him in. Like Prufrock, I also begin to worry about the reaction of my peers, and my resolve begins to crumble. More often than not, my plans end with the fourth stage: giving up.

            At the fourth and final stage of this cycle, Prufrock has already imagined his friend giving him a negative reply: “That is not what I meant at all/That is not it, at all.” He has scared himself into believing his chance has fled, that he was never worthy of the chance to begin with. He says to himself, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” believing himself unable to be the hero of his own story. Sadly, my mind goes the way of Prufrock in similar situations. I tell myself that my plan wouldn’t have worked out anyway, that I’m not in a movie, and that’s not how life works. I let fear control my actions and rule my mind and, like Prufrock, I let the moment fade away. 

In my life I’ve gone through moments that are very Prufrock-esque, such that I allow myself to abandon a fully formed idea before it can come to fruition. I feed myself excuses to make myself feel better, but at the end of it all nothing gets done. Reading "Prufrock" was like seeing myself from the outside, and it was extremely enlightening. At first I didn’t realize how alike we were and judged him harshly, but as soon as I acknowledged the similarities I became worried. Prufrock is not who I want to be, and now that I’ve seen how damaging a lack of decision-making is, I know how to address it. The best way to combat my fear is to face it head on, not hide away from it. I can’t allow fear to rule my life, or I won’t accomplish anything in my life. I refuse to let myself become a Prufrock, old and grey and afraid of living. 

* As an initial exercise in developing our understanding of the poem, each student creates a visual representation of a line, image, or stanza from the poem that makes a strong impression on him/her.  Our class hangs these images on the wall in the order in which they occur in the poem and listens to the poem being read aloud while looking at them.

Sam's Literary Personal Essay: "The Love Essay of S. Elliot Mazer"

[Please note:  this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Sam's work.  Sam, who is eighteen years old, gave his permission for his work and picture to appear here.]
 

Every person has some stories, works of art, or ideas that he or she just won’t understand the first times around; for me, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” fell into this category. Two recent developments in my life, however, have allowed me to appreciate Eliot’s poem in a surprisingly personal and tangible way. Indeed, my perspective on the world has changed forever thanks to two life-altering endeavors: applying to colleges and watching PBS travel videos. The college application process forced me to reflect on my life goals endlessly until I felt like the center of some scholarly universe. My body, rejecting this feeling like the stomach rejects rocks, felt a sudden urge to binge watch PBS vacation-planning programs. Luckily, while catching up with the history of Ancient Rome and modern tourist sites, I was reminded of how large and how filled with other narcissists our world and history have been. Today, I find the character of Prufrock to be a representation of a pandemic mental condition in the Western world -- being so immersed in a culture that idealizes great people of the past that a person is kept from being content with his or her own life. Ultimately, Prufrock’s own unhappiness forces the reader to consider whether greatness should be aspired to at all. 

         Throughout his poetic ponderings, Prufrock references historical figures and artwork legendary in Western civilization, clearly defining what he believes a man should aspire to be. While the first stanza establishes Prufrock’s less than luxurious lifestyle, describing his nights spent in “one night cheap hotels” (6), the second stanza introduces a seemingly tangential idea: “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14). In our initial examinations of this poem, I failed to understand fully what relevance Michelangelo had to the piece. In my moment of need, however, a well-timed PBS show titled "The Best of Europe: Rome’s Ancient Glory and Baroque Brilliance" opened my eyes. The show focused on the works of architecture and art throughout the city: the millennia-old marvel of the Pantheon, the elaborate buildings built to memorialize ancient emperors, and even the sculptures and paintings by Michelangelo himself. As I watched PBS travel guide Rick Steves tell me about these impressive cultural attractions, I was fixated on how great they all were. These were true feats of their times, and surely remain some of mankind’s greatest creations! I admired and envied Michelangelo for being so darn good at seemingly everything, and for being so famous for it. Similarly, Prufrock repeatedly notices that, as he is living his life of mediocrity, Michelangelo manages to still be the talk of the town centuries after death. Prufrock wishes to be remembered the same way Michelangelo is, and the presence of such “great” figures in his everyday life is inescapable. Despite Prufrock’s continued assurances that “there will be time” (23) for him to find his place in society, a second mention of the women discussing Michelangelo reveals the urgency Prufrock truly feels. As he grows older and older, dappling in constant new “visions and revisions” (33) of his life, the ghosts of the greats like Michelangelo loom greater, becoming even more difficult to live up to. Rather than enjoy the creations of the past, Prufrock feels increasing pressure to be “great,” just as we today live in the shadow of celebrated cultural figures, past and present. Amidst the college application process, as I feel strangely pressured to live up to societal standards even in choosing where I go to college, I can certainly relate.

Though his life has not turned out how he had expected or hoped, Prufrock is still cognizant of some virtue in his life of simplicity—he briefly accepts that he may not be great, but he can still benefit his society. During a lengthy bout of existential questions, Prufrock asks, “And would it have been worth it, after all/After the cups, the marmalade, the tea.../To have squeezed the universe into a ball.../To say: I am Lazarus, come from the dead…” (88-89, 93, 95). Prufrock notes that he has done much in his life that he does not regret: enjoying simple pleasures like drinking tea and eating a marmalade spread. Such small moments as these have been the truly memorable ones for him, not those when he was progressing further in a career. If this is true, he wonders, was there any incentive to try to squeeze the world to fit into his own narrow goals, or to become so great as the biblical saints like Lazarus? 

*Prufrock may have not lived a life of greatness, but he has certainly enjoyed what Rick Steves refers to while sipping tea at quaint markets overlooking the Mediterranean as “the good living.” Prufrock has had the opportunity to live a life of goodness, of simply enjoying time without feeling the need to gain more fame and riches. However, until this point, he has not been able to appreciate this opportunity because he has been taught by his society that lack of ambition is synonymous with failure. He goes on to admit, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/ Am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two” (111-113). Prufrock seems ready to embrace a role in society he never expected to: that of the common man. After all, even if a select few historical figures lead and shape movements, it is ultimately the everyday people, the side characters, who have to make the movements move anywhere — Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he reasons, would have no plot if Hamlet were the only character.  

After I applied to college and, in the process, made myself overdose on narcissism from all of my supplemental essays describing what a promising and incredible specimen I am, I found in these PBS travel videos the same feeling that Prufrock has. I was sick of trying to be a great, superlative college student; all I wanted was a nice view and a cool culture to experience while floating around in a Venetian gondola. I didn’t feel the need to be Michelangelo, as long as I could occasionally go to the Sistine Chapel and give him an imaginary pat on the back. I considered this desire more of an entertaining dream than anything I would actually consider doing in the near future. 

And, wouldn’t you know it, so does Prufrock. While he does decide that his dreams of greatness are no longer achievable, he also proves unable to let them go, and thus unable to either achieve his goals or find happiness by straying from them. Although Prufrock is glad to have experienced simple pleasures in the past, he is resigned and depressed at the thought of living so normally in the future: “I grow old...I grow old.../ Do I dare to eat a peach?/ I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach,” (120, 122-123). Prufrock will endure, rather than enjoy his retirement of long walks on the beach, for he feels he has still not earned anything in his life. He is so mired in disappointment with himself that he even doubts whether he is worthy of eating a peach; surely, he thinks, such bounties of the earth were meant for people greater than he. Prufrock has grown old pondering his indecisions, and now he believes it is too late to bother deciding any of them. 

He concludes his thoughts on a nihilistic note: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea.../Till human voices wake us and we drown,” (129-131). To him, there is no point in attempting to achieve greatness in the eyes of his society because he has romanticized even the greats themselves: had he been more critical of the works of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, he would have realized sooner that their lives were no more meaningful than his. Now that he can see past the transcendent artwork his idols created, hear their real “human voices,” he understands that they were just as depressingly imperfect as he is. Any higher moral values they chose to communicate in their art were not the rules they themselves lived by, but the rules that they knew they should have been living by and weren’t. Hopeless, Prufrock submits to drowning in time, letting himself be flushed away just as the supposed greats of yore had been centuries before. He convinces himself that what happiness he found in living the “good life,” and what hope he maintained as he sought the “great life” were both equally pointless. He believes he has been, to this point, constantly romanticizing the world and his place in it, much as I did while watching travel videos and taking in the gorgeous Mediterranean vistas. There is no point in seeking a good life, he reasons, because his has built to disappointment.

            Prufrock, stagnating in despair after a life of indecision and disappointment, possesses the most dramatic version of the mindset that we all have in some capacity, or have had at some point in our lives—the anxious, insecure mindset that arises from searching for our places in a society that calls specific individuals great and tells all others to try to become like these elite few. Indeed, I have always idolized these figures myself, and wondered whether I could live up to their legacies in some way. The question that so many of us high school seniors seem to be asking ourselves right now is “Do I want to go to a college that seems fun and happy, or do I want to try to get into one that’s prestigious and enviable?” Having applied to upwards of ten colleges over the course of winter break alone, I have now become able to find significant meaning behind “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot’s Prufrock spent his life asking himself whether he wanted to live the “good life” or the “great life,” and as a result achieved neither. By tracing the development of Prufrock’s thoughts throughout the poem, I have concluded that my most important goal in life is to not become like Prufrock. While migrating to a foreign country based on the information I received from a one-hour TV program may be slightly too irrational for right now, I do know that I must be decisive in all of my endeavors—some of these decisions may even just be to sit back and relax for a day or two. The last thing I want to do is waste another day sitting in my room and procrastinating writing college essays the same way that Prufrock has, essentially, procrastinated his whole life away. 

* As an initial exercise in developing our understanding of the poem, each student creates a visual representation of a line, image, or stanza from the poem that makes a strong impression on him/her.  Our class hangs these images on the wall in the order in which they occur in the poem and listens to the poem being read aloud while looking at them.

Scott Ketcham's "Darkness and Beauty" at the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery

So already, Scott Ketcham's M.F.A. degree show is up!  At the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont, Darkness and Beauty runs through February 8. Scott's gallery talk is January 30.  

I am inspired the individual pieces and the totality of Scott's work. And I am thrilled for him, and for all of us who can make it to Johnson State College and have the experience of being immersed in it. The show is magnificent.* Surround-sound for the eyes. Images that allure and repel, and then allure again.  Works that compel moments of uncertainty and recognition, that unsettle and settle us. As Scott's artist statement explains,

Dark images come to me, from me -- a happy man with a comfortable life. Yet these apparitions do not threaten but seduce me, for all darkness radiates mysterious beauty, all loveliness casts melancholy shade.

My work celebrates beauty and darkness, longing and departure. Within a gaze equally primal and decadent, high-minded and voyeuristic, squirmy nakedness and luscious paint join in erotic delight. A magic climax transforms paint into mortal, living flesh. Metamorphosis comes as a surprise.

There's been a kind of birthing here.  The large painting you see in the photo of the gallery above makes no bones about it.  The only painting in the show that has a title, it's called "The Birth of Abraxas." The work on the walls of the gallery both emerges naturally from Scott's earlier figure work (including the figure work he did during the early innings of his M.F.A. program), and steps out and away from it into some new emotional, conceptual place that's been waiting -- even yearning -- to stretch to its full height and width, to flex its unfolding muscle, to assert its heft and substance, to announce and then manifest itself.

Scott's journey recalls for me the response of Betonie, the unorthodox medicine man in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, to Tayo, the novel's central character who fears that he is hardly up to the arduous, high-stakes ceremony ahead of him: "You've been doing something all along.  All this time, and now you are at an important part of the story." It also recalls for me the wondrous, dangerous knife at the center of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife that can carve doorways into other worlds. Scott may not have cut an opening into another world, but he has definitely managed to slide the blade of his vision into another room, and to follow it there.  No doubt this has been "an important part of [his] story."

I've been watching the evolution and movement sometimes, sometimes hearing "the music from a farther room,"** sometimes not.  When we arrived at the gallery on the morning of January 11, I understood for the first time that a further creative process lay ahead. The final challenge was to transform the empty gallery space so that our eyes, imaginations, minds, and hearts could take in Scott's work and hold it close. "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you," says John 14:2.***  And so on that Saturday, Scott and Leila Bandar, the gallery's director, combined their energy, vision, and design sense to "prepare a place for you." Together, they made that space into a place, a room, a mansion if not a world.

The gallery is a nearly square room with high ceilings and tall windows on one of its four walls. At night, the windows on the outer wall reflect the contents of the gallery (as you can see in the top photo above); during the day, they admit the blue and gray light of Vermont winter. The three remaining walls host approximately fifty of Scott's paintings, loosely arranged in groups by content and theme.  One set of paintings features birds; another features -- or at least gives the impression of featuring -- couples.  Another set  is distinguished by the non-rectangular shape of each panel's design; I refer to this set of six, which you can see hanging in the middle of the wall shown here, as the "keyhole group" because every painting makes me feel as if I'm peering into a dark, forbidden space. Three sculptural installations and one animation complete and define the space.

Part of what feels alive and exciting about Darkness and Beauty is that it contains works that hadn't been part of Scott's working vision of the show because they did not exist before late December. Right after his teaching semester at Massasoit Community College was over in early December, Scott began to do some sculpting, working with cast plaster and built plaster to explore emergence and divergence, and other passages. He worked without feeling pressured to create something worthy of the gallery show, but he also worked with energy, purpose, and excitement -- and with the hope and possibility that he might create something that could go into the show.  Ultimately, he decided this work had something to contribute to the show, so it journeyed to Vermont, too.

The sculpture you see in the last photo above captures for me Scott's journey, and even his present state as he concludes his M.F.A. program: almost fully emerged, but still struggling toward full realization of his capacities to fly, perhaps even to soar. Who knows what will come next?

* So already, I know I'm Scott's wife and I know I'm biased, but the show is still magnificent.
** From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
*** From the King James Version of the Gospel of John.  

Howard's End #4: The Wisdom of Solomon and Estuaries, and Persistent Questions of Home

So already, the battered cover of my copy of Howard's End says it all. This blog post has been a long time coming. In terms of the intentional yet still haphazard process I've gone through to understand why this novel enthralls me, I feel as if I have been keeping company with T.S. Eliot's three kings in "Journey of the Magi":

      A hard time we had of it.
      At the end we preferred to travel all night,
      Sleeping in snatches,            
      With the voices singing in our ears, saying 
      That this was all folly.

It's very early on Saturday morning -- still dark -- and the voice on the radio has just reported that it's three degrees outside.  I've been awake for a while thinking about this blog post: fears of folly for sure, but then a moment of self-recognition at least -- folly still perhaps, but self-recognition.  So, as the last line of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine says, "there . . . [is] nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home." 

But I warn you. This is going to be one long, rambling blog post!


Through my window, as if to encourage me, the pale apricot of dawn has now appeared.  As I struggled yesterday, I had the insightful, heartfelt blog post my student Solomon published on December 10 to inspire me.  Yesterday, I still feared that my over-identification with Margaret -- actual and sometimes aspired to -- was impeding my ability to get to the heart of this novel, was making it "impossible to say just what I mean!"* Today, I understand that my identification with Margaret -- not my over-identification with her -- must be essential to the meaning that I ultimately make and convey. 

Solomon's discussion of the "our own obtuseness" was what drew me in and began to "unmire" me:

The idea of connection exists throughout the novel. However, it is an abstract form of connection, a form that begs for a deep understanding of, and link to, the clarity and wisdom within us all. It is our obtuseness which blinds us to that wisdom. Until we connect, we are all Margaret's charity cases, EM Forster's charity cases, the charity cases of those who see the stain of obtuseness that abstracts our view. Howard's End is beautiful because it viciously swipes at the stain that so easily distracts us to what lies before us.**

Solomon's blog helped me to understand that in viewing my identification with Margaret as a source of "obtuseness" and seeking to set it aside, I was, ironically, bidding myself not to connect.  Furthermore, even as tried to disconnect, I couldn't: I kept noticing more and more aspects of Margaret's sensibilities that the movie version of the novel did not and could not convey fully, and my sense of connection to Margaret only grew.

It's fully morning now; blue skies with some clouds edging in from the west.  If you could you extend your line of vision from my dining room window (which happens to be in an old factory building that's been converted into condominiums) beyond the far housetop at the right-hand edge of this photo, you would soon see Black's Creek and, beyond it, the southerly end of Wollaston Beach.  This fact isn't merely incidental.  You'll see.

Right after I started my blog in late June, I was struck by a passage in Chimimanda Adichie's Americanah:  Adichie's main character's "blog was doing well, . . .  and yet there was cement in her soul.  It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness . . . that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness."  The whole issue of where one is at home, feels at home, lives without "cement in her soul" was also on my mind:  my approaching retirement, which signaled less time in Cambridge and more time in Quincy, raised questions about how much Quincy did and could feel like home to me and what "home" actually meant to me.  As I wrote in my journal in early July, 

Over the last few months, I've been thinking a great deal about home as place -- trying to understand it, when I've never had the experience of having [any kind of an idealized] spiritual home that belonged only or in part to me.  A few months ago when I first thought that a good answer to the question of "What are you going to do when you retire" was "Drive around and listen to the radio," I also had begun to wonder why I felt so much like myself when I was driving around and listening to the radio.  And I know a lot of other people who feel similarly "at home" when they're between places, caught up in that simulation of rootlessness and possibility -- as if with gasoline and time, they could go anywhere, do anything, be whoever they wanted, become whoever they wanted, start anew.  So is home about possibility? certainty? possibility and certainty? . . . Is home a world or a base camp?. . .  Is home the raison d'être, the destination, the meaning, the purpose? Or is it the stronghold from which . . .  -- fully aware on some level of one's tendencies, weaknesses, strengths, and dreams -- one ventures forth to discover new tendencies, weaknesses, strengths, and dreams?

The only thing I know is that real home cannot exists without real truth. 

Enter Solomon's wisdom about the threat obtuseness poses to our inner, essential clarity and wisdom. And enter Margaret Schlegel, who for most of Howard's End is without a home -- or technically, between homes. For much of the novel, there's much in Margaret's life -- most notably her engagement and marriage -- that might ordinarily contribute to the feelings of support, comfort, and the sense of being in place often associated with home.  But those feelings are practically non-existent for Margaret:  her engagement and marriage are both futile exercises in trying to cultivate Henry's abilities to connect emotionally and spiritually and, in so doing, to create a bond between them that could feel like "home."

It's her first visit to Howard's End that offers Margaret her first temporary liberation from the unrest that has characterized her life since she aligned it with Henry's:

Her evening was pleasant. The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. . . . She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howard's End, she attempted to realise England. She failed—visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable. Helen and her father had known this love, . . ., but it had been hidden from Margaret till this afternoon. It had certainly come through the house and old Miss Avery. Through them: the notion of "through" persisted; her mind trembled towards a conclusion which only the unwise have put into words. Then, veering back into warmth, it dwelt on ruddy bricks, flowering plum-trees, and all the tangible joys of spring (204-5).

Interestingly, Margaret's first impulse upon experiencing this liberating peacefulness and "sense of space" is to "realise England."  Because Margaret is a seeker of "visions," home must be not just a haven, but a vantage point, a place to see from, understand from. Shortly thereafter, she reflects that  ". . . [Howard's End] was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree," observing later in the same paragraph that "House and tree transcended any similes of sex. . . . Yet they kept within limits of the human. Their message was not of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave. As she stood in the one, gazing at the other, truer relationship had gleamed" (205-6). Howard's End is never mere real estate for Margaret; nor is it merely the potential physical and symbolic locus of familial affection, connection, and tradition. For Margaret, Howard's End embodies the eternity of England, past, present, and future wrapped up in the "now" which she feels instinctively at a later date when she and Helen ascend its stairs on the one night they expect to spend there:

The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes. It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came "now," and "now" once more as they trod the gravel, and "now," as the moonlight fell upon their father's sword (315).

"Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present." Margaret might have thought these lines from T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" said it well.

But the fact of the matter is that Margaret has intimations about the "something moreness" of life long before she lays eyes on Howard's End.  In initially representing to herself the different ways she and Henry think, she explains that

It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered about he mysterious or the private. The Thames might run inland from the sea, the chauffeur might conceal all passion and philosophy beneath his unhealthy skin. They knew their own business and he knew his (161-2).

In contrast, Margaret, cultivating the wholeness of her vision, deliberately contemplates civilization and the land and water that underlie and surround it.  She looks for the forces, natural and economic/political, that shape England, and wonders whether England belongs to the Henries or the Margarets among her citizens.

The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (175-6)

Despite her questions about to which English people England does and should belong, Margaret is certain  of England's bright eternity. Later, married but hardly settled, she offers a less optimistic view of England's future:

Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task! (261).

While the flat, despairing tone of this passage reflects Margaret's concerns with England and civilization present and future, it also reflects Margaret's own transformative -- and therefore necessarily difficult -- moment.  Margaret is making new choices on the basis of a new sense of purpose and urgency:

As for theatres and discussion societies, they attracted her less and less. She began to "miss" new movements, and to spend her spare time re-reading or thinking, rather to the concern of her Chelsea friends. They attributed the change to her marriage, . . .. Yet the main cause lay deeper still; she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things. . . . Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power (262).

Even when "closing of the gates" feels absolutely necessary and right, it also feels momentous and definitive -- and therefore disorienting and strange. (That's what my retirement is feeling like right now!) The familiar we've outgrown always offers its own brand of comfort; a little despair is understandable.

But later, out of the "creative power" she's taken care to nurture in herself, Margaret offers a vision -- tendered not with certainty, but with hope --  for an England of the future that halts the frenetic "progress"  of the present civilization through a collective and renewed sense of the interconnectedness of civilization and the earth on which it rests and depends.

"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," she said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilisation that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, . . ." (339).

This is an adult, mature Margaret who's speaking here, daring to imagine a future that runs counter to currents of the day and risks being dismissed as foolishly optimistic.  She's been thinking of other currents for a while -- the motion of the Thames, the streams and rivers that continuously sculpt and resculpt England's "sinuous coast." Acting fully on her commitment to seeing life wholely, which requires consolidating and cultivating the mind's creative power,  Margaret really is at home, finally -- in herself. When Howard's End, in addition to being her spiritual inheritance, becomes her eventual legal property (through another Wilcox will), the event is anti-climactic yet nonetheless right. Though Howard's End has been more important as a means than as an end all through the novel, we feel vindicated that Mrs. Wilcox's perceptive dream has been realized -- and relieved that Margaret no longer needs to wonder where home will be.

When I first was drawn to and curious about the Howard's End passages about English towns, waterways, and land features and types, I knew nothing about estuaries. So I turned to the internet, from which I learned that estuaries are coastal water bodies that combine fresh and salt water, often through the tidal movement of water. At the same time, I learned that Black's Creek was also an estuary -- one of four prominent estuaries located along Quincy's twenty-seven-mile coastline, and one of the two most associated with the early history of Massachusetts. While much has changed in Quincy since John Wollaston established a trading post at Black's Creek, the features of the land haven't, according to various sources I've read, for thousands of years.

Curious about Furnace Brook Parkway and why it begins on one side of but doesn't cross Quincy Shore Drive, I learned from Wikipedia that "Furnace Brook . . . begins on the eastern slopes of the Blue Hills and meanders for about four miles from southwest to northeast through the middle of Quincy, ending where it meets the Atlantic estuary known as Blacks Creek near Quincy Bay." I'm not fully sure why all of this means so much to me, but I suspect that I've been needing to build a relationship with Quincy's land and history in order to call Quincy home.  Furthermore, walking near this place on a regular basis connects me to time past, time present, and time future -- and, in so doing, gives me that feeling that, like Margaret, I'm trying, and sometimes succeeding, at seeing life whole.  Why this makes me feel "at home" I don't fully understand, but I think it has something to do with the feeling I have when I'm driving along "the open road" with my radio as my travel companion. 

I know that this sounds a little strange -- to me, too.  But herein again Margaret saves the day: 

"It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. . . . It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences, eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey" (337-8).

So here's to sorrow and color, and to the chance to be ourselves, even when we baffle ourselves. Again, it's her creativity that empowers Margaret to take this stand against the dominion of the daily grey, which too often makes home -- and almost everything else -- subject to other people's conceptions. Here's also to the right we all have to see life whole, even when there's often so much pressure on us -- not just in the workplace, but in some of our associations with individual people and groups -- to see steadily.

As I finish writing this, it's very early afternoon.  Mid-morning's gray clouds have dissipated, permitting January's unrelenting sunshine to cast the shadows that are common just two weeks beyond the winter solstice. In this same two weeks, I have been struggling to remember another work of literature in which old, interconnected waterways figure prominently. Yesterday, I finally remembered that it's Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, another novel about literal and figurative homecoming, that ends with passage that refers to venerable waters:

The sun flared. I'd heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home. 

It's a car that Lipsha Morrissey is bringing home, but he's also going home with a new sense of who he is, where he fits, and where he belongs.  Margaret Schlegel would agree with him that we do live on dry land. But for many of us, it's a good thing to keep wetlands in view, in our mind's eye at least. And maybe even in the rear view mirror.

So thanks, Solomon; thanks, E.M. and Margaret; and thanks, Black's Creek. And however each of us envisions home, may it be, in all of its potential variation, a place of positive power and authentic connection.

*It always comes back to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for me!  
** http://litwritlogblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/howards-end-end.html
Screen shot of open-road car dashboard from http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/885229428465157919/DF63E4B8DA5A78D1EB06FFF1A220AA015E467FBD/
Forster, E.M. Howard's End. New York: Vintage Books, 1921. Print.  
Wych Elm photo:  Screen shot from http://chestofbooks.com/flora-plants/flowers/British-Wild-Flowers-1/images/Wych-Elm-Ulmus-glabra-Huds-others.jpg
Plum Tree Blossoms photo:  Screen shot from https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeUapVekue9YvXTwc9D3q9AU_6lDnoOB_PP_Z2aVHLzXWqdBEe7sqSRHvyg1_GZycqPL5RBAbqBzM7Ho-orquOY19o7xDXHHaL5WMDcNEGaxecdLGDPfbL4f-fG6x9Tz8oMQtcP3ODZX9Y/s1600/IMG_0324.JPG 
Map of Southern England:  http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/so/print.html 
Estuary research:  http://www.estuaries.org/what-is-an-estuary.html
Furnace Brook Parkway research:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furnace_Brook_Parkway  

Incarnadine by Mary Szybist: A Poetry Book Recommendation

So already, I write today to recommend Mary Szybist's National Book Award-winning collection of poetry, Incarnadine.  I first learned of this book through John Freeman's Boston Globe review of it and immediately added it to my holiday wish list.  The back of the book, in my opinion, gets it just right:

"Mary Szybist’s richly imagined encounters offer intimate spaces and stagings for experiences that are exploratory and sometimes explosive. Through the lens of an iconic moment, the Annunciation of an unsettling angel to a bodily young woman, Szybist describes the confusion and even terror of moments in which our longing for the spiritual may also be a longing for what is most fundamentally alien to us. In a world where we are so often asked to choose sides, to believe or not believe, to embrace or reject, Incarnadine offers lyrical and brilliantly inventive alternatives."


Viewed in terms of its dominant biblical motif, this book of poems invites us to imagine from so many viewpoints not only the encounter between Mary and Gabriel, but also the experience of Mary as she both anticipates and actually experiences the moment when "the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."   But "invites" might not be nearly a strong enough word for what this book does:  through its varied forms; its allusions to and meditations on events, individuals, and groups past and present; and its use of imagery and perspective to create paradoxical voices and states of being, it just plain yanks us into the center of those extraordinary moments -- and other moments that disturb us and don't let go.

Check out these lines from "Knocking or Nothing":

     Knock me or nothing, the things of this world
     ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish,

     clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
     Let them.  Let the fans whirr.

     All the similar virgins must have emptied
     their flimsy pockets, and I
    
     was empty enough, 
     sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn,

     dumb as the frost-pink tongues
     of the unpruned roses.

     When you put your arms around me in that moment,    
     when you pulled me to you and leaned

     back, when you lifted me
     just a few inches, when you shook me

     hard then, had you ever heard
     such emptiness? (Szybist 62)**

Szybist's Mary is hardly meek and mild, hardly blandly submissive.  She's got edge, intelligence, and curiosity. I don't think I ever took the time to imagine the different tones of voice the biblical Mary might have used when she responded to Gabriel's announcement, "troubled at his saying," with her very sensible question, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Though she's relatively quick in the moments following to identify herself  as "the handmaid of the Lord," she's already thinking "how me" if not "why me." In Szybist's poem, she gets to to the "why me" -- and sounds hardly elated as she ponders the question.

As a former "Bible as Literature" teacher, I've always been fascinated by Mary -- and all of the biblical "go-to girls," the ones who move religious history forward and who, in my opinion, are chosen for their roles quite deliberately.  I've always loved that it's in the context of the woman-to-woman encounter of Mary and Elizabeth that Mary pours out her feelings and faith in the Magnificat, a prayer that is so significant to Christians and so Jewish in form, imagery, and spirit.  In 1994, when I visited the Church of the Dormition in Jerusalem, I was so pleased to see six very important earlier biblical women -- Eve, Miriam, Jael, Judith, Ruth and Esther -- hovering above the life-sized statue of the "sleeping-in-death" Mary, courtesy of the mosaic-tiled domed ceiling above her.*** 

But don't be misled by how excited I can get about the connections between biblical texts and Incarnadine.  Szybist's focus on "annunciation" does not matter most as an amplification or interpretation of the biblical narrative. If Szybist's poetry, in the fashion of midrash, fills in scriptural blanks, it does so in order to move us, her readers, beyond the doctrinal, decreed, and narratively recognized and accepted to a more immediate, personal experience of the problems and possibilities of spirit and meaning in our own lives. The power of Incarnadine resides in the respectful yet inventive way Szybist makes use of an imagination-and-faith-stretching biblical moment as a stimulus for exploring, understanding, and perhaps even accepting her own spiritual emptiness and fullness, and, by extension, for motivating us to strive to encounter our own. 

But as I think of it, perhaps she wields that biblical story more as a catapult than a stimulus. We've entered a falling rock zone in Incarnadine: despite her craft and control, the steadiness of her beautiful language, the rocks hurling themselves onto our path are real, so we must pay attention to them. In "Entrances and Exits," the poet is examining a book of paintings in her office when the news of the day -- the rescue of an older woman who had been missing in the wilderness for two weeks and the death of Pavarotti -- collides with the unexpected visit of a friend's six-year-old daughter on the prowl for snacks.  These random events intertwine to inform the poet's response to Duccio's Annunciation.****  There is other news of the day at the heart of "So-and-So Descending from the Bridge"; you can listen to Szybist read it by watching the bottom video embedded in the National Book Award web site. Prepare to be haunted.

And so I leave you with a paragraph-stanza from one of the book's few prose poems, entitled "Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary":

     It's not enough to say the heart wants what it wants.  I think of the ravine, the 
     side dark with pines were we lounged through summer days, waiting for 
     something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the 
     stars so close they seemed to crown us.  Once, I asked for your favorite 
     feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was as if we took the bit and bridle 
     from our mouths.  From that moment I told myself it was the not yet that I 
     wanted, the moving, the toward -- (Szybist 22)

If you read this book, listen to Mary Szybist read her poems, or read any of her poems in other places that they're published, I would love to hear your thoughts. 

*Szybist includes the text of Luke in her notes so we know that the King James version of Luke plays a major role in her thinking and writing.  I am writing about Mary's experience in the present rather than the past tense because I'm dealing with it more as an experience in religious literature than in religious history; no offense intended to those who view it as history.
** Szybist, Mary. Incarnadine. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2013. Print. 
*** Interesting that none of the matriarchs -- Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel -- make it onto the dome ceiling; interesting that most of the six portrayed are for all intents and purposes woman warriors who actively defend Israel against enemies that would destroy it.  The photo web address is <http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Middle_East/Israel/Yerushalayim/Jerusalem/Mount_Zion/photo382359.htm>.
****<http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/duccio-the-annunciation>