Twenty/Twenty

I've been reading Shakespeare's King Lear since the weekend. This evening, I reached Act 2 Scene 4 where Lear confronts Regan and Cornwall and says: "Beloved Regan, Thy sister's naught. O Regan, she hath tied Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here." (Stage directions: He indicates his heart.)  

Prometheus did not immediately come to mind. Something about the powerful physical gesture Lear makes at this point set me thinking. From 'passion' my mind jumped to how this passionate play was loved by the English, of whose coldness some people have commented upon. From that to my own countrymen, Indians, of whose passion some people have also commented upon... And so on I went thinking of this, leading to that, ending at how when I was younger I was more clear-sighted about myself. Some predictions I jotted down about my future in my journal did come to pass (to my surprise). 

Anyhow, this is what my thoughts were and what I posted on a social networking site, before I resumed reading:

You know how vision worsens with age? I was thinking earlier of how metaphorical vision too worsens with age. It has in my case. Hindsight may be 20/20 ... But the road ahead, the present moment... all too difficult to read correctly. Is it to do with the fact that when one is young one can project, say the situation that one is in, on the "backdrop" of other people (in the classroom or the shop-floor)? Whereas when one is older, the people around you are fewer in number (there are fewer people at the top, where you may be placed at work and loneliness does exist in families....) Also, when one is younger, life stretches out before one, like a seemingly endless road. And that somehow helps you put things in some sort of perspective. This valuable element - space - shrinks with passing years. At any rate, it is the young who can, prophet-like, see the future (at least) in a cold clear light. It's all blurred after that.

Drop me a line if you care to share your thoughts.

Dandelions

I'm fascinated by the dandelion as a literary symbol. 

Brief research on google shows that the weed could represent something stubborn - something/someone which/who won't go away. But I've seen writers and illustrators use it to represent memory... especially one from very long ago and very nearly forgotten... the import of which eludes the mind... the deeper meaning of which, when grasped (in the fullness of time) has power to transform the individual. 

Enjoy the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ_QqtXoyQw&feature=share

Flawed Me!

These days while I'm writing I'm also looking at myself. I see two things. The first is that I'm almost never shocked by man's transgressions against God's laws. But I AM shocked by man transgressing lines that another man has drawn - even if the act itself is not strictly immoral but only insulting. 

The second thing I've realized about myself is that my heart has never missed a beat or beat faster except in fear. Never in joy, or excitement, or even love. 

I feel very flawed right now.

Biblical Narratives of Slavery and Exile... the difference?

Hi!

Early this morning I was meditating upon Jeremiah 16: 14-15 -

"Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;
But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers."

and I thought how odd it was that we, as Christians, know the narrative of the Israelites' flight from Egypt backwards... but don't know the narrative of their return from Babylonian exile quite as well. And when I thought about it, I realised one thing. The narrative of the flight from Egypt and the 40-year wandering in the wilderness was probably written down by Moses after the events had taken place. The question is, was this narrative filtered through Moses' consciousness? Did his own participation in the event - beginning to end - contribute to the narrative's structure? And thus giving the narrative a proper beginning, middle and end... making it a plain good story.

Of course, like all Christians I too believe that the Spirit of God dictated the Bible - Genesis to Revelation - and the different prophets and scribes merely wrote down what they were shown. But we know that Jeremiah, when he was called to be a prophet, was shown what was a rod of an almond tree. He was asked to describe it. When he recognised what he was shown correctly, he was commended - "Thou hast seen well". So the prophet's mind is important as a tool that receives the prophecy. I feel Moses would have been able to use what God showed him (about what happened in the Garden of Eden for instance) as also his own narrative as of someone who was in the thick of things.

The narrative for the Babylonian exile is different from the Egyptian one. The narrative of this latter event in history is scattered. The major prophets - all three of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel I think - foretold the carrying away of the Israelites as captives to Babylon. The event, when it finally happens, is recorded almost dispassionately by Jeremiah. The books of Daniel and Esther record events that took place during the exile in the courts of the foreign rulers. Scribes Ezra and Nehemiah record the rebuilding of the Temple. You'd need to be a very ardent scholar to apply your mind, place the scattered pieces together and get the complete picture of this huge event. Does it matter that, unlike in the Egyptian narrative, there is no one human who was there in the beginning, middle and end... to tell the story in one piece?

The Jews no doubt hand down complete stories of these two events to their generations.

Morrison's Sula - part 6

After Sula’s death, Nel will mourn her but even then she is mourning her own lost girlhood.



“We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Sula, the character the book is named after, the outlaw, had served her friend and her community merely in defining themselves. For a period of time, she keeps them away from the chaos Shadrack represents. But Shadrack, the real hero of the book, is the one friend of Sula’s who never could become that. Sula, who “cuts out” whenever her path crosses Shadrack’s, is also shown to be undeserving. So do we trust the “madman” in his assessment?


"She had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend – she had the mark of the fish he loved)"


Sula, though the central character, is denied the opportunity to realize the existence of a friendship through which she could have really transcended her boundaries. On her deathbed, she says of the community in the Bottom,


"Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me…. After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim… then there’ll be a little love left over for me."


Sula then is about relationships that are frail, mortal… that don’t survive sexual politics. It is about ordinary people who experience loneliness but don’t know how to really cherish each other. Perhaps in a more ideal world it might be possible for agape friendships between people, especially women, to blossom and mature.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Hope you enjoyed the essay. Would love to know your thoughts....

Morrison's Sula - 5

By the time Sula is on her death bed, they have gone to being foils to each other. For instance, when Sula had returned to Medallion Nel had ruminated, “… talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself… Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.” And we feel that however genuine her happiness at getting her old friend back, it is about herself – Sula made her laugh, made her see old things in new ways, in whose presence she felt clever... Sure there’s gratitude but there’s also a sense of herself as defined by the other. Sula does slightly better. She, who had drifted back to Medallion partly because Nel is there, defines herself at the expense of Nel only after breaking up the latter’s marriage – “she and Nel were not one and the same thing…. Now Nel was one of them.” Sula feels that now Nel belongs to the town and “all of its ways.” For, by the time Sula is dying, Nel has become the ‘good’ woman. “Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring”, which “hid from her the true motives of her charity” in visiting her one-time friend. On the other hand, Sula is termed “devil all right” at a social meeting of the women in Medallion. The town had united as a community against the evil Sula represented. After her death, they fall apart.

Morrison asks – how easy is it to stick to the straight and narrow when there is no other who would help the self to reinforce its sense of being virtuous? How much of being good is to do with defining oneself for purposes of gaining social approbation? When one is powerless in society as Sula is, how important is it to be known to have a personality rather than as one who was merely a product of circumstances or “good”?

Morrison undermines Nel – a faithful wife, an adequate mother and a responsible member of the church – by detailing how the thing she mourns most when her husband leaves is the lost sex, how her bear love for her children almost drives them away and how quickly her benign concern for Eva Peace turns sour when the latter probes her on Chicken Little’s death. Before the book closes, Sula’s wronged grandmother asks Nel about Chicken Little’s downing, “Tell me how you killed that little boy…. You. Sula. What’s the difference? .... Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you.” Nel is not spared the exercise of probing her own conscience.

"But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped. She hadn’t wondered about that in years. “Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?”

All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment."

Morrison employs sexual imagery – Nel feels good about herself when someone else is suffering, or worse dying, and her enjoyment is sexual. This is how she assuages her own feelings of powerlessness. Sula, who could be reduced to a mess when Chicken Little drowns, grows into someone who could, despite attempts to transcend powerlessness through education and travel, not escape.

"…hers was an experimental life – ever since her mother’s remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow."

Sula, for all her outlaw status, is someone lacking in real strength and courage. Possibly driven away from the higher pursuits she sets out for (on her friend’s wedding day) by a more powerful world which she grapples with for 10 years, she destroys those in her sphere of influence. And she meets with no opposition. When Nel means to but doesn’t ask, “How come you did it Sula?” i.e. take Jude away from her, the latter “looked bored as she sucked her teeth. ‘Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.” Her head is not full of platitudes and teachings young girls’ heads usually are full of. It is easy for her to take the wide road to hell. (In fact, her grandmother had said to her, “hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you…”) She is looking for completion, but looks in all the wrong places.

"In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous."

Sula harbors some very violent thoughts for Ajax, the man for whom she discovers the meaning of possession. After Ajax leaves her, she ruminates “It’s just as well he left. Soon I would have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity.” As she is liberated from her feelings for Ajax, she sings to herself, “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are.” On her deathbed she asks a startling question in that final conversation with her friend.

“How you know?” Sula asked.

“Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her.

“About who was good. How you know it was you?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”

Morrison's Sula - 4

Morrison suggests that Nel’s and Sula’s friendship is complex, with more to it than meets the eye. The boundaries between one person and the other are not clear, even to the friends themselves. Before Nel gets married, we are told “their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.” And:

"They never quarreled, those two, the way some girlfriends did over boys, or competed against each other for them. In those days a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other."

The storytelling in Sula, which is mostly linear in structure, becomes non-linear when Morrison talks about what cements the friendship. She starts with sex, then goes to shedding of blood (the episode where Sula slices off the tip of her finger to scare the Irish boys who had harassed Nel) and finally death (Chicken Little’s). All three would be taboo for young girls and they are no less assertive than men for breaking these taboos. It is breaking these societal taboos that cements their friendship. So much so that the friendship doesn’t rupture until personal taboos are broken. Nel is unable to share the father of her children with her best friend, something Sula can’t understand. It is only when she herself gets involved with Ajax in a way unlike she did with other men that possessiveness enters her dictionary.

Sex will play an important part in their friendship till the end. To be gazed at lustfully by men, they had made a bold foray into Edna Finch’s Mellow House like “tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome.” Their daring is stunning because they are 12-year-old girls living in a small town in the 1920s. When Ajax calls out “pig meat” the two girls guard their eyes “lest someone see their delight.” The young men tease the girls as they do in my culture, both to aggressively set limits to the threatening freedom of “modern women” and to assert their power over them. And these two girls, who had “discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them” used “each other to grow on.” This expression of sexuality adds to the intimacy they share. They go on to compare “how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other.” This sharing of the details of their forays into the sexual arena is much alike how men compare the women they’ve “had”.

Morrison creates a world, the Bottom, where the yoke of sexual politics lies light on its women denizens. Unlike Paradise, in which the men of the town attack the Covent where errant women have taken shelter, in Sula, the men enjoy the sexuality of women like Hannah and Sula Peace without condemning them as sluts or assembling as mobs to drive them out of decent society. Morrison’s description of female lust is powerful as her female characters turn their gaze on men and objectify them. Nel, as a 55-year-old woman, remembers the time she had been 11.

"Jesus, there were some beautiful boys in 1921! Look like the whole world was bursting at the seams with them. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. Jesus, they were fine…. The sun heated them and the moon slid down their backs. God, the world was full of beautiful boys in 1921!"

Nel, who had had as much feminine desire as Sula, never transgresses the norm. Is Sula is the doer and Nel the one who wants to do but usually never does? Is Sula only open to suggestion? Morrison’s portrayal of the two girls is complex. While it is Nel who had murmured before she befriended Sula:

“I’m me… Me. I’m me. I’m not their daughter… I’m me. Me… I want… I want to be… wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful…” For days afterward she imagined other trips she would take, alone though, to faraway places. Contemplating them was delicious. Leaving Medallion would be her goal.

it is Sula who had travelled “not too long, but maybe too far” before drifting back to Medallion partly because Nel is there. She tells Nel when the latter meets her before her death, “Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.” While Sula was the one who swung him around and around, Nel is the one who had felt good to see Chicken Little fall.