I’m doing that thing again…

You know, the one where I have a ton of things to post about like visiting friends, new homes, delicious food, good times, and the holidays (oh yeah! And early Christmas presents!  WOO!), but I haven’t the time to do it.  Strangely, for me, the Christmas holiday has been tied to sad feelings for a long time, so I constantly battle self reflection and social examination with the desire to put up a Festivus pole, celebrate the Solstice, Decorate trees, bake cookies, and wrap more gifts than I should because wrapping with wire ribbon and shiny paper makes me happy… it’s the simple things, folks.  So I’ve been doing some literary and musical meditation, and what better way to share my holiday spirit than to get you all thinking? I intend to post more, but we’ll see how the travel-crazy holidays effect that.  

On with the quotes, my darlings… can you detect a theme?

“If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”
— Neil Gaiman “Murder Mysteries”

~*~

“There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.
Whenever it rains you will think of her. ”
— Neil Gaiman (accompanying text for Tori Amos’s album Strange Little Girls)

~*~

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.” 
— Harold Bloom

~*~

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

~*~

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”"
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

~*~

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost…but won’t. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

— Sylvia Plath

~*~

Tags: Alice, Gaiman, Lewis Carroll, Literature, Quotes

It has certainly been a while, hasn’t it? 

We moved to our lovely new place in Baltimore with some difficulty and exhaustion, but move we did.  The kitchen is amazing, and the soaking jacuzzi tub is divine!  We traveled home to help a one @DjLunchbox move to his new abode on the weekend of Halloween and handed out candy to the kids in my parents’ neighborhood.  Both Jack and I got sick to varying degrees, and only this week are we starting to feel better and back to normal.  There have been visits to local restaurants, a visit to the Walters Art Museum to see the Heroes: Mortals and Myth in the Ancient World exhibit and a lecture that had me resorting to my old intellectual elitist mentality, unfortunately.  But hey, I’ve accepted it.  We headed back to Brewer’s Art for the Baltimore Tweetup this week, and finally got to put some faces to the Baltimore names we’ve been seeing flit over our screens.

All in all, it’s been pretty wonderful.

So why the deep thinking recently?  I’m not asking you for answers, I suppose, but throwing thoughts against a screen to try and figure things out.  I’m feeling a very real, very visceral need to read Anna Karenina again.  Every year or two I revisit the novel, cover to cover, and every time I read it I gain a little deeper insight into the human condition.  I need something from that text, specifically.  It’s full of love, passion, lust, hate, lies, death, hope, and social and emotional roller coasters that only the classic Russian novels provide for me.  It’s beautiful language, and sometimes you need to be surrounded by someone else’s beautiful things and thoughts, and complex emotions and feelings in order to put your own world into perspective.  I’ve always argued that people watch reality TV for the same reason they went to the theater to see Shakespeare, or to the Colosseum to see gladiator games — Not for violence or cruelty, or tragedy alone, but to see other people going through something far worse than yourself.  For me, literature and music are the only things that can provide that kind of escapist comfort.  There’s something beautiful about language and imagery, and for me, reading all of Anna Karenina is to get to this one paragraph:

“She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever. ”

-Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Part 7, Chapter 31)

No, it’s not enough just to read that paragraph. Yes I need to reread the entire novel.  And maybe War and Peace again as well.  I’ve neglected classic literature for far too long, and I need to remedy that immediately.  Before it would be a short span of time — a month or two, at best — but this time… this time I am left feeling marooned after many months away.  Anna always brings me out of a black cloud kind of week or month.  Literature can do that for me.  Othello and Hamlet do that for me.  Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” does that for me.  Casablanca does that for me.  Francisco de Zurbaran’s The Crucifixion (1627)  will always do that for me.

I wonder what the books or plays impact the worlds of others as profoundly as  Anna Karenina impacts mine… (hint… )

Tags: Anna Karenina, Classic Literature, Literature, Updates

 While Shakespeare may have written “enterprises of great pitch and moment,” his strength was not doling out advice.

This occurred to me tonight while watching Othello.  Every so often  I’ll get the urge to watch one of the adaptations of an Early Modern play (Okay, so it’s more often than not.  I can’t help it! I’ll shrivel and die without hearing iambic pentameter and glorious prose at least once a week).  It isn’t always centered around any particular mood, but often I find myself drawn to specific plays for dealing with particular emotions, moods, or profound moments.  Tonight’s mood prompted me to watch Othello for various reasons

I was reminded of the comical and popular notion that The Godfather contains all the answers to life’s questions (Incidentally, I’d be taking The Godfather–part 1 of course–on that little island escapade we discussed a while back).  Surely the Bard, whose work has persisted in the minds of the audience for over 400 years, had more to say, right?  Not so much.  It would seem that Master Shakespeare’s major solution to every difficulty in life is Death.  Well, suicide, murder, or (in the case of the comedies) running away to some enchanted forest (social death, if you will).  I’m not really seeing any of these as viable options.

As a Tragedian, this shouldn’t surprise me–it’s not like I didn’t know this before.  Any high school student worth his salt could tell you Shakespeare was full of death:  Want all of your father’s inheritance?  Kill folks.  Want to be king?  Kill your friend(s).  Drive your husband to murder?  Kill yourself (oh, but do go insane first).  Someone took the position you feel was rightfully yours? Destroy their lives, plot their deaths, and then they’ll kill themselves to boot.  The Empress destroyed your family bit by painstaking bit because you took her throne and killed her son?  Hack off your sword arm, Kill your daughter, then cook the empress’ sons in a pie and feed it to her.  Yeah, we know all this.  For some reason, though, tonight’s realization was profound. 

It had to do with Iago in particular.  By far, he is my favorite villain in literature.  Iago systematically plots and executes the downfall of no less than four people (five if you want to count Brabantio’s broken hearted death) with the precision of a Swiss watch.  Every possible obstacle he encountered, he managed to use to his advantage through quick strategy, logic, and even humor.  He understood how people thought, what motivated them, and played the puppet-master to terrifying effect.  What makes Iago so brilliant is his methodology.  He didn’t just rush in and slaughter those who “wronged” him.  He poisoned their minds and let them destroy themselves. 

Of course, he was discovered.  But when, after killing Desdemona and watching Iago kill Emilia, Othello asks Lodovico to “Demand this demi-devil why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body,” Iago speaks his final lines: “Demand me nothing.  What you know, you know: From this time forth, I never will speak word.”

And he doesn’t.  Ever.  Lodovico charges Cassio to punish Iago as he sees fit, but there is no indication of how or whether it was ever done (many could argue that Cassio’s “soft” nature would lead him to take pity on his one time friend, “honest Iago”).  It’s not the punishment that’s so troubling, though.  It’s that Iago takes his reasoning with him and locks it away.  It’s never made clear exactly why Iago does what he does.  He alludes to a handful of possible reasons, but never proclaims any of them as his motivation.  Even those reasons are made as soliloquies and meant only for the audience, so no one in Cypress (except Iago himself) has any inkling of reasoning.  Othello, on the other hand, explains in painful detail why he killed Desdemona (even to her while doing it), and then why he kills himself.  By not answering “Why” Iago retains complete control, even to the end. 

So my troubled thinking comes from the fact that Iago doesn’t lose in the end.  Yes, he’s “caught,” but his power is in his manipulation and control over the thoughts and actions of others.  By refusing to explain himself, he forces everyone else to posit questions, to wonder.  Only he has the final answer and he refuses to give it.  His soul isn’t laid bare.  He retains his pride.  He may have destroyed others, but to him it was a successful enterprise.  He accomplished what he set out to do, and at no point suggests that his own well being mattered a whit in the long run as long as the others were destroyed.  So where’s the justice?  There is none.  None at all.  That is why Othello is, in my opinion, Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.  It’s not fair.  There’s sad, then there’s tragic.  Sad things have resolution and things go wrong anyway.  It’s a pity. Tragic things are without resolution, without excuse and reason, and they aren’t at all fair.

I’ve often considered writing an adaptation of Othello, much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead  is of Hamlet, but rather than the work running concurrently with the play, I wanted to set it either before or after the play.  Iago fascinates me in so many ways that I don’t have much of a choice but  to write them. 

Can you think of any other tragedies that are as profound?  I’d love to hear them.

Tags: Literature, Shakespeare, Tragedy