Poem: Riding MARTA on a Business Trip

MARTA train arrives in Atlanta's airport photograph: visitingdc

Faces I saw on the train from the airport,

twin faces painstakingly exact,
except for a
birthmark on one of their chins,
dressed in a gray hooded pullover,
one blue, one grey, a branded name, the same,

stood on their seats with a cousin or friend,
lions and lionesses
guarding
a traveling father and mother
planning, checking the stops …
don’t want to miss it …

going to the zoo, a little vacation
with the kids

said the papa

sitting right next to me

and as the train ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhed by,
a twin’s tooth came loose in the aisle seat,
between Civic Center and Peachtree.

Showcasing the discarded flesh to his brother as if
rejoicing in his difference,

jostling up to his twin, eagerly sharing his tooth,
snuggling up to him, intimacy,
the entire family of the car noticed
and sighed a collective ahhhhhhhh of parental instinct,
distracted from reading, staring out the window,
getting off, getting on,
the gapless gemini grinning
his roman face leonine, as I have said,

and switching places with his father, to calm him down,
to displace him from his brother,
he glowered in the seat, never quite glowing,
or sharing his tooth,
stowed probably in his pocket.

When the train had stopped and they had gone.
I didn’t see them again; I had turned my head and when I had looked
back,
where the twin had sat, there was an empty space,
an orange-tinted plastic seat

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"Lady" © 2006 by Greig Roselli

Notes on Pico Iyer on Orhan Pamuk's Novel "Snow"

In an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, Pico Iyer listens while Ishiguro explains the plot elements of his “indecipherable” novel The Unconsoled (1). The novel is about a pianist named Ryder who has an invitation to perform a concert in an unidentified town in Europe and stays at a hotel in town but he is not sure why he is there or if he has even been invited but he is afraid to ask anyone so he pretends his way through his stay. Without a past or a clear future Ryder has to figure his way through the maze. Through this clever set-up, Ishiguro says in the interview, the novel does not develop through the traditional conventions of flashback or chronological telling, but rather, the characters Ryder meets in the hotel are images of him or projections of himself through which we learn about Ryder’s story. Ishiguro’s idea is that when people dialogue with one another they really do not listen to the on another or understand them but rather project their own image of themselves (either past, present or future) onto the other person as an extension of themselves. Therefore, a person in a novel could be an extension of a past memory of the protagonist or a projection of his own feelings. Either consciously or unconsciously, the same strange set-up is in Pamuk’s novel Snow. Ka is a Turkish poet interviewing families of suicide “head-scarf” girls for an Istanbul paper, while also hoping to find a wife in the beautiful Ipek; so he travels to Kars, a border town near Russia, in the middle of a fierce snowstorm and ends up getting stuck there, surprisingly finding moments of happiness and able to write his first poem after four years of silence. The novel is framed by the streets of Kars not only as a geographical border but the confines by which the novel develops. One gets the sense when reading the book that everyone knows Ka’s innermost thoughts; his thoughts are transparent to everyone he meets, even the silliest incidents, like the newspaper publisher predicting that he will write a new poem and recite it at the evening’s National Theater production.  This is because the people Ka meet are extensions of him, as either visions of his past, or prospects for his future. 
   

Necip is a vision of Ka’s past.  When Ka meets Necip in the snowy streets of Kars, the boy tells him that he is a messenger from Blue, an Islamic extremist hiding out in the city (65-67).  Ka is struck by the boy’s beautiful, large green eyes and his piercing, childlike trust and precocity that Ka likens to his own youth, which is why, Ka admits, he is able to warm up to the boy.  Necip even tells Ka that Ka only likes him because he sees in him his own youth (I can’t find the page number!).  This connection is mentioned a few times in the novel along with the weird announcement of how much time in hours and minutes remain until Necip will die by a gunshot wound to the head, destroying one of his beautiful blue eyes, the vision of the poet.  Necip is the boy Ka once was but also a sad reminder of who Ka could have become; while Ka is from a secular, bourgeoisie class from Istanbul, Necip is a poor, religious kid from the country, doomed to die, caught in the fight between the radical Islamists and the secular government.  Necip believes in God while Ka only sees God in the traces of snow lacing the streets of Kars with silence (the silence of snow is alluded to at least a dozen times but I am not really sure what it means, but maybe I am not supposed to know).  Necip wants to be a writer and eagerly shares with Ka a manuscript of a sci-fi story he is working on and confesses his unrequited love for Hircan (aka Kadiffe, Ipek’s sister) who is much older than he is; while Ka sees that the boy’s ambitions are idealistic, it is seems he is drawn to Necip’s idealism as a panacea for his own stubborn refusal to be happy.  Ka’s poem “Snow” which he recites at the National Theatre in downtown Kars is a mirror image of Necip’s own dream of the hellish landscape of hell; the two poets share a common muse, it seems, although their paths are radically different.  Pamuk is sentimental just enough to bring you right back to reality but not gruesome to the point of excess. 
    Ipek is Ka’s hopeful prospect for the future.  She is Ka’s dream for a future life in Frankfurt where he can write poetry and make love to a beautiful woman.  He even admits that he arrived in Kars, not to only pursue the story of the suicide girls for the Republican but to seek Ipek’s hand in marriage whom he knows is living in Kar’s Snow Palace hotel which her father runs.  Ipek is Ka’s wish for happiness, a wish he is ashamed to admit because he secretly thinks he does not deserve happiness.  He does not know Ipek but remembers her from childhood; all he remembers – to his slight chagrin – is that she is beautiful and recently single.  He lumps onto her all his hope for a future, as if the clearing of the streets of snow and the end to tribal warfare will be over with the consummation of a kiss.  Ipek blushes at Ka’s advances and even lets him kiss her but she refuses to let him make love to her while her father is in the same building.  Ipek knows Ka wants her because she is beautiful; and she is not angry with this but at the same time she diverts his comments about a future life with a smile and a remonstration to stay on the present task.
   Blue is a strange mirror image of Ka. Ka is a good guy who writes beautiful poetry, a little conflicted and lives with a guilty conscience but for the most part would not seriously malign another human being; Blue is a suave guy, young and articulate but sinister – at least to me – in his reasoning. He is sensitive like Ka, but missing moral aptitude and a true sense of “what’s going on”. Blue is the fundamentalist side of Ka. I guess the Sheik falls into this category, but the Sheik represents Ka’s own theological doubt and uncertainty about the existence of God; Blue is Ka’s literal approach to the world to erase the poetic, natural beauty of Ka’s lyrics. Blue tells Ka not to report back to the West what he writes about the suicide girls. Blue wants to silence the Ka within him. 
    So far I can only articulate well enough Necip, Ipek, the Sheik and Blue as projections of Ka but I imagine all the people Ka meet are versions of him. Kars is like a winter wonderland, a mazy kind of place and a fragile dream; violence happens; things do not look good for the next half of the novel once the snow stops and forces will be able to move around freely. It should be interesting to see what kind of Ka emerges from this place – or if he ever gets out. It makes me sad to see that Necip will die, but maybe this is part of Ka’s journey – the death of childhood. I don’t know. At the end of this article, I don’t think I like my thesis anymore, but it helped me to do a close reading of the text.

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1. Kazuo Ishiguro [videorecording] / the Lannan Foundation; directed by Dan Griggs. Los Angeles, CA : The Foundation, c1996.  Lannan literary series ; no. 49

Milton’s ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’: Eros, Lust and ‘Writing a Prostitute’

Leo Spitzer, in an interesting rejoinder to a colleague’s claim that Milton is an inferior poet to Shakespeare uses “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint” to argue that Milton is universally as a good a poet as Shakespeare was.  Spitzer counters the claim that the personal, contingent nature of Milton’s best sonnets do not make him any less universal a poet than Shakespeare Because Shakespeare apparently writes a better sonnet about love because he has somehow objectified the experience of love and made it universal while Milton uses the image of a specific person, his supposed spouse, making his sonnet indecipherable outside the known events of Milton’s chronology (See Spitzer 21).  Spitzer argues that the poem can be interpreted apart from the historical facts surrounding the poem and that the spouse in Milton’s twenty-third sonnet is not necessarily, nor reduced to, a specific episode of Milton’s life but rather a type of the Platonic form, an imago of marriage akin to the ideal Donna Angelicata tradition in literature, like Dante’s Beatrice, an angelic lady to rival any of the best love sonnets of Shakespeare (Spitzer 21). This argument makes it clear that Milton’s poetry transcends the mores of Puritanism and the 17th Century and proves that Milton can be enjoyed in the 21st Century as well as the 28th — and, I may add, every generation gives another perspective on the poem that others may have missed. 
    Spitzer’s article is refreshing because most of the previous scholarly work on “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint,” especially in the past two centuries, have focused on the question of who the actual ‘late espousèd saint’ is.  Critics do agree that the subject of Milton’s last sonnet is one of his two wives (he had three), Mary Powell or Katherine Woodcock. When it comes to the identity of the saint, I prefer the argument that favors Katherine Woodcock because — to use Ockham’s razor — firstly, she is the simple and uncomplicated solution to the problem of the saint’s identity which has gone unchallenged for three hundred years according to Huntley until W.R. Parker came along and posited Mary Powell as a more likely candidate (Huntley 468-49). (1)
     And secondly, it is true that Milton never saw Katherine’s Woodcock’s face because he was already blind when he married her.  In the poem she wears a veil but the speaker still recognizes her, hinting at the known fact that when a blind people dream of a person they know but have never seen with their own eyes, they see them as veiled or faceless, so it makes sense that Milton would be referring to Katherine in the poem. (2)
     The third reason is that Katherine Woodcock died after the spot of “child-bed taint,”  mentioned in the poem, the Hebrew law prescripted in Leviticus that a woman must be ritually purified seven days after childbirth.  Where one stands on the argument of identity puts one on one side of an academic battle line, so I figure I must take a stand even though this is not the primary issue given attention in this essay.  I think there is a need to know the identity of the saint, not because it would solve an enigma in English literature, but because it reveals the desire in human eros to touch the object of our desire, to reach out with the fingers, “to reach out and touch faith,” to quote Depeche Mode.  
    Because, here, I am not interested in the historical identity of the saint, necessarily, I will tend to take the more post-Spitzerian approach to the sonnet as a piece that stands on its own two legs and is textually satisfying in its own well-tempered Petrarchan form. (3)   Anyone who studies Milton should know that the number of secondary sources on the poet is overwhelming, so the number of articles that surround the saint should come as no surprise — and this does not include mentions in biographies of Milton and criticisms on other works that may mention the sonnet in passing or as a comparison. Still, there are a surprising number of essays dedicated to the subject of who the saint is and if you sweep all those aside, you still have a healthy stack of articles that deal with Spitzer’s observations on the poem and other scholars who have approached the poem from other perspectives and vantage points, which is still surprising considering that the sonnet is 14 lines and 119 words long. (4)
     Like Spitzer and Wheeler, I think the poem is more about love and love-lost than an actual person — while, at the same time, I grant that Milton was probably thinking about one of his wives when he wrote the poem.  I think the poem — at its heart — is more about the image of eros, erotic love, the poignant pathos thorned by loss and regret, and the myriad ways — healthy and unhealthy — we attempt to recapture that lost image of love.
    Milton, unlike Shakespeare, is rarely discussed as “sexy” or “erotic” because usually, the restraints of Puritanism prevented him from openly discussing sex and sexuality.  I do agree that Shakespeare is more openly sensual in his sonnets than Milton is, and even though Shakespeare beats out Milton in the sheer number of pages of poetry that he has written, one cannot dismiss Milton as an inferior poet or as a sexy poet just because he is labeled as a Puritan writer thus ipso facto fixated on sin and Satan.  These stereotypical labels often attached to Milton preclude him from being interpreted as a sensual, erotic poet not bound up by whatever taboos we wish to impose on him.  Even though he wrote his Christian Doctrine at the same time as the sonnet he also wrote a blank verse poem about Adam and Eve that is very similar to Sonnet 23, especially in the way it ends: “She disappear’d, and left me dark, I wak’d” (Schwartz 99).  In an essay on the erotic (but not necessarily sexual) relationship between Milton and Charles Diodati, John P. Rumrich translates eros-filled passages from their letters to one another (130, 132, 134).  Milton openly wrote about sex in his treatise on divorce, talking about the burning need for a husband and wife to be stimulated by good conversation.  And “Comus” is filled with sexual metaphor and imagery, and in Paradise Lost — you get the idea. 
    Milton has no problem with sex as long as it is expressed within the bond of marriage and peppered with good conversation between a man and wife; he even posited that sex existed before the fall and that man’s disobedience, unfortunately, introduced lust, which has spoiled sex ever since (see his Doctrine on the Discipline of Divorce for more).   
    And in the Areopagitica Milton writes about the parable of the wheat and the darnel in the New Testament, where Jesus speaks about the need for the wheat to grow alongside the weeds, how good and evil are intimately bound together, and the truly human struggle to wrestle with both to come out alive, to know by experience what is the better choice.  Milton thought it was better to confront temptation rather than escape it.  For, in the end, the good always triumphs — for if we really believe in the goodness of God, then we should not be dismayed by the presence of evil.  So it is important to understand this about Milton to fully appreciate the struggle of eros, erotic love, and the loss of love (and the ways we attempt to achieve lost love) played out in the last sonnet.         
    But of course, eros in the poem is not necessarily privileged; the eroticism of his poetry is implicit and begs someone to tug at a loose string from the text and pull and pull, like a stray yarn on a sweater, to find out what is hidden beneath Milton’s Puritan desire, to uncover the struggle inherent in the text of the poem, the struggle interweaved like good and evil.  It could be said, ‘Obviously, his twenty-third sonnet is about what the Greeks called eros (eros, erotic love), no matter if you tug at a stray string or not — because the poem is about conjugal love between a man and woman, someone who has shared the beauty of intimacy in life and has born the speaker a biological child.’  However the apparent eroticism of the poem is not the physical sex life of the couple while she was alive, but the erotic yearnings in the poem that ring a hollow gong because the beloved is gone.  The saint is dead.  The question is, how has the eroticism of their life together been dissolved by her death to remain only as a dream — an image that easily escapes the poet in the last lines of the poem, at the first break of day in the morning when the saint flees, bringing back a psychological night once again?  Honigman notes the neat reversal in the poem, noting that the poem begins with an emergence from darkness and closes with a return to darkness and back to daylight (45).  The poem is very much about the consciousness of the blind dreamer enraptured by the image of his dead wife (Hall 107).  To what extent will a person go to recapture the image of the beloved?  There is a limit to how far desire can go, how fervently a person can yearn before it turns into erotic fantasy.  The eros of this poem verges on the pornographic and the artificial.  How is this so and how far does it go? 
    I reprint the poem here from Honigman’s annotated collection, Milton Sonnets, before I go into a critical discussion of the sonnet.

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
    Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
    whom Jove’s great Son to her glad husband gave,
    Rescu’d from death by force through pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
    Purification in the old Law did save,
    And such, as yet once more I trust to have
    Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
    Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight,
    Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear, as in no face with more delight.   
    But O, as to embrace me she inclin’d,
    I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

    What makes the poem most interesting is that the dead saint is depicted both as pure and tainted, as both rescu’d and fleeing, as both real and imaginary, as both veiled and seen.  It is not readily apparent in the poem that the goodness, sweetness, and love perceived is completely pure and lily white.  The “espousèd saint” is not exactly the Donna Angelicata of Dante nor is she the Aldonza of Quixote — although Sokol has suggested that she may be inspired by Petrarch’s Laura (142).  She is an admixture of fantasy and reality, of image and person that makes for a complicated and multilayered figure in literature composed in the tightly scripted verse of a sonnet, probably written in 1655 or 1658 (Schwartz 98).  What drew me first to a reading of the poem as erotic was, “Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight ...”    
    The image of the woman is veiled, so the Miltonic speaker sees an image of the woman in his own “fancied sight” in the language of Renaissance English, that could mean either “delusive imagination” or “enlightening imagination” depending on the context ( Sokol 143).  But because she is veiled, because there is a physical barrier between the speaker and the woman, she has a mysteriousness about her that makes her at once tantalizing and unapproachable.  It is a fantasy of the woman rather than an enlightened imagination, I would argue. It is a preceived image.  The veil stands as a symbol of visible obscurity, both obscuring and revealing the deepest of desires.  It is a fabricated image in the mind of the poet as well as a fabric.  The love seen is most likely an ideal form of love, a Platonic form that can never be reached; however, it is something else as well, something not so ideal, something veiled and shielded from view.  The fantasy of the poem is the suggestion that the image of the saint will become corporeal — as reachable and touchable as it was for the speaker in life — but this is a fantasy, a chimera which we know, and the poem knows, will never come to pass.  Desire is so great that it is mistaken for reality; because he loved her, he dreams about her.  Even without a face she has a name, a history, and a past.   
    Like the bereaved man who keeps a photograph of his dead wife in his wallet, looking at it as if it will bring her back from the dead, Milton’s poem is a photograph of his “late espousèd saint” brought back like Alcestis from the grave by Hercules, “through pale and faint.”  In myth, what happens when the dead are brought back from Hades?5   Can someone be “rescu’d from death”?  In the Greek myths either they are lost forever, like Eurydice, or you do in fact bring them back with the help of a god or goddess but the question is, ‘who is the person brought back?’ — or should we ask — bought back?  The sonnet is like the wish of Admetus to buy back his Alcestis in Euripides’s play, to get Hercules to successfully wrest her from the grave.  But bought love is not the same as real love, especially when the love you want to buy has been lost.  And recall that Alcestis is brought back by force, not by her own volition, as if raped like Zeus capturing the boy-shepherd Ganymede and bringing him to Mount Olympus to be his cup-bearer.  If the poem is like the grieving husband looking at a photograph of his deceased wife, then the poem is also about the addictive search for an image to sate a desire and the costs we will pay despite the impossibility of the task.   
    Just as gods capture boys and maidens to be lovers, people pay prostitutes to love them for money; they pay for a face to replace the one they have lost.  The fantasy of the sonnet verges on a pornography of love for the image of the face is not seen on the saint, reminding us that she has become an anonymous figure, someone brought back from the dead.  The word pornography means “to write a prostitute” or to “buy a prostitute” (6).  The image he trusts to have “without restraint” is pornographic as well as prostituted because it is not real and it is not mutual but it is also very human, rooted to a real love of a real person — a pure person filled with goodness (purity is privileged) — but since she has been profoundly lost, both physically and mentally the sonnet is asking, ‘how can I write her back?’.  It is also far removed from reality, which is the feeding ground for lust, eroticism gone haywire and the stuff of pornographic imagery!  The paradox of a pure, white-veiled donna angelicata//sullied, open-faced succubus is understood in the context of loving something you cannot have, so you resort to any medium that can fulfill that gross love — even temporarily.  The woman of the sonnet is not the donna angelicata or the platonic form — absolutely, nor is she the sullied bride of child-bed taint either — she is neither of these extremes, but she is an image, shifting back and forth in the poem.  She is an image written into a poem, condensed into desire and made into a chimera.  This is not the same as interpreting the poem as intentionally pornographic, but rather, unraveling the poem to see how this has been written underneath the lines.  By referring to the poem in this way it is not implying that the poet’s desire is somehow perverted or sinful, per se, but that his desire for an image of the beloved is an empty one, unable to be fully consummated; therefore, it is rife with the irrational desire to tear away the veil and rescue the dead — which may be wishes but are far from the truth.  If every sonnet has a problem to be solved, then the problem of this sonnet is how to reconcile this paradox?  How do you reconcile the image, veiled with the corporeal, flesh and blood presence? 
    The conclusion in lines 13-14 does not give an easy solution: 

    But O, as to embrace me she inclin’d,
    I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

George McLoone acknowledges in an article in Milton Quarterly that the last two lines are sexual as well as eschatological and ecclesial (17).  There is a desire for both the spirit and the flesh   Every encounter is bound to be fleeing away, a return to the normal bout with night that turns into day, that reality brings, like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic.  The poet understands that the image is false, is not the real thing, but he returns to the image time and again, hoping, just once, that the image may be made real.  The inhabitants of Plato’s darkened cave prefer the shadows and when a prophet comes back from the light to announce the truth the cave people kill him and continue to worship the shadows.  The image of the sonnet is both the shadow world of the cave and the bright light of the external sun.  The longing of the poem, the insistent desire to have “full sight of her in Heaven without restraint” is a real desire but what is exposed is just a fake as a pornographic image, a pixelated fantasy designed to fix you.  There is nothing illusory about the desire in and of itself, but what happens to this desire that cannot have full sight?  The wish to be free when there is only restraints only brings restraint.  It is interesting the word “restraint” is used in the poem.  He wants unmitigated access to her but cannot have it save through force.  No matter what the desire, it cannot help itself but fall back to a written song of chains.  The pornography of the poem is its insistence that desire can be written at will, as if desire itself is sufficient to raise the dead, to bring back, “goodness, sweetness and love” because it is desired without restraint.  But is the sweetness the corruptible sweetness of a cherry coca-cola or a one-night stand?  Is the goodness good or only make-believe?  This makes it an image of desire.  Like any image of desire: a body of desire splayed out on a glossy page to be devoured by a raw erotic appetite can only lead to the same disappointment the turn of the sonnet concedes: “day brought back my night”.  This is true with any image touted as perfect, as amenable to the needs of the appetite or any addiction for that matter: the perfect Tom Collins, the perfect high, the perfect drag of a cigarette, the perfect orgasm.  Addiction searches for a fix better than the last.  Mere desire, mere human desire, which falls back on itself, that relentlessly pursues the image for its mere ineluctable attraction — in a post-lapsarian world — brings about the emptiness that this poem so poignantly proclaims.  In a way, the poem is a complement to sonnet CXXIX by Shakespeare, the so-called lust sonnet, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame” where he says, “Before, a joy propos'd; behind a dream.” (7)   The moment of the dream is bliss, the moment the pure saint dressed in heavenly white appears is certainly euphoric and buzzing — one feels the excitement in the poem but one also feels the feeling akin to addictive bliss, to an empty erotic longing that comes with unfilled, unrequited love.   
    While it can be argued that Milton is not talking about unadulterated lust but rather the conjugal love of a spouse, it can be argued that the love object of Milton is a dream; therefore, it is the same as lust because the joy Milton expresses in the poem is unattainable and the speaker knows this, knows the dream as a dream when he wakes up from sleep as a sad suffering.  The poem is about the suffering felt when eros  — eros how it should be felt and experienced with someone you love — is not felt and the strange human propensity to pursue this empty eros even though it is false (and we know it to be false) and bound to fail (8).  It is almost as if the love expressed in Milton’s sonnet is exactly the same as lust because the beloved in the poem is no more alive than the numbness the poem ends with, “my night”.         
         

Aesthetic Thursday: "Agrippa Fecit": The Pantheon of Rome

I bookmark a few facts about the Pantheon in Rome in this post.

View of the Exterior of the Pantheon
Image Credit: Greig Roselli

1. The Pantheon in Rome is an ancient temple built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 125 AD on the site of an earlier temple commissioned by Marcus Agrippa. 

2. It was initially dedicated to all the gods of Ancient Rome, but it has since been used as a Catholic church known as Santa Maria ad Martyres.

3. The building is renowned for its architectural achievement, with a giant dome that covers the entire main chamber and an oculus at its center, which allows natural light to enter the room below it.

4. The Oculus measures approximately 8 meters (27 feet) wide. It allows sunlight into the Pantheon during daytime hours when opened fully - although there are no windows or other means of entering direct light inside otherwise!

5. Inside, you can find many beautiful sculptures, such as statues of major gods from Ancient Greece & Rome, and paintings on marble walls depicting scenes from Roman mythology & history - making this one of the most impressive monuments in Italy!

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Video Credit: Ariel Viera

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A Poem Written During Hurricane Season: "on the vacation of spirits"

I wrote a poem about Hurricane Katrina - because I lived through it. Here is the poem (and yes, I took the photograph too).

on the vacation of spirits

when the zephyr blazed through MR GO, the gods, naiads, goddesses, with their hollow shrieks vacated the levee womb, a deposit bereft of running life
left, vacant and empty where once
spirits danced and melancholy wept –
on the corner of St. Claude and Alvar –
now split into dry wood, a gaping gash,
unsutured and sullied with faded peeled shrimp –
drained,
as if blood itself where all that is necessary for a full spectrum rainbow –
now only empty houses, prom dresses

milton’s house,
left on top of a pickup
because there are no longer laughing gods to re evacuate,
no longer a god to sit on the stoop at the fish market,
a boy to close the door behind him when he leaves

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text and image © Greig Roselli

Book Review: The Hours

When I read the required reading list for the Virginia Woolf Seminar I took at Southeastern Louisiana University, I was happy to see Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours included in the list. I had read the book before and liked it so much that I read his two other books: Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World (which along with the Hours was made into a motion picture). My favorite is Flesh and Blood, his first. It is a drama spanning three generations of a suburban New York family; quite dysfunctional, of course, because no one wants to read about normal people. They’re too dull. All of his novels deal with family issues. A Home at the End of the World is about three friends who try to make a family together, to raise a child and to make a home for themselves. The Hours is about family as well; most poignantly when family becomes suffocating and you want a way out.

It’s funny the images that Cunningham frequently uses in his novels. In an interview with Cunningham in the Kenyon Review (I think it’s the Kenyon Review), he talks candidly about his books and how they have been received by the general reading public; especially his role as a gay author writing books that do not necessarily fit into the Gay and Lesbian genres. It could be said that Cunningham is breaking new ground by writing books from a queer perspective accessible to the non-queer type and not solely formula fiction. Typical gay books tend to follow a formulaic outline: 1.) boy (or girl) is unsure of his/her sexuality 2.) has a sexual experience 3.) there is talk about the danger of AIDS 4.) then “coming out” to family and friends 5.) maybe more sex 6.) falling out with partner 7.) and either a reconciliation or more commonly, going separate ways. I have even heard that some formula fiction (whichever the genre) is so predictable that you can flip through the book quite easily and find all the parts. While not all queer fiction is formulaic, the books I’m talking about are either “coming out” books, gay bildungsromans with stereotypical characters, or they tend to be Harlequin romances or Barbara Cartland yarns with a homoerotic theme. Suffice it to say, hopefully, Cunningham's books represent a shift in queer fiction. He doesn’t even use the word “gay” (if at all) in his novels. Sexuality is fluid for him; what I mean is that sexual identity is not fixed in stone; like the Kinsey model -- none of us are either completely one way or the other; most of us lie somewhere in the middle of the sexual spectrum.

And also, as we mentioned in class — we read novels because we want to read them; we shouldn’t read a novel because a character has or has not a particular “orientation” — so what if a character is gay, straight, transgendered, bisexual or whatever? It’s the same problem we affix to other genres — Christian fiction, historical fiction; as if the genres themselves dictate how we are supposed to enjoy the book. Someone mentioned in class last night that walking into a Barnes & Noble, you get the sense that the books are choosing you not you choosing them.

I can’t help but mention the fact that in the interview in the Kenyon Review the interviewer mentions that in every one of Cunningham's novels there is mention of baking a cake. In Flesh and Blood the mother is baking a cake for a birthday party; in The Hours, Laura Brown sticks her hands into cake dough, evanescent of her repressed sexuality and in a Home at the End of the World, Bobby learns to bake a cake from his best friend’s mother and eventually becomes a chef. Responding to this observation about cakes in his novels, Cunningham laughed and said that it wasn’t done on purpose. But, he said, it was true — cakes are everywhere in his works. If you want to know the symbolism of something in a book don’t ask the writer because he will deny any kind of signification; writers don’t like to give away “why” they wrote a book (as if there is something to “give away”);. Readers, however, are different from the writer of the book in that we want to discover meaning behind recurring images in a novel but authors are reluctant to say, “yes I meant this when I wrote that.” If I were to give meaning to baking in Cunningham I would say that he is very much involved with domesticity, uncovering the mundane “stuff” we do in our everyday superficial lives. But, he just as well may say that it was a coincidence.

Speaking of cakes and domesticity, it is interesting to note how Cunningham “places” his novels. He doesn’t portray starving people in Ethiopia nor does he showcase the horrors of war in Iraq — his novels are about sometimes superficial peoples’ lives in an artificial world trying to find a home. Clarissa in the Hours lives in a fabulous apartment; she is privileged; she is throwing a party for her former lover; like Mrs. Dalloway, it’s all rather superficial. What’s the point? What’s the so what? Cunningham is writing from what he knows just as Woolf wrote from what she knew, her (and his) collection of memories and experiences that serve as the fodder for the novels. What’s more universal: dying of AIDS in Uganda or dying of AIDS on the Upper West Side?

I don’t know if the Hours (or any of Cunningham’s novels) will make the list in the years to come. It’ll be interesting to see what’s included in the canon before my own life is finished. The Hours is a fine book; it is not an imitation of a previous masterstroke, but nor is it a genius piece of work either. I enjoyed it a second time after reading so much Woolf in a short span of time. It was a nice dessert! I can’t help but think, though, that perhaps cake may be Cunningham’s only perduring legacy.

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Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual Sphere

Virginia Woolf, Photograph: AP

Not only is Virginia Woolf a cultural icon, as Brenda Silver in her book, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere, demonstrates, but she is also influential in the current intellectual sphere.

But, what is the intellectual sphere and what does this have to do with Woolf studies?

The intellectual sphere is the realm of influence surrounding the propagation of ideas, forming an intellectual history from Confucius to Kant, et cetera. Intellectual history is the record of this journey; mainly domineered by men, so it is curious to consider Woolf as a member of this sphere.

Will Durant, the well-noted historian, listed the top-ten most influential thinkers and did not include a woman. It is difficult to think of the most influential thinkers in history without thinking of class and gender. And besides, do we think of Woolf as an intellectual, anyway? Novelist comes to mind. Essayist. Woolf did write 500 essays on topics ranging from current British figures, novelists and literary criticism. In A Room of One's Own she contributed to the idea of the androgynous mind, the idea that the most creative artist creates from the locus of both "man" and "woman".

Also, Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury group: artists, writers, poets who didn't include the masses. She was a member of a higher social class than most; she didn't have to work. She was very well-educated -- more than many men -- but she didn't have a university education like her brothers. She was able to be educated because she was the daughter of an educated man; she read the books in his library. She describes herself as being between the devil and the deep sea (Three Guineas 74 See more on this page). Her father's library educated her: the Victorian books that surrounded her educated her; She received a pastiche education, pulling knowledge from wherever she could. She did feel bitterness about this; she writes in the Three Guineas about "University Education": "What is this mysterious process that takes about three years to accomplish, costs a round sum in hard cash, and turns the crude and raw human being into the finished product -- an educated man or woman?" (24).

But, are we speaking about an intellectual elitism here? Would Woolf consider herself a part of an elitist intelligentsia separated from the masses? How did Woolf imagine herself in the context of the intellectual elite and/or the public sphere? It is difficult to speak about "the intellectual" without also speaking about a class society. Intellectuals, as Gramsci puts it, come from the different social classes so as to articulate the identity of that particular class. This is different from Plato's idea of the Philosopher King in his dialogue The Republic. Ancient Greece was a democracy of free men, women excluded. The intellectual was a man who had the leisure time to spend writing and thinking. He was taught gymnastics in school, learned the art of war. The slaves worked or went to war -- the women stayed home and kept their chitons tight around their belts.

Plato does ask the question, though, why is it that Women are reserved the role of nurturer, thus the weaker sex, and man has the role of a warmonger, the stronger sex? Marx can be called a public intellectual for he wrote about the rise of the working class. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were intellectuals for the Civil Rights Movement in the '60s. Cuddy-Keane, in her work on Woolf and the intellectual/Public sphere, argues against the popular notion that Woolf was an elitist. Woolf deliberately published her essays in magazines that many people read: Ladies' Home Journal, for example. Woolf gave lectures at schools on the importance of education. Again, in the Three Guineas, she writes about the importance of education, "judging for yourself, comparing the views" so as to distinguish between fact and fiction. Woolf didn't trust the status quo. She realized that the war effort wanted able bodies, producers, and women were fixed to provide for the state as long as they were forbidden from an education; the women's college that asks her for a guinea, she argues, will only purchase matches and petrol that will burn the college to the ground! (36). She noticed that the world is divided into public and private spheres.

In a comical way, she broke into this private sphere. As a young woman, she poked fun at government security by dressing up as an Ethiopian prince and boarding the HMS Dreadnought to the chagrin of the British Navy who fell for the hoax! Woolf realized that women were excluded from the private sphere and she wanted to bring the divide that separated them closer. Woolf published two book series called the Common Reader. In it, she published essays, literary criticism and biographical sketches for anyone to read. In a way, this is her most accessible work for the public intellectual sphere. The Three Guineas, which we read in class, is her most polemical attack; but also, her most insistence insertion into the intellectual sphere, championing her cause as a pacifist.

Works Cited:

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge. 2003

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader: First Series. Harcourt Brace. 1925, 1953.

--------------------. The Second Common Reader. Harcourt Brace. 1932.

---------------------, Three Guineas. Harcourt Brace. 1938, 1966.

I also consulted the Philosopher's Index, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Intellectual History to find entries on Woolf. Woolf had one entry in the 2004 edition of the Philosopher's Index and none in the others, except a cross-reference note at the end of an article in the Philosophical Encyclopedia. 

I also have a fuller, annotated bibliography on Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual Sphere posted here.

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