Category Archives: A prose flourish

July 3, 2013 · 5:40 pm

Celebrating A Year’s Presence on My Blog with New Stories

Dear Readers,

As of tomorrow, July 4, I will have been publishing material on this site for exactly a year.  The date signals not only my independence from the tyranny of the need to deal with agents and editors and the whole literary infrastructure which supports the very big business of publishing in standard print mode–though if asked I would be willing to publish that way too, face it, I’m a realist!–but it also marks my celebration of a year’s consistent effort to turn out reasonably good and responsible posts on literature at the same time as I publish my own efforts.  I hope you will have a look at my stories, published here under the lengthy title Sympathy And Centripetal Force and Eight Other Young and Hopeful Stories.  The title, though cumbersome, is at least honest in that it marks the stories frankly as revisited efforts from my literary past, and indicates that I still think these early efforts, never before published, were worth updating some and putting before you, my public.  Though I have modernized a few aspects of the stories, there are some “dated” items in them which I have left unaltered because they carry the flavor of the time and place of the story, and I wanted to leave them be.

So, though I will certainly return to the recent project I mentioned in my last post, that of commenting on some of our feminist and feminine forebears in writing, I wanted to take this opportunity to mark my own special anniversary by diverging slightly on this path and putting up a new page.  I hope you will enjoy this short collection, and for those of you celebrating the Fourth of July tomorrow, Happy Independence Day!  (For those of you who are from elsewhere in the world, please excuse our silliness and fireworks, it happens to everyone at sometime or other!).  Shadowoperator  (aka Victoria Leigh Bennett)

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June 20, 2013 · 8:50 pm

Shadows of reality and shades of the imagination in Isabel Allende’s collection “The Stories of Eva Luna”

The storyteller’s art is above all a way of defeating mortality, a way of underlining moralities and playing them off against each other, and a way of leaving one’s mark on the world.  But in The Stories of Eva Luna, the storyteller’s voice drifts like smoke across the scene and disappears from one story to the next, fading out between moments and leaving only a taste of clean, clear water, somewhat in the same way the sand mandalas of the Tibetan monks are visible for a short time then blow away in the next strong wind.  The only continuous thing is thus the spell of words rising and falling and then halting, in fact introducing mortality at key points, sometimes making moral points and sometimes not, and allowing even and especially the storyteller to evade capture by leaving no mark at all behind.  It is not a coincidence that these characteristics coincide with an opening and closing mention in the book of the tale of Scheherazade, for the character Eva Luna narrates tales in bed in this fiction at the request of her lover Rolf Carlé (another character from the original novel Eva Luna, to which this collection of stories is a sequel).

The picture of South American life is what emerges most clearly, whether it is the life of the twentieth century or of the earlier centuries with their conflicts between Spanish conquerors and aboriginal citizens; in fact, history is set at odds in the South American scene of these stories, because the economic climate pictured herein is one in which several histories are being played out at once in the same or near physical space, with the economically privileged citizens living cheek-by-jowl with and in seeming ignorance of or indifference to the native tribes and their traditions.  Indeed, part of the richness and irony of Allende’s portrait of South American life comes from this juxtaposition of different traditions, and in the very midst of this scene, the storyteller takes a central place, and is received differently by different portions of the populace.

There are aristocrats and dictators, peasants and native Indians, prostitutes and degenerates, revolutionaries and banditti, sexy women and virile men, aged men and women of both wisdom and foolish credulity, children who suffer and children whose innocence protects them, and in the middle of all this, the fortune tellers and storytellers and magicians (who are sometimes one and the same) take up their posts.  Yet, in all this richness and confusion, it is clear that this is not reality, but a facsimile, a model of reality touched with the magic of the storyteller’s art, particularly in those places where the more fantastic elements of belief come into play with both Christian and secular miracles, ghosts, curses, places and people who disappear in thin air, reappear, then fade out again, doctors and professors of strange sciences whose cures and discoveries cannot be re-documented.  Yet the story also touches reality in those places where Eva Luna appears as a character, or one of her friends or acquaintances from the novel Eva Luna is woven into one of the dependent stories as a character, sometimes in words very similar to that of their original appearance in the first book.  Thus, the figure of the storyteller sits before us always, and in fact, the first section in the book is one spoken by the lover Rolf Carlé, describing the storyteller as she appears before him just as he asks her for stories.

The book circles back to the reference to Scheherazade in the end with a sad story about a young girl who comes to an unenviable end which Rolf is unable to prevent, and Eva Luna is stricken too, because of her empathy with Rolf.  Rolf is a famous camera man, who has tried to mobilize help for the young girl, but to no avail, and Eva suffers because Rolf’s emotional paralysis is one which has been lying dormant for years under a layer of accomplishment and happiness with her, until the young girl cannot be saved.  I don’t think it ruins the experience of reading the book at all to quote from the last page of the final story “And of Clay Are We Created,” in which the storyteller must cede ground to reality because at a certain point fiction is stricken mute.  She addresses Rolf directly, just as originally in the book he addressed her in his description of her:  “You are back with me, but you are not the same man.  I often accompany you to the station and we watch the videos of [the young girl] again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something you did not think of in time.  Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked.  Your cameras lie forgotten in a closet; you do not write or sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains.  Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal.  I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.”  On the final page just after this, we read:  “And at this moment in her story, Scheherazade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.”  Thus, there are some wounds that storytelling cannot heal, wounds that require private introspection, a kind of private storytelling akin to self-therapy rather than the more public storytelling of having even one other person present.  But paradoxically, by stating this in the story framework, Allende has given the cue and initiated the moment of healing by indicating that it starts with a voyage into self, a fearless exploration of nightmare terrain.  Finally, by reverting back to Scheherazade and the “first light of dawn,” the hope of awaking from nightmare terrain of whatever negative stories we all have privately or share with each other is extended to each of us as we read, and we too see the “first light of dawn” and the preservation of who and what we are for yet another day.  By concurring in this adventure of the storyteller’s art, we thus defeat mortality a little longer, reinforce the humanly shared morality of helping one’s neighbor to live and have joy, and by chalking this reading up to experience, leave our own mark on the world of the imagination, having found yet another thing we can share with others to make all our lives better and richer.

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June 15, 2013 · 4:15 pm

“[The art of the novel] happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things…has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”–Murasaki Shikibu

Isabel Allende’s novel Eva Luna, written about a sort of modern-day Scheherazade continually dancing on the edge of the volcano of societal upheaval with her tales as her only defense against falling, is first and foremost a novel about new beginnings.  Eva’s mother Consuelo dies when Eva is only a child, and from then on, Eva makes her way through the various strata of society from being a house servant to being a loved informally adopted daughter to being a well-known and respected formal story-teller.  But it is not a rags-to-riches story per se, because one is always having one’s attention called to the reversals and contretemps in the plot of Eva’s life, and there is never an easy answer to her dilemmas, despite the basically strong and positive way in which she seems to confront her problems.

A key theme relates to the role literature plays in our lives, whether of the “high” literary variety or of the popular variety heard on the radio and seen on the television screen.  What seems to be important is the impetus to keep on telling, keep on telling, and never stop.  It’s almost as if Eva is spinning out a thread like a spider from which she may hang until her feet touch solid ground again, for in every part of her life, and regardless of whom she is staying with or living with or serving, there is always someone to whom she can tell her tales, which gives her an added purpose in life to merely being a house servant or a dependent.

Yet another important element in the book Eva Luna is the plethora of generations of mothers and mother figures, and the degree to which they contribute support to younger women, not so much financially as psychologically and spiritually.  There are many male characters, but they are often seen as adversarial unless they manage to think beyond the machismo of the average male in the South American society of the time portrayed in the book, during some part of the twentieth century.  Possibly due to the fact that while being born in Peru, she is a Chilean, Allende seems purposefully to have left the exact South American country she is writing about imprecise and has instead created a sort of composite land for the story.  Yet still the female characters, in their subsidiary place in society, are yet seen as the hidden strength of the country, while the men bickering and politicking and warring and torturing and imprisoning each other are seen as passing fads, with one following behind and more or less resembling another, despite their apparent differences.

This, however, does not mean that there is not an opportunity for love between men and women.  The women in the book (and this includes a transgender woman named Mimi with whom Eva Luna resides in the latter part of the novel) keep looking for love, accepting the men as much as possible as they are, never giving up hope for a better life or a better relationship, forgiving and overcoming and enduring in a way that Allende evidently sees as essentially female.  The men, in their turn, look to the women for nurturing and companionship and sexual love, and are conventionally male in general, with the good and the bad alike that goes along with this.  The question of love is not relegated only to passionate sexual relationships, however; family or family-like love and societal love of one’s fellows are equally subjects of the book.

While Eva Luna’s stories are told to happy, unhappy, and desperate people alike in the novel, Allende makes her character Eva, a storyteller from a very young age, aware of the way in which stories not only help ameliorate harsh conditions, but also can distract from harsh realities which need to be addressed.  For instance, in the final pages of the book, Eva negotiates with the Comandante of the government over just how much of a real recent event (the freeing of guerrillas by their comrades, friends of Eva’s) can be put into her televised fictional script (since the government is trying to suppress the guerrillas by keeping quiet about news of their success).  This shows not only how Eva’s stories have power over the small and comparatively simple events in her friends’ lives, but how they also acquire power in the daily events of a country as well.

Allende has emphasized throughout her own story that while people are continually requesting happy endings to stories from Eva, Eva chooses instead to go for high drama and complicated and tragic endings.  But for her story of Eva Luna’s own life, Allende generously and equivocatingly gives us a choice:  after providing a qualified happy ending for Eva with a lover, in which the “judicious” and “modest” degree of love and happiness they win is at the end of the penultimate paragraph said to be worn to “shreds,” Allende ends with “Or maybe that isn’t how it happened,” and then goes on to suggest that sometimes reality responds to how it is described rather than the other way around.  This means (according to the storyteller) that though she has provided a slightly elevated and ecstatic description of Eva’s love, it isn’t totally fictional.  And here the indeterminacy and open-endedness of stories which is a contemporary preference finds acceptance.

It took me a long time to read this book, partly because I found its episodic structure a bit distracting, partly because of other things that have to do with time commitments rather than with literature.  But I’m not sure it wasn’t the ideal way to encounter the adventuresome and inventive Eva Luna, who was always in another scrape, always surviving somehow, always finding another audience for her stories.  Eva Luna is a character of Allende’s who becomes a character in her own tales, so that a voice from beyond the world of fictional limits speaks to us, penetrating and interpenetrating our own views of reality and story, and giving us hope of passing beyond our own limits, our imaginations having become our swords with which to slash through the veil between worlds.

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April 27, 2013 · 1:41 am

The old-fashioned and repellent question of “breeding,” and a way in which it still applies

When I was but a young person, I attended a summer day camp which had horseback riding as an activity, and I also took horseback riding lessons independently.  What sticks in my memory are two horses in particular, Prince and Show Prince, two horses whose similarity in name bore not at all upon their individual equine temperaments and manners.  The pure thoroughbred, Prince, whose people had retired him to the stable for cheaper boarding on the condition that young people could (after being taught to be gentle to his mouth) ride him for lessons, had the manners of the most flawed and cranky aristocrat.  He tried to buck.  He had a habit of twisting around and trying to bite his rider, and with the best will in the world to be gentle to his mouth, it was hard to do, because he fought his young rider constantly, fishtailing and dancing around, not in high spirits as would a racer, but in pure spite and bad temper.  By contrast, the mixed breed largely Appaloosa, with the misnomer Show Prince (a misnomer because though he could win trophies as an Appaloosa, he was not a thoroughbred competitor), was a perfect and lovable mount, one whose manners were kind, whose gait was so gentle that I once found myself galloping and being held on safely almost by his will when all I was asked to do was trot.  He was affectionate and dear, responsive and never ill-intentioned, and had a truly gentle mouth because it would never occur to anyone to jab at the reins.  Thus though Show Prince was perhaps less valuable in dollars, he was a dream of a horse, the ideal horse with children, who yet had some pride of place in breeding circles as a show horse.  I was years away from having heard of a writer named Henry James, for whom the question of human “breeding” was so very important that it was one of his most constant subjects, which he turned back and forth and back again and examined in great detail.  Yet, years later, when I read his short story “The Real Thing,” one of the first things that popped into my mind were my old acquaintances, Prince and Show Prince, in one of those unbidden sorts of thoughts that will occur when the mind is not censoring itself.

People are not horses; horses are not people.  That much is clear.  When we discuss the question of “breeding” in people, there has historically and repellently been a tendency to assume that wealthier people are necessarily “better bred” than poor people, though there has also been the opposing mythology (for “breeding” is a mythology in the sense of an informing societal belief) of “nature’s gentlemen,” that is, of those of poorer status who have an innate sense of what to say and do in difficult situations.  The writer Henry James was one much given to exploring the questions relating to breeding and good manners, and in “The Real Thing,” an artist, an aspiring portrait painter who makes the main part of his living in doing magazine and book illustrations, meets up with both sorts of people.  He has some regular models, such as Miss Churm, an irrepressible Cockney, and Oronte, an impoverished Italian man who acts as his butler as well, and they both have a sense of how to pose for various portraits of aristocrats and rich people in novels with whom they have nothing in common.  By contrast, there are also a Major Monarch and his wife, who come by when recommended to the artist by Mr. Rivet, another artist.  They are genuinely “well-bred” people, who have fallen on hard times financially.  They have looked for work, for what they might be able to turn their hands to, among various venues, and have at last hit upon the stratagem of asking to pose as the artist’s models for aristocrats and well-bred people, reasoning that since they are “the real thing,” it ought to be easy.

This is a mistake, as the artist finds out.  He tries his best, but is unable to make anything successfully of Major and Mrs. Monarch.  Whatever they do, they simply are not “right” for the role of artist’s models.  For what they lack, it turns out, is the ability to practice “imitation,” which Miss Churm and Oronte have in abundance.  Miss Churm has so much that she is able to pose as an Italian, whereas the Italian Oronte, in the right costume, makes a perfect artistic model of an English gentleman!  At a point near the end of the story, the artist has to tell Major Monarch that he can’t afford to lose the artistic contract in order simply to give them employment.  The text reads:  “I drew a long breath, for I said to myself that I shouldn’t see him again.  I hadn’t told him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic” [italics mine].

The artist does see his erstwhile “well-bred” models, though.  His friend Jack Hawley, who has returned after an absence, has told him that they are ruining his work, and so he is “disconcerted” when they turn up again, to watch him sketch at a love scene between his other two models.  The artist feels that “this is at least the ideal thing.”  Not “the real thing,” but “the ideal thing.”  Suddenly, Mrs. Monarch offers to straighten the hair of Miss Churm, whose curls seems a little untidy to her for the scene.  The artist is at first afraid that Mrs. Monarch means some harm.  “But she quieted me with a glance I shall never forget–I confess I should like to have been able to paint that–and went for a moment to my model.  She spoke to her softly, laying a hand on her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl, understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss Churm’s head twice as charming.  It was one of the most heroic personal services I’ve ever seen rendered.  Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and, looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my paint-box.”

The next ten minutes are telling.  While the artist continues to work, the Monarchs (so tellingly symbolically named for their erstwhile social status) do his dishes and clean up his kitchen in order to be useful to him.  As he says, “They had accepted their failure, but they couldn’t accept their fate.  They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve.  If my servants were my models, then my models might be my servants.  They would reverse the parts–the others would sit for the ladies and gentlemen and they would do the work.”  For the time being, this dutiful bowing to the forces of “fate” ruins his ability to work, and he dismisses the sitters temporarily.  He continues to allow the Monarchs to work for him for another week, then he gives them “a sum of money to go away.”  He gets the remaining contract for designing the rest of the book series’ art works, but as he says, “my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into false ways.  If it be true I’m content to have paid the price–for the memory.”

What’s most obvious is that the “false ways” the Monarchs get him into are ironically the opposite of the “true ways” of art, which are in turn only the arts of “imitation,” as opposed to the attempt to secure “the genuine.”  Miss Churm knows how to “look over a head” in an imagined “crowded room,” though she says honestly that she would rather be “looking over a stove”; it’s no doubt a bit chilly in the artist’s rooms in her borrowed costumery.  But the point is that the artist can make it look good through “the alchemy of art,” which does not need the actual facts with which to construct a painting or illustration.  And it’s hard to believe, honestly, that the artist really doesn’t mind if he has been done a “permanent [artistic] harm,” or that he feels repaid in having “the memory” on which to look back.  Still, when the Monarchs first walk in, before he knows they want to be paid as models, he assumes they are there to pay him, that is, to sit for a portrait of themselves as wealthy people do.  This is perhaps the crowning irony, that they would have been appropriate for his most genuine aspiration to fulfill itself in terms of.  Or is the crowning irony that Mrs. Monarch shows a kind of quality of gentleness that he is in fact incapable of painting, that is individual, not class-oriented, and not susceptible to artistic representation?

So, though Henry James often plays favorites and writes far more sympathetically of the so-called upper classes and less so of the so-called lower classes, even to the point of being often and sometimes justifiably labelled an elitist, in the world of art, at least in the world of this story, he recognizes no aristocrats except those who “can make the thing work.”  Thus essentially, my old friend Show Prince told me a much-valued secret a long time ago, when we were trotting and cantering and galloping around together:  Prince may have gone to some sort of valuable stud farm and have sired other genuine aristocrats as crabby and intemperate as himself, and have made the thing work that way, in a sense “doing the dishes” like the Monarchs, but for making the thing work as a mannerly steed with the true sweetness and aplomb of the real artistic gentleman, give me Show Prince (and Oronte and Miss Churm) every time.

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April 15, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The Nature of Human Imperfection, Idealism, and the Spectre of Human Doubt–Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best-loved and most effective tales (which Edgar Allan Poe praises for the mastery of its brevity and “single effect”) is his tale “Young Goodman Brown,” about the spiritual adventure–rather, misadventure–of young Goodman Brown, who journeys away from his young “aptly named” wife of three months, Faith, on an “evil purpose,” about which he tells himself, “‘Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth, and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.'”  Now, there are ways of arguing as to whether this short story is a fable, parable, or exemplum, all special kinds of allegorical endeavor, and one could make a closely reasoned argument for any of the three, but this technical detail is of less moment, to my way of thinking, than the fact that Hawthorne seems to prefer a final mystification as to which of the three exactly it is.  As M. H. Abrams told us long ago in A Glossary of Literary Terms, if it’s a fable, it “exemplifies a moral thesis or a principle of human behavior; usually in its conclusion either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an Epigram.”  Well, in a long paragraph at the end of the story, the narrator shows young Goodman Brown’s life history in brief after he has (perhaps, or apparently) attended a witches’ sabbath.  The narrator draws a conclusion, however fictionalized and broadly painted:  the moral seems to be either that one should, if one wants to retain faith (that key word again), either never part from the right path or–and this is a split moral, from which we see the saturnine features of Hawthorne grinning at us broadly–we should have a sufficiently complex view of human sin and redemption that we can allow for the occasional straying from the right path, as long as we also envision human goodness to reside in a disproportionate overbalance on the “good” side of actions and intentions.  On the other hand, if the story is an exemplum, it’s told as “a particular instance of the general theme of a sermon.”  If in fact we see Hawthorne’s story as an example of the way ministers and priests and speakers of various kinds often preface their sermons and talks with an illustrative story, then this is an exemplum; but given Hawthorne’s complexity of vision and the way he often in his tales seems to prefer putting his reader over a barrel or leaving the reader sitting on a fence (to mention just two uncomfortable psychological results of his work), he makes a somewhat quizzical preacher.  Still, if complications and complexity are the issues he is trying to raise, then this story is a perfect exemplum of the issues involved.  Finally, if the story is a parable, or “a short narrative presented so as to stress the tacit but detailed analogy between its component parts and a thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to us,” this would account for the ease with which the analogies in the story as it is structured shine forth (though again, one has to beware of seeming ease when Hawthorne is the source–he likes to throw the occasional spanner into the works).

Now for the story itself:  young Goodman Brown (and the story, as must be obvious by now, is set in the American Puritan era) leaves at sunset to make a journey of some sort overnight away from his young wife Faith.  Faith begs him not to go in a key but indeterminate phrase, on this night “of all nights in the year.”  Thus, the night, which fills Faith with apprehension at the thought of being alone, is an important date somehow, perhaps Halloween or some other night of ill omen.  As he tells her in response, “‘Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.'”  He feels guilty and thinks that it’s as if “‘a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night.'”  And of course, near the end of the story, we are proposed the option of thinking of Goodman Brown’s adventure in the forest that he too might have had a dream:  “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?”  But then the solemn knell of Hawthornian tones rings out in the final paragraph:  “Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of ill omen for young Goodman Brown.  A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.”  For, when young Goodman Brown goes forth toward the woods, he goes to meet a man “in grave and decent attire” (and many texts tell us that the devil appears as a gentleman) who bears “a considerable resemblance to” young Goodman Brown as if they were “father and son,” though “more in expression than in features.”  In short, as this fable, exemplum, or parable leads us to believe, he goes to meet the devil and attend a witches’ sabbath.

Several times during the course of his journey farther and farther into the woods, Brown bethinks himself of his Christian teachers and people who have been held up to him as moral examples, and he wants to turn back, and even declares his purpose to the devil, who slyly doesn’t resist his suggestions but leaves him with his options open.  Still, as they walk on, he sees and hears these very moral examples heading for the same place he is heading, and saying such things that he believes they have been deceiving him all along.  They talk about a “goodly” young man who is going to be taken into their communion, and the devil, when young Goodman Brown protests that his own family has always been free of the taint of sin, responds thus:  “‘I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say.  I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village….They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight.  I would fain be friends with you for their sake.'”  When young Goodman Brown–though still walking ahead–objects that he doesn’t want to break Faith’s heart, the devil cunningly agrees with him and allows him to step to one side of the path, where he nevertheless sees other moral exemplars of his youth coming along to the meeting, and hears them greeting his new acquaintance in a friendly manner.

When the devil gives Brown his staff to lean upon (again, an involved kind of symbolism from Hawthorne), he tells Brown, “‘You will think better of this by and by….Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.'”  Next come along in front of the resting Brown some male members of the “communion,” who discuss the fact that a “goodly young woman” is to be taken into the fold, and though the well-known figures further demoralize Brown, he looks up to the starry heavens and shouts, “‘With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!'”  But then, a cloud comes between him and the stars, and we read:  “Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices.”  He then in desperation begins to call out Faith’s name, but hears mocking voices and a woman’s scream.  “‘My Faith is gone!’ cried he after one stupified moment.  ‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.  Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.'”  He has of course before been relying on the Christian doctrine that if a man or woman is sufficiently good, that they may even take a sinning mate into heaven with them; but because this is his weak point, relying upon Faith rather than upon himself, this is where he is morally the weakest (or perhaps Hawthorne wants to point here to the necessity as well of Good Works, which from what we have heard from the devil in Brown’s moments of doubt, Brown’s relatives haven’t practiced).

There is a dramatically rewarding and frightening scene of Brown in the woods at the witches’ sabbath, where he comes face to face with the other “convert,” Faith, his wife, and the devilish figure says, “‘Lo, there ye stand, my children….Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream.  Now are ye undeceived.  Evil is the nature of mankind.  Evil must be your only happiness.  Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.'”  Then, after they are welcomed by the whole group, Brown suddenly perks up and shouts to the apparent figure of his wife, Faith, “‘Faith!  Faith!….look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.'”  The text says he doesn’t know if she does or not, but that the whole scene promptly vanishes, the fiery hearth and forest as well as the rest, and he finds himself sitting on a rock.

So, what do we have?  We’ve had the chilling apparitions associated with demon worship, yet we have the option (or do we?) of interpreting the whole thing as a dream.  At the very least, we have the option of assuming that in the end Brown repented of his bad mistake, and departed “a sadder and a wiser man.”  But the end of Hawthorne’s tale tells us instead, in a lengthy paragraph, that Brown felt suspicion and dread the rest of his days of everyone around him, including Faith, who continues in the end of the tale to greet him as she did at the beginning.  The last line reads, “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession [again that word “goodly”!], besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

Thus, Hawthorne’s story is about the nature of human imperfection and its involvement with idealism:  too much idealism, which demands that  one never err or make a mistake, can be the real mistake, because any little slip can cause one to assume that there is no way to recoup the loss.  This was one of the perpetual criticisms which Hawthorne, in all his tales, seemed to be making of Puritanism:  too strict and unrelenting a moral code seems to invite mistakes, because people are human, and cannot help the occasional misstep.  Thus, those who are held up as models in the average community, like ministers, deacons, judges, and virtuous women, are often held up by Hawthorne as short-changing those who rely upon them.  But were so much not expected of them in the first place, idealistically, or were more forgiven them, then they would not seem so flawed and dramatically imperfect.  Hawthorne cleverly selects a prime sin in Puritan times, consorting with the devil and witches, because it involves us to some extent in the realm of the imagination:  we can propose to ourselves that it is an allegory even, in which whatever it was that young Goodman Brown was going away for that night was perhaps some quite ordinary sin, symbolized by the illicit meeting in the woods, and thus was a sort of flaw more of us might be able to sympathize with rather than something a bit anomalous.  The spectre of human doubt is the face of young Goodman Brown himself, gloomy and brooding over all the scene that had previously been so filled with joy for him–once doubt enters, can it ever fully be dismissed?  Or is human doubt the nature of human life?  This is why I say that Hawthorne’s dark visage grimaces at us a little in stern amusement:  he knew that his tale was one that we couldn’t easily dismiss with an either-or idealistic answer, because he allows us the same freedom either to doubt or believe that the devil-figure allows Brown, and if we lack imaginative robustness and are so weak-minded as to be swayed by a cloud that sweeps over the midnight stars and the sound of the wind shrieking in the forest trees, then we deserve what we get.  And what we got this time was a superlative tale by a master of the short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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April 11, 2013 · 8:25 pm

Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”–The Nature of Aspiration, Longing, Disappointment, and Fulfillment

Today, I had it in mind to share a poem by Robert Frost, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings.”  Unfortunately, this poem has no version which is in the public domain yet (i.e., which has been out for a sufficient period of time and can be found elsewhere on the Internet), and so my own sense of aspiration and longing to communicate both the poem and an analysis closely interwoven with it cannot be met.  Strangely and funnily enough, however, as I was searching the Frost poems that are quotable in full, I ran across another Frost poem which I find intriguing and worth commenting on, and so I wasn’t doomed to disappointment, but instead was able to fulfill at least some part of my desire to share a Frost poem today.  The title of the poem is “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” and it appears in several other places on the Internet, but I want to quote it in full, so here goes:

“The people along the sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./They look at the sea all day./As long as it takes to pass/A ship keeps raising its hull;/The wetter ground like glass/Reflects a standing gull./The land may vary more;/But wherever the truth may be–/The water comes ashore,/And the people look at the sea./They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?”

Some commentators on this poem (who can be found in other sites on the Internet) like to point out that the people who watch the sea and its horizon are deluded (are in fact “gulls” like the bird in the foreground, that is, “dupes”).  Others point to the finite nature of human achievement.  By contrast, I would like to point to the infinite nature of human aspiration, which persistently looks at that which seems opaque, or boundless, or impenetrable.  The received wisdom about this poem also seems to be that Frost is taunting or mocking the effort to see “out far” or “in deep,” but I’m not sure that’s really the point of the poem.  It may well be that he is in fact practicing a sort of self-mockery in titling his poem “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” as if he was aware that his own view is shallower than that of those whom he is watching.  The mystery of the sea beckons, casts its external evidences forward (like ships and sand–the “wetter ground”–and the gull) and seems to frustrate or deliberately limit what can be seen.  Still, the humans insist on their view of the horizon and the water which “comes ashore” to such an extent that Frost, writing of them, does not say that they “turn their backs on the land” but rather that they “turn their back on the land,” as if they were all one body.

As one body thus the humans “look at the sea all day,” regardless of the land behind them which “may vary more.”  They clearly find something which makes up to them for the fact that “they cannot look out far” and “they cannot look in deep”–perhaps after all, Frost is not slighting the watchers at the shore, but is instead commenting on and commending to our attention the nature both of disappointment and fulfillment, and the difference between goal and process, between achievement and journey.  For, despite the fact that the sea seemingly limits our abilities to penetrate its meaning, still the goal and the achievement of doing so may not be the correct things for us to be focusing on.  Perhaps instead we are meant to be focusing on the process of the quest and the journey, of the seeking itself.  And thus, the people who sit and stare so fixedly at the sea are not necessarily the “dupes” of the view (and of Frost, one might add), but instead are doing what humans always do when faced with a limitless puzzle–continuing to ponder and question the conundrum in view, somehow secure in the “knowledge” that even if none of the present watchers manage to circumvent the enigma’s unending nature, yet there is more than enough of that nature there to supply generations to come with riddles which they can solve, not perhaps the ultimate riddle of existence, but smaller goals to achieve which all chip away at that riddle, piece by piece, adding more and more to the stock of human understanding.  And here, I’ve mixed Frost’s metaphor, by suggesting that the sea (a fluid, after all) is a solid something which can be chipped away at like a block of stone–I apologize to my critical readers for this figure, though of course I could switch my figure and say that Frost, in mentioning “the wetter ground like glass” means to foreground the sand as an objective correlative of sorts for what the sea itself endlessly washes back and forth, gradually itself eroding the solid earth beneath.

Finally, the nature of human faithfulness to “keeping watch” is perhaps also being commented upon, whether or not one sees it as commendable being a matter of individual interpretation:  “They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?” suggests other sorts of watches, such as religious vigils and death watches over deceased bodies or ill persons, and the victory of human perseverance in maintaining watches of these sorts.  For, who can look “out far” or “in deep” to the endless mystery of human life and death, and not wonder “wherever the truth may be?”  Whether “on the land” of our ordinary perspectives or “on the sea” of our more unusual views and speculations, we are both limited by our capacities and distinctly suited by our longings and aspirations to touch some small parts of the “infinite sea,” and find some sorts of fulfillment in the watches we keep.  Thus, though today I did not get to put before you the full text of “The Bearer of Evil Tidings,” I was able to find some measure of fulfillment and soften my own disappointment by putting before you yet another Frost poem, which I hope you have enjoyed.  A simple search of the author’s name and the title of the poem, listed together, will take you to various sites where other commentators have written on it.

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March 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

“The Way of Thorn and Thunder (The Kynship Chronicles)” and Fluidity of Process and Purpose

Twice previously to this post, I have had something brief to say about this magnificent fantasy novel, and I’ve promised then to come back to it and conclude my remarks.  It took me a long time to get back to finishing it up, not because it was not gripping and vital enough to hold my interest, but because I had just plainly entered a phase when I was a little further away from my “reading fantasy” self and a little closer to my “reading what purports to be realism.”  Recently, however, I at long last returned to finish up the second half of The Way of Thorn and Thunder (The Kynship Chronicles) and found myself thoroughly satisfied with the promise of the first half of the book as it was fulfilled in the second half.  There are many reasons why this is so, but one of the most compelling is what I would like to term the “fluidity of process and purpose” in the book.

For there is no question, this book flows.  At first, it was hard to stay attached to some of the characters because of this, and the reason seemed to be that just when I would reach a point of intense involvement with one set of characters, the scene would shift and I would find myself with a different set of characters within a very short amount of time.  There were also a number of places where (in contrast to the things we’re all lectured about in beginning creative writing courses) new characters were introduced fairly late and began to be important in the story.  In other words, this fantasy novel was too lifelike in some respects!  What a strange thing to complain about!  Not that I was complaining–I liked all of the characters and all of the scenarios, and found them very enticing to follow:  it’s just that the book, like the “Eld Green” life force itself (called the wyr), kept slipping and flowing away from my control of the plot.

Then I asked myself, finally, “Why should a reader control the plot?”  And thereupon I made an important discovery:  the reader was evidently intended to ride like a surfer on the waves of the novel, occasionally losing his or her balance when the plot or characters did something unexpected, and wiping out.  Then he or she was supposed to go back out into what I have called the “flow” to try again, not to master the fluidity of process, rather to enjoy it as it passed underneath with the reader riding along until something else changed.

There also was a fluidity of purpose:  the topic seemed to change from advocation of good ecological practices to kind love practices to responsible governing practices and so on through a whole list of actions and beliefs that might support our real world better than we are proving ourselves capable of now, for the most part.  So, as I found, I hadn’t really left my realistic reading world behind at all:  I was only engaged in seeing that there are other tactics and strategies for everything we need to do in the real world, and that “continuity in change,” a phrase which occurs in the novel, is one of the key topics though it is hidden away in a picture of a world which appears on the surface to be a fantasy.  For, except for the force of magic, which most people in the world today might regard with toleration as a fantasy subject, yet would probably not really believe in except for their own particular stripe of religious belief, there are many, many points of correspondence between the experiences of the characters in this novel and those of people in real life.  And just as the positive characters adopt each other freely into their “kynship” structures, allowing friends to become kith and kin, so the reader is taken up as a novelistic responsibility by Daniel Heath Justice, who never once lets the reader off with making a facile generalization and never lets the reader down by doing something trite.  This novel, in conclusion, is well worth reading for anyone who finds the topics of fairness, equality, and societal love important issues; as well, it’s just a plain fun, good-humored, and remarkably admirable world in which to find oneself.  The only problem is that it ends too soon (do I hear “sequel?”).

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March 24, 2013 · 8:21 pm

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”–James Russell Lowell

The title of my post for today is basically a half-truth, and I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I wanted to call it to my readers’ attention because, quite often when we are bemoaning the fact that something is no longer as it was, we are told by well-meaning but possibly quite wrong-headed friends or family “You just see it that way now.  But don’t you remember at the time when I tried to get you to see it/them/the experience/the day in a positive light, you were full of gloom and doom, and dreaded meeting the persons involved/going to the event?”  That is, there is truth in the statement that once we have overcome a difficulty, the positive aspects of our experience are what we prefer to remember (always assuming that we are not born-again pessimists, who prefer to see things in a negative light anyway.  Or, we might be persons who prefer to remember both halves of an experience or another individual because we believe in the principle of balance).  It is questionable whether or not we can assume that things “always seem fairer” and as well we may argue that through the magic of memory and our ability to create repetition, the “tower” of memory and the past isn’t as “inaccessible” as one might assume from that fact that we look at time most often as something linear, and most often see the past as gone and done with.  In fact, James Russell Lowell’s assertion seems quite valid only from the perspective of the linear, and foregoes any association with living through one’s memories as a way of reanimating the past.  It’s as if he assumes that memory is only an old scrapbook, and our past a faded collection of photographs, which in his day was largely the way memory was thought of.

Of course, we know now (and this might at first seem to make his insistence on his point more justifiable) that memory is imprecise, and that witnesses to scenes are notoriously unreliable even when they are making their best effort to be accurate; yet this very imprecision is what is reassuring, when one thinks about it.  For it is in living through the memories we have, and reanimating them through the agency of this imprecision, that we create new things.  When we come face to face with others who lived through the same times or experiences, we may of course decide to argue as to whose analysis of the past situation is more accurate, and there may in fact be cases in which one person’s memories are wildly inaccurate, for example with those who have Alzheimers.  Yet in a situation in which both people can be assumed to have normal memories, it is part of the adventure of living and loving and part of the risk attached thereto that animates our being and keeps us vigorously discussing “what really did happen.”

Finally, why is it, in Lowell’s poetical figure, that “Longing” is the one in the “inaccessible tower of the past” beckoning?  Longing is what the beholder feels when someone or something else is beckoning–hence the poetical figure itself is askew.  For, Love or Memory or Experience or some other entity is what beckons that causes the person on the plain below–to expand the picture–to feel Longing. Thus my dissatisfaction with the entire image, and my feeling that Lowell was cheating poetically and relying on cheap sentiment at the same time.  May we all “look back” with impunity on good things, forget as far as possible negative things that cause us pain except to keep their lessons in mind in order to avoid repeating them, and not tell ourselves, as Lowell seems to be attempting to do here, that if only we were experiencing things in the present they wouldn’t “seem” as “fair”–Dammit, we know what we like and what has pleased us and displeased us, don’t we?  James Russell Lowell, let’s have no more palavering on the matter–you’re sounding more and more like a grim, dissatisfied type of customer who has nothing good to say about either the present or the past.  Time travel is only possible in our day and age with memory aiding–I say, let’s live it up, past, present, and based upon these two, future, with anticipation of more good things like others we have known fulfilling its role.  And that’s my not-very-intellectual-but-deeply-felt post for this first week of Spring 2013!

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March 12, 2013 · 4:42 pm

“The Sin Eater,” or Much Ado About Something, After All….

Recently, JM at thelivingnotebook provided a helpful reminder about how Freytag’s Pyramid demonstrates narrative and dramatic structures by diagram.  The diagram begins with exposition, then follows through with rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.  This is by and large the structure that an overwhelming number of novels and plays and even some works of nonfiction follow, and we are probably all familiar with its rhythms, though we may never have heard of the terminology or the title before (though of course, it is often taught in beginning drama classes or in creative writing classes).  So used to this pattern can one get, in fact, that the continual frustration of it in a work of art can seem like a meandering lack of artistry, like in fact the sheep named “Virginia Woolf,” who wanders in and out of the scenery in Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Sin Eater nibbling the shrubbery, a sort of weird objective correlative for the plot, which often seems missing, to say the least.  Yet, I maintain that The Sin Eater turns out to be “much ado about something” after all, and here’s the course of my logic:

The novel is gossipy, without many events standing forward boldly as events; even the travel to the little tourist town of Llanelys in Wales that the family makes to the bedside of their dying father and the later cricket match against town visitors which they and the villagers play are overshadowed by the many, many conversations featured in the novel.  The family sits at table or elsewhere and argues and bickers an unconscionable number of times, and one keeps expecting to see a climax somewhere, or at least some rising action, developing from all the chatter.  Rose, who has married into the clan and who is Irish, not Welsh, manages all the hosting going on, and also controls a lot of the conversation by being as controversial as possible and continually contradicting the statements and preferences of her brother-in-law’s wife, Angela, an Englishwoman by birth who is very up-to-date and at the same time is more conventional even given her wanderings from the marital path than Rose is.  In fact, much of the tension of the novel, such as it is, is generated in the dialogues between the two women, Angela carrying on a flirtation with Edward, a visiting guest, to which her husband and son of the house Michael seems to be indifferent, Rose attempting to sabotage the flirtation and criticizing it constantly in backbiting asides.  Henry, Rose’s husband and Michael’s brother, is largely clueless, and the youngest member of the family, the young woman Ermyn, is beginning a study of the Bible and forming her own grotesque opinions about how modern reality and ancient text coincide.  The “sin eater” of the title is Phyllis, their hired help, who like Rose shares a belief in the occult, and who will probably be the one who eats the crumbs of the “funeral baked-meats” off the dead man’s chest when he dies, in order to consume away his sins with them, an old Welsh country tradition.  Her son Jack the Liar and his son Gomer, her idolized grandson, make up the rest of the household along with the Captain, the old man who is lying in bed near death.

That this Freytagian Pyramidal structure is not suited to The Sin Eater becomes glaringly obvious even by the middle of the book lengthwise, because there is no action being taken.  The cricket match, which occurs every year and should provide a crowd scene replete with action, seems to be organized almost as an afterthought, though with Rose’s usual careful spitefulness and deliberate attentions to the refreshments.  Meanwhile, Angela flirts with Edward, Edward gets drunk, people come and go, Michael ignores the flirtation, Henry makes inane and pointless comments, Rose repeatedly tries to incite others to anger, Ermyn, shut in by partial deafness, misreads cues and interprets the actions of others in line with her new study of the Bible, which in a humorous twist she hides in a copy of Country Life to read because she knows that the others will think Biblical study odd.  And Phyllis, in a power-grabbing dynamic perpetuated against the very family she works for, saves all the best tidbits for her grandson Gomer, and constantly plots against the family’s happiness, though until the end in a futile and repetitive way.

What happens at the end is after all the “kicker.”  For, the short-lived rising action, foreshortened even, arises just after the end of the cricket match near the end of the book, when the visiting hooligans are trashing the cricket field and refreshment tent at night, and the family have all gone home to the farm house.  Ermyn is sent out in the dark with a flashlight to look for a visitor’s purse, and she comes across Michael and Gomer having a sexual encounter in the dark in the bushes.  When Michael is startled and runs for the house, Gomer grabs Ermyn instead and attempts to rape her, in line with what she has been reading in the Bible about the visitor’s concubine in the land of the Benjamites.  A house visitor, one of the local gentry, comes along and rescues her, though she finds his heroic attitude humorous, and it’s unclear whether or not he manages actually to save her before she is violated.  By the next day, Gomer has gone into hiding elsewhere, and Ermyn is driven even further into herself, telling no one about what happened, not even Rose, whom she admires, when Rose has her come to help clean up the blood where the fight took place the night before.

The climax comes at the very end of the novel instead of earlier, and there is no denouement–instead, Ermyn sees Phyllis (apparently in revenge for what Ermyn now knows has been going on between Michael and Gomer before and for which Phyllis hates Michael) tampering with Michael’s car, but again says nothing.  Suddenly Rose announces that Gomer has been located, and that Henry has borrowed Michael’s car to take him and Jack (Phyllis’s son) to pick up Gomer.  Phyllis dashes out the door, too late to undo what she has done, with the emotional certainty that she has killed or maimed her own grandson and two others who were not guilty of offending her.  The novel ends with this climax:  “Phyllis was running as fast and as futilely as the wind from the sea.  Somewhere, in another world, someone was howling as the sin eaters of old must have howled, fleeing the houses of sorrow weighed down with strange sins.  Up on the hills the wind swept softly around the old church where the saint slept on undisturbed.”

I say, however, that Phyllis has the “emotional certainty” that she has killed or maimed three people, because the novel ends where it does and there is no active conclusion to it, but only the thematic one given in the text I’ve provided in the paragraph immediately above.  If there is certainty, it is in all the omens and magic words and reiterations of the word “bloody” which occur, the word “bloody” occurring in swearing contexts, but coming true in literal ones, and mentions of the “hounds of hell” and other old country traditions appearing repeatedly in Rose’s and in Ermyn’s thoughts.  Ermyn’s readings from the Bible also seem to have a literal component.  So, the novel ends with the climax; the only way in which the reader is not cheated of the dramatic element is in fact contained in the picture of Phyllis, trying unavailingly to catch up with the car before it leaves, taking Henry and her son Jack (instead of the miscreant Michael) to get Gomer, and not knowing at what point the brakes will fail, or the engine falter, or whatever she has perpetuated come about.  Thus, the novel is “much ado about something,” after all:  Phyllis has a lingering resentment against Michael from the beginning, which is never articulated except when she all-but-deliberately breaks a dish or gives Gomer the best of the food.  The family is taking from her family by the old droit du seigneur standards, in spite of the fact that they put up with her querulousness and cantankerousness.  It’s just that in this novel (and it turns out to be an exciting novel, after all), the real action is submerged beneath at least two or three layers of other realities:  1) the literal conversational reality, casual and fairly meaningless 2) the level at which Angela is attempting to start a relationship with Edward and Rose shows a desire to mock and frustrate her 3) the level at which Rose and Ermyn celebrate their different perspectives on life, the occult and the nascent Biblical.  All of these are levels which Alice Thomas Ellis, the mischievous novelist, flourishes in the reader’s face, being deliberately misleading until the very end of the book as to where the dramatic motivations and energies of the novel are going to finish up.  It is up to the discerning reader to allow himself or herself to be entertained and edified by the picture of dysfunctionality long enough to ask the important question:  “What is all the tension about?” and to reach that startling and evocative ending in which all becomes apparent.

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March 6, 2013 · 9:02 pm

Loving Half a Person, or, Love’s Complaints….

How often have you heard someone say the immortal (or rather significantly transient) words, “You know, I really love/like him/her, but sometimes his/her temper/pokiness/vanity/fastidiousness/false modesty/hairdo/stinginess/gregariousness/flightiness/shortness/slovenliness makes me angry/sad/amused/sick/etc.”?  It’s that old “I love that person, but…” disease.  And what it means is that one is trying to sort through someone else’s psyche and discard some annoying habit or quality that provokes or otherwise exasperates one, and keep only the “good” part or parts to cherish and foster.  We’ve all done it, even the most tolerant of us.

I’ve said that these words can be transient, but they can be transient in two senses, a positive and a negative.  The positive sense is one in which the words are uttered, accompanied by a sigh or swear words, and then shelved in the awareness that “no one is perfect, I love him/her anyway, I guess I should put up with it (after all, I have my own faults), there’s nothing I can do about it, I accept that life is just that way,” and so on and so forth.  These are the words and sentiments of those who like to think of themselves as realists, but who are perhaps even a tad optimistic in their outlook.  They think that what goes around comes around (in spite of the fact that sometimes it doesn’t, to judge by any newspaper’s headlines), and an ounce of toleration is worth a pound of bitching and griping in coming to grips with life’s unfairnesses.  These folks are the ones who by and large save at least themselves a lot of pain and emotional groping for a solution and avoid grief, because they go along their way with an amount of equanimity which sees them through the rough times and the uncertain fortunes of love and love’s qualms.  As the I Ching notes in one of its more tongue-in-cheek passages, love sends people up to the stars in joy and down to the depths of despair, and this variation in altitude is a matter of happiness or unhappiness, “left to the subjective opinion of the persons concerned.”  Since the oracle offers an opinion on almost everything else, this refusal to comment tells its own story.  Thus, having an even temper and an accepting frame of mind about life and its vagaries is decidedly an advantage.

The negative sense in which these words (“I love him/her, but…”) can be transient is that they can recur, time and time again, when what we are doing is not accepting a person’s foibles and traits, but instead have apparently forgotten in between times that these traits annoy us, and are instead complaining yet again about something which bothers us about this person.  This is what I’m referring to as “love’s complaints.”  But the source of love’s complaints goes even deeper:  it is that whereas we have fallen in love/like with a person’s “good” traits, we are trying to reject the traits which seem to us less “good.”  We are in fact loving half a person.  This puts us in the somewhat ludicrous position of the speaker in Monty Python’s song, who loves “Eric the Half a Bee,” a “hive employee” who lies “half-asleep upon my knee,” and whom the speaker is said to love “carnally…semi-carnally” (for of course it’s impossible to love something as small as a bee in any way whatsoever without making it a “half” or “semi” of something, once living, hence the crazy comedy of the song).

It’s perhaps stretching a point to suggest that making “half a person” is what we in fact risk doing when we describe someone’s characteristics to others or even in our own minds as less than satisfactory, but it’s nevertheless true that we do this.  We are not just criticizing, we are excluding.  We are saying that we only accept half of what is there, and sometimes when things go on long enough this way, we end up accepting even less than half, or rejecting the whole in an effort to attain wholeness of mind in our own psyche, where it’s often uncomfortable to exist in a half state.

So, what’s the solution?  We either end up accepting, once again, that people and life are not whole and perfect (though perhaps someone’s being constantly consistent would eventually begin to plague us as much as inconsistent imperfections), and are in fact like Andrew Marvell’s bird, “[waving in their] plumes the various light,” or we fail of humanity ourselves, variable creatures that we are.  For, humanity itself, loving and complaining as it does, seeks itself in other people, and we too have quirks and inequalities that make us less than satisfactory.  The only way not to be half a person oneself, thus, is to attempt to the best of our ability to love and accept our lovers and friends as fully as possible, because it is only then that we allow ourselves to exist in our fullest being.  This is not just moralizing and being sweet, it is a necessity of daily living, unless one would want to be constantly dissatisfied and complaining about all the adversities and unfairnesses of life, which would be grim indeed.  For, it is through extending ourselves to love not half a person or half-people, but whole people, even if we do sometimes find ourselves making “love’s complaints,” that we keep from grousing all the time, and find occasion to cherish.

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