Mary of Egypt

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

From "The Hanging Man" by Sylvia Plath

St. Mary of Egypt--Death in the Desert, Emil Nolde, 1912.


*St. Mary of Egypt is my latest obsession, for literary rather than religious reasons. She's a fascinating character, and the evolution of her legend is a study in the dramatic effect a subtle shift in narrative can produce. An article on St. Mary of Egypt is here, and you can read St. Sophronius' The Life of Our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt here. There is a John Tavener opera about Mary of Egypt, which alas, does not see to be available online, though you can sample it at Amazon. If that whets your appetite for more Tavener, go here for a wonderful short piece of his on YouTube.

If you know of literary, artistic or musical treatments of the legend of Mary of Egypt, please share them with me in the comments, or send me an email. Thanks.

More Lucretius

One of the best-known passages of De rerum natura is "Folly of the Fear of Death" in Book III. Lucretius makes a very persuasive case for a rational attitude to death.

Nothing to us was all fore-passed eld
Of time the eternal, ere we had a birth.
And Nature holds this like a mirror up
Of time-to-be when we are dead and gone.
And what is there so horrible appears?
Now what is there so sad about it all?
Is't not serener far than any sleep?
And, verily, those tortures said to be
In Acheron, the deep, they all are ours
Here in this life. No Tantalus, benumbed
With baseless terror, as the fables tell,
Fears the huge boulder hanging in the air:
But, rather, in life an empty dread of gods
Urges mortality, and each one fears
Such fall of fortune as may chance to him.

His words are perfectly sensible. Who can argue with him? And yet, who can actually muster this detachment? Not me. Death shocks me. Thoughts of my own death overwhelm me--not with fear, but with painful amazement. When I think of people I love who have died, even the ones who have been gone for decades, I'm astonished and sickened that they are gone, utterly lost to this earth. The sadness and grief soften over time, but the truth of death never loses its power to shock. The eloquent reasoning of Lucretius can't disarm it.

Burial of St Lucy, Caravaggio, 1608

Love according to Lucretius

Yea, in the very moment of possessing,
Surges the heat of lovers to and fro,
Restive, uncertain; and they cannot fix
On what to first enjoy with eyes and hands.
The parts they sought for, those they squeeze so tight,
And pain the creature's body, close their teeth
Often against her lips, and smite with kiss
Mouth into mouth,- because this same delight
Is not unmixed; and underneath are stings
Which goad a man to hurt the very thing,
Whate'er it be, from whence arise for him
Those germs of madness. But with gentle touch
Venus subdues the pangs in midst of love,
And the admixture of a fondling joy
Doth curb the bites of passion.

From "The Passion of Love" in Book IV of De rerum natura (On the nature of things)

Paolo and Francesca, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, 1913

Hard at work here

No time for the blog. See you tomorrow.

"They cannot be destroyed..."

"In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass; but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith."

Katherine Anne Porter, June 21 1940

*I've posted this quote before, but its wisdom is worth returning to in any time of crisis. The American Visionary Art Museum is one of many organizations raising money specifically to aid Haitian artists. They are selling Vodou flags like the the one here. See more at their slideshow. You can see a nice selection of works by Haitian painters at the Gallery of West Indian Art.

Blake, in honor of the day

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

From America a Prophecy by William Blake, 1793

Complete text is here. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Middle-aged perspective

Earlier this month the icy weather kept me housebound for a day, and I appealed to my Facebook friends to help me decide what to read to fill the time. I eventually settled on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, which I first read more than 20 years ago. Something in the chilly atmosphere made Wharton’s world of beautiful things and brittle people seem alluring, but what really sold me was a friend’s comment that she’d like to return to the book herself now that she has “a middle-aged perspective.” Whoa.

I’ve been comfortable thinking of myself as middle-aged for quite a while but I didn’t like the suggestion that my view of the world—and of literature—has started to wither along with the rest of me. That’s not really what my friend meant, of course, but that’s how I read her. “Middle-aged perspective” struck me as a polite way of saying sour, cynical, resigned, passionless, etc. So I plunged into The House of Mirth with a sort of half-conscious agenda, determined to enjoy it in the same way I had the first time around. I was going to relish Wharton’s ruthless dissection of society, and I was going to wallow in the tragedy of beautiful, useless Lily.

Unfortunately, I got about 40 pages in and had to abandon the book. As it turns out, I apparently have acquired a middle-aged perspective, and it has nothing to do with being sour or cynical. On the contrary, I found that I just couldn’t bear the cruelty of Lily’s fate, because I can’t feel superior to her anymore. My younger self pitied Lily’s weakness and her captivity in a vicious social order, but I didn’t feel any real empathy for her. I never saw myself as someone who might ever be trapped by illusion and the inexorable passage of time. Now life has taught me better. We’re all trapped, in one way or another. Some of us manage to work out a better ending for ourselves than Lily does, but we all share her costly addiction to self-delusion.

Edith Wharton was 43 when she wrote The House of Mirth, and she tells us in the book’s first pages that Lily is doomed. Actually, she lets Selden tell us:

“As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the civilisation which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

I think that passage is Wharton’s invitation to us to feel Lily’s plight as our own. I didn’t see that twenty years ago and now I do. That’s middle-aged perspective.


Illustration by A.B. Wenzell from a 1905 edition of The House of Mirth

"Heal the Earth, Heal the People"

I trust we're all doing what we can to help Haiti. It's essential to offer as much support as possible during this catastrophe, but we have a moral obligation to help Haitians restore their environment and protect their culture as the country is rebuilt. With her usual insight and passion, Anya speaks to the issue in a blog post here.

"Dream with her dreaming"

Dream with her dreaming
Until her lust
Seems to her seeming
An act of trust!

From "Ars Amoris" by J.V. Cunningham

Reclining female nude, Franz von Lenbach, 1902

Back early...

...because I can't wait to tell you there's a new crop of reviews, interviews, poetry, etc. at Chapter 16. Also, I can't resist shamelessly encouraging you to read my article on Alan Lightman and his new book, Song of Two Worlds. If you come to this blog for the poetry, Lightman's work deserves your attention.

The Hermit, Salomon Koninck, 1643