"The Dead"Diamonds

I first read Dubliners about six years ago, because I thought it was required reading for a class(it turned out that the syllabus had changed and that it was no longer required, much to my ire). I didn't enjoy anything in it or the experiance of reading it(I had, and still do, a dislike for reading short story collections. I tend to be happier reading novels or a story entirely on its own and not as part of a collection). Except for the last four pages of The Dead. I remember being very startled at how something previously so distant and cold for me had suddenly become so beautiful and real. And I bemoaned that the whole thing couldn't have been like the last few pages, with that great, terribly painful revelation about Michael Furey and how we are all to die, and fall as the snow does outside of the window.

Really, one of the diamonds that we were instructed to locate I think foreshadows this directly: At dinner, Freddy Malins talking to Mr Browne about Mount Melleray, where he will be going shortly, and the monks that live there, who sleep in their own coffins. Mr Browne doesn't understand this at all--why would they do a thing like that? "Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world...--The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end."(pg. 201) This was an "oh" moment in a way that it wasn't when I first read it.

Same for the moment when Gabriel looks back and sees his wife Gretta on the stairway, listening to the music, terribly moved. "She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on a piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing." (pg. 209). Its a bit like The Wind in the Willows when Rat and Mole no longer remember and strain to hear the music, but cannot quite hear it. It's really terribly moving.

Today was a Joyce day, illuminated by a very good blog entry by Adam Benson about the term epicletie, which Joyce valued over "epiphany" in regards to Dubliners. Why? Because epicletie refers to the invocation to the Holy Ghost to sanctify the wafer and the wine for the ceremony of Eucharist. It also carries connotations of a court summons. Joyce aims to have the "oh" and "ah" moments in the Dubliners stories to have this quality of sanctification and of summons to right action.

This is really what Joyce strove to do; to have secular epiphanies for the modern world in which we live. Since we are no longer in the age where epiphanies were had everyday in the act of observing plants grow and the hunting of animals for food and these things were linked with divine significance. Hence why the Elysianian mysteries had something told, something seen and something shown, and how the something shown being a stalk of wheat(as far as guesstimation can have it)would've been a powerful epiphanic experience. Now in our secular context the important thing is ultimately telling, not showing. And this is why the stories in Dubliners seem insignificang: we aren't being told of their significance, we are being shown them.

However much Joyce appears to be Realistic or Naturalistic here, he is in fact a Symbolist, since every single word has meaning and operates in a very specific way. Such as the importance of the word "blind" at the beginning of Araby and how at the end, his eyes are burned and scorched with anguish. Ala Oedipus Rex.

A philosopher named Giambatisto Vico was very important to Joyce's aesthetics as well. Vico, who constructed an entire mythology around the importance of the clap of thunder, which he felt marked the turning point for human development. Perhaps not coincedentally, there are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake, all onomatoepaically spelled out with one hundred letters.

We are to read The Dead for discussion on Friday. One of the things that it would probably behoove us to do is to consider how Joyce got from the stories in Dubliners(the style of which he described as characterized by "scrupulous meanness") to Finnegans Wake, which is may be scrupulous as well(but sure as hell doesn't seem like it)and might make an unsuspecting reader think that the writer is mean for having written gibberish to be deciphered. But how did it happen, and is there a difference really? And I have got to say that Jennie Lynn reciting the last few pages of Finnegans Wake was extraordinarily impressive, and that it was really rather beautiful. As though it becomes like music rather than words and you don't care if it makes sense anymore and just listen to how it sounds.

And I do have to say that I rather like that the motto for MSU comes from a poem of epiphanic despair(No Worst, There is None) written by a depressive Jesuit priest and lyric poet.

On Friday we we're forbidden to read Nick's blog, and I now know why: it would make the rest of us feel that it would be futile to write again, so completely complete is his definition of epiphany.We must also read Jennie Lynn's blog about chaos.

The predominant discussion of class today was the issue of forgetting: why does the great god of Nature have Rat and Mole forget that they saw him? Some in class have taken this to mean that Grahame thinks epiphanies should be forgotten and that this is wrong. The question than became, perhaps the emphasis really falls not on forgetting, but on remembering. And that the great epiphany isn't forgotten, but is around us all the time and we must seek to remember that it is there. Which ties in with anagnorisis , which is actually something that I had been wondering about, if it had a connection with epiphanies or not. Well, lo and behold Sam posted a quote from Northrup Frye from page 130 of Northrup Frye on Milton and Blake: "Epiphany is the theological equivalent of what in literature is called anagnorisis, or "recognition." This is what the Joycean epiphanies in Dubliners are like.

For those who have some exposure to Classical mythology will know, anagnorisis is frequently an extremely painful thing, such as when Oedipus realizes he killed his father and married his mother, or when Agave realizes its her son's head and not a lion's that she's bearing in her hands.
This perhaps ties in with a phrase that was brought up today: via negative, or the negative way, which means attempting to describe God by negation. Basically, everything falls short and is therefore horrible to some extant or another.

This is something that Dante was aware of, in his compositon of The Divine Comedy, where he witnesses all of these horrifing things before finally beholding a vision of a rose at the highest point in heaven. Clearly TS Eliot was heavily influenced by Dante, as the lotus clearly suggests.

I'll close this entry with mentioning a tiny epiphany I had yesterday afternoon while meeting with my group the Cokers. Douglas was talking about how the poem seemed to be written in different poetic voices, and then a little light bulb clicked on: different voices, the "they" in the poem. Because it is their voices! It was a nice bright winged brief moment.

We've been assigned to blog about our various epiphanies with literary texts. This, it ought to be said right off the git-go, will not be the final entry on this issue, for which I could post a great many entries. But today I am going to tell about my encounter with a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer called The Slave, one of my very favorite books of all time.

I first read it about three years ago, for Mr. Sexson's Biblical Foundations of Literature class. I picked it up on a Saturday morning, intending to just read a chapter or two at a time. I didn't move until I'd read the whole thing through, and when I looked up it was dark outside. It was a case, as they say, of not being able to put it down. Which doesn't happen to me terribly often, even with books I enjoy. For those who haven't read it, its a very wonderful, potent story of the relationship between Jews and Christians, and wondering of the cruelty of the world with the silence of God. And how, in spite of this, there are epiphanies(possibly even subtle theophonies, if such a thing is possible) to be had. One of the most stunning occurs near the end of part two, where our protagonist, Jacob, is fleeing those who would kill him with his infant child after having lost his Gentile wife in childbirth.

"Jacob remembered the words his namesake had spoken on his deathbed: 'And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was a little way to come to Ephrath; and I buried her there...' His name was Jacob also; he too had lost a beloved wife, the daughter of an idolater, among strangers; Sarah too was buried by the way and had left him a son. Like the Biblical Jacob, he was crossing the river, bearing only a staff, pursued by another Esau. Everything remained the same: the ancient love, the ancient grief. Perhaps four thousand years would again pass; somewhere, at another river, another Jacob would walk mourning another Rachel. Or who knew, perhaps it was always the same Jacob and the same Rachel . Well, but the Redemption has to come. All this can't last forever." pg. 278-279

This may seem obscure to those who are looking at this blog who haven't read the novel. But perhaps not. In a way, this is an epiphany; the understanding of a pattern, of a story, and that you are a part of it.

Our group meetings wisely took place at the beginning rather than the end of class(maybe this is just what we should do from now on); the Cokers are on their way to memorizing their divided up sections of the section--I am section 7, right near the end. Therefore I am not panicked about where all my lines are. And on the 20th of February we shall give a presentation of the content of "East Coker", much of which is addressed to the understood "they". Who are "they". It is very likely that "they" refer to the spirits of the dead(coincidence linking this to the Joyce story?), specifically from ancient times; the world in which they lived is now completely carpeted by modernity, but it may not be lost to you, if you listen close enough.

We listened to Van Morrison's rendition of the song "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", which was fun, even if the speakers were muddy.

I liked Abby's story of her "food epiphany" with eating the oxtail soup at the Cul-de-sac restaurant in Rome. Relates in a way to the petite madeline in Proust, and the food in Babette's Feast and Like Water for Chocolate.

This is one of the things that Eliot, in section three of the Four Quartets, categorizes as moments of happiness: frution, fulfillment, affection and a good dinner. But he also asserts that the epiphanic moment goes beyond "happiness" , touching upon notions of the Sublime, which is simultaneously beautiful and terrible, wonderful and painful.

And there is Taylor's defintion of epiphany--knowing what must be done, which ties into two words which will be important: right action.

Well, we're still approaching a definition of the epiphany: there's the Little Epiphany(which makes you go "oh!) and then there's the Big Epiphany(which makes you go AHA!). The movement of the Big Epiphany from the religous sense(seeing God come out of a whirlwind would kind of be a AHA! moment) to the secular sense is generally credited to James Joyce; the Joycean epiphany is where you read along and then suddenly have a "aha!" moment; his short stories in Dubliners are all built around this idea.

Virginia Woolf of course was also highly attuned to the notion of the Little Epiphany, as page 161 of To the Lighthouse explains; how there is no "Great Revelation", but instead "little daily miracles", "matches being struck in the dark."

But even the ancients weren't completely dissociated from the idea of epiphanies within the processes of life; at least as Karen Armstrong has it, with her comments upon ancient agriculture in A Brief History of Myth: " the crop was an epiphany, a revelation of divine energy." The processes of nature, therefore, can be in and of themselves, a facet of divine power.

It is our homework assignment to share our own Aha! moments with literature. It is the experiance that matters, not the telling, when it comes to epiphanies. So than perhaps the task becomes to have the telling be in fact an experiance, or at least as close as this is possible, and it may not be. I don't know. Or maybe this is what Wordsworth was getting at when he defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility".

I believe I left the previous blog off with the question of the difference, if any, between an epiphany and a theophany. I'm not sure I've come any closer to a concrete distinction, but I think something might be touched upon, which I will share with discussion of Wind in the Willows.

I re-read the chapter entitled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" where the Mole and the Rat, searching late into the night for a missing baby otter named Portly, hear this unspeakably beautiful music(at first Mole doesn't hear, saying to Rat "I hear nothing myself but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers." pg.124). Following the music, they come upon the great god of nature playing his pan-pipes, with the baby otter asleep by his hooves. Rat and Mole are overwhelmed and so joyous that they can hardly bear it. But than dawn finally breaks, and the Vision is gone, and they don't remember what it was they saw.

"For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before." pg. 127

They don't remember seeing the great god of nature, but they still can hear the music, even after they've forgotten the encounter. I thought it was interesting how the line form the first section of "Burnt Norton"-- "In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,/And the bid called, in response to/The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,/And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at. "

So, really this episode is an example of a theophany, the revelation of a God to mortal beings, like that of Moses seeing the burning bush in chapter three of Exodus; Moses cannot bear to look at Yahweh, just as Job is sorely humbled and cowed by the display of cosmic force when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind in chapter 37 of Job. (I almost wonder if it is any accident that Grahame's great god of Nature is so much more benevolent; really the Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures is a real bad-ass, which is something which I am sure we will discuss more of later).

So, perhaps the epiphany is what is left over from a theophany, both in the sense of we still hear the sacred music though we no longer know where it comes form, and the understanding that something has happened; there was a moment when I could See, rather than just see. Or I could be just skimming the surface.

Even from the day before yesterday, a great many blogs have already gone up and running intensely in a way that makes me green with envy due to their visual opulence and humor and pertinence.

Many center around the question of what an epiphany is. It derives in part from the Greek word phanos, meaning "seen". It is beginning to appear more and more that epiphanies require the act of seeing, such as Taylor's memory of seeing leaves for the first time after she got her glasses when she was eight. One says "I had a prophetic vision" after all. The word vision comes from the Sanskrit word vid, meaning "to see"(which is obviously where the term "video" comes from). And the important Hindu scriptures are called the Vedas, deriving from the Sanskrit vid as well. And in case it wasn't connected enough, the final word of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is "vision". Lily Briscoe the painter says "I've had my vision." At another point in time I will be blogging about my first encounter with To the Lighthouse, and by extension my first encounter with Virginia(on whom, it must be confessed, I have a raging intellectual crush), a writer perceptive to epiphanies if anyone was.

And this connection makes sense even more, since TS Eliot takes a great many points of influence from The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu religous text.

And the difference, which we doubtless will begin to explore, the difference(if any) between a theophony(seeing God) and an epiphany.

And I also need to read Theodore Roethke's The Far-field now.

The Beginning

Today was the first day of the capstone class on epiphanies, which promises to be wonderfully enlightening.

We broke into our groups already, which are organized around the four sections of TS Eliot's Four Quartets(which we must have on our persons at all times, such is the decree), and which the groups attention will be devoted to. The group I belong to is the Cokers--sounds very official to me for some reason.

The first text aside from Four Quartets that we are to read first is Wind in the Willows. More in-depth discussion of the epiphany and the nature of the beast will follow shortly.