This bitter-sweet and ambivalent thing we call life...

What really fascinates me about the human experience is the ambivalence of it.  Ambivalence seems to be a key buzzword in this course.  I threw it out in my last blog and have encountered it in both the Frye and Zimmer readings.  Ambivalence, or duality, seems to be the key in unlocking the mysteries of the Spiral (another obsession of mine), that strange symbol of existence and (lack of) time that has no beginning or end, and is in itself an on-going mystery.  Very cryptic indeed, but there is a reason why I'm an English major and not a scientist.

Perhaps the ambivalence of both our earthly and dreamworld experiences is what produces the recurring themes of our literature.  Metaphors of quests in mirror worlds teeming with opposites, twins, apparent as opposed to physical deaths, disguise and ambiguity all represent the duality of our experience.  By the duality of human experience I mean our spiritual lives resonating from some other unknown plane of existence which we cannot fully comprehend while we are living on this physical one.  The murmurs from this other world come to us through our dreams and we try to make sense out of these rustlings by echoing them in our literature.  This is also what I meant when I said that we as writers and poets are but conduits to that other realm where the Ocean resides.  When we dream are we not almost always on some sort of quest?  I suppose I should not presume to know the nature of the dreams of everyone else, but I know that for myself this holds true.  In my dreams I am always sojourning through strange worlds and more often than not, I am traveling with people or entities whom I do not know in my waking, terrestrial life.  I feel as though I am trying to accomplish some task, but alas, it never comes to fruition, or if it does I do not remember it.  And so I am left to believe, especially after a truly haunting vision (you know them when you have them) that it must mean something--something specific to me--and so I must hold fast to the feeling of that quickly ebbing vision, for eventually a feeling is all that will remain.  These recollections are usually piquant in nature, instilling sentiments that are at once disquieting and exhilarating.

This duality is also at the heart of our life's experiences, at least it is for me.  We quite simply cannot take the good without the bad; and maybe this was the inherent flaw in the single God's great biblical design, for I am inclined to argue that man's "tragic" fall from the paradisal state of the flawless garden was inevitable.  As alluded to in my last blog, I am also inclined to argue that man  never belonged in this atrium in the first place and neither did the plants or animals, as if our world and others that may potentially exist are merely static figurines forever ensconced in the Father-God's snow-globe collection.  I have long believed that religion is nothing more than a social construct falsely rendered from misreading mythology.  I believe the only separation between the sacred and the secular is an ideology imposed by some powerful past conglomerate that is no longer identifiable.  I think this notion is at the heart of Zimmer's piece concerning a pagan hero and a Christian saint; I think this notion is at the heart of Frye's work as a literary critic; and I think this notion is at the heart of literature.  It is but another ideology, to be sure; but it is a much more enriching ideology than the exclusive and oppressive one under which a large faction of society currently labors.  I am hostile to this belief system because it attempts to remove the ambivalence of natural experience, as do the more vulgar of popular romance stories which is also why I'm hostile to them.  During our descendant journey from childhood innocence to the jaded realm of adulthood we come to realize that black and white are only the ideals from which true life experience shades itself.  There is not always a happy ending to our daily life's journeys, and so we come to appreciate them much more when we are graced with them. 

Conn-eda's journey is also a descent, a fall, from innocence.  What I find particularly fascinating about this story is that the downward movement to the Fairy Kingdom is progressive rather than devolved.  Zimmer writes:  "Conn-eda is thus outgrowing his innocence.  Such a childlike state of grace has to be surpassed through experience, and experience precisely of the intrinsically twofold, ambivalent character of everything that forms life's warp and woof.  Such an awakening entails the peril of a loss of all faith in virtue and in the values of good--the peril of indifference or callousness to the distinction between good and evil and to their unending strife; or it may entail the opposite spiritual disaster--impotent despair, absolute disillusionment in man's capacity to realize the everlasting, great ideals"(37).  And for me this is where the Sacred Scripture (as it has come to be ideologically and socially defined) failed for me.  It was only through reading literature innately deemed secular that I awakened from my disillusionment, a state that was only deepened when I went looking for meaning in churches.  But my truly personal apocalypse came once I learned to read that Sacred Scripture through a secular lens.  The further down I go, with each trap door I open, the less I know and the more voracious I become.  I don't want to return to the Garden, I don't want to be Job--piteous, naive fool that he was.  I want to walk to and fro in the earth, and up and down in it.  I want to walk the path of Conn-eda and maybe someday remember one of my visits to the Fairy Kingdom.

Descents from Innocence

I like this image of Daphnis and Chloe because it depicts the beauty and innocence of the story's pastoral setting.  The lovers are barely discernible from their setting, and the story's landscape, rather than the love story of  its characters, is the subject of this piece.  I chose this painting because I realized why I liked D&C more than our other two classic Greek romances.  It wasn't so much the characters themselves, or the plot, or the structure.  The setting, or more specifically the dream scape, as I see it is a rendering of that child-like innocence from which we have all descended.  I return to that place from time to time in the bitter-sweet ambivalence of memory, but I would never again wish to reside there. 

In Sexson's Bible as Lit class I was placed into one of the Garden groups, and the interpretation of this mythological trope as put forward by Frye has come to occupy my mind a great deal.  It has become an obsession of sorts, as I have since been trying to unravel the mysterious ramifications of this event.  "In sexual and earth-mother creation myths death does not have to be explained:  death is built in to the whole process.  But an intelligently made world could not have had any death or evil originally in it, so that a myth of fall is needed to complement it" (Frye 112).  This is explained as an artificial myth because it is a myth of deliberate creation rather than a myth of birth.  Frye also writes:  "The artificial myth won out in our tradition, and the lower world became demonized, the usual fate of mythological losers.  But many echoes of a very different feeling about the lower world linger in romance" (112-13).  The cave of the Nymphs in D&C is not a place of demonic descent and torture, nor is it a representation of hell.  In fact it is a place of refuge and quiet beauty.  It is the place where the infant we will come to know as Chloe was abandoned to the protection of the Nymphs by her true father.  He says at the end of the story that he had hoped that she would be found and raised by other parents, but it is reasonable to assume that he knew she very well could have been fated to die there.  The cave then becomes the dual symbol of womb and tomb that is so prevalent in pastoral, earth-goddess mythology.  It is in this cave where Chloe first realizes the implications of Daphnis's naked body, and so a layer of her naivete is shed and a small increment of awakening or knowledge is gained.  It is to this cave where she flees, and although she is taken captive by her pursuers, fate once again steps in to rescue her.  Pan appears in a dream to the general of the Methymneans:   "...you have torn from the alters a virgin whom Love wishes to place at the heart of a story, you showed no shame before the Nymphs as they looked on, nor before me" (167).  In fact dreams are an important plot mechanism in this story:  Dryas and Lamon are sent identical dreams concerning their adopted children from the Nymphs; the Nymphs also speak to Daphnis in a dream, consoling him that Chloe will be returned to him.  There is even a beautiful garden in this story, a garden that is destroyed by jealousy and petty plotting.

According to Frye the Garden symbol is the second level of literary movement; it is one level above our so-called middle earth, the every day world where we currently dwell, and one level below heaven, the cosmos, or whatever one wants to call this plane.  Below middle earth is the demonic underworld (97-98).  "As for the earthly paradise, according to Christian doctrine it was, but it cannot now be; consequently in romance the paradisal is frequently a deceitful illusion that turns out to be demonic, or a destructive vision.  The fourth level, though purely demonic in Christianity, is in romance often a world where great rewards, of wisdom or wealth, may await the explorer" (98).  In D&C I would not argue that their pastoral paradise is deceitful or destructive, but it is illusory.  Neither Daphnis nor Chloe were born into slavery and shepherd's work; these are not their true identities.  When their true identities are revealed they are symbolically descended from their innocence, and even though they choose to live out their lives in the country they are still unable to return to their previous state.  This is sealed by the consummation of their marriage bed and the last lines of the story:  "Daphnis and Chloe lay down naked together and put their arms around each other and kissed, and even as they got less sleep that night than owls, Daphnis did some of the things that Lycaenion taught him, and it was then that Chloe learned, for the first time, that the things they had done earlier in the woods were merely games that shepherds play" (210).

The true tragedy of the Christian's fall of man is, from what I can gather, the loss of innocence incurred with this event.  Man is no longer in his "rightful" place, the place for which God created him; but I have to question whether that artificially mythical place is truly where man was meant to reside.  Did we not fall because we chose knowledge over eternal life?  I would say yes.  And with that answer comes another question:  why?  Why did we make that choice?  The simple answer of free will is not enough for me.  Of course we had free will, otherwise we would still be lounging around naked in an artificial atrium like animals at the zoo.  Maybe we looked down and saw the natural rhythms of earthly life and knew that that was where we truly belonged, with birth and death and all that comes in between.  And this is the natural life pattern, is it not?  I have descended from childhood innocence into adulthood (as have we all) with all of the hard lessons, and scars, and tribulations that are the price of this knowledge.  I do not want to be a child forever, nor do I wish the same dull fate on my own children; and this is a hard thing.  A huge part of me wishes I could lock them away from the cruelties of the world, so that they would never have to be hurt as I have been.  But this would be a huge disservice to them, for they would never be able to experience all the fleeting beauty this world serves up along with the horror. They would never be able to reach backward to find solace in that hazy time of innocence to help them on their own journeys, to propel them to keep looking for whatever it is that they seek.

Oh What Murky Depths We Tread

I'm having a hard time forcing myself to read Callirhoe.  I hate it; and I also hated An Ephesian Tale.  I know there is arguably little difference between these two dreadful pieces of literature and that of Daphnis and Chloe, but I cannot, will not, sit here and blog a lie.  I can't pretend to like this stuff; I would not read it if it weren't required material, and I don't read modern day romances either.  I love fiction, which can be grouped in that larger, catch-all genre of romance, but not these awful, formulaic love stories.  I can't stand those terrible episodic murder mysteries my mom reads either.  At least she doesn't read romance novels, though.  Nothing irks me more than when people, usually men--no offense meant guys, I know the men to which I'm referring to here are not a fair representation of your esteemed gender--assume that my love of literature is based solely upon the reading of Harlequin romances.  "No," I usually sneer at them, "I prefer to read good literature."

Hold up.  Since when have I turned into to such an elitist, literary snob?  I hate snobbery just about as much as I hate romance novels and the two afore mentioned class readings.  I just want a little bit of substance in my reading life.  Is that so unreasonable?  Perhaps.  I totally appreciate and recognize the indelible and ancient patterns of storytelling, and I delight in seeing them artfully retold time and again; but the flimsy archetypes and predictable contrivances of "low-brow" literature just don't cut it for me.  I read because I want to know...something.  But what that something is, I'm not exactly sure.  I love literature because it has its tentacles in almost every other aspect of life and culture.  I love literature for being a mirror to hold up to my own selves, and I love it for being a lens which I can use to peer into the selves of others, real or imagined.  You see, I've never read to escape; I read because I'm a voyeur, because I want to make those connections and I want to find that something, whatever it may be.  And I feel there is nothing left for me to find in these stories composed of such immense breadth and platitude.  I have come to desire stories of depth, created by layers of murky descent.  I don't want to be told who is good and who is bad, I want to seek that truth out for myself.

And so, I shall conclude my rant with a Frye quote:  "Great literature is what the eye can see:  it is the genuine infinite as opposed to the phony infinite, the endless adventures and endless sexual stimulation of the wandering of desire.  But I have a notion that if the wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either" (30).  He's right of course, and not just because he's Frye, but because without the lower rungs we would not be able to climb to higher literary realms.  Oddly enough, I believe that these higher realms are actually located in the depths of the Ocean, rather than the shallows.  Counter intuitive, I know, but it makes perfect sense if we consider the fluidity of time-space outside of the earthly plane, which is where the Ocean also resides.  As writers and storytellers we are merely conduits of a power far greater than ourselves.  The "low-brow" is no less important than the "high-brow," but I have decided to discard my worn out slippers and tread into the web cast by the Sirens' call, echoing from within those murky, unfathomable depths.