A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Art, chess, coffee, glasses, Joshua Jammer Smith, Link, Link SNES, Literature, original photograph, Play, William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

1 June 2019

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Stained Yellow #77

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Art, coffee, Dice, glasses, Humor, Joshua Jammer Smith, Literature, mechanical pencils, Play, still life, The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare

Stained Yellow #77

14 June 2018

Costs of Dreams and Fairy Queens-Sandman, Shakespeare, Lamps & Llamas

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"If these shadows have offended", A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alan Cumming, Comics, Dream, Dream Country, Dreams, Faeries, graphic novel, Hamnet Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, King Auberon, Llamas are Awesome, myth, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Play, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Sandman, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, The Doll's House, The Sandman, trickster, When the time comes...you'll recieve a llama, William Shakespeare

I never foresaw that llamas would become so ingratiated into my daily existence.  I honestly only ever thought about llamas when I was watching the Emperor’s New Groove and that was the extent of it.  I now own a llama that wears a bow-tie, talks in the voice of Project Runway Model host Tim Gunn, and have been challenged by one to read every play written by William Shakespeare.  Life is a strange oddity, but I’ll take it over the alternative any day of the week.

Working at a Public Library has its own advantages and disadvantages, the former being greater than the latter.  Yes there are frustrating patrons, yes there are long periods of tedium interrupted by bursts of endless tasks to perform, and yes there are literally thousands of books I’m not allowed to read while I’m on the clock.  But with each of these negative realities there are many more advantages that make this gig not just worthwhile, but a real passion.  I love helping a child find the exact book they were looking for (usually something by Rick Riordan, though Diary of a Wimpy Kid makes a close fucking second place).  I love working with the 3D Printer and explaining it to children, parents, and even regular adults that are just fascinated with it.  I love making displays for authors like Truman Capote, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and of course William Shakespeare.  But best of all I love my job because my co-workers are like a family to me and everyday I’m working for the library I feel like I’m home.

Which of course leads me back to the llamas and then eventually Shakespeare…and then eventually Neil Gaiman. 

One of my coworkers, a woman named Brenda Choy, is absolutely obsessed with llamas.  Whether it’s Sid the Llama, who has an actual online following, Bernice Llama, who has her own facebook page, or else the dozens of llamas stacked around her computer monitor, anyone and everyone who works at the Public Library at some point encounters the “llama department.”  And while some co-workers roll their eyes and/or sigh at all this silliness, I’ve welcomed it to the point that I now own my own llama.  His name is Xavier, he wears a bow-tie, and he’s fabulous.  This llama material isn’t just a lead-in however, because along with communicating regularly with the llama department, I’m also occasionally collaborating with them, and during one of the many numerous conversations I had with Brenda it eventually came out that I’ve never read all of Shakespeare’s plays, but I’ve always wanted to.

It’s come about now that I’ll be, starting in the month of May, reading every play by William Shakespeare and filming myself in a pseudo-Masterpiece Classic homage to each play starring llamas.

Beat that Alan Cumming.

This has led to a bit of over-preparation on my part, because while most employees would simply say they’ve read the play and then do a quick video, I can’t be that person.  I’ve already begun purchasing every play Shakespeare ever wrote, I’ve begun listening to nonfiction Shakespeare audiobooks, and I’ve started collecting actual books about the life and work of William Shakespeare.  And while I may get around to writing about all of it, I thought about one reference to Shakespeare that has assumed a significant meaning in my life.

Dream Country is the third of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Series, and it holds a special place in the entirety of the run because it is most famous for the story about the cats.  I’ll probably get around to writing about that one later on, but for the time being Dream Country is important because the third chapter of the book is about Shakespeare and his company performing the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This performance is important largely because the audience is the actual host of Fairy Folk observing a human’s interpretation of their race before they retreat from the world of men.  It’s also important because, like so many of the humans who encounter the Lord of Dreams, the story of Shakespeare is about personal sacrifice at the expense of dreams, and Shakespeare, it’s revealed, has made such a dream for himself.

Morpheus says as much to Lady Oberon during the performance of the play:

“We came to an…arrangement, four years back.  I’d give him what he thinks he most desires—and in return he’d write two plays for me. 

This is the first of them.  (11).

The reader does not really need an explanation past this, for if they bother to only read this one lone comic book in The Sandman Epic they receive all the real explanation that is needed.  The Immortal Bard William Shakespeare has entered into an arrangement with a real immortal being, The Lord of Dreams, in order to become a successful writer, in fact a brilliant author.  What the reader misses is in fact that this is a small reference to an earlier book in The Sandman series titled Men of Good Fortune.

In the previous volume it’s a single chapter that, like many of the small independent works of The Sandman run, appears to be completely random.  But, as with so much of this comics series, it sows a narrative seed that will eventually grow into it’s own independent story while also feeding the main body of the larger narrative.  Dream meets a man he has entered into a contest with, once every 100 years.  While he is meeting this man, named Hob, he overhears a young playwright named William Shakespeare speaking with Kit Marlowe, the most famous and talented playwright of his age.  Dream listens to Hob’s bragging, but his ears catch wind of the conversation and one quote by Shakespeare strikes the reader:

God’s Wounds!  If only I could write like you!  In Faustus where you wrote—“To God!  He loves thee not!  The God Thou serves is thine own appetite, wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub.

To him I’ll build an altar and a church, and offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.” 

It chills the blood.

He follows this with a revealing statement to Marlowe:

I would give anything to have your gifts.  Or more than anything to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead.  I’d bargain like your Faustus for that boon.

It seems lately that whenever I appear around my friends and coworkers an expression is uttered over and over again.  “Speak of the devil,” to which I am compelled to reply, “and he will appear.”  I try my best not to speak in my pathetic attempt at a Bane impression when I do this, but I am an attention whore at heart and so anything to make me look foolish is just too good to pass up.  Still this social interaction is a chance to reflect on the nature of cliches and their nasty habit of being cliches for a reason.  Will Shakespeare is revealed to be painfully mortal in this passage, just another aspiring artist who observes the success of others and covets it rather than dedicate themselves to their craft.  And Gaiman, to his credit, does an incredible job of humanizing Shakespeare, while also using his particular set of genius, to turn Shakespeare back into some sort of myth.

The story of individuals offering up something to the great trickster/temptor is one as old as time.  Whether it’s Satan, Loki, Odysseus, Puck, Mbeku, Genies, Maui, or even Coyote, human beings have always created narratives in which there is some supernatural being who manages to prey and manipulate weaker minded people to perform deeds against their own self-interests.  This has tended sometimes to be appropriated by religion to justify pushing morality onto it’s subjects, but if one looks a bit deeper at this frequently occurring trope the reader is able to see that the pattern is it’s own explanation.

At some point everyone is tempted by their dreams to become, and at some point everyone gets had.

Gaiman’s Shakespeare becomes a human being, but also a mythic soul because he becomes a man who has achieved immortality, but at the expense of his own life.  At the very end of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, once Robin Goodfellow has given his now iconic speech and thus fufilled Gaiman’s contractual obligation to remind you that dreams are something of a theme in The Sandman universe, the reader is told plainly that Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare, died in 1596 at the age of eleven years old.  This is not creative re-writing of history as most of the comic is.  Gaiman is in fact steeping his characters in the real history of their place and time, and Hamnet Shakespeare did in fact perish leaving Shakespeare as the sole male relative in his family.  Many have speculated how this death ultimately impacted Shakespeare, and some have hinted that his play Hamlet is a poorly veiled effort to explain his grief.

But Shakespeare the man isn’t my concern for this essay because Shakespeare the myth is something far more interesting.  And so I have to return briefly to the llamas.

I recognize that it may be foolishness to become so emotionally invested in what is ultimately a lifeless toy.  Yet my own llama, which was a gift from Brenda not long after my friend Savannah killed herself, has become something of an icon to me.  It’s a physical, material object, but in it’s own form and shape it’s a reminder that I’ve found a space and place that gives me purpose and drive.  I strive, everyday, to make the Library a better place for having me in it, and though I don’t always succeed, this passion fosters itself in a desire for personal self-improvement as well.  I’ve always wanted to read the collected works of William Shakespeare, often for the selfish reason: simply to say I had. But now it feels like it’s serving a larger purpose.

Shakespeare is a figure and an idea in the culture, a symbol of intellectualism, or too often pseudo-intellectuals who wish to appear smart.  Every intelligent wannabe hipster can cite at least one Shakespeare quote that they think is appropriate, which often times it isn’t.  And the ability to cite Shakespeare is so often equated with intelligence that it becomes galling to those  of us who don’t understand the reference.  This is getting into the idea of intelligence as a form of commodity and I would love write further on this, but that would be getting even more off topic.  The connection here is, while I am beginning my reading into Shakespeare, his work, his life, and the commentary that surrounds him, I managed to find one book which seems to say it best. 

Harold Bloom is many things, most of them obnoxious, but his book Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human does have many incredible things to say about the life and work of Shakespeare, and considering The Sandman and Midsummer Night’s Dream there was one quote that seemed to say it best, or at least offer up a unique perspective I had never considered before. 

In his introduction to the book Bloom muses about the cultural and social impact of Shakespeare’s work and he observes the man’s unique place:

Shakespeare’s works have been termed the secular Scripture, or more simply the fixed center of the Western Canon.  What the Bible and Shakespeare have in common actually is rather less than most people suppose, and I myself suspect that the common element is only a certain universalism, global and multicultural.  […]. Yet I hardly see how one can begin to consider Shakespeare without finding some way to account for his pervasive presence in the most unlikely contexts: here, there, and everywhere at once.  (3)

Whether one likes or outright despises the plays of William Shakespeare, what cannot be taken away from the man is that his visions and dreams have lingered after him, becoming the sort of cultural foundations for so many great works of art.  What is The Lion King without Hamlet?  What is Dead Poet’s Society without Midsummer Night’s Dream?  What is Kiss Me Kate without Taming of the Shrew?  And what is Harold and Kumar go to White Castle without…

Okay that last one is actually The Odyssey, but the point is Shakespeare matters because he’s lasted and become a fixture in the society and culture.  “To be or not to be” can be quoted by almost anyone, and the “beast with two backs” was a line in the opening scenes of Othello.

Shakespeare has become, in his own beautiful fashion, a sort of myth.  And the entire career of Neil Gaiman is itself one long love-song to myth.  Which brings me back to Sandman because while the character of Dream has become itself a beautiful myth for the modern age, and Morpheus himself a kind of trickster in the vein of Satan or Puck, Gaiman allows him often to speak in riddles and philosophy that make the Sandman series into the sublime art it is.  In the closing pages of MidsummerNight’s Dream King Oberon and Queen Titania are speaking with Dream, asking him why he commissioned the place from Shakespeare in the first place.  His response is almost Shakespearean:

You have asked me why I asked you back to this plane, to see this entertainment.  I…During your stay on this earth the faerie have afforded me much diversion, and entertainment.  Now you have left your own haunts.  And I would repay you for all the amusement.  And more: They shall not forget you.  That was important to me: that King Auberon and Queen Titania will be remembered by mortals, until this age is gone.

King Auberon thanks Dream, but reminds him that the narrative is not based on actual facts.  Dream responds:

Oh, but it IS true.  Things need not have happened to be true.  Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot. 

There are many facts about William Shakespeare that, because of the fault of record keeping and the chaotic nature of life itself, have been lost and so many of the facts of William Shakespeare have been lost to writers and historians.  There is a great sadness in knowing that we will never know as much about the actual life of the man William Shakespeare, but there is still the art.  The plays, the dreams, live on.  And in the course of human events Shakespeare has become, as Harold Bloom said, a kind of secular magnet.  Shakespeare is a myth for the modern age in the way he continues to inspire the language, the visions, and the characters that are fostered and created.

Dream Country, and Midsummer Night’s Dream are just another example of how the Immortal Bard has inspired the latter generation of artists.  Gaiman’s comic is a love letter to William Shakespeare, because rather than simply borrow he creates from the mythic quality of the man, reminding his reader that while Shakespeare was a mortal man, he was a man who laid the dreams that lived after him.  He makes this mythic, almost unapproachable figure into someone flawed and human.

Dreams have a price.  And the men and women who pursue them must needs know this if they begin their journeys.  I’ve lost myself so much time, typing away at my keyboard, aspiring, doubting, and dreaming.  And while the dream in my head is to achieve the title of writer, Gaiman is brilliant in reminding me that the dream is the reality.  Writing like this, everyday, every weekend, getting in my 300 words is the dream.  It costs me my time, it costs me the pleasures of spending time with others, and often times it costs me most of my happiness and satisfaction.  But I chug another cup of coffee, content in my dreams, knowing that I’ll get another paragraph in before bed, and at least one scene read in Twelfth Night.

Such dreams are made by little decisions, and little actions that live on long past the moment that I was.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Dream Country were cited from the Vertigo paperback edition.  All quotes cited from The Doll’s House were taken from the Vertigo Paperback Edition.  All quotes cited from Shakespeare:Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom were taken from the {} paperback edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

If it hasn’t been made explicitly clear, I LOVE The Sandman Series just as I LOVE the collected works of Neil Gaiman.  The man really hasn’t disappointed me yet and when I recently sat down to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream again I was forced to make pause as the final recitation of Puck’s monologue.  It’s a scene that has been borrowed, repeated, stolen, and re-imagined numerous times, and I admit freely I used it to make an end in my own first novel.  There’s just something to the lines.

But reading the book again I was struck by this small moment and I actually felt tears form in my eyes.  The only real word was sublime.  I don’t know how the man does it, but damn, there just isn’t anything like Neil Gaiman.

“He Wishes to Think!”…and Maybe Dance with Mr. Kelly: Inherit the Wind A White Tower Review

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"He wishees to think!", Charles Darwin, Christianity, Courtroom Narrative, Dick York, Donna Anderson, Education, evolution, Evolution is not JUST a theory, Film, film review, Frederic March, Gene Kelly, Harry Morgan, Henry Drummond, history, Human evolution, Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion, humanity, Idealism, Individual Will, Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence, John Thomas Scopes, Philosophy, Play, Political Discourse, Politics, Public Education, Public speech, religion, religious corruption, Robert E. Lee, Robert Osborne, Scopes Trial, Spencer Tracey, Spencer Tracy, Stanley Kramer, Turner Classic Movies

Honestly the most disappointing part of the film is the fact that Gene Kelly doesn’t tap dance.  The man shines as a wisecracking journalist who always has something clever or witty to say, but after a while I kept wondering what was keeping the man from dancing right in the middle of the courtroom.  I recognize that Inherit the Wind is based on an actual play and that drama typically avoids frivolities like dancing, singing, and general merriment, but I mean, it’s Gene Kelly.

One of the greatest pains about living with the cable package that I do is that I don’t get Turner Classic Movies.  Though I get plenty of other channels I usually wind up watching only PBS or Cartoon Network for Adult Swim, although I will admit without shame that Steven Universe and Adventure Time are also some of my favorites.  But I miss TCM because so much of my childhood was my parents turning the station on and then taking care of chores or other household tasks leaving me alone with Robert Osbourne who would introduce film after film with his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema history.  On one side note when Robert Osbourne passed away earlier this year it the first celebrity death which really made me cry because so much of my childhood was tied with that man.  TCM always promised wonderful movies, and it’s because of that channel that I eventually discovered films like Annie Hall, Spirited Away, The Seventh Seal, the original Scarface, The Great Dictator, and eventually Inherit the Wind.

Growing up in a private Christian school it’s nothing short of a miracle (though I despise using that poor word) that I ever came away knowing what evolution was, let alone what it argued.  Fortunately, I had a biology teacher who was a scientist as much as he was a Christian and so he taught us the scientific theory without remorse or shame.  When I got to college I eventually wound up tutoring biology and more or less teaching it for four years to freshmen and so in that time I managed to learn a great deal about the scientific principle, being able to argue against anyone who argued that it was “just a theory.”  During that time I met my wife, who herself is a biologist, and so recently when I discovered that the library had a copy of Inherit the Wind on DVD, I checked it out and showed it to her.

To be honest, she didn’t really respond much to it, and this is probably because I forgot that Inherit the Wind is more of a film about lawyers and philosophy than it is about the principle of evolution.

Based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no not the Civil War Era general, unless that man had a secret past historians
don’t know about) Inherit the Wind is based upon the Scopes Trial, sometimes referred to as the “Monkey Trial,” which took place in the early 1920s.  The case in question centered around a man named John Thomas Scopes who dared to teach his high school students about the theory of evolution despite there being a state law which prohibited the practice.  Inherit the Wind rewrites the case but insofar as it changes the names of the characters involves and loads the court proceedings with grand speeches about individual will and human initiative.

Most of these come from Henry Drummond the Clarence Darrow substitute played by Tracey in one of his most iconic roles.  Tracey shines continually during the film offering one beautiful statement after the other about the human race.  During one exchange he speaks with Matthew Harrison Brady whom he has called to the witness stand, and during his interrogation he offers this gem:

[challenged to say if he considers anything holy]

Henry Drummond: Yes. The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted “amens” and “holy holies” and “hosannas.” An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.

I regularly read the early essays that I wrote for White Tower Musings, and with some embarrassment, but not much, I recognize this exact sentiment dominates most of my writing.  I was reading a lot of Christopher Hitchens at the time and so the humanism just infected my prose.  But even after the embarrassing grammar errors have been corrected and I’m left with that rough early material I still find in my early arguments this exact position to be true in my heart.  I’ve written regularly about atheism, but never outright about my humanism.

I’ve developed into my own self and am now comfortable with who I am and what I believe.  My life is a godless one, and while there are some that would pity me for that I stand firm by the conviction that ideas are a far greater testament to humanity than any church or sermons preached therein.  The ideas of Marx, Freud, Hobbes, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Voltaire, Steinem, Trotsky, Bradbury, McCloud, Nietzsche, and yes even Darwin constitute a greater monument to the capacities of human beings.  These ideas inspire and drive more personal ambition, innovation, discovery, and insight than any god could possibly do.  Ideas offer up new visions of reality, and this to me has always been far more interesting than any Psalm or Prophet.

The ultimate conflict with religion, and this comes from having grown up in it and reflecting upon the experience, is that it offers only one vision of reality: god is the source of everything.  Once one has accepted this worldview the achievements or discoveries of mankind becomes secondary.  What is the origin of life, god.  How did DNA develop, god.  Why should man be benevolent to his fellow creatures, god.  I could go on with this but I’m supposed to be writing about a film.  I’ll settle on the fact that religion as an ideology is constricting because it limits the ultimate potential of man into one single reality rather than leaving him open to new ideas, and when Christianity festers into the realm of politics it has a limiting effect on free will or free thought.

Drummond’s regular speeches note this when he further questions Brady about Cates and faith:

Matthew Harrison Brady: We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!

Henry Drummond: Then why did God plague us with the capacity to think? Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one faculty of man that raises him above the other creatures of the earth? The power of his brain to reason. What other merit have we? The elephant is larger; the horse is swifter and stronger; the butterfly is far more beautiful; the mosquito is more prolific. Even the simple sponge is more durable. But does a sponge think?

Matthew Harrison Brady: I don’t know. I’m a man, not a sponge!

Henry Drummond: But do you think a sponge thinks?

Matthew Harrison Brady: If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks!

Henry Drummond: Do you think a man should have the same privilege as a sponge?

Matthew Harrison Brady: Of course!

Henry Drummond: [Gesturing towards the defendant, Bertram Cates] Then this man wishes to have the same privilege of a sponge, he wishes to think!

This line alone has become its own sort of icon in terms of the legacy of the film.  Most of the “commercials” that saw on TCM would always have this one line, with Spencer Tracey making his grand and dramatic gestures.  And the word “grand” seems the most fitting in describing much of the approach of Inherit the Wind because so often the film feels like one speech after the other.  This can sometimes come at the expense of the narrative, but at the same time this doesn’t kill the film.

Ultimately Inherit the Wind is a courtroom narrative, and such stories tend to be limiting in terms of what a director can do in terms of narrative.  Within such narratives the viewer is given a lawyer, maybe two if the director wants to develop both sides of the case, and so the viewer is usually left becoming a member of the jury as they try to decide who’s side is right.  The exception to this would be To Kill a Mockingbird where the viewer is given no chance to see the opposing lawyer’s arguments because they know already that Atticus Finch is the “right” lawyer.  But the courtroom narrative is classic in that its origin are in antiquity.  The ancient Greeks are attributed with establishing most of the traditions  and foundations of Western civilization, and the use of the courts and rhetoric is perhaps one of the most crucial developments of their culture.  Though each city state was different in their application of the law, a policy existed in ancient Greece where, if a man found himself compelled to go to trial, he would be forced to act in his own defense or else serve as the prosecution.  As such a study of rhetoric wasn’t just something for leisure, it was of paramount importance to the individual citizen.  A man (because it was ancient Greece, don’t forget that) had to know how to arrange words so that he could defend himself.  The setting of the courtroom is one as old as recognizable civilization, and so while Inherit the Wind can feel like one long series of speeches, in the film’s defense, that’s exactly what a courtroom is.

Stanley Kramer who directs the film would only a year later direct the movie Judgement at Nuremberg which also starred Spencer Tracey and as in both films he manages to construct real characters outside of the courtroom so that the viewer isn’t left simply listening to speech after speech that are devoid of personal character.  The strength of Inherit the Wind isn’t just that it constantly sings the praises of humanism in defense of Darwinism, it is instead a film about a strained friendship that climaxes in a courtroom.

Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady are two old friends who have had a falling out because of their difference of opinion about religion.  In one scene the pair of them are rocking on the front porch of their hotel and discussing the nature of faith when Brady asks his friend a question:

Matthew Harrison Brady: Why is it, my old friend, that you’ve moved so far away from me?

Henry Drummond: All motion is relative, Matt. Maybe it’s you who’ve moved away by standing still.

The success of this scene is largely on Tracey, but then again, I’m biased in this capacity.  Tracey as an actor manages to convey a down-to-earth man who has ingested and processed the humanities and knowledge of mankind but not gone so far up his own ass that he’s lost the ability to shoot straight or be humble.  Inherit the Wind as a film is often a film about Henry Drummond and his attempt to level the people around him who have gotten so concerned with the religious abstract and one quote in particular seems the best demonstration of this.

Matthew Harrison Brady: [to Henry Drummond] They’re looking for something that’s more perfect than what they already have. Why do you want to take that away from them when it’s all they have?

Henry Drummond: As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.

I’ve written, some would say too much, about my upbringing in East Texas and my observation of religious people so I won’t go back over stories that are beginning to become adages rather than accurate memory, but I will defend this line because I’ve heard this argument before.  “Even if god doesn’t exist it gives people hope,” is a line that reeks of false conviction and is in fact one of the most pathetic arguments I have ever heard.  If I can stay on topic, the film Inherit the Wind portrays Christianity often as an antithesis to reason and moral virtue and so the reader who believes in god may shout harrumph and not bother seeing the film.

I would hope they would consider the opposite.

Rather than being a film that does nothing but damn Christianity, the film in fact is a call for sanity.  I’ve seen by the example of a small handful, what can happen when those who are religiously inclined, open their minds and hearts to new ideas and allow their faith to deepen because of the challenges of science, technology, and discovery, and while I will continue to debate them about the foundation of their reality I will always respect their level head.  Inherit the Wind is not a film that damns Christianity, it only damns those who would prostitute religion for political gain.

The Christianity that is on display in the film is not a sane ideology, it is a bullying, stunted cancer that eats away at the people of Tennessee by leaving them terrified and in a place where progress is associated with the devil.

Drummond answers this in what is quite possible the most beautiful lines of the film:

Henry Drummond: Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

There’s a great number of reasons for watching a film like Inherit the Wind, the largest being that it’s a film that helped establish the courtroom drama as a narrative structure.  But for my opinion Inherit the Wind is a beautiful film about humanism overcoming bigotry and the importance of individual integrity.  Even if the reader disagrees with the theory of Evolution and what it argues about the origin of human life, they would hopefully agree that an individual person has the right to believe what they want to believe and think what they want to think.  I believe that flat-earthers are idiots, but if they believe that the earth is flat and they have come to that decision on their own that I have no business telling them how to think.

It is when one uses violence or intimidation to justify their world view that action is necessary.  Hiring lawyers and going to court will not provide the satisfaction that might come from punching somebody right back in the nose, but it will keep more violence and bigotry from occurring.  The courtroom is a space where philosophy can be argued and defended against the cruel and fanatics.  It is a space where the ideas and progress of humanity can be argued and defended and where a man can stand up and say firmly, “I think.”

This year will mark 92 years since the original Scopes “Monkey” Trial, and a film like Inherit the Wind is wonderful reminder that even close to a century later we’re still having the discussion of evolution, and whether or not teachers should be allowed to teach it.  The clouds smell a little more like Gasoline, but there are far more people willing to stand up and say without shame or fear, that “I think.”

There’s also people like me who are still waiting for Gene Kelly to start tapdancing.  But you can’t always get what you want.

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Having more or less taught biology for four years it’s important to make sure the reader knows this: Evolution is not JUST a Theory.  This unfortunate, bullshit line has been crafted by critics of evolution, however it demonstrates their ignorance of what a scientific theory actually is.  In the humanities a “theory” is just an idea about reality than can be easily accepted or rejected.  The reason for this is that in the humanities you are dealing with subjectivity of human experience.  What I see and believe is different from what the reader sees and believes and so we could look at the same painting by Rembrandt and come to different conclusions about what it means or what its origins were.

The humanities are SUBJECTIVE, while science and mathematics are OBJECTIVE.

If something is a Scientific Theory that means it has been tested literally millions of times by scientists all over the world who are trying to refute the conclusions of the original hypothesis.  This constant testing is not just an effort to disprove other people, it’s an effort to make sure that the facts that are being expressed by science are accurate.  Human beings can observe evolution in lab settings as well as the wild, and the mountains of evidence in the fossil record only further demonstrate the fact of evolution.  If something is a “theory” in science it is because scientists are firm in their conviction that it is a fact.  There is a “chance” that it could be refuted by new evidence, but it is a “chance” the way there’s a “chance” that I could go out on a date with Matthew Lewis.  It’s not that it isn’t possible, it’s just probably probably probably not going to happen, but, I can dream.

 

If the reader would like a more nuanced explanation of the difference between a scientific Law and Theory they can follow the link below to an article my wife found for me when I asked her about the difference:

https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-definition-of-scientific-law.html

WordPress Told Us Vaginas Don’t Wear Hats, But We Say Otherwise

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Book Review, Cloche Hat, Family Guy, Feminism, Gracie and Frankie, Harry Potter, Manipulation of women, Play, Playboy, Queer Theory, Rape, sexual Education, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Superbad, The Big Lebowski, The Penis Book, The Vagina Monologues, Vagina, vaginal imagery, Vibrators, Voldemort, Vulva, What Vaginas Smell Like, What Vaginas would Wear, Women's Bodies

 

If I had a vagina myself I think it would wear a cloche hat.  I know it originally as a “flapper hat,” but that’s far too obscene when discussing women’s lady-bits.  I’m thinking that it would have to be light gray with a solid black band and a feather or else a felt flower along the right side to really make everything pop.  My vagina would never wear red or pink or maroon hats, for that would be too grotesquely obvious, and in fact the only color near those shades I would ever consider wearing would be a deep wine, and the name of that particular hue would have to be as obscure as the dye that produced it for nothing is too good for my vagina.

This is all a lovely exercise in imagination, but the conflict remains that I have a penis and penises don’t look good in hats.

Like so many things in my life I learned about the Vagina Monologues through Family Guy.  If you listen close you can hear thousands of feminist’s cringe after reading that.  Given what the Vagina Monologues are actually about, and given the fact that Family Guy has, in the last few seasons, done little to actually help its own reputation as being a den of refuge for sexist humor this cringe isn’t entirely unwarranted.  Still the image of a woman’s waist, clad in just a pair of pink panties doing stand-up, was actually pretty funny and a great opportunity to observe the real originality of the early seasons of the show.  Whether Family Guy is sexist or not is for the YouTube comment sections, the point is watching that show exposed me first to the idea that The Vagina Monologues was a performance that had something to do with Vaginas and, most assuredly, feminism in some form or capacity.

On that same note before actually sitting down to read the book I had never considered how the smell of vaginas could actually play a role in how a person felt about their own.  Likewise, it was a revelatory experience reading the names of various types of clothes women would wear, or dress, their vagina in if they got the chance.  Vaginas, and here my maleness really shines, were just internal body parts for women that had to do with sex and childbirth.  In my defense, growing up in East Texas I rarely heard the word at all, and in fact actually saying the word aloud was like muttering the name of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, yet another famous V word that really needs to be spoken aloud so that we as a society can eliminate the fear that surrounds it.

Voldemort, I’m talking, writing, about Voldemort.  And vaginas.

Eve Ensler, who is the main performer and writer (really compiler) of The Vagina Monologues has a section where she reads just the smells women have offered for vaginas, either their own or others and I have to list out a few because they range from beautiful to morbid to hysterical:

Earth, Wet garbage, God, Water, A Brand-new Morning, Depth, Sweet Ginger, Depends, Me, No Smell, Pineapple, Paloma Picasso, Roses, Yummy candy, Somewhere between fish and lilacs, Peaches, the woods, Strawberry-kiwi tea, Fish, cheese, ocean, sexy, a song, the beginning.  (93-95).

She also provides several lists throughout the Monologues and I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the list of clothes women provided when asked, “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”:

A beret, a leather jacket, mink, a pink boa, jeans, a male tuxedo, emeralds, an evening gown, Armani only see-through black underwear, Sequins, Something machine washable, Angora, a red bow, a leopard Hat, a silk kimono, glasses, sweatpants, An electrical shock device to keep unwanted strangers away, a pinafore, a slicker.  (15-17).

I’m sure if I read that out loud to my wife she would appreciate the “electrical shock device” but that’s just because she would, if it were possible, be a supervillain that destroyed people for fun.  As for myself, like I said above, my vagina would wear a cloche hat and look fabulous while doing so.

These lists though are important to read and listen to, principally because they do not come from just one woman’s imagination.  The Vagina Monologues is not so much an original play, as it is the readings of various testimonies of women from all walks of life.  Ensler has made a career talking to women and hearing their stories and she repeats their stories for audiences so that they hear from a woman in her 80s who had never even seen her vagina, a six year old girl who says her vagina would smell like snowflakes, survivors of rape-camps during the war and genocide in Bosnia, lesbians and their sexuality, women menstruating, a woman who hated her vagina until she met a man who loved it, a woman who had an orgasm once during her teens and the resulting “flood” embarrassed her too much to worry or think about it for almost 40 years, and the stories could literally fill volumes from that point on.

My reader may interrupt and ask why a whole book is really necessary when talking about Vaginas, but to this complaint I can offer only contempt or pity.  You see the most popular essay I have ever written was about dicks.  Big black dicks to be precise.  Almost every day I pull up White Tower Musings and see that some other person has typed in some charming assortment of words involving “penis,” “black,” “girls fucked,” and “Mandingo.”  There is a near constant worship and fascination with penises, which is ironic when you remember the fact that people will seemingly do everything they can to talk about penises without actually saying the words penis.  If there is a paranoia or embarrassment with acknowledging vaginas in our culture, there is a dramatic and sometimes violent fear or disgust of the vagina.

Two cultural references probably give better examples than I could.  The first is from the movie Superbad.  Jonah Hill is defending his free use of pornography and when the issue of penetration comes up he has a line that’s revealing and truly pathetic.

Evan: You could always subscribe to a site like Perfect Ten. I mean that could be anything, it could be a bowling site.

Seth: Yeah, but it doesn’t actually show dick going in which is a huge concern.

Evan: Right, I didn’t realize that.

Seth: Besides, have you ever seen a vagina by itself?

Evan: No.

Seth: [shakes his head] Not for me.

Likewise in the movie The Big Lebowski, Julian Moore plays an artist who is probably the exact image of feminism every anti-feminist thinks about when they masturbate to how much they hate feminism.  She introduces herself to The Dude before mentioning a particular quality about her art.

Maude Lebowski: Does the female form make you uncomfortable, Mr. Lebowski?

The Dude: Uh, is that what this is a picture of?

Maude Lebowski: In a sense, yes. My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.

The Dude: Oh yeah?

Maude Lebowski: Yes, they don’t like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.

The Dude: Johnson?

These two impressions are just microcosms of the larger issue which is that people are often encouraged to ignore and feel repulsed by vaginas at the same time they’re taught to love and adore them.  One example of the book provides a beautiful, in every sense of the term, demonstration of this when she interviews a group of senior women:

I interviewed a group of women between the ages of sixty-fie and seventy-five.  These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the women had never had a vagina interview before.  Unfortunately, most of the women in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their vaginas.  I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the feminist era.  One women who was seventy-two had never even seen her vagina.  She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention.  She had never had an orgasm.  At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina.  She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried.  This monologue is for her.  (23-4).

From here if my contester has any other objections I’m afraid they’re going to have to leave them at the door, because after this story The Vagina Monologues aren’t just relevant they’re more important than ever.  It’s important that men and women, especially from previous generations to realize, that sexuality is not limited to youth.  For my own part I learned this lesson by reading Ensler’s play, but also from the show Gracie and Frankie.  Originally when the show began I wanted to watch it because I loved Martin Sheen in West Wing and growing up Dad would often let me watch Law & Order where Sam Watterson was always the most interesting part of the “law” slot.  The show is about two couples and Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play the wives who find out over dinner that their husbands have been having an affair for close to forty years.  Gracie and Frankie, who at first hate each other, begin to live together and so the show follows them as they try to figure out what’s next and where to go after the life you’ve built suddenly stops.  The end of the last episode of season two brought the issue of elderly women masturbating however because Frankie receives a vibrator as a gift (I think it’s a Hitachi wand) and she sprains her wrist.

I sound painfully virginal when I write this out, but I didn’t think women over a certain age masturbated.  Even if I did, I just didn’t really consider it because being a young man masturbation is a far more personal experience and you usually don’t think about other people masturbating while you’re masturbating.  The attitude is, sexist as it may be: of course men masturbate, but why would a woman?

Perhaps this demonstration of masculine solipsism is great Segway into lesbianism.

Ensler interviewed several lesbians, but one in particular came back to the show and told her she hadn’t quite got it right and so Ensler tried again.

“As a lesbian,” she said, “I need you to start from a lesbian-centered place, not framed within a heterosexual context.  I did not desire women, for example, because I disliked men.  Men weren’t even part of the equation.”  She said, “You need to talk about entering into vaginas.  You can’t talk about lesbian sex without doing this.

“For example,” she said.  “I’m having sex with a woman.  She’s inside me.  I’m inside me.  Fucking myself together with her.  There are four fingers inside me; two are hers, two are mine.”  (115).

Once again I must profess my ignorance.  Being a bisexual man, and former straight man, one is often exposed to “lesbianism” via pornography.  This unfortunately perpetuates a bad label because, as boys grow up with the internet as I did, there is cultivated the idea that lesbians are fluid in their sexuality, open and available to men.  This is obviously bullshit, but unfortunately nobody teaches you that.  Because schools in the United States often cower beneath the might of outraged parents or religiously funded institutions, real healthy sexual education is often a garage enterprise, with the odd sex-ed teacher showing up with condoms and the eventual abused banana.  My point is simply this passage was an excellent reminder that lesbianism is misunderstood by many men because no one bothers to teach them that lesbians don’t hate men, they just aren’t part of the equation.

In one of the more powerful portions of the book Ensler discusses her experience interviewing women who survived the “rape-Camps” of Bosnia.  The break-up of the former country of Yugoslavia created a political cluster-fuck resulting in an ethnic cleansing and apparently between the bouts of murder a few soldiers established a systemized unit for the consistent rape of women.

I should forewarn my reader that this can be a little rough:

Not since the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me.  So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart.  Don’t know whether they’re going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain.  Six of them, monstrous doctors with black masks shoving bottles up me too. There were sticks and the end of a broom.

[…]

Not since I heard the skin tear and made lemon screeching sounds, not since a piece of my vagina came off in my hand, a part of the lip, now one side is completely gone.  (63).

Ensler’s recordings here serve a historical and political purpose, but I find that simply writing these stories down is a profoundly human act.  It’s also a reminder that I lack a great strength because simply typing them out I had to stop.

I had to stop and cry again.  Close to 2000 women were impregnated as a result of rape, because of these camps.

But lest I succumb to the morbid conclusion Ensler notes what The Vagina Monologues mean for her later on:

This is my favorite part about traveling with the work.  I get to heat the truly amazing stories.  They are told so simply, so matter-of-factly.  I am always reminded how extraordinary women’s lives are, and how profound.  And I am reminded how isolated women are, and how oppressed they often become in their isolation.  How few people they have ever told of their suffering and confusion.  How much shame there is surrounding all this.  How crucial it is for women to tell their stories, to share them with other people, how our survival as women depends on this dialogue.  (98).

I hear the complaint immediately.  My reader will contest; this is nothing but typical feminist tripe.  Why isn’t there a Penis Monologues?  Why isn’t there a show where a man reads testimonies by men about their penises and the funny or sad or terrifying stories about their penises?  Why should I care about vaginas?

There’s a problem with this argument and it reeks of bullshit.  The contester who makes this argument is often self-serving because they are lazy.  If the critic who makes this charge is truly serious and is legitimately concerned about the absence of a Penis Monologues then he should stop complaining and actually do something about.  Quit your job, start asking men about their dicks, start recording the stories that they tell, start booking gigs, and make The Penis Monologues a thing.  But of course they won’t, because it’s as I said before, the critic who suggests the Vagina Monologues are self-serving feminist tripe are themselves just pedantic cowards who need to feel special shitting on someone else’s good time rather than going out and making something of their own.

My animosity aside, there is tremendous importance to The Vagina Monologues as a performance, but for my own part as a written document.  Not everyone will be able to see Ensler’s show.  Not everyone will be able to meet her and tell her their story or listen to the testimony of other women.  The chance to hear the stories is where everything comes full circle.  “The Battle of the Sexes” is an unfortunate lingering marketing ploy that, beneath the layers of bullshit reveals an almost mythic truth, which is that men and women constitute their own communities.  Calling The Vagina Monologues feminism is of course fair, but it’s also limiting for at stake is not just whether women are allowed to talk about their genitals as much as men.  The Vagina Monologues are the community of women recognizing one another, recognizing their differences, and at the same time finding themselves unified by the very fact they each possess the same, and at the same time not so same, set of genitals.  Each woman forms a relationship with her vagina the same way a man does with his penis, and by having a venue from which to talk about their relationship women are able to find one another.

And at first it will just be about the differences but then the similarities.  Women who were abused, women who are lesbians, women who never found their vaginas and perhaps still haven’t, these connections and differences make the Vagina something more than a place where babies go in and out, it makes them a symbolic totem from which women can find one another as individuals, as women, and feel connected to someone else.

Ensler ends her introduction with a statement that is almost a manifesto:

In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered.  It’s an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed.  (xxxvi).

One of the best teachers I ever had was a woman, and during one of her lectures (I think it was during Jane Eyre) she told us that consistently it has been observed that the way societies remain advanced is by educating women.  Education is a frightening activity, and requires dedication for it often a tedious exercise.  Most of all however, it requires real courage that comes from inner strength.

A book like The Vagina Monologues is vital, not simply because it’s a wonderful feminist document, but because it affords women, as well as men, to examine the way we as a society and culture view vaginas, how we treat people who have them.  Rather than hiding them, or being disgusted by them, we should at least have the courage to at least talk about them.  Even if we’re uncomfortable, even if we’re scared, and even if we’re simply apathetic, we should still try and find the effort to ask a few simple questions about them and listen to what the other has to say.  These little questions matter, because they encourage reflection.

They also make me reevaluate the cloche hat, but damn if nothing else looks good on my vagina.  And sun hats are just so blasé.

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

For my own part, I didn’t get a chance to work it into the article. but here’s my vagina story.

For my own part, though I don’t have one myself, vaginas have always been a mystery.  When I was five years old I had the nasty habit of going through my father’s stuff.  Usually his desk because he has nice pens and pencils.  One day, and I’ve never forgotten it, I was looking through his drawers, shortly after he’d told me not to, and when I opened one of them I saw a naked woman resting against an old aluminum radiator.  This was my first Playboy magazine.  Boys are supposed to go through a “latency period,” a period of life when “girls are gross” and one forms homo-social bonds with other boys.  I never had that.  My first memory ever was a girl, and looking at the girl on the magazine I felt an overwhelming urge to be “close” somehow.  I knew it was bad looking at this, but I stole it under my shirt and snuck off to my room.  Once the door was closed I opened the magazine and studied each picture.  It was a collection of centerfolds from the late 90s to the original founding of the magazine.  There were lots of beautiful women in all manner of poses, and while the breasts were nice to look at what I’ve never been able to let go of is the impression of seeing a woman’s vulva and pubic hair.  I didn’t know what a vagina, a vulva, or pubic hair was, but I did know one thing for certain: I liked it.

I would eventually steal this same magazine over and over again through the years until I found the internet, but those women were my first exposure to vaginas.  I may have come to find Playboy a rather repulsive institution over the years, but I can never take away that first moment when I realized that women were different and my interest in them seemingly doubled over night.

This is my vagina story.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I found this Daily Show Meme a few years back and I’ve been holding onto it hoping to find a proper place for it.  I hope you enjoy, and also allow to reflect on the fact that a woman using the word vagina in a public debate on abortion was barred from speaking.  Let that sit in and then reflect on how American culture handles, or doesn’t handle, vaginas in discourse.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve discussed vaginas a lot in this essay and I’ve used a lot of images that are reminiscent of vaginas, or refer to vaginas, or act as pseudo-vaginas, but like The Penis Book before it would be a mistake to be coy about this, so below is an anatomical rendering of a human vagina.  No jokes.  No funny.  Just what it is.  And in fact, if you pay attention, this isn’t a vagina at all, this is a vulva, a word which, when often spoken aloud, makes people either giggle, roll their eyes, or become righteously offended.

And that’s the point.  Vulva and Vagina are words, medical terms, and we can’t even say the word without either giggling or else feeling repulsed.  It’s just a part of the human body and the healthy attitude isn’t to fear it, but to acknowledge it, because the alternative isn’t really working in anyone’s best interest.

 

 

Hubris Blinds Even Batman’s Eyes

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A Rose for Emily, Batman, Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth, Batman: The Court of Owls, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Book Review, Circles, City, Comics, Edith Hamilton, Eyes, Gotham, graphic novel, Great Expectations, Hubris, Julius Caesar, Literature, Medea, mythology, O, Brother Where Are Thou?, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, Play, Polis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sophocles, The Aeneid, The New 52, The Odyssey, Tragic Flaw

Batman has become an archetype, and because of this making additions or alterations to his character or universe is not only a daunting task, it’s damn near impossible.  I remember a few months back the Graphic Novel Book Club that I’m a part of finally decided to read Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean.  I’d been lobbying for the book because, apart from Fun Home, I had never read a graphic novel that was so dense with symbolism and meaning.  I’d actually written an essay that a friend of mine published, presented a paper on it at a small academic conference, and even written two papers for school on it.  As such, when the meeting came, I gave my rating (10 means you have a shrine for it, 1 is you burned it and cursed the ashes) and then shortened my multivolume lecture on the book to a 10 minute ass-kissing monologue explaining why I thought the graphic novel was brilliant.

The remainder of the group didn’t share my views and proceeded to thrash the book apart.

Contrary to some though I actually enjoy it when I receive criticism because it forces me to consider new angles and either drop my old perceptions or reconsider my position to strengthen it.  After the meeting one of my friends approached me and apologized, “It’s just that Batman is an archetype you know?  He has to fit a structure or he isn’t Batman.”

This idea intrigued me, but it also made me wary about writing about Batman books or movies lest I suffer the eternal and unforgiving wrath of the internet.  Whoever has suggested that nerds are meek clearly had never met one for the last decade has demonstrated that nerds can be vicious and cruel when so inspired, and speaking as one I can attest to this fact.  Still though it’s getting to a point when scholars are able to sneak in copies of The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One to conferences and classrooms and the eyebrows of the academy are not so ruffled.  Batman always was art, and now that people have the venue and gumption to argue it as such I want to contribute in any way I can.

One of my favorite Batman stories is The Court of Owls.  Around five years ago I went through a Comics explosion after one of my colleagues in the SI Office dropped ten comic books on a table and went to work.  The first book I picked up was Detective Comics #1 of something called The New 52.  DC comics had just rereleased their entire publishing line starting over from number 1 and so comic fans everywhere were both ecstatic and cautiously optimistic, or, as so often happens, waiting for somebody to mess up.  I read the books on the table and immediately acquired directions to Ground Zero Comics, and from there my life was changed.  I didn’t just read comic books, I inhaled them.  It was about eight months later when I picked up Scott Snyder’s Swamp Thing run (impressive in itself for being the first good thing to happen to that franchise since Alan Moore), and from there I went to Batman which had been following the Court of Owls storyline.

What’s impressive about the series is not just how beautiful the actual books are, it’s the level of detail packed into every frame, every dialogue, every character.  The resulting strength of the two volume story line made it quickly surpass every book in terms of sales of The New 52, and it has effectively established Snyder as one of comics’ greatest contemporary writers of the medium.

What makes Court of Owls unique is not just reinventing Batman’s badass badassery, it’s something far more ambitious.  The first page of the book creates it:

In this one page Snyder has introduced a newspaper and a civilian populace alongside the architectural structures that make up Gotham and in this effort there is an attempt to create a real landscape of Gotham city.  My reader may immediately protest, Gotham always had a landscape.  I would argue however that Gotham was more of an abstract plain.  Reading books like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Hush, and even Batman Arkham Asylum there was a pronounced lack of physical space concerning Gotham and this first page is only one example of it.   Snyder regularly begins each chapter at a landmark, a social group, a historical scene, etc. and each of these opening passages brings out Gotham city not only as an urban hub, but a city with a rich history and culture that often gets ignored because Green Lantern’s in Gotham and needs Batman’s help.

It’s fair to say the history of Gotham city has largely been ignored because of such distractions, and while they were fun and interesting, the effect was to turn Gotham into an arena in which the gods were often fighting and dueling.  Snyder himself isn’t immune to this, for in the Endgame saga when Joker returns he plays on this very idea pitting Batman against Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Superman employing references to opera in order to solidify the presentation.  Before the reader gets the idea that I feel this is a cop-out it’s important to note that I actually don’t mind this.  Superhero’s by nature have always been melodramatic and archetypal, and while realism is slowly infecting the genre (sometimes to its benefit but often to its misfortune), the figure of superheroes in the collective imagination remains god-like.

Still, The Court of Owls succeeds as a story because of it’s grounding of Batman as a man with faults, particularly as it presents him as a man who felt himself master of history.  In the graphic novel’s second opening Bruce Wayne narrates the history behind Wayne Tower, one of the city’s cultural landmarks:

The original Wayne Tower.

If you came to Gotham city today, right now, and took a tour of the building, here are some things your guide would tell you:

The tower was constructed in 1888, under the watch of my great, great grandfather Alan Wayne.  He built the tower to serve as a symbol of welcome to people coming to Gotham.  And, as your tour guide will point out, from the ground up it’s designed to give visitors like you the feeling that they’re cared for and protected.  For example, your guide will say, the building has twelve gargoyles or “guardians” as Alan insisted they be called—one to watch over each passageway into the city.  The five guardians at the first tier were placed there to watch over the five original gateways to the city—the three bridges and two tunnels.  Higher up the tower is a ring of seven guardians, one to protect each of the seven train lines that converge at union station, below Wayne Tower’s base.  And at the top of the tower, is the observation deck in which Alan insisted remain free and open to the public every weekend, all year round.

This is a long passage, and remember that this is only one page with several shots of a tower silhouetted against a sunrise.  The Court of Owls is rife with presentations of the urban landscape, and while part of that is to hint at the idea that someone is watching from afar, another rhetorical effect is to place the figures in question against the size of the city and legacy of Gotham.  Bruce Wayne is Batman, but he is just a man, and as the end of this chapter demonstrates he’s plagued by hubris:

Whoever it was that just tried to kill me, he was good.  But he made a mistake.  He tried to use Gotham’s legends against me.  But I’m the only legend this city needs.  In many ways, it’s my oldest and truest friend.  And it knows me better than anyone, just as I know it.  Which is why I can say that there is no Court of Owls.  Not in Gotham.  Not in my city.

The words “my city” betray the man, not the god that’s often presented.

While I was originally going to simply review Court of Owls, as I wrote and researched images for this essay I began to observe more and more how much Snyder presents Bruce Wayne as a man who believes himself totally in control of his city and its history, and as this pride becomes more and more apparent there is constant references and attention paid to eyes.  Because I’m that kind of writer, connections between works are always being made apparent.  The combination of eyes, hubris, city, and owls all lead eventually to Oedipus the King, sometimes if inaccurately referred to as Oedipus Rex.

Oedipus the King is a play I had to read originally in High School, and I don’t mean the summarized portion of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.  Freshman year of high school was when we had to read the classics such as Medea, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Julius Caesar, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and watch the film O, Brother Where Are Thou?  We also got to read Great Expectations and Faulkner’s short story A Rose For Emily, which in hindsight still doesn’t make much sense but at least both of those of those texts got me permanently hooked to Dickens and Faulkner.  Oedipus the King was the first on the list, and It was all very Greek to me.

That’s a joke, and a reference to Shakespeare you see.  See?  I should never try to be funny.

Oedipus the King, just in case the reader was sleeping during class when they should have been paying attention, is a play written by Sophocles and the inspiration Freud’s famous Oedipus complex.  He’s also the figure of a brief mention in Disney’s Hercules movie.  Oedipus is considered a hero of Greek tragedy because the man’s downfall essentially defined tragedy in drama.  King of the city of Thebes during a time of great plague, Oedipus calls out to the citizens of the city-state that he will discover the cause of the disease and punish those responsible.  Consulting with the city’s oracle Tiresias he discovers that someone has violated the royalty of the city.  It becomes clear to Oedipus, and his wife Jocasta the wife of the former ruler, that he has performed the atrocity.  Clues and prophecies eventually lead the viewer, as well as Oedipus himself to recognize that he is the culprit of the offense until at last he recognizes that the plague has been caused because Oedipus has killed the former King of Thebes and taken his wife, who is also Oedipus’s mother, into his bed and sired two children from her.  Jocasta hangs herself at the revealing of this fact, and Oedipus upon finding her puts out his eyes with the pins that holds up her garment.  The play ends with Oedipus being sent out into exile from the city state with Creon assuming control of the city.

At this point the reader may wonder what significance or relevance Oedipus has to the Batman graphic novel currently under discussion.  If my reader will be patient, I will demonstrate how the stories mirror one another.

Throughout the play Oedipus the King there are brief allusions to eyes, often used in both the figurative and symbolic sense.  In one scene the blind oracle Tiresias is summoned to the palace and gives the following prophecy:

In name he is a stranger among citizens but soon he will be shown to be homegrown true native Theban, and he’ll have no joy of the discovery: blindness for sight and beggary for riches his exchange, […].  (93).

Oedipus himself makes numerous allusions to sight during his investigation, but the most damning is near the end when he describes the death of the man who would become his father:

O no, no, no—O holy majesty of god on high, may I not see that day!  May I be gone out of men’s sight before I see the deadly taint of this disaster come upon me.  (110).

Oedipus eventually makes his wretched discovery and a second messenger relays what occurs after he discovers his mother/wife has hung herself:

Second Messenger: He tore the brooches—the gold chased brooches fastening her robe—away from her and lifting them up high dashed them on his own eyeballs, […] he struck his eyes again and yet again with the brooches.  And the bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his cheeks—no sluggish oozing drops but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.  (132).

Before I suffered my first dream about my teeth falling out, there was nothing that bothered me so much as damage, specifically damage by needles, to the eyes.  Oedipus’s tragedy was ultimately his hubris because it “blinded” him to the reality of the fact that he believed himself a kind of god or blessing to the city of Thebes, and that blindness was due in part to the fact he was blind to the history of his lineage and city.  Looking back to Court of Owls there’s a similar predicament as Batman discovers that not only does the Court of Owls, a secret society responsible for the covert assassination of respectable citizens over the entire history of Gotham, exist but that it has existed seemingly hidden from him despite multiple efforts during his life to find it.  He’s also blind to the fact that a man by the name of Lincoln March is growing ever closer to him eventually appearing to say that he is Bruce’s brother.

Eyes hold a special significance to the human species and Ralph Waldo Emerson explored it in his essay Circles:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.  It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.  St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.  (403).

Snyder uses technology to show Batman’s blindness, for at the start Bruce demonstrates a contact lens that acts as a kind of supercomputer.  This is the stuff of Batman technology that, while a first outlandish, is actually based in real or upcoming technology not that far away.  But more than the “super-computer contacts” is the constant closeness of Bruce’s enemy that, like the truth of Oedipus’s past, ultimately attempts to destroy him by revealing that he has been blind to the true nature of the city.

Gotham and Thebes are the plains from which these two characters emerge because in the classical drama the city, the polis, is everything.  Human beings are social creatures by nature, and reading many ancient and pre-modern texts one often sees that the punishment of criminals is often not death, but banishment.  Human beings establish their identity and comfort in relation to one another, therefore when the hero suffers exile he experiences the ultimate punishment because he is denied the chance to find comfort and happiness by interacting with his friends and fellow citizens.

A conflict emerges however.  Oedipus is ultimately destroyed by his blindness by actually blinding himself and becoming exiled.  Batman, being Batman, cannot be exiled from Gotham (unless they’re doing some kind of “event” storyline, but even that doesn’t really mean anything when there are around six to seven Batman books on the market), but by the end of the Court of Owls Bruce’s ego has been broken and then eventually restored.  And it’s rather telling that the final panel in the graphic novel is Bruce’s eye containing Gotham.

By now it should hopefully be clear what my actual thesis is.  Batman: The Court of Owls follows in the tradition that my friend Anthony spoke of earlier.  Batman is an archetype in the vein of a classical hero, however rather than Oedipus who is destroyed by his tragedy, Batman satisfies the new paradigms concerning the hero.  Batman is a superhero, a figure who overcomes his mistakes and survives through it and so what is happening here is a kind of alteration on the traditional narrative.  The reader of Batman is different than the citizen of Greece who would have watched Oedipus and felt a kind of catharsis from the tragedy.  Hero-worship and hero-fantasy have become the norms of contemporary narratives; people like to watch the hero win and overcome. Rather than mourn a man’s tragedy, the contemporary reader wants to see Batman overcome and conquer the enemy that seeks to destroy him.

What unites these two works however is the idea of the city as a place of power where men find their destiny and greatness.  Snyder’s gift to the Batman universe is not just a great new villain for fans to enjoy, his gift is giving the city of Gotham new details and features from which new writers and story tellers will be able to draw inspiration from.  While the character of Batman will remain the superhuman tactician with enough gadgets to give James Bond penis envy, The Court of Owls has brought new life, energy, and most importantly a new Gotham City for Batman to discover.

The hero’s ego has been damaged, but bats always return with a vengeance.

 

*Writer’s Note*

If the reader is interested in seeing Oedipus the King performed much the way it would during ancient times there’s a brilliant version from 1957 which involves elaborate costumes and masks.  You can see it by following the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZUCgq8LfhY

 

**Writer’s Note**

All passages from Oedipus the King were taken from the David Grene translation published in the University of Chicago Press book Sophocles 1 edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore.  The passages from Circles was published in Emerson: Essays and Lecture The Library of America Edition.

 

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t mention it in the essay, but in case anyone was interested the riddle of the sphinx is as follows:

“What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?”

 

Answer:

“Man.”  When he’s born he crawls on four legs, when he grows up he walks on two, and in the evening of his life he walks with a cane making three legs.

Whispers in the Dark: A White Tower Guest Play

Tags

abuse, Amy Holt, Creative Writing, Guest Author, Play, Whispers in the Dark

There are few people in this life that can really earn the title of deep soul.  I’ve been fortunate in my life to meet more than one person who actually possesses this quality and character, and Amy Holt most certainly does.  We met originally when she was one of my SI students and, though this is a cliché, she was impossible to forget.  With her pink hair, boisterous laughter, and wisdom of topics from fantasy/sci-fi to using wasp spray instead of mace to take down muggers (it’s a neurotoxin so they have to go to the hospital) she instantly became my friend.  Over the years she’s been not just an incredible intellectual companion but a true friend.

I don’t like to kiss ass, and so when Amy sent me a one act play she had written in a creative writing class I read it and knew I had to publish it.  A dark masterpiece about abuse the psychological state it can leave us in, Amy’s play is haunting and beautiful.

I hope you enjoy.

Whispers in the Dark

            [The scene opens to an empty kitchen, a dining table with no chairs [DSC], and one          window [CSL], only one light spotlights the table and room, but it is daylight          “outside”; there are a two entrances to the kitchen, one [CSR], the other is where a      woman enters. [USC]].

(WOMAN enters.)

            [standing with a blank look, she shambles across the room, swaying and clutching a          whiskey glass that only has ice left to her chest, staring at her bare feet. Dressed in a            shabby-looking sweater that looks two sizes too big and hole-riddled jeans, she        shuffles to one wall in an empty kitchen, nothing but a black ashtray on an empty         table. She leans her left side against it. Her hair is erratically messy, with dark circles      under her eyes. In the other hand, she holds an unlit cigarette. Closing her eyes, she           talks into the empty glass:]

WOMAN

            It was your fault, really, but you’ll never know it.

(said sadly and with a heavy sigh, crosses stage to [DSR])

            You were the tragic antagonist that was never supposed to be in my life.

            You were never supposed to mean anything.

            But you did. You did.

(shouted)

            GOD DAMN IT!

(throws a drinking glass against [USL] wall, shattering it. WOMAN chuckles darkly.)

            God damn it.

(pauses solemnly)

            That was the last one. The last glass that was left of you.

(tugs at the sweatshirt)

            There’s still this. I swear I’ll be buried in it.

(looks out towards the audience, her gaze sweeping back and forth; dreamily)

            I burned the photos; that night in fact. What few there were. What little of us there was. Odd- how I don’t remember how you even became a part of my life.

(WOMAN fishes a lighter out of her pants, leans her back to the wall and slides down, lights the cigarette, and takes a long drag, before colliding her forehead into her knees and exhaling.

She raises her head up so fast it knocks against the wall behind her. She lets it rest there.)

WOMAN

            You were just… there. At parties- I saw shadows of you, ghosting in and out of the social circles. Then after the bar, racing my ex-husband down hydroplane highway to smoke hydroponic.

            How you slid your car into a ditch and cried like a bitch, and it was fine.

            The bruise you lied about.

            The trip to jail.

            And then there’s the big hole that you left at the end. Or at the beginning, depending on how you look at it.

            You were always looking with those orbs of malachite.

(snorts and takes a drag)

            Fuck you, darling. You and your damn green doe-eyes.

(WOMAN hits her head against her knees 5 times, saying “Fucking. Damn. Green. Doe. Eyes.” on each respective hit. WOMAN raises her head and shimmies up the wall to stand. She moves across the stage to set her cigarette down in the ashtray, strip off the sweatshirt and lay it across the table. She is wearing a vibrant red camisole top underneath it and a pearl necklace. Leaving the one cigarette burning in the ashtray, she takes out another and lights it, moving from [DSC] upstage to [CSL], opening the cabinet to get a dustpan. She sets it on the counter and looks out the window.)

            Thinking back, it was always your eyes.

            The way your hair fell in rings of gold curtains, casting a malicious shadow under your eyes, making your soul-sucking jade slivers shine like the Styx. That sexy dark mystery. My forbidden fallen child-man.

(takes another long drag, exhaling up and staring into dead space, pauses, then bluntly:)

            A virgin at 22.

(chuckles, takes another drag)

            Playing with cards and telling tales of wizards, rolling dice… surprising your dad one morning with a girl in your bed. Hiding under the family quilt in the morning light, shadows cast on the wall your mother hand-painted.

(snorts, and takes another drag, wobbling to the center of the room, waving the dustpan in one hand and the cigarette in the other, mimicking a man:)

            “Dad! I have a guest. Coffee for two.”

                        That was my introduction. Like a harlot.

            And we hadn’t done anything…

            Yet.

(laughs darkly, and looks behind her out the window)

            Is it sick that I find glee and guilt in that I was your first?

            Glee because it was so trusting of you.

            Guilt because it was so trusting of you.

(pauses sadly, takes another drag)

            You didn’t know me. I didn’t know you. The monster you became. The nightmare I began. I knew it, but I didn’t.

(talks to the audience, wide-eyed, palms flat on the table, on the chest of the sweatshirt.)

            Deep down, that blackness that whispers in the dark while dreaming- the things that claw you apart in dreams and leave real wounds to find when you wake.

            Deeper down that that, go there.

(takes a drag, exhales sensually/languidly)

            I reveled in the darkness, bathing in it and the spiritual blood it would spill.

            The unbridled chaos.

            Life was so fucking stagnant and yet in such an angry turmoil, it might as well have been inverting the intestines into the bloodstream.

            Deliciously toxic and horrifyingly pleasing. Gut-wrenching insides that coiled and spawned the meal worms of desire. That was the lust I felt for you.

(Ashes the cigarette, takes another drag and puts it out on her jeans.)

            Broken. You wanted to fix me. Promise me anything to get a grin. Full, gorgeous, tempting lies about traveling and hidden money; promises of jade tigers and other sparkling trinkets to buy affections of air-headed simpletons. You managed to slip in the promise of something more dazzling though.

            Love.

(WOMAN bursts out laughing, throwing head back, losing her balance and stumbling into the wall [DSR],hitting it and falling down it, then begins hitting her head sideways into the wall over and over, before breaking into sobs and screaming.)

            I NEVER WANTED IT!! I NEVER NEEDED IT!!

            I WAS LOVED! I HAD LOVE!             I HAD LEFT LOVE IN SEARCH OF BETTER LOVE WHILE STILL BEING IN LOVE!!

(Gasping for air, she continues softer:)

            Being lonely and in love. Fuck.

(sniffles, then struggles to stand.)

            And now you’re in my head. It’s your fault, really. I bet you fucking put a hex on me. That would be like you.

(wipes her nose on her sleeve, then stops, chuckles and shakes her head, taking out another cigarette and lighting it.)

            You were never just a rag. Though I could throw you like one. Skinny ass.

(reaches around the corner and grabs a broom; begins sweeping up the glass, putting the cigarette in the ashtray.)

            Though not when I needed to. Muscle is more dense than fat.

(WOMAN begins sweeping)

            I can’t hear water without thinking of all those candles. Never fails, every time.

            My favorite show was ruined when you changed the lyrics so you could serenade my narcissism, with such genuine love in your eyes.

(stops, leans her forehead on the top of the broom)

            Such love… that led to obsession.

(WOMAN unnerved; moves to the ashtray, picks up the cigarette and takes a long drag. She looks out the window and down at the sweatshirt.)

            Coming home at 4 a.m. To find you sitting on my apartment stairs in icicle-balls cold, shivering, crying- no, whimpering, like a beaten animal, cowering and injured from a comment I made about not wanting to go to your bed that night.

            Begging forgiveness for any misdeed that would cause such a harsh denial of, “Not tonight, I’m too tired.”

            No was rarely told to you. You didn’t like it- fucking spoiled child.

(takes another drag)

            Child. You were still considered a child. Barely legal, running wild and hot.

(takes another drag)

            I had wanted children one day. I thought they would look beautiful if they looked like you.

(takes another drag, then puts the cigarette back into the ashtray to continue sweeping)

 

            And you never thought that I would find out about your lies.

            Not the elaborate ones, that seemed so good, they could never be a falsehood.

(takes another drag, snorts and laughs)

            Bitch, please. I’ve kept my darkness hidden from most of the world for years; not to mention all the petty shit I kept from you.

            So I guess it was only fair.

            Wrongs and rights and all that horse shit.

(takes another drag)

WOMAN

            And yet, I still could have had it all. Without you.

(shouts and throws the broom, begins to stomp her feet as she screams and throws her arms out to the audience in rage.)

 

            I COULD HAVE HAD CANADA, FUCKER. I would have been round and plump with life, probably on my 3^rd batch of bun-in-the-oven. Fresh and full of promises.

(stops and picks up her foot, she stepped on a piece of glass. Laughs darkly and looks out the window [CSL], then down to the floor, her hair hanging in her face. Terrified:)

            Glass against flesh. That was what it felt like as you tore through me.

(sounds of a car pulling up, a door shutting, and footsteps outside)

            I have it great now.

            So why can’t you get the fuck out of my head. Why can’t I sleep at night?   WHY DO I ALWAYS SEE YOUR FACE?

(throws cigarette. Sighs. Limps over to the cigarette, leaving a trail of blood. Picks up cig, takes a drag)

            Why do I hope that I didn’t ruin your life, but still secretly hope that I did, just so I know that you will never forget me?

(Puts a half-lit cigarette in the ashtray and lights another, limping around.

The sound of front door unlocking echoes.)

            That should have been my roommate. My brother.

(She stares at the window, silent.

Recording of WOMAN saying “Be right there! Clumsy me knocked a glass off the shelf!”, her face visible to the audience, silent. She takes a drag, then puts cigarette into ashtray and looks to the audience)

            I worry that you’ll forget me.

(She limps upstage to [USC] to answer the door, fade to black)

                        (Offstage)

            I never saw it, but I was told of how your eyes bore into the backs of my brothers when I would hug them in greeting.

WOMAN

Hey, sorry it took me so long, I knocked a glass o… What are you doing here? I told you to stay away from me! No, let go of me! Stop it! NO! STOP! GOD PLEASE NO!

(screaming begins offstage, sounds of things shattering, door slams. Lights come back on stage, showing a man disheveled and covered in blood. He grabs the sweatshirt off the table and picks up the cigarette, taking a long drag, exhales, before smirking to the audience:)

MAN

            I really did love you.

(fade to black)

 

 

 

 

About the Author:

I have always had a fascination with the power of language when woven into a story.

 Since I was small, when I would drift off to the sounds of fantastical things and magical impossibilities, my imagination would overflow into vivid dreams. I would regale my family with these dreams, some horrific, some overbearingly sappy. I was encouraged to write them down.  However, this was the last thing I wanted to do, as my handwriting was atrocious (ask my Third Grade teacher…). Side note: never tell your mother you are bored at her office. You’ll promptly receive a spiral notebook and be instructed to write ten pages of the Alphabet in print, and then ten pages in cursive. Yes, this was when cursive was still a big thing in schools. I improved a bit, and began writing girlie poetry and dreaming of love.

 I fell in love in seventh grade. The Secret of Dragonhome by John Peel. I had crushed before, on wondrous magical tales like The Secret Garden, The Fairy Rebel, and the entire series of The Chronicles of Narnia­ but nothing had entranced me so as the world of John Peel. I followed with feverent passion into the world of Garth Nix’s Sabriel, then the brilliance of J.K. Rowling.

 High school and college brought forth new challenges and magical realms of their own, and I developed a deeper passion for writing my own stories that had crawled from the depths of my dreams. I didn’t realize it, but I was becoming ravenous for words. The Romantic Era blew my mind.  

 My thirst was both quenched and further fathomed to my soul in Tyler, Texas. A marvelous group of delightfully mad people in a cackling class of creative writing. Brilliance in a 24­pack. Their inspiration, encouragement, and no-holds-barred critiques helped me to bloom into a binding thirsty bookworm and writer.

 I am grateful to those who read the work I write, and please be advised, a great deal is  surreal and slightly disturbed. I hope you enjoy, and if not, blame my dreams.

Thank you for your time,

 Amy Holt

Prospero Summons Ariel

Tags

Ariel, Art, Calaban, magic, Original Drawing, Prospero, spirit, The Tempest, William Shakespeare

13 January 2016

50 Dancing Greek Dudes: Neil Gaiman and Gods That Haunt Your Dreams

Tags

A Doll's House, ankh, Bing Bong, Chorus, Comics, death, dithyramb, Dream, Endless Nights, Episcopal, god, graphic novel, Greek Drama, Inside Out, mortality, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Preludes and Nocturnes, Priapus, Prometheus, Prometheus Bound, protagonist origin, Sandman, Seasons of Mist, Skyrim, suffering, The PeaPicker, The Sound of Her Wings, Zeus

The notion of god is not lost on this former Episcopalian. Growing up in the church that I did god was, for the most part, a benevolent character that for some reason had decided to live in the clouds, bestow love and wisdom to human beings, and only ever ask that you not fall asleep during the Sermon. The god of Baptists on other hand, the god I was supposed to worship according to my teachers, principals, and abstinence-only guidance lectures, seemed to be a bit of a prick. This perception didn’t change as I aged. As I read more and more about god, and gods in general for that matter, the general impression derived was that the divine beings, who always seem annoyed or vexed by male homosexuality (lesbians don’t exist outside of pornography apparently) and masturbation, were colossal pricks. There are days when I miss that Episcopal god, because out of all deities I’ve come across he seemed to most accommodating, or at the very least that dude you could go fishing with on a Friday afternoon and have a beer with and just relax. Yeah his boyfriend is a little high maintenance, but the guy makes pretty good lasagna so you’re cool…for now.

The idea or role of god has been bouncing around in my head as of late, though the term god is something of a misnomer here. Perhaps titan is better. I’ve been considering more and more the character Prometheus for, apart from being the title of one of my favorite films, he seems particularly relevant as I approach graduating with my masters and becoming a teacher. The romantic image of Prometheus giving man the secret of fire and then suffering for attempting to help by spreading knowledge is a narrative I suspect all writers and teachers keep close to their secret hearts. We all want to change the world in our own way, and while this self-vision may be pathos, Prometheus will at some point make his appearance into the psychology of any person who teaches.

The narrative of Prometheus is defined by its very defiance. Zeus, upon overthrowing his father and becoming king of the gods assigned various jobs/aspects/locations/vocations/etc. to the other deities. Apollo became god of the sun, Hera became goddess of the home and mothers, Pallas Athena became champion of knowledge and wisdom, Ares the god of war, and so on until you get Priapus, which, dear lord did that really need its own deity?

Nevermind, just googled it, yeah it did.

When Zeus was finished metaphorically waving his dick around (you’re still seeing Priapus aren’t you, is that even attractive?) and establishing his kingdom decided he would eliminate mortals and create a new race, however Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humanity thus stymieing Zeus effort and incurring his wrath.

That is one interpretation of Prometheus, for as so often happens in mythology there are many different versions of the man’s character. Before you suggest that that’s stupid inconsistency please remember that there are well over 30 different denominations of Christianity and the core belief of that religion is to be a good person and be kind for the poor and that most of the differences between them are about when the wine turns into Christ’s blood. This image of Prometheus as the rebel Titan defying Zeus’s will have to be the functional model of the man as I discuss 50 dancing Greek dudes.

A few years back I went to a small bookstore in my hometown called The PeaPicker. It’s a charming little place with half the store being a wall of Harlequin romance novels. In the back on the opposite wall are the classics, and on the day I took my wife to go book shopping (an activity that I now recognize I have to do alone because my wife rarely reads anything that isn’t on her phone) I found a small Penguin Classics copy of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. At the time I was still an undergraduate, but I recognized the name Prometheus from a few slim mentions in high school, but mostly because I’d observed in my Norton Anthology of English Literature a play written by Percy Shelley entitled Prometheus Unbound. The title stirred something in me and I knew I had to buy the book. We returned to my wife’s, at that time fiancé’s, apartment and while she played Skyrim I read the play understanding at most three or four words. I placed Prometheus Bound on my shelf when I returned home and let it rest there until I heard its sirens call me once more.

Part of me wants to say it was watching Prometheus again lately, but in all honesty it’s likely because I’m about to graduate and start teaching and so there’s some pompousness on my part that I, like Prometheus, will be teaching man the art of fire which, in this case is writing. The realistic scenario is I’ll teach three kids what a semi-colon is.

I can at least teach somebody here a little bit about Greek Drama and the play. As the title suggests there’s a man by the name of Prometheus and he signs a six month lease on his apartment…

I really shouldn’t try to be funny.

Prometheus has defied the will of Zeus and so the titan is bound to a rock by the god Hephaestus who pities him, and the rest of the play is Prometheus talking with the Chorus, various gods and heroes that appear, all while standing in a pseudo-crucifixion stance. If that doesn’t sound terribly exciting remember this is an age before indoor plumbing and Netflix so you had to find some way to spend a Friday night apart from boy-boffing (only if you’re in Athens though). Fortunately for the reader though Prometheus does not mince words and explains outright to the Chorus why he has suffered this fate:

Now, for your question, on what charge Zeus tortures me, I’ll tell you. One succeeding to his father’s throne at once he appointed various rights to various gods, giving to each his set place and authority. Of wretched humans he took no account, resolved to annihilate them and create another race. This purpose there was no one to oppose but I: I dared. I saved the human race from being ground to dust, from total death. (27).

If this isn’t clear enough they simplify the matter on the following page:

Chorus: Your gift brought them great blessing.

Prometheus: I did more than that: I gave them fire. (28).

Greek Drama is a difficult animal to tackle when arguing about relevance to contemporary society. Most people would hear the name drama alone and immediately picture a naked man covered in meat screaming about Marxism and Jingle Bells. Ahh, how I love the legitimate theatre. Greek drama especially seems to have been reserved to a few handfuls of academics and rich people who like to feel smart, and I recognize that most people will live their entire lives without sitting down to actually read this play. Despite this I’m not resigned and I can least share a few interesting facts before I get to Neil Gaiman.

Greek Drama was the institution that refined the genre of tragedy, you know that thing that happened to Bing Bong in Inside Out (*in hushed whispers* NEVER FORGET). Originally tragedy, and I had to consult an actual PhD in Greek Drama for this information by the way, thanks Dr. Streufert, was known as “dithyramb.” It was basically a long poem set to dance while 50 people danced to it. Another playwright by the name of Thespis decided one day, “Hey let’s take one guy out and make the play around him!” This would eventually create the figure of the protagonist, a narrative structure everyone recognizes, and the remaining 49 people would become “The Chorus.” Drama would continue to develop eventually introducing the deuteragonist (the second dude who isn’t the hero) and then multiple characters, but my principle concern here is Prometheus Bound and the oddity of the play.

Reading this book in the context of mythology is rather interesting because, if you had to read Edith Hamilton like I did growing up, the character of Zeus seems reminiscent of the Christian god, until you really dig into actual mythology. Prometheus talks to the Chorus often of Zeus and one passage near the end strikes me:

I swear that Zeus, for all his obstinacy, shall yet be humbled, so disastrous shall this marriage prove which he proposes—a marriage that shall hurl him out of throne and sovereignty into oblivion. […] There is no god but I who can reveal to him the way to avert this ignominy. I know it all. So let him sit on, serenely confident in his celestial thunders, brandishing thunderbolt—that will not save him: His fall will be sure, shameful, unendurable! (47).

In my notes written on a cheap yellow legal pad I have the words written, “Political attack on unchecked power” and after that a quote I have “Even Zeus bows to necessity.” It’s difficult to understand the fallible lack of omniscience in deities if you grew up immersed in the Christian monotheism that I did. God seems all-knowing and yet reading Prometheus Bound it becomes clear that being a god does not make one immune from fault or pride. Prometheus as a character alone seems to possess foresight yet even this does not make him immune from having some kind of character.

Looking at this play I struggled to find some correlation, some literary connection, and when looking at gods and goddesses I look to Neil Gaiman.

The Sandman series is perhaps the most literary re-imagining of mythology in our time period, not to mention one of the most outstandingly original series in the last two decades. I remarked to several of my friends in a bi-weekly graphic novel book club that I truly hate Neil Gaiman because the man could sneeze in his hand and manage to turn it into art, and then probably have Dave McKean do the cover for it using nothing but medical waste and cat calendars. The series currently stands as ten books of the collected single issues along with the most recent work Overture (which was *meh,* let’s be honest) and Endless Nights (which was *dude*) and follows the adventures of “Dream” one of the “Endless” beings that govern over a fabric of existence. Dream is only one of seven siblings: Destruction, Delirium (who used to be Delight), Despair, Desire, Destiny, and, to quote from Seasons of Mist “And there’s Death.”

Sandman Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes is not the best book in the series, that station is (I hope TJ reads this and notes I took the time to write this down) the second Volume A Doll’s House, but the final chapter in the book makes the entire story worth it. Dream, in the beginning has been captured by group of cultists attempting to capture Death thereby ending human mortality. Instead they capture Dream and lock him in a bubble for a hundred years until he finally escapes. The reader follows him as he retrieves his armor and magical objects and at the end of his journey, in the issue The Sound of Her Wings he finds himself in a slump, not sure how to continue when he’s joined by a young woman:

There are few introductions in any literary work quite as magical, or paradigm altering as Death’s. The woman herself is often considered the second hero of this series and has inspired not only individual spin-offs but countless artistic pieces by fans and, thank goodness, scores of what now exists as the most tasteful female cosplay for girls wishing to avoid creepy dudes with a Powergirl or Red Sonja fetishes. Death, who is the physical manifestation of Death, talks to Dream and, like any good older sister, calls him out on his crap:

The reader may by now be wondering what does this have to do with Prometheus Bound and Greek Drama? What do comic books have to do with literature, mythology, and theism?

Well be patient, there’s one more passage to cite. Death takes Dream with her as she gathers souls to take to the “other side” and Dream is able to see how much the Endless affects the lives of mortals, and how much he, as one of them, has forgotten his own station:

I find myself wondering about humanity. Their attitude to my sister’s gift is so strange. Why do they fear the sunless lands? It is as natural to die s it is to be born. But they fear her. Feebly they attempt to placate her. They do not lover her. Many thousands of years

ago I heard a song in a dream, a mortal song that celebrated her gift. I still remember it. 

“Death is before today: Like the recovery of a sick man, Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

“Death is before me today: Like the odor of myrrh, Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

“Death is before me today: Like the course of a stream; Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

“Death is before me today: Like the home that a man longs to see, After years spent as a captive.”

That forgotten poet understood her gifts. My sister has a function to perform, even as I do. The Endless have their responsibilities. I have responsibilities. I walk by her side, and the darkness lifts from my soul. I walk with her, and I heat the gentle beating of mighty wings…”

Despite centuries of difference in time, cultural values, paradigms, emotions, artistic expectations, and philosophies both Aeschylus and Gaiman touch upon the idea that not even the gods had all of existence figured out. Dream is technically one of the “Endless,” a being that surpasses gods (I need to remember to appease the Internet Nerd Gods lest I suffer their wrath), and as the lord of dreams he governs over the dreams and ambitions of mortals, but even he is not immune to ignorance, pride, or fault. Looking back to Prometheus then, and wondering briefly about that Episcopalian god I left behind long ago, I think of Death.

Recently I looked at the symbol she wears around her neck. It’s an ankh, an Egyptian symbol standing for life and its essence. I bridged this topic at the book club and was dealt with the platitude, “Without life, death has no meaning.” This was painfully cotton candy pathetic, as most platitudes are, but not untrue. Death and Prometheus are possessed with a sight that surpasses the beings that surround them, there’s a reason that Death is Dream’s older brother, and both are ultimately rejected. Fire and death are lessons all of us must learn because they are balances. Fire is light and energy that pierces the dark, ripping at its near endless seems trying to defy it’s all encompassing power, but without the dark fire has no purpose.

The lessons of Death and Prometheus are lessons about suffering, and for that reasons they are the ones many of us have to learn at some point. I’ve retained enough lessons from my time in the Episcopal Church to remember that one lesson. Suffering in life in inevitable, whether it be from the choices you make, or from your own fear of the unknown, but everyone has to suffer if they’re going to acquire some kind of knowledge. Without some manner of pain or hurt there is no knowledge. Prometheus saw this, and as punishment Zeus sent an Eagle to eat his liver once a day.

Prometheus would eventually be freed from this punishment by Hercules as one of the Twelve Struggles he had to endure after killing his wife and family, and while there some comfort in this I’m still not sure why the man, the Titan has been bouncing around in my brain. It might be a phase of life-issue, grad-school ending and life about to begin, or else it may be my wife’s now daily conversation about having children. I don’t believe babies normally eat livers, but I suppose that’s a lesson I’ll have to learn, and maybe pass along to the progeny when they’re ready unless I can talk my wife out of it.

Then again “even husbands bow to necessity” when necessity comes in the form of a wife.

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All passages from Prometheus Bound come from the Penguin Classics Edition which was translated by Philip Vellacott. I recognize that translations can be crappy or unreliable at times, but it’s the only edition I had on hand. If I’ve butchered the original intent of Aeschylus that fool knows where to find me.