Sasha

I was twelve years old when we first said goodbye, me and Sasha. I vividly remember that first dinner without my fuzzy friend sitting next to me with her chin in my lap, begging for whatever was on my plate. I sat at the table, sobbing over my untouched macaroni. That dog, who had been my companion for six months, was on her way to Kansas with my sister and brother-in-law, and I missed her so much already. I knew that Sasha belonged to Laurie and Brian, and that they loved her as much as I did and would take good care of her, but that did little to console me. I couldn't stop my lip from quivering as I found smudges on the windows from when she would press her nose against the glass, intently watching a squirrel in the yard. I missed that happy face waiting for me in the window when I came home from school.

I'm twenty three now, but I found myself tearing up over lunch at work and sobbing on my way home because there would be no gentle face in the window.

Sasha and I had our last goodbye this morning.

I've said goodbye to this dog a lot of times over the past twelve years; she was a dog with two families. My brother-in-law is in the Army, so Sasha couldn't always go with them when he and my sister relocated; and when she couldn't make the journey, wherever it may be, she came here. That first time, Brian was training in California and Laurie was in New Hampshire finishing her undergraduate degree and Sasha, alone in Kansas in need of rescue from a negligent dog sitter. She came back again a year later when they were stationed in Texas with an apartment too small (and an inhospitable climate) for a Siberian husky. In the months since Sasha had left, we missed having a dog so much that we got our golden retriever Heidi. We were a little anxious over whether the two dogs would accept each other, especially since my Heidi has a lot of attitude and audacity. But that qualm was quickly dispelled, and over the years, the dogs have bonded, to the point that Heidi searched the yard with perplexed sadness for weeks after Sasha had left us. To the point that Heidi stayed with her all last night.

Sasha was only supposed to be here for three years this time, while my sister and her family were stationed in Germany; but a year ago, it became evident that this visit would last the rest of her life. In October, we found out that Sasha had Cushing's disease, an illness caused by malignant tumors on her adrenal gland. An illness that would weaken her muscles, make her lose her fur, sap her energy, and eventually destroy her kidneys. The usual life span is a year or two.

When I first met Sasha, she bounded onto my front porch and greeted me by leaping up and throwing her paws onto my shoulders. She was almost year old then, but still had a lot of puppy in her, and I still had a lot of little girl in me. I formed an attachment to the dog like a young child has to a favorite toy endued with a vivid personality and internal life, a life which is a reflection of one's own inner world. Sasha was the keeper of the secrets of my twelve-year-old soul. I talked to her like she was a person, certain that, in the gaze of those intelligent blue eyes, she understood me. A precious feeling for the pains and sensitivity of that awkward age, which made it hard to let her go.

When I came home from Quincy on Monday afternoon, I knew that I had to let her go for good this time. She lay quietly on her side, her tongue lolling out. She couldn't stand up on her own anymore, and this morning, she was too weak to pick up her head. Her labored breathing was painful to watch. I sat down on the floor next to her, a cup of coffee in-hand to compensate for the five and a half hours of sleep I managed last night. She looked up at me with those still evocative blue eyes, now stained with tears from an eye infection, dimmed by illness and pain. I stroked her soft ears, still the only part of her that had turned silver with age, and said, "Soon, Sasha." It would be over soon.

I was sad to see her in such a state, so different from the strong, energetic, magnificent animal I had known. The dog who could walk for miles without the slightest sign of fatigue. The dog who took running leaps onto the couch. The one who got so excited about snow that she buried her whole face in it and stayed outside virtually all winter. But she was my Sasha still, so sweet, so calm and quiet to the last.

For her final two days, she didn't want to be alone. She yipped whenever someone left her field of vision. Her bark was always a surprisingly little sound from so large and powerful a dog, though it was less incongruous now in her weakness. I remembered Sasha the puppy with terrible separation anxiety. She once destroyed every magazine in the house when she was left alone for only an hour, and she whined indignantly whenever she was kept out on the porch for too long after dinner, impatient to rejoin the pack inside.

That's how I thought I wanted to remember her. But this morning, I was compelled to take a picture of her, knowing that it would be the last. Perhaps that was reason enough to take it. to have a punctuation mark on her life, a final image that, while so different from the young, healthy Sasha, was essential. I couldn't discount her final year, her sickness. Even dying, she was ever graceful, loving and sweet.

I ran today, I ran for a long time along routes that I used to walk with Sasha in her youth, before she started to struggle to make it to the end of the street, then to three houses down, then to the next door neighbors' house, then beyond the driveway. My parents had to carry her into the vet (we couldn't take her walking, we couldn't euthanize her until death was certain; she would have died tomorrow, but perhaps only after having seizures and suffering terribly). I wished that I could be there with her as the life left her body. One moment, she would be breathing so heavily, still struggling to sustain the last painful breaths of life. The next, gone.

She's gone now. We'll retrieve her ashes and bury them in the yard, in the place on the hill where she always sat and watched the world with bright, happy eyes. She'll return to the earth, but remain buried in my heart too.

Teach and Learn

I may have mentioned before that I am about to start graduate school this fall, to get an MA in English literature. I'm still not entirely certain what my academic focus is going to be (since I have an array of disjointed interests like postmodernism, madness, theater, work and identity), but my game plan for what to do with that degree is to teach English at the high school level, preferably in a private school or prep school. With that goal in mind, I've been thinking about how to approach teaching; true, I need to re-learn how to be a student this semester, but I think it's best to consider the two in conjunction, teaching and learning. My goal is to be both a teacher and a learner.

One of my enduring interests in literature is the construction of identity through narrative, and I think that this is one of the most important things that I have to teach adolescents; they are responsible for constructing their own identities, and facility with language is essential in doing that effectively and resisting the narratives that others will attempt to impose on them. I want to start the school year with a creative nonfiction writing exercise in which the students think of themselves as narrators and characters. There are undoubtedly dangers and limitations in viewing one's own life in terms of narrative, but this exercise of actually constructing a narrative is one way to open the discussion about those limitations, the inability to capture reality and the self in words. I want my students to realize that narratives are everywhere, and to be thoughtful and critical of every narrative they encounter.

I don't think that it's unreasonable to introduce high schoolers to literary theory; many of the theories are rather easily explained, like Marxist criticism or feminist theory, for one thing. But more important is that I want to approach my students in the same way as Zarathustra regarded the Higher Men in the second half of the book: with an expectation that they are self-sufficient and capable.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on Zarathustra and Socrates as teachers of virtue; both initially made the same mistake of assuming a position of privilege and descending to their students. In Nietzsche's reading of the Apology, Socrates chose death because he realized the inherent failure of his work and was committed to the idea of being the fool who would be taken seriously. The teacher of virtue must certainly take his work seriously, because virtue is of the utmost importance, but not himself; he must maintain a sense of irony about himself, and Socrates would not do that, so he chose death. Initially, Zarathustra insisted on being taken seriously as well, and he also failed to reach his students when he descended to them from a point of privilege. Zarathustra, however, succeeds as a teacher when he chooses to be a squanderer and a fisher of men from a mountain top:

"What to sacrifice! I squander what is given me, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that-- sacrificing? And when I desired honey I only desired bait, and sweet mucus and mucilage, for which even the mouths of growling bears, and strange, sulky, evil birds, water:
-The best bait, as huntsmen and fishermen require it. For if the world be as a gloomy forest of animals, and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather--and preferably-- a fathomless, rich sea;
--A sea of many-hued fishes and crabs, for which even the gods might long, and might be tempted to become fishers in it, and casters of nets, --so rich is the world in wonderful things, great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: --towards it do I now throw out my golden angle-rod and say: Open up, thou human abyss!"

Zarathustra approaches teaching as an overflowing of his own joy and wisdom, and the way to attract students is to throw out that excessive happiness, to lure them up to his height instead of him descending down to them. I want to teach in a similar manner, by imploring my students to "climb mountains" with me. I should not view them as deficient, but as capable and striving. I should challenge them to raise themselves, and show them how to do that by challenging myself constantly; I will also be a learner and model the life of a learner and striver for them. This is one way of avoiding the stagnation and complacency that has made me wary of teaching in the past; I have a responsibility to constantly improve myself, for myself and for my students too.

I want my students to view themselves as self-sufficient and to foster their independence. I know that they will not all love literature, and I might fail in reaching any of the goals I set for them, but it's important that I do it anyway.

The Habit-Driven Life

"As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services" (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol II: Within a Budding Grove, 319).

In the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, habits play a major role in the activities of all the characters. Life at Combray is so uniform that the mere suggestion of an unknown visitor sends many residents into a state of anxiety. Aunt Leonie was particularly disturbed whenever she heard that there was someone unknown in Combray, and her life was so organized around routines that, should her friend be a minute late in visiting her every Sunday, she would be disconsolate and agitated for the entire day. The narrator has been extremely perturbed by any variation in his habits; in the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, he makes himself ill with anxiety whenever he cannot receive his mother's goodnight kiss; in the chapter "Madame Swann at Home," he is aggrieved when Gilberte unexpectedly cannot come to the Champs Elysees; and he eventually utilizes the force of habit to make himself stop loving Gilberte. Madame Verdurin demands the unwavering devotion and regularity of her "faithful," every Wednesday, and in the second volume, Odette Swann is on her way to forming her own salon of society ladies. Such social interactions are dictated by habitual roles each person is expected to play, and conventional opinions which the entire group must hold in common, and as a result, the individual becomes engulfed in and defined by his habits, his conventions.

This calming but deadening effect of habits, and the unsettling awakening of the senses when those habits are impossible to maintain, reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, which centers on nauseating sensations of unfamiliarity, which arise from confronting reality without the filter of imposed interpretations of reality. In Search of Lost Time is by no means an existential novel, but there is an affinity here between the narrator's sense of intense anxiety when he is unable to maintain his habits, and the feeling of nausea that Sartre's character Roquentin experiences when contemplating things stripped of the meanings and even his own perceptions. For Sartre, those perceptions and customary interpretations of things, events, people, etc. obscure their reality. Proust's narrator has a more genuine confrontation with existence in this section of the novel, "Place-Names: The Place" than he has ever had before. Early on in Within a Budding Grove, the narrator deliberately chooses to see his favorite actress in a play he knows by heart, so that he can immediately dissect what she adds to the text. He is distraught that he cannot readily interpret Berma's performance of Phaedre without the authority of the text because her words fly by too quickly. Afterwards, he seeks external authority to verify that she is indeed a great actress, to counteract his own feelings of disappointment and blankness. As a young adolescent, he depends upon authorities to provide him with ready interpretations of everything; he looks to Swann to judge art for him, M. de Norpois to give him the meaning of Berma's acting, and Bergotte as the standard of his own writing, to his grandmother for social cues and judgment of potential acquaintances. With all of these filters of interpretation, the narrator is spared a direct confrontation with reality; everything is predetermined and externalized, and he need not do any work to comprehend his surroundings.

But when he abandons his habits (or more appropriately, when he is forced to abandon them, since he is a self-described creature of habit), he is sent into confusion and anxiety because of the astonishing richness of reality. There is a sense of fear, and a fear of loss, of death perhaps, when he is separated from his habitual existence. Life becomes incomprehensible because the ready interpretations no longer apply; he is forced to use all of his faculties, which come rushing back into his consciousness, in order to create new meaning. This is a difficult, frightening task, but one that he eventually comes to see as a source of joy. As his consciousness pullulates, the narrator becomes more self-aware and more interested in exploring his relation to things outside of himself; in the first volume, his imagination was such a powerful force that he was content to simply dream and escape into himself, but in this second volume, he is more apt to reach out, to contemplate the relationship between that external reality of other people and his internal reality, how his impressions and internal states create meaning that does not exist objectively. I think the intense anxiety that the objective reality of things which he cannot fully access, the recognition of his own imposition of meaning onto the outside world, provokes him to create new habits, to ease the pain of acute consciousness and the strain of using all of his faculties. There is something seductive in living thoughtlessly and automatically, in a sedated state like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, because one is free of anxiety; but then, as the narrator writes toward the beginning of this chapter on his travels to Balbec, one lives at a minimum, and risks sinking into oblivion when too much is left to habit.

Femi-Nietzsche, Part Deux

After reading "Woman, Sexual Difference and the Dance of Undecidability," an article by Iva Popovicova, I have more to add to my previous discussion of gender and sexuality in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Popvicova draws largely on Jacques Derrida's reading of Zarathustra, in which he claims that Nietzsche text moves beyond the dichotomy of sexual difference into the realm of undecidability. Popovicova agrees with Derrida's reading to an extent, but she makes one significant qualification: "It is male heterosexuality that creates the undecidability of woman and sexual difference" (Popvicova 282).

Her analysis is limited to "The Dance Song" chapter of Zarathustra, but her observations of this chapter apply to several others in the work as well. Zarathustra occupies the place of the outside observer throughout "The Dance Song"; first, he unknowingly interrupts the dance when the girls register his gaze, and then he provides accompaniment to the dance (in honor of the girls' "favorite little god," Cupid) as it resumes. He never joins in the dance, and although his singing is an attempt to "harmonize with the Dionysian rift of women's dance," that very gesture of singing and observing the dance "inscribes the dance as the feminine from within sexual difference" (Popovicova 282). Zarathustra is first compelled by "his heterosexual desire for the beauty of women's bodies" (ibid).

Zarathustra's song begins with him staring into the eyes of Life, a woman. As he gazes at her, he seems to sink "into the unfathomable." Popvicova reads this line through a Freudian-feminist lens; Zarathustra's act of gazing into this woman's eyes and his sense of losing himself, sinking, is "a manifestation both of the desire to penetrate and the fear of castration/death of the male subject" (Popvicova 285). The fear is more evident here, since Zarathustra is "sinking" and is in danger of losing himself and being overwhelmed by the feminine. But the desire to penetrate is there as well; the act of gazing is a kind of penetration, an attempt to inscribe the inscrutable into comprehensible terms, to control and fill the void that induces the anxiety of death and castration. The feminine is represented in typically phallocentric terms in the rest of the song, as a "lack," an "empty container" in need of filling, and this threat of castration and death. Life responds to Zarathustra's descriptions of her, mocking his attempts to define her: "But you men always present us with your virtues, O you virtuous men!" she says with a laugh (Nietzsche).

Popvicova points out that women's laughter often subverts the masculine attempts to define femininity, citing Helene Cixous' essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." Life's immediate reaction to Zarathustra's descriptions of her as mysterious and unfathomable is mocking laughter, and the old woman in "Of Young and Old Women" seems to respond to Zarathustra with mocking humor as well, after his lengthy attempt to describe woman's nature. According to Cixous, the Medusa is the displaced feminine who "accumulates the transferred fear of a male subject who encounters woman's power of seduction and the fear of being smitten by death" (Popovicova 286). Zarathustra, in "The Dance Song," transforms Life into a Medusa figure by misinterpreting her laughter; when she defies his descriptions, she again becomes "the incredible one" because he does not believe what she says about herself, and places her within his own parameters of definition.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, woman's undecidability, that is, the feminine resistance to definition, originates in the masculine subject's failure to grasp the feminine. Woman resists her inscription within "meanings that the masculine subject can fathom," but when she subverts or rejects those meanings, she is denied any meaning at all (Popvicova 285). The problem of female undecidability in Zarathustra is that the feminine voice is entirely absent; because women do not fit into masculine definitions, they remain undefined and without any access to the discourse. Women's voices in Zarathustra are dependent on the masculine discourse, and even though they challenge it, they do not form their own complete discourse in their own voices. Woman is not truth; in relation to masculine truth (put forth by Zarathustra), she is untruth. Nietzsche does not entirely overcome the masculine/feminine dichotomy; although women are free from the strict parameters that Zarathustra imposes on men in his masculine ideals, there is no possibility of them defining themselves because they have already been defined as undecidable.

I found Popovicova's article useful in the explanation of Derrida's readings of Nietzsche, which I intend to read myself now, but her use of Nietzsche's text was lacking; much of the article was an incompletely-explained analogy between a few lines from Zarathustra and lengthy passages from Cixous and Derrida. I wish that she had delved into greater literary analysis of Zarathustra, because Nietzsche's style is deliberately ambiguous, which may undermine some of the conclusions she drew from the imagery in "The Dance Song," especially her diversions into psychoanalysis and masculine castration anxiety. I also think that it would have benefited from looking at other passages from Zarathustra that are closely related to the themes in "The Dance Song," particularly "The Daughters of the Desert." Even with these caveats, I did find her discussion of women's undecidability in the text useful, and the implications are important to consider; if women do not have their own voices, but only function to subvert the inaccuracies of masculine definitions, women are rendered incapable of speaking for themselves, of defining themselves as Nietzsche implores men to do. This was one of my dilemmas in reading Zarathustra; some of Nietzsche's ideals are so clearly masculine, such as the warrior, that the uniquely feminine virtues are lost. Women's undecidability gives them greater freedom on the one hand; Nietzsche's masculine ideals are very narrow and strict. But women seem to be in need of a goal as well, an uberfrau, and the image of that woman is largely absent. It's clear that both men and women should be fierce creators, but the difference of the sexes introduces the question of how each takes shape, what that creator looks like as a man and as a woman.

Resuming the Search

A few months ago, I stated that it was my goal to read all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; of course, this is not only a Proust blog, and I've obviously read a lot of other things (and will continue to do so), but the Proust entries are returning! I recently finished the first part of Volume II, Within a Budding Grove.

The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.

Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.

Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.

As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.

He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.

The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.

Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.

Artaudian Cruelty (That's so metal)

As I've been working my way through The Theater and its Double, I've constantly been reminded of something that would, at first glance, have nothing to do with theater: metal music. Jarrod is much more of a fan of metal than I am, although I do like Between the Buried and Me and Bulb, but through the shows we've seen together and his frequent introduction of new bands and songs to me, I've come to understand this genre of music better. And I think it exhibits several connections with Artaud.

The Theater of Cruelty, Artaud's theory of theater in defiance of traditional western theater and literature, is an assult on the senses, a dramatic spectacle of metaphysical battles and an exploration of the dark power of freedom. Essential theater plays to all of the senses simultaneously, resulting in a frenzied, trance-like state in which the spectators are liberated and exposed to an intellectuality that goes beyond language and the traditional theater of psychology, which merely explores already-codified anxieties and conflicts. There is something anarchic in the midst of the strict, structured precision of this theater; although every movement must be carried out with almost mechanical accuracy, so that nothing is superfluous or void of meaning, the power of the gestures and sounds brings the audience to the edge of chaos.

Something very similar happens in metal concerts. A dream-like detachment from the body occurs as a response to the overwhelming physical force of the sounds and flashing lights in the darkness of a small room. Artaud's notion of "organized anarchy" is especially applicable to metal, because there is that duality of Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy. The music itself can be highly technical, even mathematical in its complex and tightly structured rhythms. Like the Theater of Cruelty, the sheer super-abundance of elements, all inextricably linked together, creates an impression of near-chaos, almost-anarchy. These elements-- guitar, drums, bass, vocals-- all crash against one another in a precise, calculated manner that nevertheless creates that other element of chaos.

In his manifesto on the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud is adamant about the elimination of the stage. Rather than perpetuating this notion of art as separate from life, that the life on the stage must be hermetically isolated from the life outside the theater, Artaud posits that the spectators should be enveloped by theatrical action. The fourth wall is nonexistent in Artaud's theater, and the only "sets" consist of the very costumes and props carried or worn by the actors. Most of the metal shows I've been to are in small venues, so the barriers between individuals in the crowd, and between audience and performer are often transgressed. The concert is not contained only to the stage, but infiltrates the entire building; the performance extends everywhere and the crowd is unknowingly transformed into performers themselves, responding to the music and creating a sort of communal dance which is impossible to fully escape. Musicians occasionally jump from the stage into the audience, or pull audience members onto the stage.

At first, I was frustrated because I could barely understand the lyrics of metal songs, but after reading Artaud, it's more apparent to me that the voice is used more as an instrument to contribute to an overall thematic effect than as a clear transmitter of words. Artaud's ideal theater liberates the mise en scene (everything apart from the written text, which Artaud claims is everything that is essentially theatrical: props, costumes, gestures, sound effects, lighting, etc.) from the hegemony of the text. Speech is not eliminated in Artaudian theater, but it does not serve its usual function of describing emotional states and psychological or social conflicts. Artaud explains that "it is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams" (94). Words spoken in dreams may be completely incomprehensible upon waking, but within the context of the dream, this distorted language is efficacious. The same is true of the growling vocal technique often used in metal, which distorts the words. The intonation becomes more expressive than the words themselves; a primal scream or guttural roar contributes far more to the mood of the song and the performance than an abstracted description of anger, aggression, or ecstasy.

That intonation, in metal and in Artaud's notion of pure theater, expresses something dark, cruel, and dangerous; the two art forms are connected thematically as well. Artaudian theater must furnish "the spectator with with the precipitates for dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, poure out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior" (Artaud 92). Metal music often picks up these themes as well, especially in several sub-genres like death metal and black metal. The imagery, band names and song titles (such as Cannibal Corpse or "Hammer-Smashed Face"), and lyrics often center around the very themes that Artaud attributes to pure theater: humanity's taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, a sense of danger. The most important theme for theater is that "we are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads" (Artaud 79). This is the type of cruelty, danger, and metaphysical that Artaud promotes; the only way to recover life's value is to be made aware of how precarious our situation is, how little humanity counts in a vast, inhuman universe. Metal music is not perhaps always so eloquently existential in its lyrics, but this sense of dangerous forces is most certainly present. Taken in isolation, the lyrics are sometimes flat-out absurd; take, for example, Cannibal Corpse's "Shatter Their Bones": "Putrid foul zombies make their ghastly approach / A dreadful horrid feeling sets in / Scrambling for weapons, an attempt to defend / Against a gruesome horde of the undead." The zombies in this song are, perhaps, a return of the repressed, an indication of western society's alienation from death and the inherant horror the living have of the dead.

To me, these essential themes are most evident, not in the words (which I cannot immediately comprehend), but in the mood created by all of the elements of the performance. This sense of fear and danger cannot be fully captured in a recording; one needs to feel the bass and the drums reverberating through one's body and experience the indescribable sort of anxiety and euphoria that this sensation induces. Likewise for the Theater of Cruelty; a script can tell virtually nothing about the true theater, because theater does not lie in the words, anymore than the full experience of music resides in the score. It's in the mise en scene that theater exists, in the present creation of gestures that can never be repeated in precisely the same way, the aggregation of all the sensory elements so interconnected that one experiences them all simultaneously and throughout the entire body as a snake is lulled by the vibrations of a charmer's horn.

Both Artaudian theater and metal music are efficacious only to the degree that they can enact on the audience's senses. They appeal directly to the senses, but there is obviously something of intellectual value in both; the cultural tendency to avoid the topics that these two art forms discusss indicates their importance, their necessity to give expression to these forces that surround us and, perhaps even more frightening, within us.

Pink Moon

Death is a catastrophe which no one can ever fully anticipate. Even when we know it is coming, that knowledge is abstracted and incomplete; my knowledge is merely second-hand, through the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, and it will remain so. I am not certain that the body ever experiences its own death, or only the process of dying. The decline of health and the sensation of a diminished life may be all that we feel until consciousness finally ceases. That moment, the intersection at which life ends and death occurs, may remain a mystery forever.

Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.

But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.

I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.

Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.

Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.

Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.

But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.

Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.

The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.

Rest in peace, Uncle Doug