Summer Reading

Since my last post, I've gone on a whirlwind vacation to Gettysburg, Washington DC, and Philadelphia, and then returned to Massachusetts for the summer. I'm still missing my puppy a lot; I have to catch myself to not call to her when I walk in the door, and the house is so quiet without her. But, I'm getting used to it and my mom and I are working on the yard to make an area for the dogs, where we'll bury their ashes.

I've also started reading for fun, something I look forward to every summer. Jarrod and I have a tradition of reading massive books all summer; our first was James Joyce's Ulysses back in 2008, then Anna Karenina in 2009, last year was In Search of Lost Time (Jarrod didn't really stick to that one...), and this year, we're reading War and Peace. This is my second foray into Leo Tolstoy's literature, and I'm just as captivated the second time around. I love Tolstoy's characterization; every character has the inconsistencies and imperfections, the ugliness and beauty of humanity.

In the first book, I found the death scene of Count Bezuhov most fascinating, especially in comparison to the death scene of Nikolai Levin in Anna Karenina. Nikolai Levin's death spurred a deep meditation on mortality and a revelation of the fragility and mystery of life in his brother, Konstantin, but in War and Peace, the final sufferings of Count Bezuhov brought out only petty, ugly, undignified bickering over a will. The difference between a poor death and a rich death is striking in these two books. Nikolai died in a filthy hotel room, penniless, surrounded only by his mistress, his brother Konstantin, and Konstantin's wife Kitty. He was desperate to live and his death was terrible and painful. Count Bezuhov does not cling to life so fiercely, and dies in his massive estate, one of the largest in Russia, surrounded by his large family. A greater difference lies in the reactions of the spectators to the death throes, however; where Kostya is inspired with awe and terror, and contemplates his own mortality and the secret knowledge of death, the potential heirs to Bezuhov's fortune elide the mystery and horror of death. They fixate on what will outlive the Count, his enormous fortune, and fight with each other over the will with hideous cunning and selfishness. Their behavior was shameful, far more shameful than Nikolai Levin's desperation to continue living, his refusal to accept his fate.

A more direct confrontation with death occurs among the soldiers in battle at the beginning of Book Two; the young Nikolai Rostov experiences war and the imminence of death for the first time. I'll write more about this after I finish the second book, but for now, I notice a pattern in Tolstoy's writing, that people will use any means possible to avoid a confrontation with mortality and death, and so the only way to face it is to strip away all the distractions and view it in its naked horror.

Masks

I've been writing this blog from an impersonal perspective. The premise was to write about books I've read, and then these last few posts have been attempts to keep myself on-track in other areas of my life, but I've kept my writing vague and distant. Both of these subjects, reading and maintaining a balanced life, are intensely personal, and these bland updates are not helping me with the unspoken goal here of reflecting thoughtfully on my experiences.

So let me begin again. I'll introduce myself. I'm in my second semester of grad school, working towards a Masters degree in English with the intent of teaching high school in two years. This summer, I moved over 400 miles away from my hometown and I'm now living on my own for the first time in my life (a college dorm 30 minutes from my parents' house doesn't count as living on my own). I live with my boyfriend, and my decision to go to school here was largely based on wanting to be together; he got a PhD offer here, I got into the Masters program, and I can say unabashedly that love led me here. People go to grad school for the humanities for a host of irrational reasons, and I say that being with my boyfriend is a perfectly valid one. Three years ago, that notion never would have made sense to me, when I was bent on earning a PhD even if it took me 20 years and a monomaniacal level of focus. Scholarship and learning are still very important to me; I'm in grad school and want to be a teacher, after all. But they're not everything, and since Jarrod came into my life, I've realized that there is much, much more to me than being a good student, although he certainly encourages me to be a scholar too (he wants me to apply to the PhD program here, but I have a lot of reasons why I don't want to). Yes, I love him.

Moving far from home has been a complex experience with a lot of highs and lows. Some days, I love my new city. Sometimes I feel inexplicably nostalgic over something random and weird, like the roads I used to run on in my hometown or the way the morning sun fills the kitchen of my parents' house. I occasionally hate grad school and threaten to quit. Other times, I love it and get excited about what I'm reading and writing. It's an undulating tide of emotions that I'm trying to sort through, but I'm thankful to have this experience. For a long time, I avoided all risks and didn't challenge myself beyond what I knew I could achieve with reasonable effort. Now, for the first time in my life really, I know that I could put everything I have into some of my endeavors and still fail.

There's life after failure, and I'm a deeper person because I've failed. There is tragedy in life and I don't try to turn away from it. There is a great deal of comedy too. I'm trying to be brave enough and smart enough to recognize both.

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.

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