Shakespeare's Memento Mori

     Every end of summer we witness the reluctant return. You can see them now on these mornings in late August, “whining . . . with . . . satchel/  And shining morning face, creeping like snail/  Unwillingly to school.”  We can console ourselves by remembering that at least these children are learning misery, which will stand them in good stead for the “[l]ast scene of all, / . . . second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  The foregoing quotations are from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques' famous “The Seven Ages of Man” account of our predictable tenure on this earth.           Shakespeare has us coming and going.  And our exit is the occasion for one of his masterpieces, regarded by many as his greatest tragic play.  Lear, of course.  And here, a short essay I wrote charting the path the play lays out for us on our "long fools-errand to the grave."

Lear At The Dinner Table

by Michael Casey

          Our children remember what we forget we've said, and they forget what we want them to  remember.

          In family conversations during meals when my children were young, I apparently developed a practice that I paid little attention to--quoting passages from literary works that seemed apt to our comments and discussions.  One that always served me well was Lear's "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/ To have a thankless child."  Even though I referenced it humorously, it apparently had a sticking (if not stinging) quality in the ear of my older daughter, Michele.  Years later when she was in her freshman year at Harvard, and had the opportunity to be the assistant director and dramaturge for a campus production of King Lear, she bedeviled the lead actor for repeated iterations of the "sharper than a serpent's tooth" passage until she could hear what she called her father's "withering tone."

          My younger daughter, Katie, had little interest in the dinner table's literary leavings.  "Hey Dad,  today in English, I learned that 'My heart is cleft in twain,' is in Hamlet.  I thought that was just something you liked to say."  Katie is a musician and it is her voice and her flute that I hear in the music of others, such as Tusanamuro in Ran.

          Both these daughters are at my heart's core, but they will be legatees of no land and certainly no kingdom.  While I know of no father who would not want to hear words of praise and love, I know of none who would assign such expression as a declamation exercise.  None but Lear.  I don't know whether his courage is awesome or awful. 

          When Lear himself speaks the "serpent's tooth" lines, he is beginning to feel the full force of his divestature. His expectation of filial devotion mocked, his own foolishness in bloom, he richochets between daughters who have deserted him.  There is something in Lear that fails to recognize or anticipate the necessary separating self interests of those whose selves he helped to create.  Because he is bringing his "darker purpose" (I, i, 38) into light; i.e., "to shake all cares and business from our age,/ Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/ Unburthened crawl toward death" (I, i, 41-43) he thinks his kingdom division will preclude "future strife" (I, i, 46).  Of course it does not.  The strife, intensified and internalized, sears his sanity and his soul.

          Of all the illusions that Lear is prey to, perhaps the most ruinous--and the one we are all vulnerable to--is that blood bonds will bind our children's choices.  In the play, it is not Lear alone who misreads progeny and sibling.  Gloucester invites destruction from his "natural" son, and Edgar allows Edmund to broadside him into ditch and hovel.  They receive the worst from those of whom they expect the best.  Why is it thus?  As Lear asks, "Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?" (III, iii, 76-77).

          It may be that there is a commonality in the nature of tragedy, family and aging.  Bound by suffering, lineage and mortality, we all seek the links that will preserve our presence and expand our pleasure in community.  But neither Lear's rage nor the Machiavel's plots can eclipse the stark truth that Tolstoy told: we are born alone and we die alone.  When we look at "the thing itself; unaccommodated man. . . such a poor bare, forked animal" (III, iv, 108-110), we learn along with Lear that we are formed by the force of finitude and the clock is always ticking.  No one can "unburthen" us.  If we ask our children to do so, we will be fortunate to hear Cordelia's reply.  To have love and duty returned in respectful regard is more than many receive or deserve.

          We raise our children to leave, and we cannot cleave to the harmful hope that they will organize their heart's energies around our accumulating debilities.  For all its individual facets, aging is a private country.  The character of Lear is a problematic pathfinder but he shows us the rectitude of righteous rage.  And he makes good on his claim--"I will do such things--/ What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth" (II, iv, 279-281).  He is a kind of perfect storm, and Dylan Thomas caught his power truly in these lines about his own father: "Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

          There is an old proverb Lear probably should have heeded: "Don't undress before you die."  Astonished though we be at Lear's nakeding of himself,   we still marvel in the great grand clamor of his going.  We could do a lot worse with our own exits.  And probably will.

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

     If memory serves, it was "The Lovin' Spoonfuls," a 60s group that had a hit record with the tune, "Did you ever have to make up your mind?"--a jouncy ditty that laid out the dilemma of choosing one love over another.  "To say yes to one and leave the other behind."  Well, the challenge of choice is true not only in romance but also in reading.  Indeed, there is no more fundamental decision to be made than what not to read.  No one can or has read everything (not even Harold Bloom) and so we should make good choices.  Whom do we choose to keep company with and from whom do we turn and walk away?

     It can be an uncomfortable and uncertain decision.  Fortunately, with books we are allowed to sample.  In romance, keeping company for that purpose would be, shall we say, un-gallant.  Recently I have had two attractive candidates come into my ken.  One, which I shall term "the Devil," and the other--"the deep blue sea."  The former is the novel C by Tom McCarthy.
                
     Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and reviewed by virtually all the major "high culture journals," C packs a postmodern punch.  And reading it invests one with literati street cred or at least savoir faire.  But as reviewer Randy Boyagoda, writing in the June issue of Commonweal puts it, "Why join hordes of plebian [sic] bookworms reading a new Jonathan Franzen novel about the foibles of ordinary, recognizable people, when we could instead be among the few initiates able to appreciate the vertiginous and mysterious mind-world of Tom McCarthy's fiction, a place where everything is connected and nothing matters?" Despite the stark warning of those last two words in the quoted passage, I chose to dally with the Devil.  I sampled C but we didn't go all the way.

     In the midst of this entanglement, my eye was caught by a title in hardback on my shelves.  It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick is a hefty novel published six years ago that received some brief attention at the time but has since receded from the literary memory of most.  As a matter of fact if you want to test someone's familiarity with modern novels ask them if they even know of (must less have read) this book .  I'm as undiligent as they--even more so--because I knew the book was there on my "to be read" shelf but always found a way to postpone the date.  The book stuck with me in part because of a minor but intriguing claim to fame entirely separate from its content.  It's All Right Now is a first novel by an author ten years my senior.  I found it remarkable that someone of that vintage would publish a first novel.

     It will come as no surprise that I have chosen Chadwick over McCarthy.  I give his book the nickname 'the deep blue sea" because of its orientation toward interiority.  The protagonist, Tom Ripple, is as British and as "blue" as they come.  What he sees makes him so.  A London suburbanite and a family man, Tom regards himself, his spouse and children, and himself with reams of rue.  He is frequently fatigued, plagued by languid lust, contemptuous of his employ and his boss.  He longs for quietude and strives to understand human motivation and behavior but can only arrive at an overwhelming sense of futility made bearable by irony and wit.  In short he's my kind of guy.   But he may not be yours.  If you're not delighted by the disconsolate, you can always hitch a lift on the "vertiginous and mysterious mind-world" of C.   I'll stick with my crotchety, craven alter ego.

    

    

 
    
    

Reading Recs

I'm adding Library Thing to Casey's whollywrit. I've put up here some of the titles that I've reviewed or remarked on in different places over the recent past. As I become familiar with the site, I expect to collect, organize and post my comments more efficiently. We'll see how it works out.

A Girl I Can't Forget

     Not everyone is found or findable on Facebook.  Not even Google can produce the goods on all who are or were in our lives.  Who hasn't dithered with searches that were fruitless and been puzzled that a trail can go cold.  I have not been able to locate the second smartest person I ever met; one of the groomsmen at my wedding; a colleague from my Great Books days who was one of the best on-her-feet-presenters in front of a group you could imagine; and a recent teaching colleague who said repeatedly before he retired that "we'll stay in touch, we'll have coffee."  Yeah, right.
     I have reason to believe that all of these folks are alive and well.  They just do not want to be found (and not only by me; others who have looked have also come up empty.)  I have to admire their ability to cloak and cloister themselves, apparently without the resources of the witness protection program.  Perhaps part of the answer to the puzzle is in the thought I expressed last year to my siblings when we were discussing how well or how little we knew our deceased sister.  "I think each of us got to know her as much as she wanted us to." 
     There is a force, however, that retrieves the traces of faded friends, be they living or dead.  Memory.  No computer needed.  Memory creates the pull of the past and and makes possible the backward reach that lifts others into the now.  All of this was focused for me when I came upon a  quiet and modest piece I wrote in my "salad days" ("when I was green in judgement," Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra).  I published it in the college literary magazine I edited. Here it is, unchanged from that time.

          "And your prayers are requested for the repose of the soul of Miss Donna Hoffman,
          who was killed last night in a traffic accident.  The Rosary will be held . . . "
          
          And that was how I heard of it, quietly and simply, in church, announced from the
          pulpit by the sympathetic voice of the priest.  I remember feeling surprised, and a
          little lump forming at the bottom of my stomach, and a vague fright spreading
          through me like a rush of cold air. 

          We had gone to grade school together and had a crush on each other then.  She
          was thin and wiry with a square face and her eyes were always bright blue with
          defiance.  We were often sarcastic with one another as was the code of our
          adolescence, but we laughed a lot, mostly at our classmates and seldom at our-
          selves.  She would call me up on the phone and we would talk for an awfully long
          time, and I remember little things--like how you could hang up and not break the
          connection if the other person held the receiver, and I remember her telling me
          about some guy she went tobogganing with. 

          She was quick and intelligent and I remember a cute little essay she wrote once
          about a penny and a dollar and I thought it was terribly original until a few years
          later when I read the story somewhere else and had a good laugh, remembering
          her version.

          The nun who taught us once remarked that she was the only girl in the class who
          had a "natural beauty" and I readily agreed because that phrase set her apart and
          somehow explained the electric feeling I got one day when she bumped into me in
          the aisle and her hand brushed my leg. 

          But then we left and went to different schools and lost contact and it wasn't until
          college that I remembered seeing her again and then it was only casually, socially,
          little more than "hello" and "goodbye."  I do remember seeing her one night walking
          by the dorms with a guy, holding hands, and she looked up and said, "Hello, Mike"
          and the light caught her face and there was something different there, something
          gone.

          Then later, at a big dance, some of the fraternity men got to fooling around with the
          microphone between numbers and a deep experienced voice announced her name
          and wished her happy birthday and I knew then that she had "arrived" in the social
          circle and was beyond reach forever.  Not long before her death I was talking with
          a friend of mine who knew her also and he showed me a picture he had of her. He
          began to talk of how she was "messed up" psychologically, and he started to tell a
          lot of wild stories he had heard . . . but I closed my ears to his voice because that
          was not the girl I knew, not the girl I remembered.

          I am looking now at the picture he had, and it is really not a very good one for she
          was much prettier than she is shown here.  She looks a little scared, timid almost
          but if you look closely you can see the bright look defiance in her eyes which the
          thing I remember most. 

          And I'm really not sure why I wrote this; it's a strange kind of obituary you'll agree,
          but at least it gives form to a memory if nothing else. And though her death really
          was a terrible thing it would be infinitely worse to erase the thought of it and com-
          fortably forget about her.  I am grateful for the brief childhood friendship we had
          and for the vivid memory of her which lingers in my mind . . . the bright blue look
          of defiance.

Grunts from the Wordgrump (7)

A dopy doc, the dog-dazed, and a dozen dim-witted questions

•For the second time the young medic said, “that means. . . . .”  I stopped her. “I know what exacerbate and eructation mean.  Let’s make an agreement here.  Don’t explain words to me and I won’t point out when you mispronounce them.”  

•I understand that it is unusual to see a St. Bernard in a public setting.  I understand that you and your little one may get excited about “the big doggie.”  But do not rush up to pet my dog without invitation or permission.  I don’t walk O’Malley for your entertainment or enjoyment.   In almost all cases, he’s too big and your toddler is too small.  While he is not aggressive in any way, he could knock your child down with his tail and make you stumble simply by leaning.  If anything untoward occurs, my dog will be blamed.  Admire from a respectful distance.   If that sounds haughty, good.  That’s how it was intended.  Close contact has to be earned and merited.

•The classic distinction between ignorance and apathy—I don’t know and I don’t care—is the answer to the following questions.

          Does Wal-Mart exploit its employees?

          Who will the Republicans nominate for President?

          What are celebrities doing and saying?

          Must everyone recycle?

          What’s the most popular mobile device?

          What are your visions and dreams for the future?

          Were you affected by Harry Potter nostalgia?

          Do you envy other people’s money or sex lives?

          Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

          What’s your sign?

          Are you wearing the right size bra?

          Will I die fat?

         

         

         

         

         

Pagan Homer and the Path to Salvation

     Three years ago we begin a formation program in lay ministry. Now we have concluded our course of study and reflection. All of my peers have spoken of discoveries and delights in a curriculum that drew from scripture, church history, sacramental theology and other domains, such as leadership and human development. Many accounts have been presented about how this program has been found to be personally meaningful, and individually enriching. Most seem ready to “focus our vision” and find ways to speak the voice of the word in the welter of the world. All we have to do is come up with an answer to the question, “Quo Vadis”?
     Before we can reply to that query, we need to recall the story of the Roman god, Janus, he of the two faces that could look forward and back at the same time. He was the divinity of gates and doors, of tasks completed and new enterprises undertaken. The month in which we had our last class meeting and the first of the final presentations bears his name and evokes an apt image of dual vision. Taking a cue from pagan mythology might seem an odd way to begin a retrospective on a Christian course of study but the pagans were here first and I believe they have much to teach us. Indeed, I’m going to reach back before Rome to ancient Greece, to a poet who sang his story-song before the written word had found its form. Homer, the writer who in most ways first rendered for us the welter of the world, provides the literary equivalent of the journey, the trip outward, and the recorso, the trip back, that has so many analogues in spiritual pilgrimage. That movement is found in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey.

                                                               

     The story is familiar. Odysseus, Ithaca’s king, leaves kith and kin to join the Akhaian forces in their war on Troy, occasioned by the abduction of Helen. When that war is won (thanks in part to Odysseus’ trick of the Trojan horse) Odysseus begins his journey home. It is a long journey fraught with peril and it takes many years for him to arrive safely.
     When I was a classroom teacher, I taught the Odyssey more than a few times. In leading students along the twisting path of Odysseus’ travels, I constructed a comprehensive question—alliterative in pattern and twenty-six words in length—that invited attention to the core of the journey. I would like to share this question with you because I think its constituent elements apply in important ways to the spiritual journey we have been on together.

     Here’s the question:


Why does the homesick homeseeker have to go through a period of being homeless at home before he can lay hold of the haven of home?


     Let‘s take a look at the parallels.

     Odysseus is a “homeseeker” in that he has been away from Ithaca for twenty years. As Christian pilgrims, human beings are also are in quest of their spiritual home, union with God, for “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee” (Augustine). We were cast out from our original home because we were at war with ourselves, drawn to walking and talking with the Lord in the Garden of Eden (Genesis), but fascinated by the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil which Satan used to lure Adam and Eve into transgression. Given the expulsion from Eden and the company of the divine, we are “homesick” and seek to find the place of meaning and repose that we knew before original sin.
     The middle part of the question, “have to go through a period of being homeless at home,” deals with the purgatorio of wading through the welter of the world. Odysseus’s world was different from ours but the obstacles were fierce. For Odysseus, returning to Ithaca required surviving encounters with Kyklops, the Laistrygonians, Skylla and Kharybdis, the Seirênês and Kirkê. Monsters, on land and sea, malevolent malingerers, and predatory femme fatales plagued him. Our demons assume different shapes. They exist more in our inner landscape than our outward terrain. But we have to overcome indifference, inertia, incompetence, insecurity, and inconsistent performance. Some of those forces are in others; some are in ourselves. And as we struggle with them, we may feel far from home, bereft of the hospitality of the heart that heralds welcome. In other words we can be “homeless at home.” Odysseus was in this state because he was in disguise. He arrived on Ithaca under the cover of a false identity. He had to do reconnaissance in order to determine upon whom he could rely when he emerged to attack the suitors of his wife Penelope.

                                                         

     “Lay[ing] hold of the haven of home” meant that Odysseus had to slay the suitors who had sustained a siege of his spouse and his house. He moved from the submergent self of disguise to the emergent self of personal declamation. We may need to make an analogous movement. As a Woodstock forum in Philadelphia recently observed: “we are becoming a do-it yourself church for the laity.” (Thomas Reese, S.J.). To the degree that is the case we may shape our lay ministry mission by drawing on our own creativity and imagination as well as the content of the formation program we have moved through.
     The qualities of creativity and imagination are what we seek to evoke and confer on those we minister to. We want to identify "beatitude," and call out the blessedness that God has created in others; we seek to confer on them an awareness that the goodness of creation inheres in their hearts. We offer them the “Balm of Gilead, “to make the spirit whole and save the sin-sick soul.”
      So again the lay ministry question, “Quo Vadis”?   What is the caring core of the phrase “to minister.” We know that etymologically it means to give aid in the form of physical help or spiritual succor. That would seem to be a purpose that would be universally supported. But such is not the case. The work of lay ministry is seen by some as obstructive and presumptive of the prerogatives of the ordained ministry. There can be conflicts with church authority. What should we be prepared to accept and what should we be ready to resist? The beginnings of some answers can be found in a modern poem by Cavafy, a Greek poet. In his eponymous poem “Ithaca,” Cavafy sets down a reflection on Odysseus’s home and metaphorically our ultimate destination. Here are the last stanzas.


Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
And even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.


Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.


And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
You must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.


Finally, and more concretely, a brief video clip, based on a force of nature that will show you beauty and beatitude in one fell swoop. I want to introduce you to my spiritual advisor. You will see him rejoicing in his God-given charism. The clip is only 25 seconds long and it ends with the advice he gave me when I asked him what I should do in ministry.

In praise of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

     There are times, as all habitual readers know, when you get a reading rhythm going and you can feel yourself being fed by a book and you wish to stave off the finish of the story. That’s a good thing.  An even better thing are the rare times when you read more slowly than is your wont, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also to catch your breath and regain your composure because you fear the book will be the finish of you. 

     The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the novel by David Wroblewski, (2008) is a work wonderously wrought. I came late to this novel and I knew that it had been successful and widely praised.   It exceeded my expectations.  It may have destroyed my disinclination to spend time with first novels.  The language is precise, the narrative is daring—using implicit analogues to Hamlet to unfold the characters’ heartbreaking travails—and it’s filled with dogs . . . oh the dogs!  The Sawtelles are breeders of a different ilk.  They train their dogs far beyond the level of basic obedience before they allow them to be placed.  And to acquire a Sawtelle dog your character will be scrutinized as well as your wallet.

        Now at this point you may exclaim, “Aha!  Of course . . . if it’s about dogs then Casey will be ga ga about it.” Actually, I usually avoid “dog books,” having been disappointed in the past.  But this novel is as much about people as it is about their animals; Wroblewski explores the mutual mysteries of the “cognitive heart” in both species. You don’t have to be a dog person to be drawn to this book.  The characters are compelling and the narrative is knotted so well the stitches don’t show.

       Edgar is mute but not deaf.  He grows up on his parents’ farm and easily steps into their work of breeding and training.  Almondine is his dog who owns him as much as he does her.  Their relationship is exquisitely conceived as she tends to him when he is voiceless and vulnerable as an infant child.  Young human and dog are present and prescient to each throughout the story.  Trouble arrives early when Edgar is a teen.  His uncle re-enters Sawtelle family life and you can see Shakespeare’s Claudius in Claude without squinting a bit.  Trudy is perhaps less convincing as a Gertrude manqué but the father Gar is the quintessential senior Hamlet before and after his demise.  Most deft is the echoing of the play within the play.  Edgar teaches the dogs a pantomime and a trick to catch Claude’s conscience—or what there is of it.

     But even if The Story of Edgar Sawtelle were shorn of Shakespearean parallels, it would still compel.  When Edgar flees to the forest with three of the Sawtelle dogs, there is tension and tenderness in their plight.  In this late section we meet two eccentric secondary characters who are vividly etched. By their singularity they teach the boy about the verities of the human heart.  He puts these insights to good use in the dangerous and dramatic conclusion. By the end of the book we have not only been moved but edified.

     Don’t go to your grave without reading this novel.

Grunts from the Wordgrump (6)

Dead-On-Arrival Diction is the condition of words that have become cliched through misuse and overuse. Not to mention being annoying as hell.   Here are three examples running rampant.  Iconic is a word that has a dignified and noble function originating in art history.  Now it is used to describe perfectly ordinary rock songs and and sports figures who have managed to overstay their time.  If everything is "iconic" then  nothing is.

     I swear I will scream if I hear surreal  spoken by one more person describing an unexpected experience.  The use of the word "surreal" is never unexpected.  It is completely predictable.  You know it will be uttered when you hear the words, "I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  It was ______ ."   Well, no it wasn't "surreal."  Few things are.  Unless you want to make an intelligible connection between what has disturbed or frightened you and the intentionally fantastic images of surrealism in art, theater, or literature, then leave this word alone.

     Contemporary observations about political discourse find much to be negative about.  Understandably.  You will hear this said: "It's all just rhetoric ."  Political expression may bloviate and pontificate, be repetitious and ranting, or simplify and distort.  But what such  language almost never achieves is "rhetoric."  Rhetoric is an art and a craft.  It is language contructed with care in order to effectively communicate.  The body politic suffers from its absence not its presence. 

     The words you choose to use say something about your mind and your ability to discern.  Cliches and wear-worn phrases almost guarantee you will make no useful impression on your audience or your reader.

     And finally, get off my lawn!