Poem: "Portraits"

Click here for a printable copy of "Portraits" © 2007 Greig Roselli 

Poem: "brother & sister"

    she’s a waif about to vomit her bread,

    to get ready for the Banana Republic shoot,
    the “I love it when you look at me” pose.

    she’s singularly angular, positioned on a bar,
    her brother at her side,
    singing glad hallelujahs to the boys passing by.

    Everyone loves a stare, a glance, une regarde,
    but this gal wallows in it,
    lapping up the paparazzi shots, the mental
    undressing behind the pews.

    She loves it;
    she’s sick,
    or possibly stuck in a Truffaut film.
   
    he loves it,
    complete.

    And we are so sick that we stare anyway,
    because we know he, she, they love it.

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Book Review: Warmish-Cool Pleasure in As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, is the archetypal quest story, one of the most satisfying and basic plots in the literary canon.

The Journey Story
William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, is the archetypical quest story, one of the most satisfying and basic plots in the literary canon. Like Homer’s The Odyssey, the pleasure of the quest narrative is in the process of the journey, not necessarily in the final outcome. We read a narrative like As I Lay Dying or The Odyssey to discover pleasure in the journey itself. It's this desire for the journey that makes a story about wandering heroes so appealing. For example, it is not a plot spoiler to find out prematurely that Odysseus slays the suitors and saves his wife and son. In fact, that's not the most exciting part of The Odyssey. It is about the becoming of the hero that is so enthralling. The pleasure of the journey quest is in the process of becoming. As Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher wrote, “One cannot step in the same river twice,” so also is As I Lay Dying a journey-process of becoming, albeit a macabre journey of a poor white family in Mississippi to bury their dead mother’s corpse.

The River as Metaphor for Story 

   In this post, I will explore how the madcap journey the Bundren family undertakes becomes, like an ever-changing river, a locus of pleasure in the narrative itself. I will show this using the tableau image of Darl drinking the water-filled gourd because the language and tone of this scene is inebriated with warmish cool water riddled with stars, as Darl describes it himself (8). I will then show how the narrative of the water-filled gourd is depicted as sensuous pleasure, the pleasure of the body and the readerly satisfaction of a wavelike release - in the story's end.

The Bundren Family and Their Motives

   Oddly enough, the disturbing nature of the story is what makes the novel pleasurable. The motives of every Bundren family member cannot be said to be of the highest moral value. Each and every one of the clan has their own motive: Anse, the father, Cash, the eldest, Jewel, Darl, Vardaman, the youngest, and even Addie, the dead mother, all have strange desires and motives. The fact that Cash, in the novel’s opening scene constructs his mother’s coffin, as she lays dying, in a place where she can obviously see and hear him, is sadistic and disturbing. Who would do this to their own mother? After her husband has gone to work and the last “dirty snuffling nose” had gone to school, what kind of mother would go to a quiet place so she “could be quiet and hate them?” (114). But this is the kind of pleasure that Faulkner is gesturing at in this novel. Cash derives pleasure from constructing the coffin, as is shown in a chapter that lists deliciously how he made the coffin on the bevel (53).  His reason?  “The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on a bevel” (53).
    This pleasure is what makes one reader say, “this book is so funny” and another reader to say, “this book is so sick!”   There is a voyeurism ingrained in the reader to want to find out more about this strange, poor family and what compels them to undertake their journey no matter how much you feel or think their journey is depraved.  The reader is interested in as many details as can be garnered that can aid in putting the narrative pieces together to understand the journey arc of the novel.  This is highly pleasurable.  Added to this is the structure of the novel itself.  It is told by a series of monologues written in a stream of consciousness style.  The reader puts together the pieces of the Bundren’s journey through the varied and limited mental states of the characters.  Being inside of the mind of a character provides pleasure, for it is a romp within the mental imagery of another “person”.    

Darl as the Central Character

    The character of Darl comprises many of the scenes in the book.  We are inside Darl’s mind, it seems, more than any other character.  Darl seems to be a logical character, but one notices that he takes too many “soft right angles.” There is something sinister in his immediacy with the world around him. Darl emphasizes an unmediated relationship to the world.  His conception of the world is dictated solely by sensuosity.  Although this will prove to be his demise into insanity, he finds pleasure in what he apprehends to be intuitively sensuous and tangible.  He is not interested as much in the concern and care for other human beings as long as they fit into his own sensuous relationship to reality.  For example, the scene with the water-filled gourd warrants how Darl’s sensuous response to things around him becomes a fixated locus of pleasure in the narrative arc of the story’s journey.

The Water-Filled Gourd

    Around the side of the house, the Bundrens have set a cedar bucket to allow water to sit.  It gives the water a sweet taste.  As the father Anse points out, water tastes sweetest when it has sat in a cedar bucket for at least six hours, not in metal.  It’s “warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells" (8).  Once the water has sat for a time, it is poured into a gourd.   
    What enhances the pleasure for the reader in this scene is how Faulkner situates the text within the narrative structure of the chapter.  We are inside Darl’s troubled head here. But we hear his father ask him, “Where’s Jewel?” (8). It is in the interstices of this question that Darl fantasizes about going to the water-filled gourd at night, stirred awake, to see the stars in the water inside the gourd, to be intoxicated into an erotic reverie.  But the text reverts back to reality.  Back to the scene where his father had asked him about Jewel’s whereabouts. The text brings us in and out of internal journeys into external journeys and out again and back again. This is what gives the novel a heightened sense of journey for the reader.  The pleasure of the text is not only Darl’s own bodily pleasure, but the text itself becomes an erogenous zone. The text is a sensuous locus of pleasure as well as the pleasure of the character Darl himself, despite Darl’s own descent into madness.

Jean Mohr's Photographs of Boys in After the Last Sky (with Edward W. Said)

in After the Last Sky:

The Palestinian boy in Jean Mohr’s photograph elicits sadness just by looking into his eyes (WOR 623). He is of unknown age, so the caption says, because we are not sure if he is even a child although he is small enough to be a child.  His child-sized tummy, poking out from beneath his tight Grease t-shirt is tiny like a child’s. He doesn’t have a man’s beard.  Nor is he a toddler.  He has a playful half-akimbo pose with his left arm perched on his hip, a boy’s shaved head like a London chimney sweep and his body semi-contrapposto – but his face is veritably adult looking with those sad sad eyes.

  “You see it in our children who seem to have skipped a phase of growth or, more alarming, achieved an out-of-season maturity in one part of their body or mind while the rest remains childlike” (623).  Said has similar impressions to my own.  Except Said is writing in the first person plural “we.” “Our children,” he says.  A Palestinian himself, Said is not only looking at a boy marked by deportation, war, and strife but looking at one of his own exiled children, a child who has grown up too fast, as the clichéd expression goes.  This assertion of “we” makes his already poignant comments – and the photograph itself – an intimate expression of the pain and loss of the Palestinian exile.  This is the portrait of a child whom the Palestine’s enemies say,  “Kill them before they kill you” (623).  This is a child that the enemy says could be a potential terrorist; they say in Lebanon you should kill the children because they’re the ones who’ll kill (623).  The child in the picture is lost.  The real child who suffers is lost in a bungled list of population reports and military strategy.

But how can you justify that kind of statement when you look at this photograph – or any of the photographs in the After the Last Sky?  What kind of sloughing off of humanity do you have to do until you reach the point of disregard for human life?  Is the point of no return when you can believe that “there are no Palestinians” (623)?  Insert any group here for “Palestinian”.  When you can strip the Palestinians of identity like, “Non-Jews. Terrorists. Troublemakers. DPs. Refugees.  Names on a card.  Numbers on a list” (624)?  It seems to me, once you strip a people of their sense of place and identity you can then place upon them labels sufficient to your own cause.  The Palestinians have nowhere to call Palestine, no stable place to call home (although there has been an attempt by Palestinians like Said to refer to this disposed land as Israel/Palestine).  The boy in Mohr’s photograph, ill-fitted in his American style t-shirt – what is he thinking?  What is he trying to tell the observer?  What can be read in his face?  If anything?

Jean Mohr, photographer

He is similar to another boy who appears later on in the book.  This time a young villager is peering into the window of an Israeli officer in Kalandia, near Ramallah in 1967 (640).  In a series of photographs by Mohr that illustrate the juxtaposition of two worlds: one Israeli and the other Palestinian, in this one he captures another Palestinian boy caught by the photographer peeking into the quotidian life of the conqueror’s den.  The photographer is taking the photograph from the inside capturing the child looking inside.  The soldier is oblivious to the child and lost in thought (640). The Israeli officer has one hand on his chin and the villager has one hand on the windowpane, a look of shy curiosity imbued in his eyes. He has been caught by the gaze of the camera and looks downward just enough to give himself away as the forgotten one.

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Poem: "St. Roch"

St. Roch

Your ancestors are buried here,

she said,

pointing to the fuzzy monitor;

my roots displayed

as if someone had known all along

that francis killman is my Great Grandfather,

a tattoo of a woman sewn on his thigh

that I have never seen before,

never knew him before,

gets kinda excited

decomposed into a puddle

at St. Roch

his ashes are —

I presume, , ,

but I can never find him,

passing the chapel,

Cubicle “A-2-Z” is absent,

a square window penciled in on the side,

and peering in like Scrooge on Christmas day —

I see there are crutches, braces, wooden canes,

old socks

s t r e w n

on rocks carved, “Thank you to a saint”

LEFT BY KIERKEGAARD’S FAITHFUL

and we are changed —

the peeled off pavement

of Holy Trinity walk

and Saint Irenaeus lane

suffer … drop a penny, sink a ship, sailor blue leaning against the wall, washed out from the lake pontchartrain after the storm

Three Boys at the Pantheon

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Eulogy for My Dog Maggie: 1990-2006

Maggie on a walk

When my dog Maggie died, I wrote her eulogy.
     When a girl reaches that age of sweet sixteen uncertainty, my girl has reached the age of mortal certainty, her skeleton worn out from a teenaged span of use, her gauzy eyes barely seeing, her ears clotted with wind, her matted hair uncombable — she sits in the living room panting, refusing water, wagging her tail nevertheless.
     She was a Humane Society special. $50. That’s what she cost. Including her shots. Nick was 9. I was 11. Brad was like 16. Brad, Nick and I picked her from a mixed bitch’s litter, the babies all scrunched up beneath her teets, we picked the one — eyes still kinda closed — who had the personality we were looking for, independent but lovable.  Mom was concerned, “How big is she going to get?”  The vet assured us this dog could be a house dog (She ended up being an outside/inside dog).  She was a Springer Spaniel mix; we didn’t meet the father. And the mother is a strange memory -- because why would I remember her, the dog who bore my baby when I myself and my family would become a mother to this mutt? Maggie is the name we gave her after severe brainstorm in the living room.  We called her many titles over the years.  Fat girl, we called her. Pretty girl. Morga. Maggie. Morgus. Thing. Baby. Hey, baby. Mooga. Maggie Roselli. Maggie the Magnificent.
     Her first night, we were afraid she would "let loose" all over the house, so we put her in the bathroom and shut the door. She cried all night. I slept in the top bunk, being older — and Nick slept on the bottom. Both of us heard Maggie’s cries. She hated being by herself. Even till the end. She hated it. She would prove to be a dog who followed you wherever you went. Just to be with you. So she wouldn’t be alone.
     She would get on a kneeboard in the Tchefuncte river just so she would not have to wait alone in the boat. She followed Nick and I to the bus stop — and sometimes attempted to get on the bus!  She went with me into the woods and we got lost a few times.  We were off the beaten path; we had gone into the woods to eat blackberries; I turned to her — as lost as she was — “Maggie, where are we?” She just looked at me, crushed chlorophyll frescoed into her face.
     We finally got out of the woods, onto a country road a few miles from the house.  She didn’t complain.  And just a few years ago — in her later years — she followed Zack and I to town.  It’s a long walk to town but Maggie insisted she come along.  When we got to the river she walked down the algae-covered concrete steps and got soaked; she loved it.  But when we got to the hamburger shop near the main drag and I tried to get Maggie some water from the clerk, Maggie wanted to get inside into the Air Conditioning.  Her tongue was panting so painfully, that it almost reached the ground.  But I wouldn’t let her.  She looked like a sea hag come from her morning bath.   She waited behind the paned glass door and at the first moment she got she squeezed past a customer and showed up by my side.  She scared a lady exiting the restaurant. “Get that thing away from me!”  I have to admit, inadvertently, Maggie looked menacing.  I pretended she wasn’t my dog, but when the owner asked whose dog it was, Zach turned me in, “It’s his dog,” pointing directly at me.  I picked up Maggie and cradled her sloppy wetness to my dry shirt and walked out.  We called a cab; they charged a canine tax.  Bastards.  Zach loved it.  So did Maggie.  I don’t think I let Maggie follow me on my walks ever again.

John Milton on Adversity

    Adversity breeds life.

An Etching of Samson, from an 1882 German Bible  source: wikimedia

 Milton liked to write about adversity because he saw it in the paradox of Christian life. Jesus died so we might have life.  “They also serve who only stand and wait” is the last line of Milton’s sonnet on blindness.  And in the Areopagitica he writes, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”  We go searching for death, and life springs up again, as usual, to quote Virginia Woolf. Actually what she really wrote was I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual. It is funny how one remembers quotes incorrectly.  Adversity is something I intuit in my own life; I have an intimate impulse, like Samson, but I also scheme and think too much like Satan in Paradise Regained, storing it up for later. Why, just yesterday somebody tried my patience and I just pretended to wait, not like Jesus, “The time prefixed I waited,” (PR 1.269) as if waiting for God’s prefixed time, but rather a time when I could get back at someone and use their words against them.
    No one likes to wait yet we sense and intuit that patience and waiting are good things.  I wish I could wait and serve like Samson and Jesus but Satan's jittery insistence to outwit God (again) seems awfully childish but worth the effort -- especially those times when you feel like Samson, blind and shorn.  In this paper I am going to talk about this adversarial jig-a-lig between waiting and serving and scheming insistence and how it plays itself out in both poems, “insistence” in Paradise Regained and “waiting” in Samson Agonistes.
    In Paradise Regained the Adversary (1.33) is determined to dupe God by insisting on sabotaging Jesus, God’s Messiah, the guy who waits and waits, calm and demur as a cat in the hot sun with his belly bare.  Jesus makes himself vulnerable by exposing himself to the desert.  Samson is vulnerable and is humbled by his weakness in the prison in Gaza, captured by the Philistines after Dalila, his wife, dupes him.  In Paradise Regained, Jesus’s mode of operation is just to sit there and take it.  The adversary, "roving still about the world" (1.34-35) finds Jesus in the desert and appears to him disguised as an old man, but Jesus is not convinced by this quick ploy to deceive him with wise words.  “Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust, knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?” (1.356). The archfiend now undisguised is first shorn of his appearance, revealed as superficial and a fake.  He is “dissembled, inly stung with anger and disdain,” not a Samson, shorn and blind, still believing in God.  Satan's insistence is "inly stung" (1.466). Satan gets so pissed off at his inability to fool Jesus with his cool words that he disappears as quickly as he had come by the end of Book one.  Satan tries to convince Jesus that truth is hard to achieve, Satan argues, and it is a bummer to have to wait for it.  Those atheistic priests who mumble prayers but do not believe are not any better, Satan contends.  Satan pulls out the lowly and woe is me card and pleads to Jesus as a supplicant, “Thou art placed above me, thou art Lord” (1.475) which gives Satan an excuse to dismiss God’s law because his not as equipped with God power, so, he reasons, he’ll fail.
    Unlike Satan, Samson knows his mission (although he question’s God ways), so when his father Manoah insists on ransoming him from Gaza and taking him home, Samson desists, saying it is impossible; he has been such a wretch, having succumbed to Dalila’s shears and is a disgrace to his country.  Samson’s only response is to sit idle on the feast of Daigon, waiting, seemly doing nothing.  “Here rather let me drudge and earn my bread, till vermin or the draff of servile food consume me, and oft-invocated death hasten the welcome end of all my pains” (573-576).  Samson has consigned himself to waiting, like the newly baptized in Paradise Regained who cry to God for a Messiah.  Samson is plagued with the Job-like questions of, ‘why is this happening to me’? Why did he lose his strength to a concubine and why is God doing this to him, the strongest and greatest warrior in the country?  Samson is similar to Satan in this grapple with truth but the difference is in how both deal with the adversity.
    Satan knows his insistence to deceive Jesus is unfortunate but he clings to the liberty "to round this globe of earth," although he curiously prefaces it with the word "prison," even though Samson is the real one in prison, "Life in captivity, among inhuman foes" (108-9).  As in Paradise Lost, Satan’s prison is psychological and tormented, “inly racked” (PR 3.203).  He is the classic psychotic.  Satan does not trust God, does not see in adversity salvation and creates castles in the sky, scheming to destroy God’s work.  Samson’s distrust is human distrust, while Satan is hardwired in distrust and anger that ends up confounding him in the end.  Both poems use this image of the prison, the desert, a place of exile, to tease out the struggle between waiting and action, freedom and bondage. 
    In book three, Satan directly challenges waiting, when he asks Jesus, “Why move thy feet so slow to what is best? …. Perhaps thou linger’st in deep thoughts detained” (3.224; 227).  In other words, Satan is telling Jesus, that compared to him, who is already damned to hell – I have nothing to lose – but you, who are the son of God, why don’t you just do something?  Satan mentions that Jesus’s entire life has been private, unlived, “What of perfection can in man be found?” (3.230) as he tries to convince the son of God to put away his meek life and conquer the world and all it holds.  Jesus merely replies that God has his due time and we must trust his providence.  This really gets Satan rolling with anger and the rest of the poem is a crescendo to the denouement of the fall where the title, “O patient son of God” is a curse and Satan disturbs Jesus’s with thunderbolts and rain.  Satan is the inverse of patience: a troubling wandering and stewing that mocks patience in its waiting but serves only to erupt at any moment.  Satan has watched Jesus from a far ever since he heard that this might be the Messiah, but it is not the same moral waiting imbued to Mary and John the Baptist.
    In Samson Agonistes, after Samson and his father speak, Dalila enters, the second person to tempt Samson to depart Gaza and give up on the prophecy that Samson will be great.  Dalila and Satan are structured with this same deceptive insistence to get what they want at any cost and in any rhetorical guise.  Samson yells, albeit oxymoronically, “My wife, My traitress!  Let her not come to me,” (725) she comes anyway, disrespecting boundaries.  For Dalila, her insistence to see Samson is fueled by conjugal desire which “prevailing over fear and timorous doubt, hath led me on, desirous to behold once more thy face …” (739-40).  Dalila wants to see Samson because of sexual desire but it is not because she really is afraid of rejection or anything; she is not as meek as that.  She wants fame is jealous of Samson’s fame – she is timorous of the prophecy and fears she will end up an unknown Philistine.  Like Satan, Dalila speaks in half-truths and justifies her insistence with false alloy.  She seems to seek forgiveness from Samson but Samson is loath to grant her such pleasure.  Dalila comes professing love and justification for her actions, and like Manoah, tells him, “… I may fetch thee from forth this loathsome prison-house, to abide with me …” (921-22).  Like Satan, Dalila is tempting Samson out of the desert of Gaza.  But also like Satan, Dalila will not win.  Samson dismisses her insistent flattery and says, “This jail I count the house of liberty to thine, whose doors my feet shall never enter.” (949-50).  When she approaches him to touch his hand Samson tells her to go away and find fame in her “hastened widowhood.”
    It is also interesting how others perceive Samson and Christ.  They do not respect their insistence to wait and serve God.  People wonder where Jesus has gone to for such a long time; why is he not here?  They think Jesus has deserted him, like the way Mary, his mother and Joseph felt when he was lost in the Temple, waiting on the sacred teachers in the Temple.  The crowd in Samson Agonistes is adverse to Samson too, stupid in their perception of why Samson will not act.  So it is not only an inner struggle of adversity of waiting pinned against acting, but also the social awareness and perception of the people around both Jesus and Samson and how they are complicit in the temptation to give up on God’s mandate.  Mary says of her son, “Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, little suspicious to any king.”  In other words, it seems like she is saying, how can this guy be a king – he does not have the public attitude, the active and moving force of a king.  It is like the crowds in Samson Agonistes when they say, “Can this be he, that heroic, that renowned, irresistible Samson” (124-26) who killed thousands of Philistines with the jaw of an ass?  Can this be he, who is now “in slavish habit, ill fitted weeds o’er worn and spoiled” (122-23)?  But Mary does wait for her son, “But I to wait with patience am inured” (PR 1.102) like Samson in that she does not understand God’s law, yet still she waits in patience.
    But what is the end result in the adversarial conflict in both poems?  How does waiting and action resolve itself?  Waiting and serving turn out well for Jesus.  He confounds Satan with his virtuous patience and steadfastness.  Satan is confounded.  Milton uses a long epic simile to describe Satan’s fall that is really cool.  We hear of Samson’s triumph from a messenger who tells us that Samson implodes the temple walls in on himself and is crushed to death by the pillars.  In a weird way, he becomes a hero.  But it is still sad.  Samson’s waiting is tinged with self-doubt and shame; he more than anyone in either of the poem comes closest to the struggle with good and evil, patience and waiting that Milton sought in his interpretation of Christian paradox.  In this way, Samson Agonistes is a very difficult poem but the most Miltonic of the two. Paradise Regained tidies up the problem quite nicely with Satan on his knees and Jesus triumphant.  My head hurts from all this thinking.  I think I am going to post now.

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