Shirley Jackson's taut 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House opens with the words "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The collective dream visions of the four figures who commit themselves to spending a part of a summer at the titular manse range from fireside banter about their imagined lives as a courtesan or a bullfighter to an image of a blood-drenched bedroom; the reader spends most of her time at the elbow of Eleanor Vance who has spent most of her adult life "caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking."
Eleanor's adolescent experience with a poltergeist who had showered her family's house with stones for three days puts her on the radar of the anthropologist who seeks to scientifically document supernatural presences in the house; at Hill House she finds that she has the ability to make up an entirely new life for herself by weaving together stray images and overheard bits of conversation -- a glimpse of two lions standing guard outside a house she passes in the car she has surreptitiously taken, a mother's explanation to a disinterested waitress about her daughter's demand for a cup full of stars -- and finds herself strangely at home in a place where she finds herself literally as well as figuratively in the grip of unseen and restless forces.
One way to read The Haunting of Hill House is as an allegory for the pleasures and perils of wholly giving one's self over to one's imagination: Eleanor Vance could be an eccentric aunt of Alexandra, the central figure in Audrey Niffenegger's graphic narrative The Night Bookmobile who comes across a Winnebago on a deserted Chicago street in the wee hours of the morning as she walks off her anger following a lovers' spat; Alexandra discovers that the RV is a bookmobile that contains everything that she has ever read from Pat the Bunny and Charlotte's Web to cereal boxes and Gravity's Rainbow (which has text only on the first 57 pages, since that is as far as Alexandra was able to get through Pynchon's novel). At dawn, closing time for The Night Bookmobile, the Librarian ushers Alexandra out of the Winnebago and she returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, finding him skeptical about her story of The Night Bookmobile, she asks the reader:
"Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -- trying to read -- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love...It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly."
Alexandra's second encounter with The Night Bookmobile kindles a desire to be a Librarian; told that no positions are available at The Library but that she could become a regular librarian, she goes to library school and rises through the stacks of the Chicago public library system and is eventually named the director of one of its branches on the day of her third encounter with The Night Bookmobile; her desire to spend all her time in that realm leads her to suicide, after which she wakes to discover herself in her favorite dress and in her most comfortable shoes in The Central Reading Room of The Library, where her own Librarian congratulates her on having been hired and where she is handed a copy of Goodnight Moon, the inaugural book in the library of her own patron. Alexandra's initial elation is deflated a bit when she discovers that her own library has been deaccessioned, since "only living people can be Readers."
Alexandra's ambivalence over her new position is counterbalanced by the final frame of the book that shows her leaning comfortably against the doorway frame of the Airstream trailer that houses her patron's collection; in The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's determination to stay in Hill House's realm despite her compatriots' decision to send her back to her drear domestic life sends her careening down the driveway of the house on a straight shot to a large tree that marks the crash site of the house's first mistress who died before ever reaching the front the door. Jackson delivers the reader from the grip of the narrative into a moment of lyric time with the line "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" Both stories seem to suggest that in wholly giving one's self over to the imaginative realm, one loses one's traction in one's waking world that, paradoxically, the very ground of one's dreams, yet The Haunting of Hill House suggests that Eleanor's real downfall comes when she began to believe that her imagination could shift the terms of her everyday world, a prospect that frightens her companions more than the elusive beasts and invisible intruders of the house itself, and which compel them to cast her out of their small circle. As the others go back to the comforts and disappointments of their public and private lives, Eleanor's sharp insights and fully realized sensory experiences continue to haunt even when the book is placed securely back on the shelf -- the kind of afterlife that might in fact be actively sought by most Readers.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
From Batman to Atropos
In "Night on Earth," a 2003 issue of Planetary, an occasional serial written by Warren Ellis for DC Comics and (most often) illustrated by John Cassaday, the series' three main characters who function as a kind of archeological team go to Gotham City to track down John Black, a young man suspected of perpetrating some very gruesome deaths in the city. The organizing conceit of this issue is that in this particular universe, Batman doesn't exist, but the man the Planetary team is tracking has been subjected to insidious experiments that have left him with the power, and pain of cycling through alternate universes, so when the team finds Black he has something akin to an epileptic seizure and cycles everyone into a parallel reality, one in which the caped crusader does in fact exist.
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Circles
This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina for an Advent retreat organized by four women -- Elaine, Joyce, Kate, and Lydia -- whom I have the privilege and pleasure to know through a community called Word and World, a group of activists who are variously and manifoldly artists, musicians, pastors, teachers, dancers, cooks, care-givers, fundraisers, singers, masseuses, students, weavers, farmers, organizers, poets, and travelers who cast their work from a faith-based perspective.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
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