Tag Archives: bleeding Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Day 145: or what

Sometimes I wonder if the movies that permeated my consciousness as a child determined my later research interests. Take Groundhog Day. I watched it the other week with the kids and realized that it’s basically a late 20th-century version of Leibniz’s parable about Sextus Tarquinius. Both can be filed under the category: stories about assholes who are momentarily plucked out of the stream of existence so they may contemplate if they wish to renew their commitment to assholery. The fact that Phil Connors (Bill Murray’s character) chooses, eventually, to be good while Sextus defiantly refuses isn’t the only difference between the two narratives. In Leibniz’s tale the possible world that is actualized is one in which Sextus’s individual interests and the world’s fail to align: Sextus meets a grizzly end but his demise is also the catalyst for the founding of the Roman republic. In Groundhog Day the interests of the individual and the world line up: indeed, the learning curve the movie traces is Phil Connors’ gradual, very gradual discovery that dedicating himself to fulfilling the interests of other people is also the route, the only route, to his own happiness.

Before we watched the movie, I was sitting on the sofa and the younger sidled up to me, eyeing my belly critically.

“Are you going to have a baby, or what?”

I answered carefully. “No. No, I am not going to have a baby.”

Later that night, after the movie, when I was going to bed, I put on my Leibniz T-shirt, as you do (it has a portrait of Leibniz on it—I’ve been told it looks like me, truth be told, which is not a terribly flattering comparison—and underneath it reads, “In another world it would be worse”), and I wondered about that other world, the world the younger the imagined, in which she would be the middler.

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Grammatically, when we express ideas about possibility, we use modal verbs like must, shall, will, etc.

This week, it being February, I had to teach “Frost at Midnight.” Duck-rabbit, I said sternly to myself, you shall. Not. Cry.

(I more or less pulled it off.)

“You shall not cry” is an example of something called “commissive modality” (I only learned this concept today.) It refers to a kind of modal statement in which the speaker indicates a strong commitment to ensuring the described event comes to pass (in this example, not crying). In English such statements usually use the modal verb “shall.”

There is something, I reflected today, especially poignant about second person commissive modality –i.e. statements in which shall is used in the second person, like “you shall not cry.” Indeed, it’s precisely when reading those lines when “Frost at Midnight”’s speaker uses shall (and it’s always in the second person, because he’s addressing his infant son) that my voice breaks:

“My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes!

“But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze”

“he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask”

“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee”

“Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

Why is shall used in the second person poignant? I think it’s because of the other contexts in which we more usually encounter “shall,” which are quite specific.

Shall is the language of the law, whether divine and laid out in scripture (“Thou shalt not …” in the King James Bible or, to go back to Leibniz and his fable, “If you will renounce Rome, the Parcae shall spin for you different fates, you shall become wise, you shall be happy,” as Jupiter says to Sextus) or secular and expressed in legal documents, where it’s normally used in the third person (“the parties shall share joint legal custody”). The most prominent use of second person shall that I can think of other than in scripture is in fairy tales, where it’s used by fairies good and bad. “You shall go to the ball!” proclaims Cinderella’s fairy godmother. [1]

In the Ladybird book version of Cinderella I read as a child (the one with the three balls and, most importantly, the THREE DRESSES), in response to Cinderella expressing her wish to attend the ball the fairy godmother says, “And so you shall, my dear.”

Or consider these lines, uttered by the bad fairy in the Ladybird book version of Sleeping Beauty:

“When the King’s daughter is fifteen years old, she shall prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead.”

But then the good fairy modifies the bad fairy’s curse: “‘The Princess will prick herself with a spindle,’ went on the twelfth fairy, ‘but she shall not die. She will fall into a deep sleep that will last for a hundred years.’” [2]

When fairies or gods use shall in the second person, it’s not poignant because their supernatural authority underwrites their decrees ; the difference is when mere humans use “shall.” Such statements become poignant because of the auditor or reader’s understanding that the speaker can’t actually guarantee that the events they so confidently decree will necessarily come to pass. When an ordinary human uses “shall” in the second person, the very use of that verb bespeaks the individual’s powerlessness and their resultant desire to take on the authority of a god or fairy who might actually make the desired event so merely by uttering the decree.

Take Tennyson’s poem “The Death of the Old Year”: the first two stanzas end with second-person shall statements; “You came to us so readily, / You lived with us so steadily, / Old year you shall not die.” And then: “So long you have been with us, / Such joy as you have seen with us, / Old year, you shall not go.” But the point, as the poem makes clear, is that the speaker has no agency to stop the year from turning. The “shall” statements are a desperate bid to ward off the inevitability of death.

All of this is a very long way of explaining why “and therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee” makes me cry; because would that all our benedictions for our babies were also promises.

Notes

[1] I looked but couldn’t figure out where this particular, now iconic expression of the fairy godmother’s promise to Cinderella derives from. Disney???

[2] I stumbled on an amazing subgenre of YouTube video while searching for these references: videos of actual Ladybird books being flipped through silently, sometimes with hands visibly turning the pages, other times not.

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Day 111: Whatever happened to you?

“Whatever happened to you?”

How, in any context, could that not be a grossly insulting question to pose to someone?

Let me tell you the context in which it was posed to me.

Here’s the back story. It was the classic boy meets girl scenario. You know: girl messages boy about Duran Duran online; boy (who didn’t, according to him, graduate high school, and who does not know at this point that I am a literature professor) asks girl, apropos of nothing, “did you read the Table Talk?”; girl swoons.

Pretty standard stuff.

But then, like many fellows I meet online, he wanted to meet either RIGHT NOW or else, whenever he next felt like meeting RIGHT NOW, and I found that …. inconvenient. So we stopped messaging.

That was exactly three months ago. And then today, there’s a little ping, and the message comes up:

Whatever happened to you?

Whatever happened to you?

 We were just reading Graham Harman in my critique class, and he was talking about what Quentin Meillassoux dubs “correlationism”: the Kantian idea that “we cannot think of world without humans nor of humans without world, but only of a primordial correlation between the two.”

So, my theory is that this dude subscribes to a version of correlationism, but in his version, he can’t think about me without iMessage or iMessage without me, but only of a primordial correlation between the two. I have not texted him in 3 months: ergo, something has happened to me. I have perhaps died, tragically. Or perhaps I have ascended onto a different plane.

Or maybe he thinks of me as akin to Schrödinger’s cat: he is magnanimously initiating this interaction in order to save me from the indignity of being simultaneously dead and alive in a quantum superposition.

Whatever happened to you?

It’s the question you ask innocently enough in the third person of a washed-up child star (cf. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). In the second person the tone is quite different. The addition of “ever” to “what” has the effect of suggesting the speaker’s befuddlement or incredulity (“what the hell!”), lending the question an accusatory, aghast, or pitying inflection. This is especially intensified because “happened to” has an unambiguously negative connotation, as if it is a synonym for “tragically befell.”

So, for example, say you see someone looking their usual self and then you see them a bit later all dressed up and looking really pretty. You would not say “whatever happened to you?” would you?

On the other hand, say you see someone looking their usual self and then you see them a bit later all covered in mud and looking really disheveled. I think it’s plausible (though it doesn’t sound quite idiomatically natural to my ear) that you would exclaim “whatever happened to you?!”

I haven’t replied to his text and I wish I could think of a really great come back: the only idea I have is “I BID YOU GOOD DAY SIR,” but I’m not sure the dignity, righteous indignation and steeliness with which I would utter that line would come across via text. (See this episode of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist 20:37 to 21:25 for an excellent demonstration of what my affect would be while uttering this line).

I know that silence is the best and most dignified response and that, as Aziz Ansari’s dating manual has informed me, “The person who receives the last message in a convo WINS!”; but I am extremely poor at being stonily silent, which is why I invariably lose this game.

Suggestions welcome!

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Day 110: Alright, love

This is not a post about being sad! I am still sad, but this is about something different, though perhaps subtly so: it is about tears.

Are there certain stimuli that invariably make you cry? Fill in the blank: “As sloths are to Kristen Bell, —— are to me.”

Here are my top four instant eye-wetters:

  • Musical boxes that play ballet music with a ballerina that twirls round and around
  • David Lean’s Dr Zhivago
  • (Ever since I gave birth to the elder), Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
  • Someone (doesn’t much matter who; what matters more is the tone) addressing me in a sincerely sympathetic tone as “sweetheart,” “love,” “honey,” or similar endearment.

So, let me tell you, the last week has been quite a week for my poor nerves!

First of all, the other morning the younger dug out this old musical box that someone gave her. It’s red velvet lined jewelry box with a little ballerina who goes around and around, and when you wind the key, it plays the theme from Dr. Zhivago. 

“Do you guys find that music really sad, or is it just me?” I asked.

“It’s just you, Mom,” said the elder.

I sighed and resigned myself to several sustained minutes during which “Lara’s theme” played in increasingly halting tinny notes, all the more poignant as the pace gradually slowed.

The week was just getting started.

Secondly, Em called me “sweetheart” not once but twice in one week. Once in a text, once on facebook. Result: instantaneous tears.

Thirdly, I had to teach “Frost at Midnight” yesterday. Now, at my advanced age, I have by now lectured on this poem many times, and so I’ve developed a strategy:

1) Never read out loud the whole thing in lecture. I did it once and learned the hard way that my voice will crack in the final stanza.

2) Talk fast and blink faster.

3) Have plenty of silly Coleridge anecdotes in your back-pocket.

Phew.

I get my sentimentalism from my Dad, I’m pretty sure.

I have a lot of memories of watching television with my Dad. My Dad, despite having a strong aversion to American culture on principle (no, not because he was a Muslim; because he was a socialist), adored American television. Bonanza; Cagney & Lacey; The A-Team: he loved them all. But, strangest of all, it somehow became a Sunday morning ritual when I was in my teens that he and I would watch The Waltons on Channel Four together.

It was a little ironic. These were rough years during which my father and I argued a lot. But we came together to watch a television show that was a sentimental celebration of familial love, as epitomized, above all, by the final scene of every episode in which the family members bade each other goodnight.

Mum was completely baffled by our devotion to the show.

“Ugh …. It’s so… sentimental,” she would say, looking at us lying on the sofa with undisguised disgust.

My brother, as I recall, was also duly appalled by the show’s irredeemable naffness.

But we were undeterred. My Dad and I were committed, deeply committed, to lying on the sofa late on a Sunday morning and watching The Waltons week in week out.

The episode would frequently end with my Dad wiping his eyes and shaking his head sheepishly; and when I would roll my eyes, he would say, referring to John-Boy Walton and his latest trials and heartaches: “I just …. I just really like that boy.”

The night my Dad died, after my brother and I had been performing CPR for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, and I had called the ambulance and called them again and called them again, and explained that I thought my Dad was dying, and they still didn’t come, I finally ran out into the street; I didn’t know what else to do.

I was wearing my knickers and a T-shirt (I still remember that shirt; it had leaf prints on it; my Mum had bought it for me at the annual fair for International Social Service, where she worked, and I wore it to sleep in); my legs and feet were bare. It was September and after midnight. The streets were quiet and deserted.

I stood on the corner of Dalmeny Road and Tufnell Park Road for just a few seconds looking in vain for the ambulance. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere I saw a man, a stranger, walking towards me. Suddenly realizing that I was alone, half naked, on the street corner, I instinctively shrank bank in fear. He stopped immediately in his tracks and raised his hands as if to say, “I’ll back away if you want”; it was a gesture of openness and kindness.

“Are you alright, love?” he asked, and then seeing my fear, he added, with such tenderness, “I’m not gonna hurt you, love, are you alright?”

Then, and only then, I started to cry.

 

 

 

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Day 104: or maybe I just need a cat

Can you chase loneliness away? Is it wrong to try? If I’m at home in the evening, whether by myself or with the children, I usually cry for some portion of the evening. I feel less sad if I’m out of the house. I told Dr. F recently that I felt fine as long as I didn’t go home. She gave me a long searching look when I said that.

I understood why; therapists want you to feel your feelings, not run away from them. But what if it’s not a feeling, per se; what if it is simply a condition? I was lonely when I was married and now I’m lonely living alone; maybe I was mistaken that my loneliness was situational; maybe I’m just a lonely creature; perhaps we all are.

I was reminded tonight, of a text exchange with a man I went out with, just once, not so long ago. He was a kind, gentle person. He also had two children. He was also separated from his former partner. We liked each other well enough but perhaps not quite well enough. A few days after our date I texted him to ask how his weekend had been; he answered lightly (seeing Star Wars, of course!) and enquired politely in return how mine was. For some reason I admitted that I’d spent most of it alone, and that I was lonely. What do you say when a relative stranger confesses that? I thought he’d say something banal like, “it gets better with time.” Instead what he texted back to me was, “I understand the loneliness. It never really seems to leave.”

Both his candor and his phrasing moved me. People leave; and people are left; but loneliness “never really seems to leave.” Do we, the lonely, take strange comfort in that? Is that, in fact, why it sticks around? Like a vampire, once you’ve invited it in, does loneliness stay for good? Or, no, this is a much better comparison, does loneliness stay for good like bleeding Samuel Taylor Coleridge? That rascal, he wrote in April 1816 that he was going to pass “a month at Highgate” at James Gillman’s house in order to convalesce from his laudanum addiction. And then he stayed for eighteen bloody years! Just lolling around on the sofa and dictating the Table Talk to his bleeding amanuensis! Eighteen bloody years. Until he died. He was just the worst.

All right, now I don’t remember where I was going with that, but I feel much better.

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