Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 35 of 263 · 20 per page

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  [T]he final, essential moment, and the climax of this vast transformation of values, of the whole Iliad , is the lamentation of the dead Hektor. However Homer may have cooled down the ritual laments of women, which appear in a wilder form a little earlier in the conclusion, it remains true that it was by adapting women’s poetry at the climax, and by accepting women’s views, that he gave the Iliad its extraordinary power. The lamentation of Hektor is not a stray incident, nor a merely formal closure” (13). Female lament questions the morality of male heroism and of many other male characteristics and institutions as well. At the moment I look at lament in preparation for some very specific questions. They are the questions to be seen later in Helmut Koester’s claim that “the different versions of the passion narrative in the gospel literature” derive from “the oral performances of the story in the ritual celebrations, ever enriched by new references to the scriptures of Israel” (1995:18). They were seen already in the quotations from Marianne Sawicki and Kathleen Corley. These, then, are the questions: Are the different versions of the passion-resurrection in our gospels but the written accounts of oral multiforms? Are they inscribed from divergent traditions of female lament, especially from the narrative or biographical content of such mourning rituals? How, in other words, do female lament and the passion-resurrection tradition relate to one another? In preparation for answering those questions in the next and final sections, I look here at actual oral multiforms of female laments. It is impossible to prove or disprove claims of oral traditions that are completely lost. But if one has some written records of a tradition, there may be sufficient evidence to prove oral multiforms at base. That was seen for the oral and epic poetry of male performances at the start of this book. It can now be seen for the oral and lyric poetry of female laments in what follows. When we read such poetry today in books , we recognize another world staring us in the face from behind the written page. This is what oral multiforms look like. THE LAMENT OF CHRYSA KALLIAKATI FOR HER MOTHER Anna Caraveli-Chaves studied female lament poetry in “Dzermiathes … a large village, situated on the Lassithi plateau of the island of Crete, and the capital of the Lassithi province” where “moirologia (laments)—like other forms of ritual poetry—are rapidly becoming extinct. The present generation of lament poets is almost certainly the last.” Against them stand male attitudes, “the underlying fear of laments as magic songs, songs which open up perilous channels of communication between the living and the dead,” and modern standards and values. Her work is superbly evocative of the social context of those laments for “the women of the ‘patriarchal’ Greek village society … as strategies of survival” (1980:130, 131). In what follows I focus for my own present purpose on one somewhat minor aspect of her study.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The lament was antiphonally performed between Kalliopi and Poulos’s mother at the graveside. Later Kalliopi married another man, whom she also outlived. The first two versions of the antiphonal lament are recorded from female relatives of her late husband; the third is from Kalliopi herself, “an elderly widow now, who has been living in Athens (earlier in Piraeus) for decades” (130–137): From a First Relative From a Second Relative From Kalliopi herself Poulos’s mother speaks: Poulos’s mother speaks: Poulos’s mother speaks: Ah, my sweet, golden crown, didn’t I come up to Dri on Easter Day with the big bread rolls and the red eggs, with a silk dress and the fat goat? How can I part from you icon of Christ? Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate from you? To lose bride and groom and all the in-laws? Wasn’t I coming Easter and Easter day to bring the fat lamb? Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate myself from you? I was proud of you, to come to my household as a bride gave me great honor. Kalliopi responds: Kalliopi responds: Kalliopi responds: Listen, my sweet mother, don’t cry for your sweet, little crown cry for the professor for you have no other child. For I will get married, another professor I will find. For I, on my part, have no need of anything, my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself. I, on my part, don’t mourn him as my husband nor as my fiancé, I only mourn him as a brother for we studied together over there in Areopoli. Stop, my sweet mother, you melt my heart. Me, what kind of good do I bring you that you are warmly receiving me? Such good [let it go] to the sea and to the deepest waters. I, on my part, have no need of anything, for I am well in my household, the household of my father, for my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, a teacher I am myself. I beg your pardon, please, I am not mourning a fiancé, but a neighbor and covillager, an only child. I will mourn him today, your only cherished son, I am not mourning a fiancé, for I hardly came to know him one month only. He passed from Dri as if an itinerant. Generous Poulo_____, my poor one, won’t you change your mind, and not for my sake, I am well in my household, queen I am and kira in the king’s palaces, my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself. Seremetakis comments that “the women of her present affinal clan, in recounting the 1932 event, play down the high status of the dead fiancé’s clan and the depth of Kalliopi’s mourning” (1991:144).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  beloved spinner of the yarn and twister of the cloth. Ah mother, keeper of the home, mother, weaver and spinner Eh mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery even the night sky itself was woven in your loom. you knew how to embroider the sky with in all its stars. I hope it is not disrespectful to admit that I prefer CK’s terminal location but AP’s doubled rendition of those passionately accurate lines. A final instance shows the “mourner’s plight” motif. This gets only lines 13–14 in AP but lines 27–34 in CK. The difference, however, is far greater than two against eight lines. There are no parallels to any of lines 27–40 from CK in the AP version. It is a long and stern reproach to the Holy Trinity, all the saints, and the miraculous Virgin Mary of Tinos Island. She vowed offerings; they did nothing. CK will go to church next Sunday (but only?) to remember her mother bringing her to communion long ago—that is, only “to see my mother.” Those lines make up one-third of the CK version. Does AP omit them because she is less religious or more religious than her mother? Less religious and therefore uninterested in them? More religious and therefore embarrassed by them? The omission, in any case, is hardly a vagary of memory. It is part of the standard censorship of oral repetition. THE LAMENT OF KALLIOPI FOR POULOS This second example comes from the other aside of the Cretan Sea, where three fingers point southward from the Greek Peloponnese into the Mediterranean. The middle finger is spined by the Taygetos Mountains and flanked by the Ionian Sea’s Messenian Gulf to the west and the Aegean Sea’s Laconian Gulf to the east. The southernmost part, past Outer Mani and Lower Mani, is Inner Mani. At its tip is Cape Tenaron, traditional entranceway into Hades. The female dirges of the Inner Mani are, in Fermor’s words, “entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece, The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables” (57–58). Constantina-Nadia Seremetakis is interested in “the particular optic of Inner Mani” against the background of “recent anthropological literature that pluralizes the concept and tangible presence of power by identifying strategies of resistance that emerge and subsist in the margins” (1991:12). I have, as in the previous case, a far more limited focus at the moment. It is in oral multiforms, in the three different versions she gives of the lament for “the premature death, in 1932, of a young man [Poulos] who was engaged to be married to Kalliopi, a woman from a high-status clan. The deceased man was a schoolteacher, as was his fiancée. Both had studied in urban centers, and he died of an urban disease, tuberculosis, before the marriage could occur” (130).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  I knew nothing of your murder Till your horse came to the stable With the reins beneath her trailing, And your heart’s blood on her shoulders Staining the tooled saddle Where you used to sit and stand. My first leap reached the threshold, My second reached the gateway, My third leap reached the saddle. I struck my hands together And I made the bay horse gallop As fast as I was able, Till I found you dead before me Beside a little furze-bush. Without Pope or bishop, Without priest or cleric To read the death-psalms for you, But a spent old woman only Who spread her cloak to shroud you— Your heart’s blood was still flowing; I did not stay to wipe it But filled my hands and drank it. I am primarily interested here in narrative detail and biographical content in traditional lament poetry, and their relationship to the passion-resurrection tradition. But those stanzas draw attention to another and even more widespread aspect of female ritual mourning. There in stanza VIII and again later in stanza XXVII Eileen laments that Arthur had no official religious ministers to attend his death. But that is all there is to it. Nothing else in the poem speaks of Roman Catholicism or even general Christianity. There is nothing about the resurrection of the dead or about reunion in heaven. Here, in fact, is how the poem ends in stanza XXXVI (35): All you women out there weeping, Wait a little longer; We’ll drink to Art son of Connor And the souls of all the dead, Before he enters the school— Not learning wisdom or music But weighed down by earth and stones. That is absolutely characteristic of ritual lament from female poets. It is not that they resist or oppose official, male religion. That would be to give that alternative too much attention or relevance. They ignore it; they bypass it; they operate on a level far more physical and primitive and profound. I have noticed that again and again in reading those traditional lament poems, though I have never heard a living lament, even in Ireland. But those who have heard them—in Greece, for example, as bodies were being exhumed from grave to charnel house—often interpret them quite differently. Patrick Leigh Fermor takes that dialectic of female lament and male religion as a simple syncretism: “There is, in practice, little belief in a conventional after-life and the rewards and sanctions of Christian dogma. In spite of the orthodox formulae of the priest at the graveside it is not for a Christian eternity, for a paradise above the sky, that the dead are setting out, but the Underworld, the shadowy house of Hades and the dread regions of Charon; and Charon has been promoted from the rank of ferryman of the dead to that of Death himself, a dire equestrian sword-wielder…. There is no clash in the Greek mind between these two allegiances, but a harmonious unchallenged syncretism” (54).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But there is surely something far more subversive at work in that dialectic. It is far more subversive because, as in the epigraph to this chapter, it is a dialectic between “tears” and “ideas,” and somewhere deep down inside us we wonder if the “tears” have it right over the “ideas.” Anna Caraveli sees it not as serene syncretism but as sharp protest: “Implicitly, in terms of subject matter alone, laments comprise a ‘protest’ against the official church and the Christian doctrine of death. The very notion of death expressed in laments is contrary to the Christian views of a rewarding afterlife for the pious. The Hades of the laments is marked by darkness and despair, and it retains its pagan name. Christian attitudes toward death preach patience, acceptance, and perseverance. Laments express despair, fear, and anger toward death and the deceased” (184). They protest, in fact, not just against the injustice of death over life but the injustice of male over female. That is why Gail Holst-Warhaft calls them “dangerous voices” and why male institutions, from city to state and from nation to church, have tried to restrain and control them. And now that the “traditional women’s lament has been almost eliminated from the modern western world,” we are left, as she says, “without a language to express not only the grief but the rage of the living in the face of death” (6, 11). Where does that rage go? Multiforms of Mourning Like epic songs, another ancient oral tradition, the laments rely upon formulaic verse structure and make use of epithets, patterns of repetition, metaphoric images, and various other poetic structures, drawn from a common stock. These formal elements serve to enrich the tradition but also function as memory aides and devices to serve in the combining of familiar with new phrases and melodies that constitutes the process of improvisation. Janice Carole Jarrett, The Song of Lament , pp. 139–140 Laments, in the present context, are not inarticulate cries of mourning, no matter how powerful, magical, or evocative such may be. They are formal, ritual, and traditional compositions that may, of course, be just as powerful, magical, or evocative as that other mode of mourning. They are, in fact, the oral, female, and lyric poetry whose parallel is the oral, male, epic poetry seen earlier in this book. Both genres span thousands of years, and they can both be seen together in Homer’s Iliad . That epic starts with the anger of Achilles but ends with the burial of Hector. In the words of Peter Levi, “Andromache wails in words, briefly, eloquently and personally: Hecuba follows more briefly, then, Helen, that is first the widow, then the mother, then the sister-in-law. Hektor’s burial follows at once, and the Iliad is over…. Homer has utterly altered the narrative of war to a tragic and compassionate poetry on as vast a moral scale as War and Peace….

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Jerusalem itself … is also not out of the question,” dated it “circa the year 200 C.E. ,” and described it as having “some sort of direct genetic relationship to earliest Jewish Christianity,” though he found it “highly unlikely that [it] would have demanded circumcision of the gentile believers” (159, 164–166). Both of those scholars gave summaries of previous research at the start of their books, but Jones had already published a far more exhaustive review in 1982. For that review and both their studies, I am deeply grateful, since I need only a very short section of the Pseudo-Clementines and am glad to avoid getting lost forever in either its primary texts or its secondary literature. Recognitions 1.33–71 has three sections. The first section (in 1.33–44) has a history of salvation from Abraham up to the first years of the earliest Jerusalem community. It describes a split between Jewish people and Jewish authorities after the death signs of Jesus—a split that, in this account, continues to widen. The Christian Jews gain so many converts that the priests challenge the Twelve Apostles and James to debates in the Temple. The second section (in 1.55–69) has the Christian Jews so prevail in the seven-day debate that “all the people and the high priest” are ready for baptism in 1.69:8. Then comes disaster. The final section (in 1.70–71) has Paul, appearing anonymously as “a certain hostile man,” rush into the Temple, attack the imminent conversion, cause a riotous massacre, and personally kill James himself. Is that history? Of course not. Is that anti-Jewish? Of course not. It is, however, rather viciously anti-Pauline. It combines the persecution by Paul in the early 30s with the death of James in the early 60s. It claims that Paul is to blame for all Jews not becoming Christian Jews. The reason is Paul’s theological claim that neither Christian Jews nor Christian pagans should observe the ritual law of Judaism—for example, circumcision for males or kosher practices for all. That theology is here personified in his person; and that person, not just that theology, is blamed for the death of James and the failure of Christian Judaism! That is a counter-theology that came from the earliest Jerusalem church and developed after that community’s flight to Pella in Transjordan and the destruction of the Temple itself in 70 C.E. It is possible, in other words, to be early, to be Christian Jewish, and to be very anti-Pauline. My present focus is on Recognitions 1.41–43’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion. I remind you that it is the connection of this with the Cross Gospel in the Gospel of Peter and with the earliest Christian Jewish community in Jerusalem that is at stake in all of this. Van Voorst sees that connection with the Gospel of Peter , but Jones does not. So, in what follows, I use the former’s rather than the latter’s translation of Recognitions 1.33–71.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It seems to me that Kalliopi was already doing that in her own lament as she disengaged herself from her dead fiancé and announced her present status and future plans for all to hear. My point, however, is that those three oral versions of the same lament show exactly the similarities and differences one would expect in such oral multiforms. Anthropology, History, Archeology Knowledge of the Risen Lord cannot be theoretical, detached, and visual. The eyes do not connect with Jesus, apart from practices addressing hunger and injustice. The tradition of resurrection appearances was not originally intended to stand apart from a community that fed the hungry and observed the laws of justice…. The women at the tomb were observing the customs of mourning. They were weeping for Jesus. Their eyes were full of tears when the realization hit them that Jesus was not in the grave. For the poor, for widows, for a colonized nation, the eyes are the organs that register pain. The Marys were using their eyes in that graveyard, but not like Greeks. They “saw” Jesus through tears…. Sixty years afterward, the churches had four sanitized little stories about a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise. But it wasn’t like that when it happened. Grief may also be a precondition for resurrection, and tears for permitting the eyes to see. Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord , pp. 92–93 In this last chapter I bring together the various strands of Part X, and I do so in a way reflective of this book’s overall method: first context , then text in conjunction with it. The context is built up from cross-cultural anthropology through Judeo-Roman history into early Roman archeology in the Jewish homeland. Here is that full context. ANTHROPOLOGY The cross-cultural anthropological basis of this synthesis is that preceding section on the narrational and biographical component in the traditional oral poetry of female ritual lament. I will not repeat it here even in summary but simply emphasize two of its aspects: women lament; men complain. I have a photo in mind that can serve as symbol of that engendered interaction. Loring Danforth’s book on death rituals in rural Greece is a commentary on the powerful photos of Alexander Tsiaras that conclude it. Plate 30 shows a customary exhumation, in which the bones are taken from their individual grave to a communal charnel house just before the fifth anniversary of burial. In this case, the diggers have worked down through packed earth and broken wood to find, first, the skull. The picture shows fifteen women around the open grave. In their center is Matinio, holding the skull in her hands. She and the skull look straight out of the photo at the photographer and the viewer. This is the caption: “Matinio has just lifted the skull from the grave and turned abruptly toward Alexander Tsiaras. She asked him if he wanted to photograph her holding the skull in her hands.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Look at both those boys, Lecia says, Pete Karr times two. He’s the only person who ever really loved me. What are we? I say. Mother shrugs. The only man, I mean. I miss him like crazy. He did adore you, I say. He felt sorry for me, she says, but he stood by, thick or thin. She runs a hand over her spiky hair, asking, Does this haircut look like feathers? In the library the next day, Mother’s bridge club marches in—a troop of ladies bearing into the small room trays of baked goods big as coffee tables. The day unfolds like that old TV show This Is Your Life, where producers conspire to drag before you the past’s every character. In aging form, they parade. There’s the doctor who examined me the night Mother went to the hospital; my first-grade teacher; the principal who told me I’d be no more than a common prostitute. John Cleary, the first boy I ever kissed, is there with his daughters. My friend Clarice from grade school, Meredith from high school (in lawyer’s garb and big as a linebacker), Doonie with his whole tribe. There’s the judge Mother charmed into freeing me from jail—nearly a hundred, he is, his liver-spotted hand still clutching Mother’s, and he still gazes at her like she’s a jam-stuffed biscuit. The druggist, the guy who ran the lumberyard, girls who snubbed me at the skating rink, girls who didn’t. I feel every school photo I ever took pass over my face to melt into the forty-year-old I am now. Seen by so many pairs of old eyes, I become my every self. Then above the crowd, a disembodied head comes gliding as if carried on a pole. From the corner of my eye, I catch the silhouette, and my head whips to track it. The profile vanishes behind a pillar. The room around me clicks off as the face eases back into view—black-haired with snow at the temples. I stand so fast, the chair I’m in tips over. The crowd parts, and the eras collapse into each other. All the notches on the time line are stripped off like thorns. It’s Daddy approaching me like a smiling phantom. Though it’s not Daddy, of course, but my cousin Thomas, unseen since our grandpa’s funeral in sixth grade, wearing the exact face Daddy had at fifty, and Lecia must think so, too, since she’s rushed to his side, hand over her mouth. Maybe that day’s bounty bumped my sales up, plus Lecia’s inflicting copies on virtually everybody she knew—clients, friends, cleaning people. Out of the trunk of her car, she hawks them like a hot dog vendor (I swear), and being as she could sell snow to an Eskimo, she reorders often. In any bookstore, she remerchandises so that my book’s in front.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  And that is how the Iliad ends: with the lament of Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen, the three women closest to Hector; with funeral pyre, golden ossuary, and deep, hollow grave; and with, in the poem’s last lines, “a splendid feast in Hector’s honor.” But where Homer’s Iliad ends, Virgil’s Aeneid begins. Julius Caesar was assassinated in March of 44 because aristocratic republicans thought he planned autocracy. Octavius, his nineteen-year-old adopted son and legal heir, deified Caesar in January of 42, defeated Antony and Cleopatra in September of 31, and was declared Augustus in January of 27 B.C.E. Octavius was also Peacemaker, Benefactor, Savior, and Son of God. He was even Lord of time itself, so that his birthday on September 23 would become New Year’s Day in the Roman province of Asia Minor, because, in the words of that calendrical decree (Danker 217), “the birthday of our god signalled the beginning of good news (euaggelion) for the world because of him.” That, however, was thirty years after the crucial exchange in 27, when Octavius gave the senate back most of the provinces and they gave Augustus back most of the legions. He was now what Caesar might have been, supreme autocrat, even if called by whatever name one chose to disguise that obvious fact. But neither deity nor power had been enough to protect Caesar from assassination. What Augustus needed (to solidify the legions and power he now had) was artists and propaganda. Virgil’s Aeneid is superb poetry. It is also superb propaganda. It tells the story of the Roman people, especially the story of the Julian clan up to and including Caesar, Augustus, and their families. It all begins long before that, though, with the Trojan male Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Aeneas is the human-divine or mortal-immortal child of that union, and it is to him that Hector appears with the Greeks already inside the walls of the doomed city. This is that vision, from book 2 of the Aeneid , in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation (43): In sleep, in dream, Hector appeared to me, Gaunt with sorrow, streaming tears, all torn— As by the violent car on his death day— And black with bloody dust, His puffed-out feet cut by the rawhide thongs. Ah god, the look of him! How changed From that proud Hector who returned to Troy Wearing Achilles’ armor, or that one Who pitched the torches on Danaan ships; His beard all filth, his hair matted with blood, Showing the wounds, the many wounds, received Outside his father’s city walls. Aeneas, “child of the goddess,” flees Troy, taking with him his father Anchises and his son Julus. They eventually arrive in Italy, and the rest is, if not exactly history, at least magnificent poetry. Virgil’s great poem, unfinished at his death in 19 B.C.E. after ten years of work, celebrated “the Trojan Caesar….

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I don’t suppose you want to come up and help out a few weeks. (Actually, Warren had said it’d be awkward, the two of them in the house alone. Despite that and despite a marrow-deep certainty that she’d never come, I want her to want to.) She says, I just can’t, honey. You know I’ve had this trip to Mexico planned for a while. After she hangs up, I cry because part of me still wants to drag her behind my car. But the other part still wants to crawl into her lap. On the phone, Lecia tells me to snap out of it. That’s a Republican thing to say, I say, sniveling. She’s a fixer, and her inability to fix my mood makes her crazy. Or afraid, or both. I’m serious, she says. Tell me what you’re so miserable about. Do you want me to come up there and kick somebody’s ass? What? I feel like I’ve turned into Mother, I tell her. This draws an actual guffaw from her. You are crazy, she says. You’re nothing at all like Mother. I’m here in the Mental Marriott, like her. Well, you pay your taxes, for one, she says. You never shot at anybody… Wanted to, I say. Who doesn’t, she says. Then she adds, Also, unlike Mother, you have a job. Several jobs, if you count writing a book and raising a kid. Your second book! Three years ago, I say, my book came out. Whatever! You’ve got the yeah-buts, she says. If it’s Dev who worries you, notice the ways he’s Pete Karr’s grandson. He is, isn’t he? I say. And it’s true that I see Daddy’s fire in Dev’s limbs. His grit. I’m hanging up, Lecia says. I gotta go make a living. I love you senselessly. Don’t kill yourself till I give the go-ahead. Checking into the hospital, I surrendered to a sobbing that I’d always held back, thinking if I started in on it it would never, ever, ever stop. Then it stops after a week or two, as if a lifetime’s portion of grief has boiled out of me. The ferocious internal motion I’ve been praying would end finally—almost in a single nanosecond—stops. It’s a pivot point around which my entire future will ultimately swivel. That first night, kneeling before the toilet, I let go, as they say. Or call it the moment my innately serotonin-challenged brain reached level X. The change happens before my eyes, the muted colors of the room brightening from gray to a cool azure. Now when I begin obsessively to gnaw on my fears, I try to wrestle them loose from myself (who are these two halves?) the way you’d take a slipper from a Doberman. It’s in my higher power’s hands, I tell myself. They say More will be revealed, not More will be figured out.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  by heart—the filigreed squares and sprouted vines. I reel back, and for an eyeblink’s time, the small structure looms as large as it once did when our young mother sat sipping vodka by the window. I can see her slim in her gray pencil skirt and white crepe blouse, legs crossed, one pump near-dangling from a toe. The old grief has been mostly drained off in me for a long time now, and I’m awestruck by her grace. You’re so damn pretty, I’d tell her if she’d turn around. I step back out into the sunshine, saying to Lecia, Check out the tin ceiling. She holds out her hand like a blind girl, and I take it. C’mon, I say, and though it’s rare for her to follow, she lets me tug her in. On this expedition only, I’m point woman. One hesitant step she takes, as if afraid to get too close to a cliff edge, then another, till she’s a few feet inside. She cants her wondering face up at the ceiling, then gasps, a hand covering her mouth. It’s not a small breath but the lung-deep, sucked-in huff you’d take, say, finding a rat running the baseboards of your kitchen. Outside in the sunlight, I keep holding her hand. Though her eyes are devoid of feeling, fat tears stream down, and she curses me for dragging her to this godforsaken place—me with my fucking therapy and passion for the old crap. I didn’t know it’d be this hard, I tell her. Inside, I’m pissed at myself for buying her don’t-give-a-damn act when I knew better. I tell her it’s good we can face this place together, good that she got us out of here when she did. Within the hour, I’m shepherding that vast chaise longue of a vehicle back toward the far side of the mountains, where she’s secured a thousand-dollar- per-night hotel room for us because there are no other rooms at any inns, and the sun can’t set on her in that town. She grabs my hand in the car, palm to palm and tight, like we’re fixing to bound off the pool’s edge together. Yes, she finally admits in the car, that was the place. I recount to her how Mother told me she was surprised we didn’t have fun in the mountains. Lecia shakes her head. The next day at the airport, she kisses my hair and holds my hand and says she loves the book and what a bang-up job I did, but she’s not in her eyes anymore. When I look at her, I see her at age eleven. Months from now, once she gets the bound galley, she’ll read it and marvel that the opening works better with the scene of Mother at the fire, which is the exact same chapter she’d read in Colorado. The publisher set type from it, but she hadn’t remembered a damn thing from that first draft. Was I sure that was written in the version she saw? I was.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  What does Martin Luther King teach, sweetie? Warren says. Dev’s twiddling a blond ringlet around his finger as he says, Take turns. Share toys. You know Grandma Charlie marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama. He wrinkles his nose, saying, No, she didn’t. So I tell the story. How she climbed in a van with a bunch of college students, and they rolled through the swamps and bayous to a city encircled by scary men with guns and blind batons that swung down even on bodies huddled in surrender. How with my daddy and sister eating our upended pot pies off TV trays, we saw fire hoses pinning people against chain link. That was brave, Dev says. You’re brave, I say. He nods as if considering. I am, he says. But as Warren and I stand in his doorway with arms around each other’s waists, swearing we won’t fight anymore, Dev wears the wearied expression of someone who knows he’s being lied to. At the bottom of the stairway, the sob that comes through me nearly breaks me in half, and Warren unbends me to draw me to him. His white shirt smells of laundry bluing, and he strokes my hair in the old way and says, We can’t do that in front of him again. 21The Grinning SkullThe grinning skull begins to take on skin— —Wislawa Szymborska, “An Old Story” (trans. Stanislav Baranczak) The next night, still hungover, I sullenly drag in to the therapy group for people trying to quit. Maybe they know ways to cut back that won’t make me too itchy. It’s a Cambridge church basement—a musty yellow room whose ancient carpet smells of wet gym socks. Hung from the walls are giant posters like you’d expect at a high school pep rally, splattered with cornball slogans. There are rows of aluminum folding chairs, baby-shit brown in color. I warp my mouth into a stiff rictus and begin trying to impersonate a good and sober person who’s only wandered in through curiosity and happenstance. Here the coffee costs a dime, and you can read the styrofoam cup’s manufacturer embossed backward on the bottom. Standing at the urn, I hear a tweedy classics professor say to a big black marine with patches from Khe Sanh on his bulging arms: It’s hard to be an articulate ghost. Illogically, as I hear this, some frozen inner aspect thaws enough that a small surge of pity swells through me. I heap my watery coffee with powdered cream and stop thinking about myself long enough to come alive a little. I notice in the professor’s baggy face his red-rimmed eyes, and the care in the marine’s gaze starts to plug me in to something invisible that rivers among these strangers. It’s like running from my cardiac area, I’ve been dragging a long extension cord unplugged from all compassion, and it’s suddenly found a socket. The room comes breathing to life.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  And I remember the fog we drove in, how it billowed up over the road from the bayou on either side till the road narrowed to smoke. The biker bars I’d been in, skinny-dipping drunk in a lake miles wide, hitchhiking: Never had I felt closer to death than with that old man feeling his drunk path on and off the road shoulder through that smoky miasma. The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the place he’s dying in, which is—in turn—a place dying in me. My life with Warren somehow excludes my daddy. The me Daddy knew doesn’t exist in Warren’s house, which is maybe why my husband didn’t come down on this mission—down being the operative word. Where I came from is a comedown. Daddy’s last upright public appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him—he’d left me? I never could decide—more than a decade before. The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away. 11In Search of IncompetenceI don’t drink every day, but I find myself unpredictably blotto at inopportune times. Like the night before my thirtieth birthday: I lie fully dressed—albeit shoeless—in a charcoal business suit in the bathtub of a Silicon Valley motel, sipping whiskey from one of those minibar bottles that makes you pucker your lips into a doll’s pinhole mouth. On the shag rug, the legal pad with notes for my all day corporate presentation tomorrow holds a single x and y axis drawn into an L-shaped graph. To say I’m ill prepared understates the problem. My sole plan is to: (1) stride into the boardroom; (2) smile like a monkey as I briskly shake hands. Then I imagine a diaphanous veil falling across the rest of my presentation. I lie in the cold bath as in a tomb. From the outer hallway comes a ruckus that works on my brain like an eggbeater. Much of the Loyola men’s basketball team is running hither and yon, playing some game with a tennis ball. Every now and then they hurl the ball against my hollow-core door. This is not an accident. Earlier tonight, with rabid expression and possibly some spit spray, I told the team they had to keep it down or I’d call the front desk. They froze and stared as if some bog creature had reared up from the mud. The instant I closed the door, the game resumed at full decibel level.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Are those texts simply two independent variations of the basic model? They are at least that, but are they more? Is Mark a criticism of the Cross Gospel variation just as Wisdom 2–5 is a criticism of the court-tale variation? I leave that question aside until the next chapter, to raise a different one here. There is, as we saw, a Common Meal Tradition that developed separately in the Life Tradition in Didache 9–10 and in the Death Tradition in 1 Corinthians 10–11, serving as a profound linkage between those twin traditions. I ask now why there is no comparable passion-resurrection linkage. There is certainly a passion-resurrection story in the Death Tradition—the Cross Gospel , for example. Why is there nothing similar in the Life Tradition—the Q Gospel , for example? COMMUNAL PERSECUTION, COMMUNAL VINDICATION John Kloppenborg accepts the presence of those two great early Christian traditions, the Life Tradition and the Death Tradition, as we saw in Chapter 22. But he has also raised the question of their relationship on precisely this point of passion-resurrection faith. “The Q document,” he says, “reflects in some important way the theology of a ‘second sphere’ of primitive Christianity uninfluenced by the kerygmatic assertion of the saving significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection,” but, of course, that “‘second sphere’ of Christian tradition … was chronologically in fact the first” (1990:71, 73). To avoid any hint of ascendancy, I rephrase his terms first sphere and second sphere , referring instead to the double sphere of earliest Christian faith and tradition. But his point stands, raising the question of the relationship between those double spheres (or those twin traditions) with regard to the passion-resurrection of Jesus. Is the passion-resurrection component simply present in one and absent in the other? This is his answer: “It is not simply a matter, then, of Q’s silence in regard to the pre-Markan passion account (if there ever was one), but of the use of a quite different explanation of suffering and the conceptualization of suffering and vindication in corporate terms. In Q we seem to be at a very primitive stage of theologizing the experience of persecution. Jesus’ fate evidently was not yet an issue which required special comment. Parenthetically, it might be observed that Q’s communal/corporate theologizing is comparable to that posited by Crossan for his ‘Cross Gospel,’ although there is no evidence of Q’s dependence on the ‘Cross Gospel’ either. Indeed it might be argued that Q’s corporate interpretation of suffering is a factor in the ‘Cross Gospel’s’ deployment of motifs from the wisdom tale in an inclusive, communal way” (1990:81–82). The Q Gospel and the Cross Gospel share a communal rather than a personal and a corporate rather than a private understanding of persecution and/or vindication. They share, but differently, the pattern of the wisdom story as established by Nickelsburg. Q Gospel. I begin with the Q Gospel . In the preceding section I described Nickelsburg’s genre of the vindicated-innocence wisdom tale.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I could hire a student to help with Dev, grocery shop, fold laundry. Other than that and some journalism jobs—and the monthly photo session or far flung reading or lecture—I was a single mom in a small town. Which is how I wind up in a sweltering theme park come August—by selling books. Before I went on the road, I promised Dev if we made it on one big best-seller list, I’d take him to Disney World. For a week: my idea of an electric chair with no off switch. Still, being there turned out to be a thrill, but for one hair-raising ride called the Tower of Terror, where they dropped us in an elevator a dozen floors. In the group photo, everyone’s hands are up in the air as they grin. I’m hunkered down as if for a bomb blast. (I have too many frames per second for Tower of Terror.) After five days of more palatable rides, Dev and I abandon the blistering park, so I can rent a speedboat we can’t afford. With his new blue captain’s hat on, he steers us bouncing over the waves. At night, while he soaks in the bathtub, I talk to Walt for way longer than I promised his kids I would. He’s suffering some asbestos-related disease caught in a car factory as a teenager. Now it’s devouring the lungs in his barrel chest, and every breath costs him. In St. Paul the year before, I’d visited him. His daughter Pam had moved home, and he’d needed an oxygen bottle. From Florida that night, I ask what can they do. Not much, he says, panting. Morphine. It’s progressive. You’re telling me you’re gonna die? That’s right. You can’t die, I say. That’s just unacceptable to me. Well, I’m not a big fan of the idea, either. He wheezes for a minute before saying, I can’t talk. Tell me your adventures . So I tell him about the long drop in the tower; and the wonton soup at Epcot; and Tinker Bell sliding down on her cable through fireworks; and a baby bird we found under a park bench, fallen from a nest, how it looked like a purplish dragon, how we sat with it till a guy with a broom swept it into his dustpan. Great job, he gasps. You’ve done. The line between us is crackling, and I know I’m keeping him on the line for myself. His breath comes in like a tide and goes out farther every time. Tell me some noble deaths, he says. I remind him that when Socrates had drunk the hemlock—in the Phaedo we read together—the cold was creeping up his legs, how his students bent over him, saying, Don’t you have anything more to tell us …. And in the Chekhov biography I just finished, he was coughing into his napkin bright red arterial blood, and once the doctor announced it was hopeless, champagne was called for.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Whitbread says, This is—long pause as he contemplates what to call himself, uncomfortable saying either Dev Whitbread or Mr. Whitbread—Warren Whitbread’s father. I put down the phone and announce to Warren, Your father’s on the phone. What does he want? Warren says, not even rising from his desk. I suppose to tell you happy birthday. The light reflecting on Warren’s glasses transforms his eyes into white rectangles as he says, Ask him if it’s important. On our regular visits to the big house, I’m all too eager to inject myself into the clever table conversations, which cover history and great novels, sport and politics—all with an ease I struggle to keep up with. But smart as the conversation is, it has a strangely repetitive quality. You never know anybody better—the talk never deepens, but neither does it show the slightest strain, and I’m nothing if not strained to the gills virtually every second. You enter that place and live suspended in amber like characters in a Victorian novel. How’re your parents, Mary, I’m asked. How’s your father? And I say the same and that it’s sad, and everyone agrees, and then the character of my pretzeled daddy is dismissed like a servant whose health has been respectfully inquired after. For four long years, Warren never meets the dying man whose care, or lack of it, occupies my thoughts waking and sleeping without relent. Dreams of Daddy haunt me. In one, I scoop his scrawny frame into my arms like he’s a baby, and his limbs begin to snap off as if they were a leper’s as I fight not to drop him. In fairness to Warren, I often have to fly down expensively at the last minute for some bedside death watch Daddy winds up surviving. Or maybe I’ve struck some unconscious deal to shield him from the cesspool of my birth, or I’m eager to win some blessing from the Whitbreads that they’re no doubt not even interested enough to withhold. So the day I move Daddy out of our childhood home, I’ve flown in alone. Lecia has a meeting in Houston that day for her insurance business, and Mother hides sobbing in the garage. There’s a big financial argument for keeping Daddy home, of course. But the florid bedsores in his heels have begun to fester beyond what I can stand thinking about. The only day nurse we can afford is the kindly but sometimes stuporific Harold. At night Mother fails to turn Daddy often enough to keep the sores at bay. So I arrive alone alongside Daddy’s home hospital bed. There’s the bleach from the sheets and the air tinny with iodine. Under the air conditioner grind, his breathing is labored. Honeysuckle vines cling to the window screen, and a chameleon hangs by its claws. My hand grasps the aluminum bar Daddy’s hand holds on to.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It’s true that Warren’s former teacher Robert Lowell wrote of himself among the blue-blooded “Mayflower screwballs” here in Bow-ditch Hall. I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases... We reach a metal door, gray as a slab, and one guy draws a heavy ring of keys from his belt. Without warning, I think of my son. The image comes unprompted and hits me like a linebacker’s tackle, with the force of Old Testament thunder that all but knocks the wind out of me. If I were right in the head, I’d at that instant be bathing him, gathering his slippery body from the suds, rubbing his head hard with a towel. I could pause to bury my face in his buttery neck. I could ponder Warren making the bed as Dev bounced naked on it, his sturdy body flying under the flapping mainsail of our king-size sheets. How Warren would bundle him up like a ghost and wrestle him down and let him escape—the pure loving ritual of all that I’ve walked away from. The attendant slides the key into first one heavy metal door, then another. Each man holds one open for me, and it’s all I can do to keep from buckling

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  It matters that the overall magnitude of the African diaspora is now quite definitely known: that, as David Eltis explains, it is a fact that eleven million Africans were forcibly carried abroad, more than nine million of them to the Americas. It matters—it stretches the imagination to visualize—that at the height of the British slave trade, in the 1790s, one large slave vessel left England for Africa every other day. It matters that slave rebellions occurred on approximately 10 percent of all slave ships, that 10 percent of the slaves on such voyages were killed in the insurrections (which totals one hundred thousand deaths, 1500–1867), and that the fear of insurrection increased shipboard staffing and other expenses on the Middle Passage by 18 percent, costs that if invested in enlarged shipments would have led to the enslavement of one million more Africans than were actually forced into the system over the course of the long eighteenth century. It matters that the incidence of revolts did not increase with the decline in crew size, hence that slave-centered factors determined the uprisings. It matters that shore-based attacks on European slave ships were twenty times more likely in the Senegal and Gambia River areas than elsewhere in Atlantic Africa. It matters that shipboard mortality (only 50 percent of all slave deaths—the rest occurred in Africa or at embarkation) did not increase with the length of the voyages or with the number of slaves per ship (“tighter packing”) but did vary according to African ports of departure. It matters that French slave ships left Africa with an average load of close to 320 captives; that one such vessel sailed with 900 slaves; that another lost 408 Africans on a single Atlantic voyage; that 92 percent of the “cargo” on another French vessel were children; and that the average number of captives on French vessels rose from 261 in the seventeenth century to 340 at the end of the eighteenth century. It is astonishing simply to attempt to visualize the consequences of the fact that in one year, 1790, French ships landed at least forty thousand slaves on the small island of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), nineteen thousand of them (equal to the entire population of eighteenth-century Boston) at the small port of Cap-Français—and to consider the profound effect that fact must have had.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Part of the work of grief entails repeated, monotonous recalling of the events leading up to the death, as the mourner undergoes a restless need to ‘make sense’ of what happened, to make it explicable, and to classify it along with other similar events…. During this process, accurate recording and telling of the dead person’s life is of utmost importance to the bereaved” (3–6). As I write this Prologue, Sebastian Junger’s powerful elegy for those who go down at sea is deservedly high on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. It centers on the Andrea Gail , a seventy-two-foot steel swordfisher out of Gloucester that disappeared with all hands off Sable Island east of Nova Scotia, October 28, 1991, in waves one hundred feet high. “If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never return” (213). That comment and the epigraph above tell us what can happen today in contemporary America after any death—but especially after a sudden, tragic, or mysterious one—as intimates mourn their beloved dead. There are dreams and there are visions. Dale Murphy, who disappeared on the Andrea Gail , left a three-year-old son, an ex-wife, and a mother behind him. His son “wakes up screaming in the middle of the night” because “Daddy’s in the room…. Daddy was just here…. Daddy was here and told me what happened on the boat” (214). Hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, visions and apparitions are not the same as delusions and hallucinations. If you wake up screaming because a giant figure is ready to attack you, that is a nightmarish dream. Your spouse reassures you, saying it is just a bad dream, urging you to go back to sleep. And you do. But if you call 9–1–1 that night to report an intruder and summon ADT the next day to put in a security system, you are moving from dream into delusion. It is part of reality to know which is which. If you come down from the mountaintop and report a revelation from the Archangel Michael, you have seen an apparition. If you keep insisting that Bigfoot-with-Wings is up there and that everyone should go to see it, you are beyond vision and into hallucination. It is part of reality to know which is which. The present discussion is not about delusions and hallucinations, about losing touch with reality, and neither is it about tricks and lies, about losing touch with honesty. Trance and ecstasy, vision and apparition are perfectly normal and natural phenomena. Altered states of consciousness, such as dreams and visions, are something common to our humanity, something hard-wired into our brains, something as normal as language itself.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Earlier that evening, Ernst vom Rath, third secretary at the German embassy in Paris, died of bullet wounds from an assassination by a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan. That night, Kristallnacht, or “Night of Shattered Glass,” resulted in the murder of 91 Jews, the destruction of over 1,500 synagogues and 7,500 stores and businesses, and the arrest of over 25,000 Jews. It was one more step in the obscene Nazi program that included laws of discrimination, acts of persecution, and extermination camps. The largest and most beautiful synagogue in all of Germany had stood for one hundred years high above the river Elbe in Dresden, capital city of Prussian Saxony. That November night it was deliberately set on fire by paramilitary brigades who forced the firefighters to let it burn while preventing any spread to adjacent buildings. (Still, one of them, Alfred Neugebauer, saved its Star of David throughout the war until a new synagogue was consecrated on the same location on November 9, 2001.) On the night between Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, February 13 and 14, 1945, the first of four Allied air raids deliberately created a perfect firestorm roaring outward from the timbered building of Dresden’s Old City center. Hundreds of heavy bombers—Lancasters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command by night and B-17 Flying Fortresses of the United States Army Air Force by day—used an intentional mix of 60 percent explosive and 40 percent incendiary bombs to ignite the ancient city and raise the heat level to almost half that of an atomic blast. My present question is not whether there were valid and valuable military targets in Dresden or whether, if present, they were actually targeted. Nor is my present question whether that firestorm was a strategic or tactical, legal or moral action for that date in the war or that place in the conflict. My question arises from the story recorded by Frederick Taylor in his 2004 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 . As the synagogue burned on that Kristallnacht in 1938, a grizzled Dresden street character named Franz Hackel…the “Dresden Diogenes”…[was] gazing in silent horror at the still-smoking ruins of the Dresden synagogue. He approached the painter [Otto Griebel], his tone conspiratorial, eyes blazing, and muttered: “This fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come back to us!”1 I want to think, throughout this chapter, about the internal dynamics of that “long curve” and how the fires of November 1938 begot the fires of February 1945. I also want to think, throughout this chapter, about another metaphor from geometry. On August 16, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Might it even be that the long, slow arc of human history or even human evolution bends toward justice? What exactly does Hackel’s curve or King’s arc have to do with God’s will?