Picking up where I left off yesterday in Chapter XVI – and not got long today. We move from the conversation with Dolly – trusten, trusten – to fifteen years later, when Eppie, the child he found and learned to connect to human life through, is now nearly grown-up.
When we’re reading prose it’s so easy to rush on and get story… story… story…but there is more to life than narrative unfolding. There’s time travel in us.
Our older and younger selves and the experiences of those younger and older selves mash together, though we hardly know it, but great prose like this shows some of that complexity. It’s worth slowing down to the slowest possible pace to pick up whatever the complex text offers. Here, two periods of time sit side by side, as if related:
This dialogue took place in Eppie’s earlier years, when Silas had to part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often been led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who live together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too of the past, and how and why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him.
‘This dialogue’ refers back to the piece we read yesterday, Silas’ conversation with Dolly, about what went wrong in his early life, how he was traumatised and how he has learned, through Eppie’s presence in his life, to trust. ‘This dialogue’ was more than a decide ago but it connects to the second sentence in this paragraph, which begins ‘now’. Now that she was grown up…the step-father has often reprised this dialogue, gone over his life-story, told Eppie of the change her presence has wrought in him.
Think of your life – think of a fifteen year period and how what happens at one stage sets up or changes what is going to happen in the future. The ‘then’ creating, allowing, bringing into being the ‘now’. Wonderful to see Silas wisely sharing this vital life-information with the child.
For it would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she was not his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point could have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up, without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his lost guineas brought back to him.
Silas had a choice: to trust or not to trust that Eppie could live with the truth of her own story. He might have created a ‘complete shrouding of the past’ – though of course gossips would have whispered it – but he would not contemplate creating ‘a barrier between their minds’. Therefore Eppie knows her own story. I find it very moving that ‘Eppie had long known how her mother had died…’ it’s as if in this second go at having a life, Silas is choosing trust, and trust in love, even more strongly than the did the first time round in his previous life in Lantern Yard. The scar tissue isstrongerthan the unbroken bone. And the child has grown strong in that love and trust.
I’m thinking of the long piece of human learning that is the experience of adult life – fifteen years! Why don’t we think moreabout development in adult life? We’re not finished! But learning hurts as well as bringing joy.
Time to stop now, this morning. But I think I am feeling my way towards are-reading of The Winter’s Tale. The long gap of time.
Witchhazel in the Old English Garden at Calderstones
Last time I read and wrote about Silas Marner, January 18th, I ended by saying I’ll come back to this tomorrow. Then I wandered off into busy-ness and didn’t write for a couple of weeks. I’ve missed Silas! I was in chapter XVI. You’ll find a text here. I’d got to about this point, Dolly Winthrop, in her nineteenth century country accent, struggling to help Silas come to terms with his previous trauma:
And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner–to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know–I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so. And if you could but ha’ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn’t ha’ run away from your fellow-creaturs and been so lone.
Dolly is a believer, thinks she is not clever, can’t read, and carries bits of bible text round in her head. Yet her thinking her would do some good for most of us, whatever we believe, two hundred years later. I’m thinking about positive psychology as a modern version of ‘trusten’. Can you keep ‘good’ foregrounded? Will it change your day if you do? I’m thinking about the many studies (see one reported here) which show people with a religious faith are happier than those without.
Trust in as yet unknown, or unimaginable good might not be a religious faith but does change how I respond to situations (when I can trust, which isn’t easy). I’m thinking of Tennyson:
From “In Memoriam,” LIII.
O YET we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Tennyson ends where I often find myself, not trusting, but crying ‘I don’t believe that!’ I imagine Silas at the real bad moment, when his close friend betrayed him. Do you trust that somehow good will come out of it? When the trauma of betrayal is stinging? What could he, practically, have done? He’d still be cast out. He’s be part of no family, he’s have no community.
I’m thinking of people who commit crimes. is it possible to trust that somehow there is an invisible good and right behind or alongside terrible human actions?
No, I don’t think so, and not trusting overall makes me feel like ‘an infant crying in the night’.
But that’s where, for a religious person, habit and form kick in. When I was young I hated habit and form and thought they were old dead things that made people false. Now I think they are useful props which might hold you up and I would like to have some! And for me, reading is the habit and form, or offers the opportunity for such. It’s a good few years since I read Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Not everyone will want to stand in the place occupied by ‘O yet we trust’, but it is a human place, and sometimes we must stand there. It’s the same place Dolly is occupying and it’s much easier to stand there with Dolly, her sleeves rolled up and some piece of washing or ironing or baking or preserving going on while she talks.
Silas puts the case for the difficulty of trust:
“Ah, but that ‘ud ha’ been hard,” said Silas, in an under-tone; “it ‘ud ha’ been hard to trusten then.”
“And so it would,” said Dolly, almost with compunction; “them things are easier said nor done; and I’m partly ashamed o’ talking.”
“Nay, nay,” said Silas, “you’re i’ the right, Mrs. Winthrop– you’re i’ the right. There’s good i’ this world–I’ve a feeling o’ that now; and it makes a man feel as there’s a good more nor he can see, i’ spite o’ the trouble and the wickedness. That drawing o’ the lots is dark; but the child was sent to me: there’s dealings with us–there’s dealings.”
The reality of the traumatic experience must not be denied: that episode did hurt and when we look back, you can see the Silas we first knew (man with the life of a spider, knowing no one, connecting to knowing, only spinning, spinning) as seemingly irreparably damaged.
It is a lovely moment between the two when Silas considers what it might have been like to continue to trusten in the light of the attack on him by people he loved:
“Ah, but that ‘ud ha’ been hard,” said Silas, in an under-tone; “it ‘ud ha’ been hard to trusten then.”
“And so it would,” said Dolly, almost with compunction; “them things are easier said nor done; and I’m partly ashamed o’ talking.”
Perhaps it is simply not a possibility, as Dolly acknowledges. The damage is too great. Time must pass. Life must reassert itself. ‘It ‘ud ha’ been hard to trusten then” says Silas and I suddenly feel a huge stress on ‘then’. At that point, you need the habit and form of an outer practice of trust to stand in for the now broken inner reality. That can come from other good people, but at that point in his life, Silas did not know any. Or it might have come from religion, but it was his religious community that had turned on him. He had nothing except his craft, the spinning, to use as habit and form. Lucky for him he had that. It got him through a long broken piece of time. (Thinking about The Winter’s Tale, where there is another wide gap of time – I’ve said that before, I know).
I’m thinking of people leaving jail with terrible crimes behind them and no craft, no habit, no outer form. What is left? To be your broken, untrusting, bad self over and over?
As for Silas, his work gave him time and money, the cottage in Raveloe, the gold piled up on the hearth, the fire that attracted little Eppie into his home as he stood vacant, entranced. And all that led to some good:
“Nay, nay,” said Silas, “you’re i’ the right, Mrs. Winthrop– you’re i’ the right. There’s good i’ this world–I’ve a feeling o’ that now; and it makes a man feel as there’s a good more nor he can see, i’ spite o’ the trouble and the wickedness. That drawing o’ the lots is dark; but the child was sent to me: there’s dealings with us–there’s dealings.”
You’ve got to stay alive and have time, you’ve got to be safe and contained while you let life assert itself. How are we going to do that for our criminals leaving jail?
I’m thinking of Dickens, in the Autobiographical fragment, reflecting on the terrors of his childhood, writing,
I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am
‘These things’ – parental abandonment, child labour, abject loneliness – made Charles Dickens the writer he became. Much good came to him in later life. Did it change the horror of his childhood? Of course not. As in yesterday’s Denise Riley poem, ‘there’s no beauty out of loss, can’t do it’. Read that chapter of John Forster’s ‘The Life of Charles Dickens.’
Yet it remains true that you see what you look for: so it is worth letting Dolly ask you, what are you looking for? Can you see any good?
Next time I’ll go further in Chapter XVI, and we’ll read this terrific paragraph:
This dialogue took place in Eppie’s earlier years, when Silas had to part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often been led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who live together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too of the past, and how and why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him. For it would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she was not his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point could have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up, without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his lost guineas brought back to him. The tender and peculiar love with which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had kept her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas’s hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but had a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling. She was too childish and simple for her imagination to rove into questions about her unknown father; for a long while it did not even occur to her that she must have had a father; and the first time that the idea of her mother having had a husband presented itself to her, was when Silas showed her the wedding-ring which had been taken from the wasted finger, and had been carefully preserved by him in a little lackered box shaped like a shoe. He delivered this box into Eppie’s charge when she had grown up, and she often opened it to look at the ring: but still she thought hardly at all about the father of whom it was the symbol. Had she not a father very close to her, who loved her better than any real fathers in the village seemed to love their daughters? On the contrary, who her mother was, and how she came to die in that forlornness, were questions that often pressed on Eppie’s mind. Her knowledge of Mrs. Winthrop, who was her nearest friend next to Silas, made her feel that a mother must be very precious; and she had again and again asked Silas to tell her how her mother looked, whom she was like, and how he had found her against the furze bush, led towards it by the little footsteps and the outstretched arms. The furze bush was there still; and this afternoon, when Eppie came out with Silas into the sunshine, it was the first object that arrested her eyes and thoughts.
The first flower on the single red camellia, 2 Feb 2018
Another week with no time to read and write – or is it that I am not making the time? I certainly have spent time in other ways, and I have written other types of things, but mainly, I’ve been on the road, out of routine.
But that stops tomorrow when I have a full week at Calderstones, The Reader’s home and Head Office and time therefore to establish the drill: get up, exercise, shower, read, write. Let’s see how it goes. Meanwhile I can confirm, for those who noticed the pledge, that I handed my Reader credit card receipts on time and in without causing – I hope – hold up time or trouble to my colleagues in Finance.
This morning I’ve been writing already, working on organisational thoughts to do with The Reader. Pressing work-related thinking! But now I have half an hour to turn to Paradise Lost.
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
Last week we saw the rebel angels roused by Satan’s oratory. I want to pick up again at the section where I finished last time. Of the now upright, innumerable and massive fallen angels, Milton writes:
Though of thir Names in heav’nly Records now
Be no memorial blotted out and ras’d
By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life.
Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names, till wandringore the Earth, [ 365 ]
Through Gods high sufferance for the tryal of man,
By falsities and lyes the greatest part
Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake
God thir Creator, and th’ invisible
Glory of him that made them, to transform [ 370 ] Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn’d
With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold,
And Devils to adore for Deities:
Then were they known to men by various Names,
And various Idols through the Heathen World. [ 375 ]
The names of these angels when they were in heaven are lost, they are ‘blotted out and ras’d/By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life’. And at this point, they had not yet got the names humans would give them later. In a sense they are now for Milton, and for us reading, unnameable.
This is interesting to me because in a minute we are going to see that soon enough, by making themselves part of the human world, by corrupting that world, we will come to name, know them as individual things, presences in person. But here they seem, more frighteningly, an unspeakable force, a bad energy, a potential for badness. Is this always there, at the bottom of the universe? is it part of the universe? Milton’s Christian patter means that fall is fall and bad is bad… but another type of religious view would accept fall, bad, even corruption as natural. I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power Myth which gave me pause for thought about fall, falling, fallenness. I’ll have to come back to this another time.
Back to the poem.
Quickly, in a move characteristic of his time travel in this poem, Milton shoots forward into the human future. At the moment these unnamed creatures are on the lake in hell, but Milton suddenly sees them
till wandringore the Earth, [ 365 ]
Through Gods high sufferance for the tryal of man,
By falsities and lyes the greatest part
Of Mankind they corrupted
This is huge potential span of future time – lasting right beyond Milton into pagan, pre-Christian times and through him into our own time and the future beyond us. And the terrifying throwaway line is dropped in as if quite understood and accepted by all – ‘the greatest part/Of Mankind they corrupted’ – yep, that’s us.
But it is also specifically the pre-Christian era. The devils become gods, as we see when we read on:
corrupted to forsake
God thir Creator, and th’ invisible
Glory of him that made them, to transform [ 370 ] Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn’d
With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold,
And Devils to adore for Deities:
Then were they known to men by various Names,
And various Idols through the Heathen World. [ 375 ]
That’s a short half hour of reading. But much still to do today and not yet dressed.
Temporary Cafe being built at CalderstonesTemporary Cafe nearly there
I’ve been on the road this week travelling between Edinburgh, London and Liverpool and I’ve been reading and rereading 4 business books and a novel, A Bowl of Cherries, by Sheena McKay. Have not bothered to do any ‘Just Started’ on them but will do that this week, a little out of kilter, but that’s ok. ‘Just Started’ is really there as record of what I have read. It’s hard to keep a routine on the road – well, hard for me, struggling with routines at the quietest of times, so my Daily Practice has been out of the window. As has daily exercise, off the menu since I was unwell in November. But now February approaches, and my thought turn to the necessity of daily exercise. the winter dark and down time is drawing to an end.
Is will power limited, as psychologists now tell us? Mine certainly seems depleted, so I’m sticking to minimalist achievements at this lightless time of year: get your work done, spend time with husband, don’t neglect your expenses causing the fiance team grief.
You can see why I like Yeats’ line ‘forgive myself the lot’ (‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’).
But to today’s reading from Paradise Lost.
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, I’d suggest a read through from the beginning first. You’ll find a good online edition here. But if there’s no time for that, well, just start here and now.
Last week I’d read as far as Satan’s call to his fallen troops, which ended with the exhortation, ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. ‘ Lets now make a start on the next couple of sentences:
They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung
Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch
On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread,
Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake.
Nor did they not perceave the evil plight [ 335 ]
In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel;
Yet to thirGeneralsVoyce they soon obeyd
Innumerable. As when the potent Rod
Of Amrams Son in Egyptsevill day Wav’d round the Coast, up call’d a pitchy cloud [ 340 ]
Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Wind,
That ore the Realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like Night, and darken’d all the Land of Nile:
So numberless were those bad Angels seen
Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell [ 345 ]
‘Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires;
Till, as a signal giv’n, th’ uplifted Spear
Of thir great Sultan waving to direct Thir course, in even ballance down they light
On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Plain; [ 350 ]
A multitude, like which the populous North Pour’d never from her frozen loyns, to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous Sons
Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibralter to the Lybian sands. [ 355 ]
So ordinary and recognisable as well as so enormous and unimaginable, isn’t it ? To begin to give us the enormous perspective of the entirety of Satan’s army ( how many things there are which are out to get us!) Milton sets us off with something we might have seen or could imagine:
They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung
Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch
On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread,
Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake.
Almost Shakespearean comic, isn’t it, that stumbling into not awake liveliness? Dogberry, or the soldiers on watch when the ghost appears inHamlet? Being bestirred before being fully awake, they no doubt bump into each other and stub their toes, getting their spears interlocked like hapless skiers. But Milton only wants us to see them, not to laugh at them:
Nor did they not perceave the evil plight [ 335 ]
In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel;
Yet to thirGeneralsVoyce they soon obeyd
Innumerable.
Even as they blunder into wakeful life, they know how bad things are and they feel the pain of burning in hell. I’m just wondering about the negatives in that sentence , ‘nor’ , ‘not perceave’ ‘fierce pains not feel’: and asking myself, why are they negatives?
Perhaps they make a good transition from the semi-comic previous, which seems to be arise out of unconsciousness, to the full consciousness implied in ‘thirGeneralsVoyce they soon obeyd/Innumerable’.
Satan’s call seems to bring them to conscious life, and before obedience to him, as they wake into consciousness, they must endure consciousness of pain. Which they do.
Oddly, I’m thinking of murderers and other offenders here and wondering, when people are encouraged into crime by another, would there be a similar pattern? I can imagine such a thing, the one who is egged-on, who goes along, with the other more intelligent or more manipulative one. You know you are goingto do what he says, and what he is going tosay is terrible. Would there be a moment of pain, of full agonising, knowledge? , about to do /be a bad thing?
As when the potent Rod
Of Amrams Son in Egyptsevill day Wav’d round the Coast, up call’d a pitchy cloud [ 340 ]
Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Wind,
That ore the Realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like Night, and darken’d all the Land of Nile:
So numberless were those bad Angels seen
Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell [ 345 ]
‘Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires;
Now we return to the unimaginable picture of this mass uprising, and Milton draws on a biblical image to help us see. This is hard for many contemporary readers as we don’t know, as Milton and his readers certainly would, many of these images. So, if I was reading this in a group, I’d use the footnotes, possibly even go back to the original Biblical text to see the source of the analogy: the main thing we need to know is that those locusts were so many that they made Egypt a place of darkness by day. i’dwant to show my fellow readers that there’s not a lot to these analogies once you’ve got the footnotes, and sometimes it pays to look:
And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.
14 And the locust went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such.
15 For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.
We’ve gone from something close to comedy to something terrifying, to fear, in a few lines. And if those locust images weren’t enough Milton also gives us images of the terrible Northern barbarians, the Vikings, the Norsemen, Celts, the northern hoardes coming out of the mist to end the Roman empire.
So numberless were those bad Angels seen
Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell [ 345 ]
‘Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires;
Till, as a signal giv’n, th’ uplifted Spear
Of thir great Sultan waving to direct Thir course, in even ballance down they light
On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Plain; [ 350 ]
A multitude, like which the populous North Pour’d never from her frozen loyns, to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous Sons
Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibralter to the Lybian sands. [ 355]
Forthwith from every Squadron and each Band
The Heads and Leaders thither hast where stood Thir great Commander; Godlike shapes and forms
Excelling human, Princely Dignities,
And Powers that earst in Heaven sat on Thrones; [ 360 ]
Though of thir Names in heav’nly Records now
Be no memorial blotted out and ras’d
By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life.
Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names, till wandringore the Earth, [ 365 ]
Through Gods high sufferance for the tryal of man,
By falsities and lyes the greatest part
Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake
God thir Creator, and th’ invisible
Glory of him that made them, to transform [ 370 ] Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn’d
With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold,
And Devils to adore for Deities:
Then were they known to men by various Names,
And various Idols through the Heathen World. [ 375 ]
The speed with which this shift of perspective happens is breathtaking: it’s like applying a different lens to something that seemed blurry- they were nothing, they were like undistinguishable slime on the burning lake until Satan addressed them: now , suddenly they are up and moving and they are forces to be reckoned with. They have form, social organisations: squadron, band, heads and leaders, they are Godlike. In heaven they sat on thrones. No more blurry mess.
What is a leader that he can bring about such a transition? I’m thinking of Hitler and the German armies – could broken forces have been brought back to life by his presence? Could the same thing have worked for Churchill? Is it only war-time leaders who raise broken people up in this way? Alas, no.
So what is it? the presence of the leader is like the presence of the pure idea. The idea might have gone, under pain of defeat, loss, suffering: each devil suffering his own pain, alone. But then when Satan appears and rouses them, and they take, or find they are able to generate, energy. why? Because they believe in something again.
Milton puts an interesting stop to this growth at line 360, once he’s got us imagining the devils on thrones: remember! they are blotted out now! It as if he fears we might be swept along:
And Powers that earst in Heaven sat on Thrones; [ 360 ]
Though of thir Names in heav’nly Records now
Be no memorial blotted out and ras’d
By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life.
That’s a good pun: ras’d and raised. They are rising up, raising themselves. That’s one perspective, one way to see it. But ras’d also means knocked down, razed to the ground. Are they up or down? Which way is up? For these corrupted devils there is no way to know: hell is heaven, heaven’s hell.
Is that what human corruption is? Not being able to tell good from bad? Thinking bad is good? There was a great soundbite from Samuel Johnson on this about no man thinking that what he desires is bad, it’s all good to him. Can’t track that one down but will continue to look.
Trees outlined in the not quite dark, Calderstones 5.00pm on Friday
Picking up my nearly regular sunday reading of Paradise Lost where I left off last time in Book 1,
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, I’d suggest a read through from the beginning first. You’ll find a good online edition here. But if there’s no time for that, well, just start here and now. Satan, cast out from heaven and now knowing only hell, is regrouping and calls on his close confederate, Beelzebub, to rouse their battered armies to try
once more
With rallied Arms to try what may be yet Regaind in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell? [ 270 ]
So Satan spake, and him Beelzebub
Thus answer’d. Leader of those Armies bright,
Which but th’ Onmipotent none could have foyld,
If once they hear that voyce, thir liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft [ 275 ]
In worst extreams, and on the perilous edge
Of battel when it rag’d, in all assaults Thir surest signal, they will soon resume
New courage and revive, though now they lye
Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire, [ 280 ]
As we erewhile, astounded and amaz’d,
No wonder, fall’n such a pernicious highth.
He scarce had ceas’t when the superiour Fiend
Was moving toward the shoar; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, [ 285 ]
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, [ 290 ]
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
I’m pausing there because line 283 opens a longish verse paragraph of the sort I don’t enjoy, and I want to skip over it. There are too many references I don’t get and the main matter isn’t very interesting to me.
But before I get into or pass by that paragraph, I want to notice something about the way speaking (or is it the items of language we speak – the emotions carried by the words?) builds up confidence or changes what you might do.
Last time I read this I had been thinking about the way Satan’s thought changes as he speaks – he doesn’t seem to start off knowing what he is going to say, but instead starts and finds himself talking himself into something (see here). As he speaks now, he’s heard by Beelzebub, who is ready to go with him and knows that if Satan addresses the troops, they will also be easily persuaded, too.
If once they hear that voyce, thir liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft [ 275 ]
In worst extreams, and on the perilous edge
Of battel when it rag’d, in all assaults Thir surest signal, they will soon resume
New courage and revive, though now they lye
Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire, [ 280 ]
That voice, their livliest pledge… yes but what is it in the voice or language of an orator which moves us?
The satanic army last heard Satan talking as they lost the war in heaven: it is the cause of their fall and the reason ‘now they lye/Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire’. Yet Beelzebub puts it in glorious language which misses out the loss of the war, and concentrates on their nobility in the fight. Look at the words: livliest pledge, hope in fears and dangers, in all assaults thir surest signal, new courage, revive. All the losses are forgotten as Beelzebub primes himself, Satan, us and anyone else listening to believe in him. Certainly it works for Satan:
He scarce had ceas’t when the superiour Fiend
Was moving toward the shoar; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, [ 285 ]
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, [ 290 ]
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
The trick of this overwhelm of reference is to look up then up quick and then read again, not thinking about them. The references are often interesting (e.g. the Dartmouth edition reference here to Tuscan artist: Tuscan artist. Galileo (1564-1642). Milton visited him and saw his telescope in Valdarno, the valley of the Arno. Galileo’s telescopeand the observations he made with it supported the Copernicanmodel of the cosmos over the Ptolemaic model, much to the Church’s chagrin. Galileo spent most of the last years of his life under house arrest, ordered by the Church.). the problem is they so interrupt the flow. You have to accept that interrupt the first and many subsequent times round! I like the Dartmouth online edition because it’s very easy to glance at the references. The Longman edition, edited by Fowler, is also good for that – the references are on the page.
Sometimes I ignore them, sometimes I’d just skip these descriptive parts entirely, and sometimes fellow readers will make me read both the descriptive bits and the notes. But let us read on now through this description of Satan. Tough going? read it aloud, follow the punctuation, pause at every comma.
His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast
Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand,
He walkt with to support uneasie steps [ 295 ]
Over the burning Marle, not like those steps
On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire; Nathless he so endur’d, till on the Beach
Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call’d [ 300 ]
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’timbowr; or scatterd sedge
Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orionarm’d [ 305 ] Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursu’d
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carkases [ 310 ]
And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change.
He call’d so loud, that all the hollow Deep
Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates, [ 315 ] Warriers, the Flowr of Heav’n, once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can sieze
Eternal spirits; or have ye chos’n this place
After the toyl of Battel to repose
Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find [ 320 ]
To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav’n?
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the Conquerour? who now beholds Cherube and Seraphrowling in the Flood
With scatter’d Arms and Ensigns, till anon [ 325 ]
His swift pursuers from Heav’n Gates discern Th’ advantage, and descending tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. [ 330 ]
In passages like this, I’d be reading a sentence or a clause at a time, and asking group members to translate into modern English to ensure we have the drift. Then I’d be looking, or asking my group to look for things of interest. Sometimes there aren’t any! Sometimes you think there’s nothing of interest and then, because you’re going so slowly, there is…
His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast
Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand,
He walkt with to support uneasie steps [ 295 ]
Over the burning Marle, not like those steps
On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire; Nathless he so endur’d,
I’ve just been in Norway and seen some of those tall pines! Mildly interested in them. Milton asks us to think of the tallest ship’s mast, then takes human perspective away by saying, ‘that would be just a wand’ (wand – thin flexible whip of wood) compared to Satan’s spear. It’s all much more gigantic than we can imagine. Once we’ve got that picture in mind he asks us to picture Satan struggling, using the spear as a crutch ‘to support uneasie steps’ which have to be compared – by Satan, by Milton, by us, to the kind of steps he would have taken in heaven, on Heavens Azure. We don’t get to see them, simply to picture them in a negative print of this. Not this. Not this. The torrid clime of Hell punishes Satan even as he tries to move. It ‘smote on him sore besides’ – besides what? I ask myself. Besides remembering how easy it was move to in Heaven.
The mental pain of loss comes before the physical pain of fire. But see what we are dealing with: ‘nathless he so endured.’ The will of this creature!
till on the Beach
Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call’d [ 300 ]
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’timbowr; or scatterd sedge
Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orionarm’d [ 305 ] Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursu’d
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carkases [ 310 ]
And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change.
Milton is using whatever references he can get to put connection points in his reader’s mind: he’s telling us something unimaginable: how do you get your reader to imagine something unimaginable? Metaphor is the method, using things we might know or could learn about: picture the fallen devils, abject and lost, like fallen leaves, psychologically stunned, amazed, by the change that as happened to them.
And then Satan rouses them:
He call’d so loud, that all the hollow Deep
Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates, [ 315 ] Warriers, the Flowr of Heav’n, once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can sieze
Eternal spirits; or have ye chos’n this place
After the toyl of Battel to repose
Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find [ 320 ]
To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav’n?
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the Conquerour? who now beholds Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood
With scatter’d Arms and Ensigns, till anon [ 325 ]
His swift pursuers from Heav’n Gates discern Th’ advantage, and descending tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. [ 330 ]
Not leaves, he calls them, not a pile of lifeless stuff on fire, but ‘Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the Flower of Heaven’ . I imagine myself as a fallen angel, addressed like this. How good (but painful) to remember I was once the flower of heaven… and is heaven now lost? Look at the syntax here. It implies Heaven is only lost
If such astonishment as this can sieze
Eternal spirits;
as a fallen angel I’d be deeeply attracted by that ‘if’. Then we have a couple of alternatives;
or have ye chos’n this place
After the toyl of Battel to repose
Your wearied vertue,
Are they resting? To even posit this as possibility is an amazingly cheeky, perhaps sarcastic, recalibrating of the situation! Satan then offers another – to his listeners, vile – suggestion:
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the Conquerour?
And perhaps that is a real possibility. Perhaps some of them, so broken, without his oratory, might change their minds? Satan now piles terror, scorn and humiliation on his listeners. The conqueror, he says
now beholds Cherube and Seraphrowling in the Flood
With scatter’d Arms and Ensigns, till anon [ 325 ]
His swift pursuers from Heav’n Gates discern Th’ advantage, and descending tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.
There’s no evidence of this – Satan is manipulating his audience to make them remember their humiliating rout and feel new fear. Why? So he can move them! Now comes the call to arms:
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. [ 330 ]
What would they have to rise up for? Well, they’d move for Heaven, ‘once yours now lost’ if it seemed a possibilty. If you read any of the reference links to leaves/shade/shades… you’ll have seen the fallen angels pictured as dead leaves piled up and also as ghosts. Satan, moments ago needing to use his spear as a walking stick, is calling them back to a new stand, to rebellious life.
A building and blurry me, well wadded, in Lysebo, Norway January 2018
Last time reading Silas, chapter 16, (text here) I’d been thinking about modes of knowing things about our lives: thinking and feeling. We had read about Dolly Winthrop turning her attention to the old problem of Silas’ traumatic early life. And today she comes back to it.
Having trouble with Dolly’s country accent? Read it aloud and take it slowly:
Dolly was too useful a woman not to have many opportunities of illumination of the kind she alluded to, and she was not long before she recurred to the subject.
“Master Marner,” she said, one day that she came to bring home Eppie’s washing, “I’ve been sore puzzled for a good bit wi’ that trouble o’ yourn and the drawing o’ lots; and it got twisted back’ards and for’ards, as I didn’t know which end to lay hold on. But it come to me all clear like, that night when I was sitting up wi’ poor Bessy Fawkes, as is dead and left her children behind, God help ’em–it come to me as clear as daylight; but whether I’ve got hold on it now, or can anyways bring it to my tongue’s end, that I don’t know. For I’ve often a deal inside me as’ll never come out; and for what you talk o’ your folks in your old country niver saying prayers by heart nor saying ’em out of a book, they must be wonderful cliver; for if I didn’t know “Our Father”, and little bits o’ good words as I can carry out o’ church wi’ me, I might down o’ my knees every night, but nothing could I say.”
“But you can mostly say something as I can make sense on, Mrs. Winthrop,” said Silas
“Well, then, Master Marner, it come to me summat like this: I can make nothing o’ the drawing o’ lots and the answer coming wrong; it ‘ud mayhap take the parson to tell that, and he could only tell us i’ big words. But what come to me as clear as the daylight, it was when I was troubling over poor Bessy Fawkes, and it allays comes into my head when I’m sorry for folks, and feel as I can’t do a power to help ’em, not if I was to get up i’ the middle o’ the night– it comes into my head as Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve got–for I can’t be anyways better nor Them as made me; and if anything looks hard to me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’ that, there may be plenty o’ things I don’t know on, for it’s little as I know–that it is. And so, while I was thinking o’ that, you come into my mind, Master Marner, and it all come pouring in:–if _I_ felt i’ my inside what was the right and just thing by you, and them as prayed and drawed the lots, all but that wicked un, if _they_’d ha’ done the right thing by you if they could, isn’t there Them as was at the making on us, and knows better and has a better will? And that’s all as ever I can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think on it. For there was the fever come and took off them as were full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there’s the breaking o’ limbs; and them as ‘ud do right and be sober have to suffer by them as are contrairy–eh, there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner–to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know–I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so. And if you could but ha’ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn’t ha’ run away from your fellow-creaturs and been so lone.”
This is probably almost enough for a Shared Reading session by the time we’ve really read it and considered Dolly’s words. I’d first want to stop and think about Dolly, who tells us about her own relation to her own thoughts:
but whether I’ve got hold on it now, or can anyways bring it to my tongue’s end, that I don’t know. For I’ve often a deal inside me as’ll never come out;
This uneducated, illiterate, country woman is a thinker, though she doesn’t have as much language as she needs for some of the complicated things she needs to think about. I would be keen to consider how many of us have thoughts or feelings or ways of knowing inside us that can’t come out, and for me this would be a chance to introduce a really big thought into the group. That thought comes from the psychotherapist Wilfred Bion and I’ve written about it here and elsewhere before because it seems to me central to some of our biggest problems.
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
Dolly is one of those remarkable human beings whose power of thought is so great that she finds ways of thinking – using her emotional experience to understand life and lives – all that stuff she refers to as ‘a deal inside me as’ll never come out’ – without much in the way of formal language to help her do so.
And what is ‘thought’ anyway, in such a context? It’s not an academic, or even a rational, spelling an argument out by logic. It feels deeper than that. I’m thinking more of a deliberate, concentrated engagement with life, but an engagement, a grappling with, that takes place internally. As a maker, say a cook or a potter, grapples with the physical materials of their trade, a thinker like Dolly Winthrop grapples mentally with the stuff of life. Not in language perhaps but in pure thought/feeling, in gut responses.
Would you take the Bion quotation to a Shared Reading group? Why not? I’m really interested in it and I think it helps me think some things about the experience of being a human…Would you take it to any Shared Reading group? No, I@d take it somewhere where I thought there would be readers who because of our previous Shared REading would be able to respond with some sort of confidence. But I’d still take it 80% of groups I’ve been in. People are intersted in thinking – trust them!
But to return to the text! Dolly, thinking in her own feeling way, finds thoughts forming when she is tending the sick or doing other practical things for people in the village and,
it comes into my head as Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve got–for I can’t be anyways better nor Them as made me; and if anything looks hard to me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’ that, there may be plenty o’ things I don’t know on, for it’s little as I know–that it is.
Now I probably need to stay here a while to feel out my responses to this, and those responses come on a number of levels.
For Dolly, God (though it is interesting she refers to God as ‘Them’) is above and made us, made humans. So far, so primitive – old man or men or higher caste folk up in the sky who create us. This thought has been around for humans since we began to develop language and perhaps even before. All over the world, early human conceived of God or Gods, who made and affect humans. Dolly is part of a long-established tradition that seems to fit only loosely with the Christianity she experiences every week at Church, most of which, by over own admission, goes over her head. She has the feeling of there being a ‘Them above’ and that is enough for her to work with.
She believes ‘I can’t be anyways better nor Them as made me’, which you might read as Dolly being a humble working woman and knowing her place. I think it is deeper and odder than that. Dolly seems very certain of it – her ‘anyways’ points that way. She feels there is ‘them’ and that they are both mysterious and benign. Shes not better than them, they are better than her. Better in what way? They created her – whatever they are.
if anything looks hard to me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on;
Better in how they understand, comprehend? Dolly’s incomprehension – why is there suffering if God is good – is an old theological problem, but she doesn’t know that: she only knows she feels the problem and she doesn’t know an answer. And she takes her own ignorance as a strange comfort. This is Dolly, without a complex theological language, yet able to think her thoughts.
When I read this I am thinking about forces in life, patterns, necessities, underlying structures in our experience. When I read ‘Them above’ I am thinking – hhhmm there is no God in that sense, there’s no above, there’s only in everything, through everything. Then I make myself rethink that. Take out the ‘only’, which is rarely a good word or thought response.
There’s everything. In the sense of its enormous complexity it is certainly above my head. When I think of everything I realise that like Dolly, I don’t know much.
I have to leave to one side, for now, her thought,
if anything looks hard to me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on;
because I don’t believe that: I believe if anything looks hard to me it’s because it is hard. I don’t expect the universe to be kind, everything to be ultimately good. I don’t believe in a loving personal God.
Oh dear, back to that rocky place again. Will continue with this tomorrow.
First, an apology to regular readers for my radio silence last week and the somewhat intermittent signal prior to that.
I’ve been very busy with things at The Reader and often times when I wake up I have got some pressing matter leftover from the day before and simply have to do the practical thing and deal with whatever it is. I hope that period of huge busy-ness is going to slow down in the weeks ahead. But if I go offline don’t think it means I’m having an extra hour in bed (though if I can, I will) just think of me reading or writing documents, ploughing through email trails or travelling on those early trains.
It makes me think about the difference between the life of contemplation and the life of action, an old chestnut to many readers, I’m sure, but one I’ve not studied, though I’ve had powerful experience of it. It’s twenty years since I founded The Reader, with my colleague Sarah Coley, when we produced the first issue of The Reader magazine in Spring 1997. The Reader has since become one of the defining acts of my life, and often has demanded action at the expense of contemplation. I’m lucky in that I had an equally long period of contemplative life before The Reader, from 1980, when I enrolled as an undergraduate in the School of English at Liverpool Univeristy. All I did, apart from personal life, and the practice of writing, cookery, sewing and DIY, for twenty odd years in the centre of my human span, was read and think about and sometimes teach literature.
That stood me in good stead, charging my innner battery for the long years of Reader action ahead. But when weeks become the kind of busy-no-stop weeks I’m in at the moment, I miss the rhythm of my life contemplative and my Daily Reading Practice. So I was glad this last week to enjoy two Reader Thinkdays with colleagues – the first at Calderstones, where for the first time we brought everyone working on site to share some reading and to do some thinking about organisational development and ethos. How can we use our cafe coffee grounds for compost and how get literature into the Ice Cream Parlour? How make a human connection between the kitchen and quality team?
Later in the week I traveled to a Polish Community Centre in Birmingham where our national and far-flung criminal justice team were meeting for their own Thinkday – same feeling of excitement and pleasure at spending contemplative time with colleagues. We read Chaucer’s poem, Truth and spent a lot of time on the pressures of working in high secure environments. We asked ourselves, what is the value, for our group members, of an hour of calm group attention – a moment of contemplation – in a week of danger, self-harm, despair?
Those hours with colleagues felt like a sort of contemplation, and a valuable use of my time, though they didn’t translate into anything visible here.
Daily Reading Practice: Sunday, Paradise Lost by John Milton
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, I’d suggest a read through from the beginning first. You’ll find a good online edition here. But if there’s no time for that, well, just start here and now.
Last week, I’d got to about line 250, Book 1. Satan, fallen from Heaven after challenging god in battle, is utterly ruined, chained to a burning lake in deepest hell. He is speaking to himself and looking about, he has risen from the lake and found some burning land on which to find a footing. And now he is contemplating his lot:
and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. [ 255 ]
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: [ 260 ]
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, thenserve in Heav’n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends, Th’ associates and copartners of our loss [ 265 ] Lye thus astonisht on th’ oblivious Pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy Mansion, or once more
With rallied Arms to try what may be yet Regaind in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell? [ 270 ]
Last week I was thinking about the way a mind may change. Satan feels sorrow, perhaps sometimes something approaching remorse but it is a flickering sensation, always overcome by his determined will to remain the same. Does this mean that he is unchangeable, a given like gold or air or fire, simply what it is, immutable? Can it be true that this how minds, beings, human beings, are?
Certainly there are some givens that do not seem to change – those who have brought up babies will have seen some element of what we call ‘personality’ or perhaps character, always present. Is this Satan’s case? He’s essentially an assertive fighter? He boasts that he is Hell’s ‘possessor’, as if simply arriving there makes him its boss. And what is it about him that makes him that boss? His mind, which is his own, and which gives him a power to own anything, anywhere. He is
One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. [ 255 ]
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater?
Like the noun ‘possessor’, the verb ‘brings’ is powerful, and gives Satan agency. This is in one sense false – he has no agency about being sent to Hell, for nine days and nights he fell, and was unable to stop himself , and is now unable to go back to Heaven (though his thoughts often turn longingly in that direction). Yet there is a powerful will in his mind – is that the same as agency? What you can do, think, in your own mind is one thing. How you can affect reality – the outside world – is another. Satan brings to Hell ‘a mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time’.
Powerful equipment, but perhaps broken – though still dangerous – equipment? Could such a mind hold you up (I imagine Nelson Mandela in the Robbin Island Prison) and hold purpose and self-control together in terrible situations? Yes. Could it be a broken mind asserting itself – I imagine an incarcerated murderer, never repentant, never sorry. Yes.
Now Satan gives us two of the poem’s most famous lines:
This is a power that minds – any minds, good or bad, working well or broken – may have, just as lungs have the power to take in – more or less – oxygen. Satan asserts the greater power of his mind over external reality. Each reader must surely recognise some truth in this – how we think about things does change them. But in what sense can the extremity of Hell be made Heav’n? If that was true why not stayed chained on the burning lake? And the next line seems in some way to undercut the sense of power Satan is desperate to hold on to;
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater?
I don’t know why I have a feeling that ‘ if I be still the same’ is sad: perhaps implies being stuck with yourself, the rigidity of not being able to change. It is no matter where he is – he is himself. For a fraction of a second this does not feel good. Then Satan reasserts himself – he’s only ‘less than he/Whom thunder hath made greater’.
That ‘less’ must chafe and gives rise to the thought that God is only greater because he makes more noise.
Can you make a Heaven of Hell by thinking? I think so. This a power humans have, one we both do and often don’t recognise. There’s also external reality in which we stub our toes on reality whenever we try not to believe in it. And yet the world changes because people think thoughts.
Time to stop for today because there is action to be taken in the garden – the ivy must come down, I think. It’s a hellish job.
But if I simply said ‘There! I’ve thought: the ivy has come down and been carted to the dump…heaven!’ I don’t think the garden would look any different. So in what sense is the mind it’s own place, making a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n?
Daily Reading Practice: Sunday, Paradise Lost by John Milton
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, I’d suggest a read through from the beginning first. You’ll find a good online edition here. But if there’s no time for that, well, just start here and now.
Last week, I’d got to Book 1, Line 241, and had seen the fallen Satan talk himself into trying again and rising from the lake of fire where he had fallen after his nine days fall from heaven,. He’s found a footing on land now (though still all fire) and looks about him:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he [ 245 ]
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hathequald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewelhappy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail [ 250 ]
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. [ 255 ]
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: [ 260 ]
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, thenserve in Heav’n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends, Th’ associates and copartners of our loss [ 265 ] Lye thus astonisht on th’ oblivious Pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy Mansion, or once more
With rallied Arms to try what may be yet Regaind in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell? [ 270 ]
Here’s a key moment in the poem. Since we have first seen him, Satan is in a state of flux, one moment despairing, another, rallying himself to fight on, sometimes seeming almost broken, moments later, resurgent. I think it is worth wondering what this feels like in human terms. The amount of energy consumed by changing mental gear in this way must be immense.
I’m thinking now about my own mind. I don’t feel I have a lot of control over it, and remember the the ‘white bear’ experiment first proposed by Fydor Dostoevsky. It’s very hard to stop your mind doing things it wants to do. But can you will it to do some things you want it to do – can you think of a blue flower, thus pushing the white bear aside? An interesting experiment on the rebound effect has shown that while suppression by distraction of other means may work for a while, the under-thought will return later and perhaps stronger.
That seems to ring true for Satan, moving all the time between despair and grief for what is lost, and angry self-assertion about what he gains by that loss. So, looking about, he sees loss:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he [ 245 ]
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hathequald, force hath made supream
Above his equals.
‘This mournful gloom’ is now the medium in which the fallen angels must have their being and there is no doubt that Satan suffers as he looks about him and realises this. He accepts it (‘be it so’) and seems in acccepting to accept that God is all-powerful.
since he [ 245 ]
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right:
But I wonder if the underlying thought ( I should be all powerful – not Him!) if asserting itself even as Satan seems to accept thereality he finds himself in. His resistance is in the word ‘ now’ (‘since he/ who is now Sovran’) which suggests that God has not always been, and perhaps will not always be, Sovran. That is just ‘now’, at this moment. There is in Satan’s mind a potential other time, which he believes in more strongly than the evidence of ‘now’,, when he will be, might be, Sovran. And this nascent thought is picked up and amplified in the next lines:
fardest from him is best
Whom reason hathequald, force hath made supream
Above his equals.
Only ‘force’ has made God Supream, Satan boasts to himself, in terms of ‘reason’, they were, are ‘equals.’
Is this true? Satan thinks it is and seems to feel utterly secure in that thought. Yet there is a sadness to his thinking that seems to undercut his rational thought. The tone of his thought is melancholy:
Farewelhappy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail [ 250 ]
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor:
10.15am – 11.15am: Sam Guglani – Medicine, Science and the Arts
What are the human and moral challenges of contemporary medicine? Why are the arts an urgent and necessary means of knowledge towards better medicine – and ultimately, better society? Join poet, novelist and consultant oncologist Sam Guglani for an hour’s reflection, including the Medicine Unboxed project and readings from his work.
Sam Guglani is a poet, novelist and consultant oncologist who specialises in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has a background in medical ethics and chairs the Gloucestershire Hospitals Trust law and ethics group. Director of Medicine Unboxed since he founded it in 2009, Sam uses the arts and creative industries to illuminate challenges in medicine. He is a published poet and writes for The Lancet, and his debut novel Histories is released in 2017.
Autumn Chrysanthemum welcome on the front step, 29 October
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, start at the beginning – and read aloud. You’ll find a good online edition here.
I’m starting today at line 192, just after Satan has encouraged Beelezebub (and himself) to believe fighting on is the best way forward.
Let’s read the next paragraph aloud to warm up :
Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate
With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes
That sparkling blaz’d, his other Parts besides
Prone on the Flood, extended long and large [ 195 ]
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast [ 200 ] Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:
Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam
The Pilot of some small night-founder’d Skiff,
Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, [ 205 ]
With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind
Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night
Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain’d on the burning lake, nor ever thence [ 210 ]
Had ris’n or heav’d his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought [ 215 ]
Evil to others, and enrag’d might see
How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc’t, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour’d. [ 220 ]
Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames Drivn backward slope thir pointing spires, and rowld
In billows, leave i’th’ midst a horrid Vale.
Then with expanded wings he stears his flight [ 225 ]
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land
He lights, if it were Land that ever burn’d
With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire;
And such appear’d in hue, as when the force [ 230 ]
Of subterranean wind transports a Hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter’d side
Of thundring Ætna, whose combustible
And fewel’dentrals thence conceiving Fire, Sublim’d with Mineral fury, aid the Winds, [ 235 ]
And leave a singed bottom all involv’d
With stench and smoak: Such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet. Him followed his next Mate,
Both glorying to have scap’t the Stygian flood As Gods, and by thir own recover’d strength, [ 240 ]
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.
This falls into 3 sections, and is worth separating out. First line 192-208, I think the first section since the opening where Milton puts in a lot of references to things/places/classical figures we might not know about. What I do with these is read over them as if it didn’t matter what they are or whether I know about them, trying to get the rough sense of the verse.
Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate
With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes
That sparkling blaz’d, his other Parts besides
Prone on the Flood, extended long and large [ 195 ]
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast [ 200 ] Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:
Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam
The Pilot of some small night-founder’d Skiff,
Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, [ 205 ]
With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind
Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night
Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes:
What’s happening here? I’d be asking my group, give me a rough translation? It’s about how bog he is, someone may say, he’s comparing him to a whale.
It’s very visual, filmic, isn’t it? There he is – eyes sparkling, but the rest of him, ‘Prone on the Flood, extended long and large’. Those references, Titanian, Briareos, Typhon and Leviathan are all about giants or gigantic creatures. The Dartmouth edition is really helpful, because you can easily look things up or ignore them, as you choose.
Milton moves happily from Greek mythology to contemporary seafarer chat when he speaks of Leviathan, the whale:
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:
Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam
The Pilot of some small night-founder’d Skiff,
Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, [ 205 ]
With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind
Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night
Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes:
Is it true – have sailors ever thought a whale to be an island and moored up on his sccaly side? Having seen some great whales off the coast of Maine a few years back I very much doubt it – they move fast. But the size is the point isn’t it? And while I am struggling to get the size of a real life whale back into my mind ( I think the whales I saw off Bar Harbour were humpback whales – they are big, especially when you are in a small boat, but nowhere near as big as Blue Whales, which are the largest animals on the planet).
All that is a simile, (note the ‘As’ line 197, and the linking ‘So’, line 209) to help us imagine Satan’s enormous size. Milton wants us to see it, like a play or like pictures (or for us a film) which is interesting given that most of what he is trying to put into our heads is thought, isn’t it? or if not thought, inner experience? He is trying to make real inner states, which don’t easily map to language and pictures. In another dimension, I suppose, this ‘story’ could be told as ‘theology’ and in other parts of his writing life, Milton does that. But here – he is trying to ‘justifie the wayes of God to men’ and he goes for mighty, dramatic, unfolding narrative illustration as the way to do it.
Let’s read the second part of this paragraph:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain’d on the burning lake, nor ever thence [ 210 ]
Had ris’n or heav’d his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought [ 215 ]
Evil to others, and enrag’d might see
How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc’t, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour’d. [ 220 ]
This huge creature, ‘chained on the burning lake’ is allowed to heave up his head, to rise, by the ‘will/And high permission of all-ruling Heaven’. This is one of those moments when I falter in my reading. God allows evil – can that be right? Yes ,according to this poem – it is given. It is all part of the whole thing. and the whole thing is complicated -containing as it must – but why? – evil? I’m going to put this part in my list of worries on my Paradise Lost page on the top line of this blog. God allows evil in that
…with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought [ 215 ]
Evil to others, and enrag’d might see
How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth
Infinite goodness,
This is one of those parts where God seems small, and I don’t want to think that because I know for Milton that can never have been the case. So rather than standing over Milton and thinking I know better, I need to get myself to work at understanding what it means for him. Why enrage your enemies? Why make the evil-doer feel bad? Or does God care about, or create, that rage? Or is it something that is part of Satan and therefore Satan’s own responsibility? For man, God offers
to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
but for Satan there is only ‘Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance ‘. Does God need a scapegoat?
Or am I thinking amiss?
Let me think of a human who is/was when alive, evil.
If that person never repents of what thy have done can they ever be anything but evil or in thrall to confusion, wrath and vengeance – say of the legal system, or the judgement of history or of their own mind. For humans in this poem, there is always a chance of redemption. For Satan, not. Why? Because he doesn’t want it. Say there was a bad human who didn’t want redemption – wanted to only think ‘what I did was good. I enjoyed it, and it pleased me’. Would we have to say of that person they were irredeemable?
Can I understand Satan as a principle of the irredeemable? Certainly, that spirit seems a presence in the human universe. We’ve seen it. There is a responsibility at the heart of things then, to accept evil as evil. In Satan that is never (or rarely? there is a moment) accepted – he’s always blustering on about how he only just lost the battle and might have won..so his sense of what is might nearly have been proved right. If I imagine Satan not as a loser/victim but as murderer/tyrant/corrupter then the fact of his not being able to see what he has done as wrong becomes an explanation of why he is forever damned. He is damned for being himself and for choosing to be that self. Is it a choice? Or did God make him like this? We’ll com to some of this later.
Milton is making me justify the ways of God to myself here!
On, to the next third of the paragraph:
Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames Drivn backward slope thir pointing spires, and rowld
In billows, leave i’th’ midst a horrid Vale.
Then with expanded wings he stears his flight [ 225 ]
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land
He lights, if it were Land that ever burn’d
With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire;
And such appear’d in hue, as when the force [ 230 ]
Of subterranean wind transports a Hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter’d side
Of thundring Ætna, whose combustible
And fewel’dentrals thence conceiving Fire, Sublim’d with Mineral fury, aid the Winds, [ 235 ]
And leave a singed bottom all involv’d
With stench and smoak: Such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet. Him followed his next Mate,
Both glorying to have scap’t the Stygian flood As Gods, and by thir own recover’d strength, [ 240 ]
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.
Now, having briefly gone inward ,to think about the psychological damage the external action is causing, Milton takes us back out again, to see Satan, in his enormity: his will seems to break, to disappear, the chains that held him there.
Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames Drivn backward slope thir pointing spires, and rowld
In billows, leave i’th’ midst a horrid Vale.
The very flames of Hell are driven back by his movement, which clears a space. This is reminiscent of the parting of the sea in Exodus and is an indication of Satan’s massive power. His will gives him the use of his wings:
Then with expanded wings he stears his flight [ 225 ]
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land
He lights, if it were Land that ever burn’d
With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire;
But the fires of Hell are everywhere, and on dry land the fire burns as a solid. and to make this real, Milton reinds of real earthly fire – volcanoes:
And such appear’d in hue, as when the force [ 230 ]
Of subterranean wind transports a Hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter’d side
Of thundring Ætna, whose combustible
And fewel’dentrals thence conceiving Fire, Sublim’d with Mineral fury, aid the Winds, [ 235 ]
And leave a singed bottom all involv’d
With stench and smoak:
Milton is creating a movement between inner worlds of the spirit, one’s psyche or psychology (where I have to keep asking myself ‘do you recognise this? ) and the powerful pictures which make connections to reality or to myth (where Milton reminds us, you know about Mount Etna? you know about Whales? It’s like that!). I’m reminded of a bit later on (Book 5) when Raphael is visiting Adam and is about to tell of the war in Heaven, and says he will use simile, metaphor, analogy to make the connection between Adam’s understanding and the heavenly reality:
what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein [ 575 ] Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?
I’ll come to this when we get to Book 5 (several years hence at my current speed) but for now just want to say that I do believe this is the method Milton himself is using throughout the whole poem – telling us things via dramatic story – that are actually to be experienced in other dimensions, dimensions the contemporary Western world no lnger has much language for. Milton’s way seems part sci-fi, part theology.
The second thought, here,
what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein [ 575 ] Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?
Is also an intersting one.We may have to use simile, metaphor, analogy but what if in some way those things hold further apart those dimensions than they actually are? What if all these levels of being are relfections of the same thing?
But let me go back to the poem: has Satan gained anything by moving from the sea of fire to the land of fire?
Such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet. Him followed his next Mate,
Both glorying to have scap’t the Stygian flood As Gods, and by thir own recover’d strength, [ 240 ]
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.
Well, the change of scene seems to have given them a sense that they can move, that they have autonomy, that they have strength. Is this false, given that both places are full of fire? Ye the rebel angels take the move as sign of their own powers, ‘thir own recover’d strength’.
Which makes me think, they are not going to stop here. More next week.
What is going on with this tree in Greenbank Park? Is this a giant nest or a strange growth? Arborealists, help!
Continuing my weekly reading of Paradise Lost…
A quick explanation for anyone who wouldn’t naturally find themselves reading such a poem: I’m interested in acts of translation from one way of thinking to another, particularly from Christian thinking in poetry – Dante, Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and many others – to my own a-religious thoughts. Many years ago, when I wrote my Ph.D, on what I called ‘Visionary Realism’, I realised that I was interested in what happens to religious experience when people no longer believe in religion. Are there, for example, still experiences of ‘grace’? Do we ever experience ‘miracles’? Are there trials and tribulations of the soul? Is there ‘soul’? …and so on. I came into this area of thinking through Doris Lessing’s novel-series Canopus in Argos, and particularly the first novel in that series, Shikasta. There’s a partial account of this in previous blog post, ‘Lifesavers’.
If you are joining me new today, start at the beginning – and read aloud. You’ll find a good online edition here.
We’re still very near the beginning in Book 1. Last time, I’d read Beelzebub’s speech which considered different possibilities re the devils fallen state and chiefly, what if they were still to do God’s bidding even here in Hell? Satan, though racked with his own inner torments, is quick to respond and shut down doubt in his second-in-command. worth reading the whole speech once through in and then we’ll go slowly:
Fall’n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight, [ 160 ]
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his Providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil; [ 165 ]
Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from thirdestind aim.
But see the angry Victor hathrecall’d
His Ministers of vengeance and pursuit [ 170 ]
Back to the Gates of Heav’n: The Sulphurous Hail
Shot after us in storm, oreblownhath laid
The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice
Of Heav’nreceiv’d us falling, and the Thunder, Wing’d with red Lightning and impetuous rage, [ 175 ]
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
Let us not slip th’ occasion, whether scorn,
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde, [ 180 ]
The seat of desolation, voyd of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves,
There rest, if any rest can harbour there, [ 185 ]
And reassembling our afflicted Powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire Calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, [ 190 ]
If not what resolution from despare.
The line ‘Fall’n cherube, to be weak in misrerable’ is one of my favourites in the whole poem. Why? Well, it is true for one thing! It rings in my heart and has done for many years, as a way of helping me think about lots of different forms of weakness, of misery and of the causes of evil. I bring the line to life for myself by thinking of various instances of weakness I have known, having witnessed or experienced them. Times when I or other people have felt or acted weakly, and I remember the misery that seems concomitant with such weakness. I read it again and look up ‘miserable’ in the online etymological dictionary (main meaning: wretched).
I read it again in the context of its sentence:
Fall’nCherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight, [ 160 ]
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist.
Interesting that Satan introduces the idea of active weakness (doing) first, before the more passive form (suffering) and that they seem in this context to be almost the same – it doesn’t matter whether you are doing or suffering, it remains the case that ‘to be weak is miserable’.
I wonder in what tone these words are spoken? It feels sympathetic at first , ‘Fall’n cherube,’ feels almost affectionate but it quickly becomes a sort of call to arms. Satan respondes very quickly to Beelzebub’s potential capitulation. ‘But of this be sure’ is a rallying cry. See t how the tense remains in the present : we’re still fighting him, it’s not over, ‘contrary to his high will/Whom we resist.’ The acknowledgement of weakness is so fleeting! It is made, but it is quickly transformed into something else, and that something else really says ‘we’re not weak, we’re active’.
If then his Providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil; [ 165 ]
Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from thirdestind aim.
Satan is a pragmatist: he doesn’t mind not winning the big battle, so long as he can continue: he’s content that ‘oft times’ they ‘ may succeed’. Oft is one limitation and feels a small one – often is not occasional. But there’s a bigger doubt in ‘may’, though the line is carried along by the hope in ‘succeed.’ So we talk ourselves up.
Next comes a sentence I don’t think I’ve looked at in all my previous readings of the poem:
But see the angry Victor hathrecall’d
His Ministers of vengeance and pursuit [ 170 ]
Back to the Gates of Heav’n: The Sulphurous Hail
Shot after us in storm, oreblownhath laid
The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice
Of Heav’nreceiv’d us falling, and the Thunder, Wing’d with red Lightning and impetuous rage, [ 175 ]
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
The storm of their defeat is coming to an end. God has gone quiet. What is this but a chance for Satan and his fellows to somehow act? The energy of Satan’s will is an amazing power. It’s not moments since we saw him at the nadir or despair – look back to line 55!
for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain [ 55 ]
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn he views
The dismal Situation waste and wilde, [ 60 ]
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’donely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [ 65 ]
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all;
But having Beelzebub to rally partly rouses him and now he is actively seeking to do something – to be weak is miserable, but his will is not to weakness:
Let us not slip th’ occasion, whether scorn,
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde, [ 180 ]
The seat of desolation, voyd of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves,
There rest, if any rest can harbour there, [ 185 ]
And reassembling our afflicted Powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire Calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, [ 190 ]
If not what resolution from despare.
It’s interesting to note that Satan doesn’t understand the action of God. The storm of fury has ceased and Satan does not know why: ‘whether scorn/ Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.’ And it doesn’t matter, because the thing is to act and to
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire Calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, [ 190 ]
If not what resolution from despare.
Reinforcement is a building up, which may be possible if there is hope, resolution is reconcilation which will be necessary if there is no hope. Whatever else happens, Satan is going to find, it seems a way to continue to fight. When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose, as Dylan sings.
I’ve been on the road this week travelling between Edinburgh, London and Liverpool and I’ve been reading and rereading 4 business books and a novel, A Bowl of Cherries, by Sheena McKay. Have not bothered to do any ‘Just Started’ on them but will do that this week, a little out of kilter, but that’s ok. ‘Just Started’ is really there as record of what I have read. It’s hard to keep a routine on the road – well, hard for me, struggling with routines at the quietest of times, so my Daily Practice has been out of the window. As has daily exercise, off the menu since I was unwell in November. But now February approaches, and my thought turn to the necessity of daily exercise. the winter dark and down time is drawing to an end.
readerjanedavis 