Where the Quest doesn't have to end

I read a tantalizing blurb about a pilgrimage through Sussex, England undergirded by the reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (which I have never read - in fact I've never read any Woolf, only seen The Hours).


Aside from how much I love the idea of this tour, and how I'm already scanning my acquaintances to determine who might be cajoled into coming on one, I was also grabbed by the last paragraph of the article. The writer refers to a moment in Mrs. Dalloway when an unemployed man stands with a handful of pamphlets before St. Paul's Cathedral, and wonders if he should go in. There is company inside, and a place to belong. He doesn't go in though, and the magazine writer offers this interpretation:

perhaps because he believes it would mean setting down not only his pamphlets but “seeking and questing” as well.

Immediately I wondered, "does stepping into Salt Lake Monthly Meeting involve setting down the Questing and Seeking which draws us there?" The only answer possible is no. There is company, and a place to belong, but there is also seeking and questing inside. Indeed the function of our company is to support each other and create the right environment for collective seeking.

There were three pieces of vocal ministry last week, which felt very promising. I love vocal ministry.

Pride and Prejudice - Granny's favorite

I just found out today that Pride and Prejudice is my grandmother's favorite book. I could not have imagined that the book which already possessed this same position of preeminence in the library of my heart could rise to an even higher stratus, but this fact has done it. 

I started rereading it on a layover in Newark last week which was supposed to be twenty five minutes and ended up being ten hours. Thank goodness it was preloaded on my kindle. 

There are two passages which stir particular minderings today. 

In one Mary Bennet is described as having hopes that Mr. Collins intends to seek her hand. 

"With proper civilities the ladies then withdrew; all of them equally surprised that he meditated a quick return. Mrs. Bennet wished to understand by it that he thought of paying his addresses to one of her younger girls, and Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him. She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others; there was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very agreeable companion."

Mary recognizes that Collins is not her intellectual equal, but trusts that under her tutelage she may guide him to higher heights. This passage surely precipitates doleful sighs from many readers who have hoped to change a man once they marry him only to find him a recalcitrant pupil. 

In her fifteen suggestions on how to raise a feminist daughter, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against the idea of Feminism Lite, which proposes such slogans as "The man is the head of the household, but the woman is the neck," or "The man is the driver, but the woman is in the passenger seat." Such ideas undermine the principal of equality between men and women. 

On Saturday night I attended a wedding in Bar Harbor, Maine where the gods of seating charts placed me next to an English PhD whose dissertation examines feminist ideas in 19th century British literature. I asked her if Feminism Lite makes an appearance in the texts she discusses, especially a 1850 domestic handbook called Household Management. 

She said yes, it does, and while she rejects the ideas in our day and age ("I don't want to be the fucking neck.") she sees that in the 1800's even the idea of being the neck, or holding the map, was pretty radical. 

Mary is this radical. Given so little chance to direct her future, it seems natural that she would dream of molding the mediocre mind of her marital partner. Poor darling; He probably doesn't even register her existence, being first overcome by the traditional tidal waves of beauty and charm in Jane and Elizabeth, then waylaid by the flattering attention of the dogged Charlotte Lucas who "secures" him. 

I cannot decide whether it's a good thing or a pity that Charlotte entertains no hope of altering Mr. Collins' character. Her ready acceptance of him, after all, Elizabeth takes as incontrovertible evidence that Charlotte's own mind is weaker than Elizabeth ever suspected. 

In the second passage Mr. Bennet speaks to his daughter Elizabeth about broken hearts in a manner that reveals the shockingly dull lives of women in this era. 

“So, Lizzy,” said he one day, “your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time. Here are officers enough in Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham be your man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”

Being crossed in love, he imagines, must be a diversion for a woman whose existence is so limited that she counts on rejection from a man in order to have something to think about and with which to distinguish herself from others of her sex. 

Before I remark on how far women have come since this time, how now accomplished they are in almost every field et cetera, let me offer that Mr. Bennet is not wrong, even in regards to our era. 

What if I had a crush on someone? Would that crush not provide satisfying (if distracting and occasionally torturous) fodder for all kinds of mental machinations, the very kind which provide the subject for much narration in Austen's books? Yes, it would. In fact, it does. And as far as being jilted goes, a large portion of the mental activity which an attachment excites circles around the fear that it will end at the partner's hand, or regret that it already has. As for distinguishing oneself from other women, I think the feelings of having a crush, or having been disappointed in love actually have a double function socially: first, which entails induction into a club of people who have tales of love and its attendant travails (an act of gaining access and inclusion) and second, in describing in detail the ways in which my travails differ from yours (the act of distinction Mr. Bennet imagines.) 

The last paragraph is partially ironic - these three women have plenty to think about,
and yet attractions and jiltings still take up a lot of our thoughts!

Thank goodness we woman have love and partners and rejection to ponder! Else our lives might be very dull indeed. 

Poem

A poem in this week's issue of the New Yorker speaks to this week's experience.

Seraphim, by Patricia Spears Jones

Once a beauty, full figured, beloved
And then a fever, sweats, water vomited
Until the body gave out. And then,

Wings and lyres and legion of other
Angels. Singing, dancing, flying about,

But once a beauty remembers
Physical love and then its loss

Eternal life seems mundane
No conflict or need or desire.

Thus, this seraphim held melancholy
Gentle as a lull in a long conversation

But heaven allows only jubilance.
Possibly the angel needed to return

Human: with feelings, tears and laughter
Or find a way to shape the sadness into
A moment of beauty when the angel's wings

Spread and flight moves to breathing
Full of vision. There an angel's tears bond
with the visitor's fear, awe. It could be

a filmmaker's perambulating Berlin,
in search of a reason to consider
the spirit, those angels set on top of monuments
across the handsome city.

And they love the lovers.
And one remains lovingly disinterested.

How dreams and death and a dearth
Of joy is visible. And wings spread
And wings fall. And the beloved becomes
A man who understands a woman's
Full figure. A man who fears fever.
A man who takes his lover in all
Her melancholy and lifts her up

And unto joy.

-------------------------------------

Much of the Sufi and pre-Islamic poetry we have looked at these weeks has shown the connection between divine and physical, human love. Our love, lust even, for another human is a yearning for the divine, from which we have been separated.

This poem gets at the same idea from another angle, it seems to me. The angel, granted paradise after a bout with fatal illness, yearns for the trials and tribulations of human love: the tears, the conflict, the desire. Life in paradise is Mundane without the elements of earthly love that the sufis write about, that painful ecstasy and intoxication that makes the sufi feel most alive, it seems.

Yesterday at the Met a few other scholars and I looked for a while at the Renaissance and classical Greek sculptures. We decided the women and men are sexualized to the same degree, but the men's sexuality (we were looking at Perseus) is glorified, while the woman's sexuality is used against her, as a tool to make her seem weak, or objectified.

I like that at the end of this poem, the man appreciates his lover's full figure, as if his eye encompasses all that she is, not just the sexualized nature, and exalts her whole being "unto joy".

Day 9: Concert, and Day 10: The Met

This is Sahar, the fearless leader of this institute, introducing the performers at last night's concert of Persian and Turkish music. The event was held at Poet's House, the largest poetry library in the world (or at least Sahar said with some conviction).

Here are some of the other teachers at the concert, on the rocks. The performers read Sufi poetry by Rumi and Hafez, and then played the musical versions of those poems. I felt nostalgic for Palestine listening to the oud. 

This is the parlor at the Penington Friends House
where guests and residents are free to hang. I've
been writing there each humid morning.

The humidity here is kind of out of control. I feel at every moment as though I've just climbed out of a steamy shower. 

Most of the artwork I saw today knows nothing of humidity, existing as it does in the Met's highly climate controlled rooms. Many of the rooms I entered today I have never been to in the visits I've had there; mostly the arts of the medieval period from lands of the Middle East and Central Asia. 

It was an incredible day. I loved seeing especially the small pieces that were in daily use by the people who practiced the kind of Islam, and read the kind of poetry, we are reading. Here are a few things I have comments about, from the Islamic galleries and others: 

Qur'an on a stand

Fantastic throne leg with some terrifying monster coming out of it. Reminded me of the "Medieval Monsters" exhibit I saw last week at the Morgan, which explored how monsters are oft invoked by religious or royal folks to show their power. "Don't mess with me," the message seems to be, "I've got this guy only a phone call away."

The daily use (though surely for the elite) objects were unbelievably beautiful.

This was all different kinds of inlaid stone, wood, and other colored materials.

I asked a docent where I could get away from the crowds, and she sent me to the East Asian galleries. She was right!

This little cabinet in the "Art of Tibet" gallery bespeaks a different attitude toward death in this particular Buddhist society: it is decorated with skulls and skeletons,
and along the iron hinges and reinforcements are "heads at different stages of decomposition." 

Just loved this little guy, begging joyfully?

Small icons of the sort that would live in homes are of interest to me. 

A temporary exhibit on Japanese painting. These screens were huge and magnificent.

Days 6 and 7 (Weekend)

Our group hopped on Metro North to go to the Untermyer Gardens today, a gem in Yonkers, available free to the public. They were created by a wealthy American who had traveled in the east (sorry I wasn't really listening to the lecture - too distracted by the walls, fountains, and views.)

So that was Saturday. 

On Sunday I went to the very silent 15th Street Meeting (they said after the 9:30 service that the 11 am service usually has more vocal ministry). A beautiful space which was really too big for Quaker Meetings now. I don't like being so far away from others in the space. It makes vocal ministry seem almost impossible - especially when there are a dozen fans trying (in vain) to overcome the 95% humidity outside and inside.

Still an important hour of worship, as it always is.

This afternoon I got to sing with a friend along the East River. It was nice to sing again, especially as a reprise to the magnificent time singing I had with friends in East Greenville, PA last weekend. A few minutes later, on my way to the Guggenheim (where the crazy crowds sent me running for Central Park - I'll figure out how to get back during the week. I was silly to think a rainy Sunday afternoon was going to be a good time...) I passed this poster stuck on a random building and appreciated this Lutheran endorsement for all my singing: 

Day 5

This morning Dr. Kemal Silay gave a fascinating lecture on Turkey's political situation and on the change in its poetry over the past several years. The overall gist was that Islamists today say they are getting back to the good old Islam, and cite tradition when they crack down on women and on gays. Dr. Silay used analysis of the kind of poetry written during the middle ages and under the Ottoman empire to point out that society in those days was far, far more lenient, diverse and welcoming than what the Islamists are pushing for now.

People in power the world over seem to be in the business of denying their countries' pasts. The leaders of Turkey, including Erdogan, whom Dr. Silay classed as a dictator, deny that Islam has ever been inclusive or diverse. The poets tell a different story.

Mihri Hatun, (1461-1506) wrote about the real beauty that women possess, not the beauty that the male poets of her time exalted.

The poet Nabi (1641-1712) calls for poetry that is not empty, but says something substantive. "Don't draw up your nets empty from the sea" he enjoined his peers.

Poetry during the Ottoman period even speaks about women with blue eyes, because the Ottoman leaders often married Russian women.

Current Islamists look back at this tradition and "have a fit" says Dr. Silay. They deny the life and zest of early Turkish poetry.

Here is a ghazal by a contemporary Turkish poet, Ataol BEHRAMOĞLU
GAZEL TO A NEW LOVE
I come to you crossing abysses
Crazy, flying I come to you

Forgetting what so often ended in grief
Oh so avidly I come to you

Full to overflowing with songs
Tongue-tied I come to you

My mind more jumbled than the bazaar
My heart all topsy-turvy I come to you

To learn everything all over again
To forget what I know, I come to you

Just like one newly come into the world
Stark naked and wailing I come to you

Saying, pluck me up again by the roots
So you’d set me flying, oh love, I come to you

Day 4

During this first week I observed that the women brought in to teach us taught differently than the men.

Bushra Rehman was the first to ask students to read things from the board. She was the first to create an activity that was a true workshop where we worked with each other and created our own poetry-in-translation. Her class was the one that had us all literally buzzing with excitement about what we had created - that's the feeling I want to create in my own classes!

Dr Pritchett

Today, Dr. Frances Pritchett followed in this model by also asking us to read the poetry projected on the board, rather than reading it herself, as all the men teachers have. She also turns the traditional teacher's advantage on its head by maintaining a remarkable website about Persian poetry.
At the beginning of her talk she said "My lecture is not going to be like the others you've been experiencing, because unlike the other lecturers I'm not trying to get you to understand every possible important thing about an area of study that I've spent decades in. That's not my goal."

She went on to explain how in her retirement, her goal has been to create resources for all the material she knows about and taught, on her website dedicated to Urdu Poetry. It is a remarkable feat. There is everything anyone would ever want to know about Persian Poetry on this site, and she maintains and updates it all herself.

Today's study of the ghazal genre also touched on the idea that romantic passion is divine in nature. It is also, interestingly, transgressive. The poet, or rather the speaker, is always transgressing in some way. So, for example, the lover in the poetry is not the poet's wife (!) or the person he is destined to marry. It is a woman or a boy who is not available.

Transgression has been so stamped out of religion - it is about conforming rather than challenging. I suppose some Christians, Quakers included, see their role as challenging power, but so little of that challenge happens at the Meeting level, or the congregational level. We are by and large very well behaved. I say this as a criticism of myself. I think I could certainly be more transgressive with my political voice. Jesus certainly was.

Another thing Dr. Pritchett pointed out about the ghazals that I liked was that because they were so formally constraining, they really allowed a poet to show his or her stuff. When there are no rules, it's hard to say that something is not good. But when there are so many constraints, you really have to know your vocabulary and your poetic tone to succeed.

I also like that in the poetry gatherings, people held their friends accountable - they might say something like "You're not using that idiom right" or "Your rhyme is not as tight there as in the rest of the poem." This kind of criticism is unusual in most writerly circles I know because we are all too friendly. We have to pay an editor big bucks to be mean! I like the idea that friends would value their friends' abilities well enough to push them. I want to do this with students- to warmly demand their best work by pointing out where they have fallen short of what they can produce.

==========================

Did you know that Langston Hughes went to Turkestan?

Hughes with a writer's group in Central Asia

Zohra Saed, our presenter this afternoon, had put together a slideshow of images from Hughes travels in the USSR in 1932-33. It was pretty remarkable. Apparently Harlem was a point where Soviets recruited communist sympathizers to come to the USSR and see how life could be. Hughes went on one of these trips, but he didn't stay on the mainline tour, which of course skimmed over the difficult truths of communism and looked only at a handful of propped up scenes of happy and productive Soviets.

Hughes literally jumped off a train as it went south and visited the southern bloc countries where he photographed working conditions on the cotton farms (which bore striking resemblance, of course, to cotton plantations of the American south).