On sitting down to read King Lear once again
Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt for looking backwards, and I think that's meant to be a reminder for us all of the dangers of unbridled nostalgia:
And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city. And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city. And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed ...The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
And maybe this is why skin tastes salty, because we're all so tempted to look backwards the way we've come, instead of keeping our heads inclined dutifully forward into the promiseland of the future. Our myth of a golden age, passed down from time immemorial, tells us that the world is, and always has been, going to hell - the past isn't prologue at all, really, but an inaccessible perfect space where laws are followed without question, where fruit always sweetly hangs from the trees and where we never knew shame at our nakedness. How can any future possibly compare to such paradise?
And so we look back.
And just like saltwater fails to quench thirst, encouraging the shipworn to drink deeper and deeper, a prolonged stare at our past can trap us into a nearly unbreakable internal gaze which can no longer see a future at all.
The Golden Age, much stronger and more woebegone than the opposing myth of progress, is a crippling siren song for a graduate student, whose job is to rewrite herself a future out of the narratives of the past.
For the past five months of studying for the first of my three comprehensive exams, I've been reading obsessively, hysterically trying to chip away at my ignorance and fill the gaps in what I think I know with cursory, desperate gulps of literature. Exclusively reading drama, my mind is a maelstrom of strange, transitory worlds that last "but two hours traffic upon a stage", worlds where revenge is possible, where love is rewarded, and where clowns always have the best lines and the last words.
Exploring these worlds five hundred years after their construction, my audience of one sees the characters in these plays returning again and again to the myth of The Golden Age, fleeing to the freedom of the Edenic forest of Arden, or chastising a poet for failing to properly endorse the myth of progress. Troilus and Cressida walk their play self-consciously, painfully aware that their story has already been written, their very names Renaissance iconography for a doomed love affair. Trapped in the past, the characters can't look forward, and Fortune marches on, crushing the blind beneath her wheel.
It's a truism amongst Shakespearean critics - whose banner, I suppose, I'm squired beneath - that as he aged, Shakespeare became more and more interested in the relationships between individuals that can forgive the horrors and terrors of a cruelly systemic world. While most of his early comedies end in marriage, his later "problem plays" and romances end in silences and miracles, a more mixed and complicated message than "love is all you need." But before the harmony threatened by the trials of the first four acts can be restored, Shakespeare's characters experience turmoils of regret and longing for an elevated past. Otherworldly magic may make Prospero's reconciliation with his usurping brother possible, or restore the marriage of Leontes and Hermione or the life of the entombed Thasia, but these events are less spectacular than the desperate need these characters have for reunification. Their guilt and longing is driven by their yearning for an inaccessible past that they can not reclaim without the magic possibilities of romance.
And just like a Florizel who flees kingly authority for the freedom of a shepherd, in my revelry and word-bathing, I want to stay in those worlds long enough to savour them, lingering over Marlowe's Tamburlaine and fussing over Bartholomew Fair long enough to make even Jonson approve. But such looking back is discouraged, and there's no time to explore as I rush through my list and gulp down the next narrative of the past. I suppose it's his job, but I can't help resenting my supervisor as he wrenches my head back around to keep my future squarely in view. In retaliation, I construct my own Golden Age, one where I could read for pleasure surrounded by others doing the same, in reading rooms with proper chairs and adequate light, where decompression with a cheap pitcher of beer and a cathartic argument could make everything right with the world again, and where the homefires burned brightly all night long.
So I can't help but look back, and I sympathize for Lot's nameless wife, eternally punished for her inarticulate longing for what has come before:
Lot's Wife
And the just man trailed God's messenger
His huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed his wife and spoke to her:
"It's not too late, you can look back still
At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
The square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
At the empty windows of that upper storey
Where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'
Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
Of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
Her body turned into transparent salt,
And her swift legs were rooted to the ground.
Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she will never be lost
She who gave up her life to steal one glance.
-- Anna Akhmatova
As Keats settles down to pay homage to the past, he too is struck "Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay". Recognizing that inherent in his backward glance is the threat of a potential loss of self, Keats embraces the past and sets it ablaze, letting himself rise from the ashes of what has come before:
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
Hmph. He must've been speaking with my supervisor.
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