The Educated Imagination

Demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street, Saturday October 8, 2011. These are the kids Fox News and the Republicans are calling a “mob.”  

From Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned:

“If we pursue either liberty or equality we lose both. The tertium quid of one thing needful is fraternity, or interpersonal relation, the kingdom of ends, the community of love, relaxing into tolerance and good will at a distance.” [Notes 58-8.71] (45)

Daily photos of the demonstrations here.

Must-see site: We are the 99%.

More photos after the jump.

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A sign at the Occupy Wall Street protest today (h/t Dish).

Here’s Frye on Jesus, love, and the community in “Substance and Evidence”:

It’s very important to realize that when we profess or articulate a faith of any kind, what we’re really doing is attaching ourselves to a specific community. Christian beliefs attach us to a Christian community; democratic beliefs make us want to believe in a democracy, and so on. What faith should do is to help create a community in which every individual loves those who are closest to him, or what Jesus calls his neighbours. From there his love radiates into good will and tolerance, which might be called love at a distance, love for those we don’t know, or for those in other communities. (CW 4, 324)

And, right on schedule, the right mobilizes for an attack organized, promoted, and led by Fox News.

Update: More signs from Wall Street today here. What’s really striking is how very young most of these protesters are. Really young. It’s horrifying to think how much they’ve already been abused by police: threatened, kettled and kicked around, arrested, pepper-sprayed.

One of the signs is a quote from Kurt Cobain (who was dead before a lot of these kids were out of diapers), “It is the duty of youth to challenge corruption.” Duty.

(Photo: Daniel Shankbone)

Stephen Harper — who walked away from Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — appears in a billboard campaign in Copenhagen, 2009

Our last few posts make this a good time to return to our ongoing “Frye on God” thread. Conservative politicians are the most likely to declare themselves Christians, but they are also the most likely to be missing any sense of Christian charity, especially with regard to the poor and the sick. Stephen Harper’s repetitions of “God bless Canada” do not otherwise appear to display much concern for the welfare of fellow Canadians in need, or for the vast expanses of nature that make up the Canadian landscape. Evangelical Christians, in fact, seem to possess a reckless disregard for the environment. Like other North American conservatives, they deny global warming in large numbers despite a virtually unanimous scientific consensus on the issue. Because big oil interests spend tens of millions of dollars every year to fund global warming denialism, it evidently is possible to serve both God and Mammon if you have a mind to do so. It’s as though a peculiar strain of Christian conservatism believes that, with the End Times coming, it doesn’t matter how much damage is inflicted along the way. As Tina Fey in her most recent rendering of Sarah Palin nicely put it, “I believe that global warming is just Jesus holding us closer.”

Those who cite the Bible as a strict source of authority often seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. The limit of their understanding is usually love. Here’s Frye in “On the Bible”:

[T]he response which the Bible itself insists on, the response of the spirit, is bound up with the conception of love, a word which perhaps means too many things in modern languages and may have rather a sentimental sound. But in the New Testament love is regarded not as one virtue among others but as the only virtue there is, and one which is possible only to God and to the spirit of man, a virtue which, in Paul’s language, believes and hopes everything [1 Corinthians 13:7], and thereby includes all the other virtues because, outside the order of love, faith and hope are not necessarily virtues at all. (CW 4, 164)

During most of the summer, I have spent my time reading about love and loss. I have delved into literary theory, theology, psychoanalysis, and literature.  In a recent article – “Can We Read the Book of Love?” in PMLA – Richard Terdiman writes: “people love being in love, and when they are they talk and write about it with an expansive intensity.” I am struck by a persistent desire as readers to read about love. Romance novels continue to be the largest portion of book sales in the United States, and during a recession romance novels increase in sales. Indeed, “we love being in love.”

Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse observes that “to try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region where love is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).” Barthes and Terdiman seem to agree that love and to write about love is to be excessive: both too much and too little.

In his recent novel, A Familiar Rain, John Geddes explores the problem of love and loss: the problem being one where we strive to return, always, to a love lost. While reading A Familiar Rain, I was also reading and writing about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; more specifically, I was writing about The Fugitive, a book that opens, “Mademoiselle Albertine is gone,” and narrates the loss of Albertine and Marcel’s reactions. In A Familiar Rain, we are presented with a protagonist who falls in love and loses his first love. Throughout the novel, he is researching memory and returning to our memories (at times the novel seems to recall H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay). Of course, the novel illustrates the problems of this search for lost time.

The problem with reliving memories, we learn, is that “all of the sorrows and the trauma we usually get over by forgetting, she can still recall. It could torment her. I’m not sure if this is a blessing or a curse.” And indeed, this is precisely the problem with remembering: intrinsic to a memory is not always a positive experience. Memory can force us to long for that which is now lost and yet persistently present because we cannot, we do not, forget. Nowhere is this more true than in the story of love, where “memory is burned into your consciousness.”

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The deaths of Romeo and Juliet in Baz Luhrman’s 1996 film adaptation

Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II of England on this date in 1152. She was the famed architect of the Court of Love at Poitiers, and the themes and conventions that grew up around it prevailed in love poetry for centuries.

Frye in The Myth of Deliverance on Courtly Love and the Eros cult in Shakespeare:

But while some forms of Courtly Love were highly sublimated, others were not, as we can see if we turn from Dante or Petrarch to The Romaunt of the Rose or the story of Tristan and Iseult. By Shakespeare’s day love is normally, in comedy, a heterosexual attachment leading to marriage. The tragic form of such love is the Liebestod, as we have it in Romeo and Juliet, where the heightened energy of love, which transforms Juliet into the most articulate thirteen-year-old in history, meets with an equally heightened catastrophe. We can see in this play how the medieval Courtly Love conventions are still operating as a parallel to Christian doctrines. Strictly speaking, from a Christian point of view, Romeo’s suicide might involve him in damnation, but not many in his audience would want to speak as strictly as that. The audience would recognize that Romeo has his own religion: it does not conflict with Christianity or prevent him from going to Friar Laurence for confession, but when he says, “My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne” [5.1.3], he is speaking of the god to whom he really is committed and who really does run his life, who is Eros. Romeo and Juliet die as saints and martyrs in this god’s calendar, just as the “good women” of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women include Dido and Cleopatra, who were also erotic saints and martyrs. (CW 28, 389-90)