New Year, Love Again. More Life!
It’s the Jewish High Holy Days and the academic ones. I like that co-incidence. I like starting again right about now. The again is more important than the “starting”: I crave fresh-but-worn. I call my friends more often. It’s a new year that taps me on the shoulder a little after it’s arrived, not demanding a new me—just saying hello, how ya doing these days? And it’s a precious time in the semester when my focus is more on having ideas than pushing and wrangling them into paper-boxes.
I’ve started writing down my “top question” again. Right now it’s: What is love?
Academic Spaces for the Question, Finally
I’m taking a class in my PhD program where we’re trying to reconstruct many Roman answers to that question. Its biggest delight is talking about “love” as scholars, in an honest-to-God academic setting.
…We REALLY don’t know how to do it! We’re not sure what we’re talking about, how the topics picked are connected, what terms we should or want to use for various sorts of desire, relations, mutual takings on of responsibility. And that’s beautiful. It’s real. Can we really speak of identity in the ancient world, a classmate challenges? How can we not?!—I insist, not yet knowing how. But really, if identities are ways we see ourselves in relation to other entities…we’ve been blessed and stuck with them from jump, I imagine.
“Imagine” is a right and useful word here. This kind of learning reminds me of Chavruta partner learning of Jewish texts, where study halls are not silent, but full of earnest debate. “Earnest” is an important word here: I’ve found the beit midrash to hold fiercely the sorts of questions that invite generous observation: they’re just too good, alive for each of us. What could be generous about observation? The care—indeed, the love—shown in attending to another’s laboring thoughts, helping them into the light of first articulation. Asking someone’s personal words for the thing we are both watching, rather than assigning them ours. In waiting inexpectantly.
In chavruta study, in the right sorts of mentor- and apprenticeships, and in this class, students are not their teacher’s disciples, but fellow travelers. In analogous contexts these travelers might not even know of one another, just out of sight around the road’s bend—the idea of “mentor texts” from ELA pedagogy suggests itself, where more seasoned writers attend the birth of a yet-school-aged author. I cherish, in this context, the gift of company and presence of other heart-minds.
Love Readings
No, I don’t mean lines on palms, but ways of knowing a text. I’m studying the poet-philosopher Lucretius for an upcoming PhD oral exam. Lucretius starts with a hymn to Venus Genetrix, Venus-who-creates, and ends, as we have his work, with a frightful description of a plague in ancient Athens and its psychosocial consequences. Both these sections have generated lots of writing, as beginnings and endings do, and as authors do when we seek too much unity in their expressions—perhaps when we force them to be us, scholars.
When I finished the last book of Lucretius’s Latin, that disquieting night, I turned right back to the hymn and I fell more in love. What if we academics read our sources like so many of us read a book as kids, not mourning the end of our trip in its world (or mourning it so much that any other action was unthinkable), but flipping back to page 1? Sure, re-reading is good for language acquisition and probably more important to our growth as literate adults than we think. But we didn’t do it purely for the repetition as kids, except in the sense that lines re-traced etch into us more remarkably.
Love is more life!
The dying Prior christens us at the end of Tony Kushner “Angels in America,” about love in the early days of HIV and so much more, with the ending words
“And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.“
Curtain falls, curtain rises, and the Great Work passes into the audience’s world. I think—and I’ll never put it in ink on published academic paper—Lucretius’s Venus hymn is a hymn to Venus as goddess of Life, not a whole lot of generative sex. Lucretius writes (I.3-4, translation mine):
[You, Venus], who fill/animate/praise the full-of-ships sea and the fruit-full lands…
I’ve dashed the verb that is the Latin concelebras: most basically to throng together to or frequent something, thus, to fill it or keep it filled—with people, say, with noise, with soul(s)—and then, widening, to make famous, to publish abroad—by filling the world with it or its evangelists. Venus grants the sea and the lands more life: an abundance of living, a vigorous vitality, and finally the eternal life of lasting celebrity in a poem, perhaps the end to which the poet invokes this Venus.
Lucretius was called an atheist and rejected as a determinist, materialist heretic for his argument for the mortality of souls by many Christian theologians in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe. I imagine his detractors never reading him, not the opening hymn—shutting my eyes to the reality that the weight of the text was never going to sway these vested religionists. Because Lucretius’s dancing atoms and creatures joying in Venus’s spring don’t take any life or magic from my world. Reading his scrolls past the end to the beginning, as we do each year with Torah, makes even his account of the plague sound a bit like Prior’s dying conviction of human vitality.
My Loves/Lives These Days
A Poem I Love
Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays hits me in the feels whenever I encounter it again. Yes, there’s a dark side to the love described: anger, when it is not the pure, clarifying feeling, but anger at. But the words gets at one way I love, by service: the middle-school student feedback that I want on my tombstone is “They are aggressively helpful.”
Return Home to Choir
I had a great time singing art songs in solo lessons and in choir, too, over my German-abounding summer. So much fun that I’m actually sticking with my yearly return to the Grace Church Choral Society back in NYC. I’m one voice that doesn’t need to strain, nor to be heard, just floating over the group’s foundation. Tickets for our December 2 and 3 concert here, with Mozart’s C Minor Mass in the mix.
ADHD-Me finished a 100-Day Project!
I took about 103 days to post 100 photos from nature, some of which will go into the chapbook you’ve heard about. (Which I’m now generating lots of wheat and lots of chaff for, more than words about the project). You can see the range of photos ending here… then the practice living beyond the project.
Love y’all!
I write letters much more easily than news. Thanks for signing up to get a letter from me once in a while. I write back to everyone who writes, even if it takes a little while.
Valeatis, Alles Liebe, Fiercely warm,
Jamie