One night in his study with brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, [my father] asked quietly, “Do you honestly think, my daughter, that dancing has progressed since the time of the Greeks?”
“No,” I replied snappily. “Do you think you write any better than Euripides?” That ought to hold him, I figured.
He looked at me long and slow. “No, my dear,” he said, “but we have Euripides’ plays. They have lasted. A dancer ceases to exist the minute she sits down.”
As Father spoke I understood death for the first time. I was a child of fourteen but I realized with melancholy that oblivion would be my collaborator no matter how fine my work.
—Agnes de Mille, “The Swan,” in Dance to the Piper
Creatures in tragic masks, creatures in comic masks, and Fifth Businesses—welcome!
I read Medea for the first time, in the Warner translation, and tbh I am not sure Mr. de Mille was entirely correct. Reading ancient tragedy, maybe even moreso than ancient comedy, makes me feel my own distance from this kind of theater. I saw Margaret Holloway perform a speech from this play once, on a New Haven street at night, and it was almost too powerful to bear—the anguish and fury seemed to claw their way out of her throat. But on the page, the speeches and exchanges seem to fall into overfamiliar patterns. Medea becomes a Disney villainess and Jason a smug mansplainer. I’m not saying the play has no power on the page, only that I can tell that I’m not experiencing it as its first audiences did. That way of theater is lost, and any equally-powerful ecstasy of the Medea will be just as mortal as Agnes de Mille’s dances.
Reading it, I was most struck by the speech by the children’s tutor. The tutor is a slave, and depicts the household’s slaves as worried for the aristocrats. So far, so comforting to the ideas of the slaveholders. But there’s also this existential bit, which not only anticipates what the chorus will say at the end, but came across (to me) as especially poignant because of the subjugation of the speaker:
Our human life I think and have thought a shadow,
And I do not fear to say that those who are held
Wise among men and who search the reasons of things
Are those who bring the most sorrow on themselves.
Among the Jesuits and Magicians
Also read Fifth Business, my first Robertson Davies. Stephen King name-checks this book and its central concept in Revival: a Fifth Business is a figure who recurs throughout life’s drama, neither hero nor villain nor good red herring, driving the plot and yet never taking on a definable role. Our Fifth Business here is Dunstan Ramsay. He’s a pompous gentleman-scholar, aware of his own restlessness but less aware of his self-satisfaction. And yet his fustily respectable life as a history teacher is pocked with weirdness. He may not believe in God, but he believes in miracles; he believes that a woman from his hometown, whose life collided with his on a snowy day in his childhood, is a saint. His encounter with Mary Dempster spurs him to an obsession with saints, especially freak-saints and holy fools.
And he keeps running into two men from his hometown: the magnanimous scoundrel Boy Staunton, all vanity and bonhomie, and the mysterious outcast Paul Dempster, born covered in long black hair. In his role as Fifth Business, Ramsay is bystander, mythmaker, and cat among the pigeons. He unites these two men’s destinies and draws them to their inevitable shocking reunion.
There’s some stuff about “myth,” which here seems to mean something like religious truth but not so definite; I found that idea a bit slack and gassy, and maybe it is simply the excuse Ramsay gives, his embarrassed apology for his own unrespectable certainty that miracles happen. This is a novel of compact, precise sentences, which sometimes hide little pockets into which our narrator Ramsay slips the unwanted insights he will have to look at later. He describes the freaks he encounters—some gentle, some fierce—with an admiration that almost slides into coziness. He enjoys their company, but his pleasure is mixed with awe. This is a comic, middle-class novel filled with genuine mystery and marvel.
“I Wanted to Be Fixed, Not Encouraged”
I listened to the entirety of “Dear Alana,” a podcast about anti-gay conversion therapy. It’s nuanced and insightful, and I’d highly recommend it. To me, one of the stories it tells is about the question, “What does ‘same-sex attraction’ mean?” What is being named by that term? A sexual pathology? A temptation to sin? An urgency in one’s longing for a specific kind of love? What does it feel like your definitions start to shift?
Bible Repairmen and Bubblegumshoes
Tickets are now on sale for Doxacon, a SF/fantasy convention for those interested in the interplay between Christian faith and f/sf. I love Doxacon and have attended many times. (You can hear my presentation on sources of authority in horror movies aka “We know it’s wolves!”, here.) I’ve found fellowship around the dinner table, played a terrific Tolkeinesque RPG, and discovered beautiful Orthodox Christian prayers. This year, the lay keynote will be from Tim Powers, author of Declare and Last Call and The One Where the Romantic Poets Are Vampires and The One Disney Probably Ripped Off for Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s a delightful raconteur who rarely makes con appearances nowadays. Discover more about the speakers and get your tix here.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Medea via Wikimedia Commons.
In Honolulu in about 1993 I saw a production of Medea. It was set in Honolulu in the 1920's or 30's, with an Asian gangster as Jason and a very exotic part Hawaiian actress as Medea. She played the role so well, it was frightening.
I will take your recommendation and listen to "Dear Alana"