What if it was a Socra-SHEs and it was just for the ladies?
Plus Prokofiev at Tiananmen and more
“Often since that long-ago Sunday, I have wondered why it is that men with large mustaches have this facility of declamatory prayer. For the stationmaster plainly had a fine relationship with his Maker (who he addressed as an old and valued friend); he also had a splendid, free-ranging mustache. Whereas Mr. Jagger’s tea-time grace was more propitiatory, uneasily terse: I seem to recall that his mustache was closely clipped.”
—JL Carr, A Month in the Country
Welcome, creatures! I’m back with some book notes.
“That Hunger, That Wholeness”
I loved Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel about China in the twentieth century, about music and form, about how we see ourselves in others and in their art; about generational trauma and multiple forms of gay desire; about, maybe, what it is like to try to hope in the face of repeated and cyclical loss.
The novel loops and curls around in time, following different branches of the family of its occasional narrator, the Chinese-Canadian girl Marie (aka Ma-li, aka Jiang Li-ling, already we’re hearing the “theme and variations” which are the book’s metaphysics and its form). Most of the book takes place in China, from the first days after World War II to the Cultural Revolution to the entrance of tanks into Tiananmen Square. (The Tiananmen scenes are some of the best mass-protest scenes I’ve read, capturing the real humor and strangeness that can dance through protest like a counterpoint.)
Throughout, the family is followed by a book, The Book of Records. This narrative is hand-copied and spread chapter by chapter through samizdat networks and obscure, lyrically-named bookstores. The author is hidden, and subtle variations within the narrative suggest it offers hints about the real location of its protagonist. But slowly we see that more than one hand is hiding hints in the book, and so the narrative is less a puzzle to be solved than a pattern, a theme with endless variations, as every generation returns to this strange tale of underground radio, desert exile, longing and searching and the hope for reunion.
If I say this book has scenes in which brutality and lyricism intertwine, I think it will sound studied or too clever by half, and that isn’t what I mean. The characters themselves think in allusions and imagery, and try to understand their own lives less than they try to understand the meaning of the music that shapes them.
The family’s story begins with the sisters Swirl and Big Mother Knife traveling from town to ruined postwar town with the child Sparrow, singing for their supper. Later generations have fewer of these openly-symbolic names, and you might think the characters are becoming individuals instead of icons, but that isn’t what happens. Zhuli and Ai-ming and Kai still discover that they are not the sole authors of their thoughts and dreams. Wholeness is not the opposite of hunger, but a collage of others’ hungers that becomes one’s own.
These characters are not individuals but layers, variations, mirrors. And yet their lives, and those thoughts and dreams, have infinite worth. They are manuscripts, destroyed or hidden or damaged by the forces driving Chinese Communism. And as with real manuscripts, the fact that each human life here is a palimpsest only deepens its meaning, rather than obscuring it.
It’s really only a symposium…
I also read two very different books in which holy early Christian men create their own Variations on a Theme by Plato, but this time with women as the icons of the philosophical life. I have to admit that I liked St Gregory of Nyssa’s late fourth-century hagiography of his sister, The Life of Saint Macrina, more than St Methodius’s genuinely odd, late third/early fourth-century The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity. But I’m glad I read both, I guess partly just because this seems like such an odd and revealing (and endearing!) subgenre.
The Life is biography, The Symposium fiction—Methodius invents a banquet of virgins, held beneath a spreading “chaste-tree,” and comes up with speeches for them. Both books reshape what it means to do philosophy or live a philosophical life.
For Macrina “philosophy” is love of Wisdom, love of Christ, expressed primarily through humility and service. She thinks and reasons and gives counsel—there’s a lovely bit where she rebukes Gregory and he sighs that he wishes he could hear more of her “sweet” words! Even her deathbed prayer is implicitly an argument about the nature of the soul, for like Plato’s work, The Life is an act of mourning. (I assume you people have already had this thought, but I discovered the idea of Plato’s writing as “grief work” in Page duBois’s Slaves and Other Objects.) Anyway, there’s a very striking phrase in this work, “the philosophic table”; and part of what it means for Macrina’s pupils to eat and drink at the philosophic table, I think, is that they live as servants. “...[S]he also persuaded [her mother] to put herself on an equal footing with the many in spirit and to share a common life with all her maids, making them sisters and equals instead of slaves and servants.” We’re told that she prepared bread “with her own hands.”
There’s an echo of that act of service at the beginning of Methodius’s Symposium, when we learn that the discourses will be narrated by the woman who served the wine at the virgins’ philosophical banquet. (I’m not suggesting that this lady was a servant in the class sense, I just think it’s interesting that she both speaks with authority and serves at the table.) But mostly Methodius focuses like a virtue-eating shark on chastity. One hundred pages about how chastity, and especially virginity, really is the most important virtue or at least the highest form of Christian witness, the chief proof of God’s power.
Lol I did not vibe with this, and I suspect most contemporary readers don’t, but I’m interested in why Methodius did. Partly he’s closer to Pelagianism than I expected. He emphasizes the perfect, people who truly have conquered their passions, and he basically says we have been freed by Christ to live perfectly. Chaste virginity is an especially powerful proof of this new freedom, because it goes against such intense desires of the flesh. The virgin is not among the beasts of the field.
You sometimes hear that the early Church wasn’t “obsessed with sex” the way Christians are today, so it can be salutary to read the kind of things they actually wrote and preserved and cited: The early Church in fact put a lot of pressure on sexual desire, and arguably especially on the nexus of sexual desire and free will.
I also wonder, though maybe here I’m breaking Methodius to my own harness, whether his experience of persecution makes virginity especially fraught and vivid for him—a problem, a fever, alluring and disgusting. Virginity is the refusal to bear heirs. It can be considered an act of irresponsibility, even a betrayal of one’s parents. (I have a friend whose mother, when he told her that he was discerning the priesthood, broke down crying at the thought of never having grandchildren.) How much more shattering to accept martyrdom with no attempt made to create a future generation who might know civil peace. Macrina and Gregory’s parents fled persecution but they themselves are that survivor generation; Methodius, a centuryish earlier, possibly died a martyr and definitely lived closer to the knives. I’m guessing that if you personally know martyrs, it is easier to believe that our will, conformed to Christ, can conquer all. Perhaps it’s also more necessary to proclaim that to die a virgin is a crown and not a curse.
His virgins do not do Socratic questioning. Mostly they unfold various allegorical readings in which Scriptural trees are really virginity. This replacement for Socratic dialogue intrigues me less than the Macrina-style wonderworking and cooking.
But I will say—I promised you guys that this newsletter would be about ecstasy as the foundation of reason, and I whiffed on that because I left DC without the book I wanted to talk about, but the climax of both Gregory’s and Methodius’s work is not a conclusion or a dialectical exchange. Gregory climaxes with a prayer, and Methodius with a hymn. Worship, song, ecstasy: this is not only the flower but the soil and the fruit of reason.
icymi
I wrote a fairly emo thing about alcoholism and promise-making: “Be grateful to alcohol, because all her promises may be a list of everything she’ll eventually take from you, but they’re also a list of everything you need. Give thanks for Sister Booze, who is grabby and playful and educational, and very, very strong.”
I also contributed to Commonweal’s symposium on “abortion after Dobbs” and reviewed a series of biographies of, uh, wolves.
Now Playing
Chumbawamba, “That’s How Grateful We Are”
I tried to find you a picture of a “woman Socrates” under a Creative Commons license but the best I could do was this allegory of The Iliad from Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer :/ via Wikimedia Commons.