Creatures, love is as fierce as death. In this edition: book and TV notes. Yes I am still on my “Succession” bs and I have a theory about why you are not. But first!
I Will Sing a New Song
Ariel & Chana Bloch’s 1995 translation of the Song of Songs is exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s earthy and steamy, and elegant in a way that very few revisionist translations attempt. The Blochs’ intention is to make the Song feel urgent, but not crude, which they feel best captures the spirit of the Hebrew. They emphasize the alternation between sensual and architectural metaphor, and the way so much of the lovers’ lovemaking takes place outdoors, in bowers they’re imagining as palaces.
Those hidden bowers are part of why the Blochs are so certain the lovers are not married, and not chaste. They’re skeptical of any reading of the Song that conforms to anybody’s moral standards, or makes too much of a “religious” point. Mysticism they’re ok with, because there’s a romance there, but political readings in which the bride is the nation of Israel really turn them off. I think this is maybe a bit numb to the political romance of the Hebrew Bible. And there are moments in the terrific endnotes where I think a more-religious or even eschatological reading just sort of jumps out at you, like their note about why they went with the traditional translations of “rose of Sharon” and “lily of the valley.” But overall, this feels like an attempt to make the Song fully itself: scraping away the centuries of exegesis and euphemism, stripping off the traces of fleeting trends, letting the text be unexpected. I loved this and you should seek it out, as you seek your Bridegroom along the walls of the city.
Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.
It’s Never Enough
I understand that it’s impossible to know what “people” are talking about nowadays, we all know only our own little eddies in the chaosphere, but I’m intrigued by how quickly “people” stopped talking about “Succession.” The show felt big while it was happening, but it hasn’t lingered, and I wonder if it will keep resurfacing or fade. It told a big story, but ended back in the tight little microcosm of one family and one company. The endings it gave that family and company were basically satisfying to me, but I really missed the feeling of a bigger world. Like, we’re told that the question of who wins Waystar Royco is bullshit, and yes it is, everybody who reacted to the finale as if Tom or Mattson won some kind of prize is cuckoo for cocoa puffs; but I would have liked to see a world outside that depleting scramble.
Take Roman (somebody has to). He’s the best example for my purposes. He got the ending I wanted for him most out of all of them, he gets his nonconsensual escape. He even gets one last taste of public humiliation, all the cameras flashing as he signs his own corporate death warrant; I love that for him. I love that he’s alone at the end, because anybody who could walk into that bar and sit down next to him would be really bad for him, and I think he’s actually managed to figure that out. I’m saddened by the journey he and Gerri went on, because they were a blast, but it works so well: She looked like a potential escape route for him, but she never was, and so once he really understood that he’d gotten out, he couldn’t even try going back to her.
(Side note, the Mattson/Ebba thing is such an interesting foil for Gerri/Roman. On a symbolic level Mattson does a thing that should be self-gift—he gives her his blood! But it’s because he’s a reverse vampire! It’s manipulative and self-absorbed, in exactly the way that a) Roman’s uhhh phone problems were, but b) his airplane attempt to make Gerri CEO was not. “If, for whatever reason, it ain’t Romey time, maybe it’s crone-y time?” is one ridiculous sentence Mattson could never say. Roman is the one whose proposal explicitly framed marriage as mutual cannibalism, and btw I would love to think more about why these kids are so deeply addicted to marrying people, but he’s also attempted to promote or protect his paramour, arguably even at his own expense. The bit where they’re all arguing about who will take the fall for Cruises and Roman jumps in to protect Gerri, by making both the only persuasive argument and an argument blithely unaware of justice or morality, is the closest thing this show will give you to true love. Oh, hey, here’s a snippet of dialogue from the cutting-room floor; you’re welcome.)
Anyways back to my real point: The fact that Roman alienates Gerri for bad reasons, when he really needed to get out of her orbit for good reasons, is one of those Mobius-strip “your worst tendencies are your only hope” things this show kept doing with him. I love that! Their whole deal feels resolved, like something whole has been created and some sublimity and insights achieved. It works on both the character level (Who Will Survive, And Will We Still Ship Them?) and the allegorical level where like Gerri is worldly success. Their story feels artistically satisfying in exactly the way that Roman/Mencken (or Roman/America) does not. I think part of why I imagined that baseball kid, or the delightful management-training partner, returning in the finale is that just glimpsing them would indicate that debts are still unpaid. And a story feels more real when it knows where its debts are. Roman’s relief at the end feels… fake, not because he hasn’t acknowledged all his debts but because the show doesn’t. By retreating to the microcosm of these specific individuals, the show kind of says, “Don’t think too hard about the big picture—we didn’t!”
Am I really complaining that I got a tragicomedy about the evils of camel expansion, starring a drug addict and a pervert and a woman (derogatory), but it didn’t imagine a post-imperial economy or even just reinvent monasticism? I mean I think I’m just asking for a show that had more to say about the political and religious questions it so frequently raised and clearly cared about. But also, if its ending had been just as big and satisfying on a character level, and also done something unexpected with politics or The Soul… maybe you’d still be talking about it.
My “My Reign, Though Brief, Was Entirely Constitutional” Toga Is Raising a Lot of Questions Already Answered by My Toga
Also just started Waugh’s Helena and enjoying it vastly. An oddly… fantasy-novel cadence? The prose style reminds me of nobody quite so much as Peter S. Beagle.
Now Playing
Klezmatics, “Honizkaft.” Starts 36:40 at this link, or you could just listen to the whole album, of course. Ver iz er vos geyt oyf funem midbar?
Thomson’s gazelles photographed by Christoph Strassler, via Wikimedia Commons.