Of New and Old Art in a World of Fairytales

Here are some photos of the project that has recently occupied, and continues to occupy, most of my creative time:  the first three pages from an illustrated book.  These photos show the paintings and details completed and in progress.  As with most makers of anything, I periodically question the entire project - the images feel derivative, the story hackneyed.  But I continue painting and calligraphy-ing and the pages unapologetically display all of the flaws associated with anything crafted by the human hand.  I like this.  As soon as I finish this post, I will continue working on the fourth page...and then the fifth...usw.   

I have been experimenting over the past couple of years with medieval illumination and aesthetics, copying the work of 13th-century monks to get my sea legs in the style, but also playing with the images and designs because straight copying is interesting, but creatively unsatisfying.  In April, for the first time, I executed my first entirely original medieval-inspired work.  Like any medieval painting, it appeared to tell a story that, if one only knew it, would render the painting comprehensible.  Trouble was, I did not know the story any better than anyone else.  So I made it up.  I posted that story and the original painting here. With the story, "Amrita and the Ifrit", completed, I began imagining how I could tell it through narrative pictures; a book's worth rather than just one.

I describe "Amrita and the Ifrit" to myself as a multicultural fairytale.  I have been slowly, but persistently, working my way through Richard Burton's (in)famous version of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.  I have deep affinity for the tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, for the creepy dark fables of ETA Hoffmann, and for Snorri Sturluson's Edda.  In addition to enjoying fairy and folktales on the unintellectual, visceral level for which they were created, I relish thinking about their epistemology.  Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment pays homage to the wisdom and moral ambiguity of fairytales and contends that they speak to children in important ways that modern, overtly pedagogic stories do not.  In When They Severed Earth From Sky, Elizabeth and Paul Barber examine mythologies from around the world to determine how oral cultures amalgamated knowledge into stories in order to pass it from generation to generation.  

Essentially, Bettelheim and the Barbers recognize the psychological importance and epistemological validity of the story, although not just of any story but of the most basic story - the story we tell to our young to introduce them to the way of things.  With all of this in mind, I deliberately wrote "Amrita and the Ifrit" in archaicized language.  I used that fairytale trope of things occurring in threes (or sevens or nines).  Physically impossible things happen without remark or explanation.  I could not, however, settle on a kind of fairytale - a region or a set of characters.  Instead, I grabbed elements, names and beasties from a number of cultural traditions.  I made them interact with each other.  I hope, when read in this light, "Amrita and the Ifrit" has some charm to it.     

The process of creating this book has proven rewarding, frustrating and comical.  I notoriously grow bored with too much repetition.  You know that guy who can eat tuna sandwiches every day for lunch and still love them?  He's bizarro me.  I knew I had found my master's thesis when I finished a research paper on the topic and still felt remotely interested in studying said topic.  I have similar impatience with repeating myself artistically.  Book illustration, which requires painting the same characters and settings over and over again, has thus proven quite challenging.  As with all good challenges, however, attempting to meet it gives me a great sense of accomplishment.  The jury is out as to how well I have succeeded; the characters change subtly from page to page and, as page four is turning out, one character is undergoing a more concerted and obvious shift as the story continues.  I also cannot seem to stick to my originally-planned format of medieval-inspired structural gilt framework.  The creatures are beginning to inhabit the frame; the gilt becomes less structural.  We will have to see how this ends up!  

Book: On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach over 50 years ago, precisely during the heyday of the Cold War's nuclear arms race.  A brilliant example of counterproductive thinking that would influence such near disasters as the Bay of Pigs invasion, not to mention the release of innumerable films and novels dealing literally and metaphorically with human kind's ability to wipe itself off the face of the earth.   

On the Beach, as novel and film, differs from works like the brilliant novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, for instance, in that Shute did not choose the relative safety (or creative freedom) of rooting his meditation on nuclear holocaust within the science fiction genre.  Shute chose the heartbreaking and alarmingly mundane real world for his backdrop.  Another difference between On the Beach and so many other fictive post-apocalyptic nightmares is that the action of the story concerns neither the grand conflagration that ends in human extinction nor the way humankind slowly, painfully recovers after a nuclear holocaust.  Instead, the plot explores what, given said holocaust, human extinction would feel like.

Shute focuses on the year or so after the northern hemisphere has annihilated itself through nuclear war.  The resulting cloud of radioactivity slowly, relentlessly creeps south, promising to eventually wipe out all animal life on the planet.  The story occurs in Melbourne, Australia, one of the last large cities to contain life, and it centers around a small group of people: an American submarine captain whose family back home must already have died, an Australian naval officer with a young wife and a new baby daughter, a spirited young Australian woman who dreamed big dreams and now mourns the loss of her future.  

As tales of post-apocalyptic horror go, On the Beach seems extremely quiet. Of course, therein lies its power and resonance.  Dialogue and character, rather than action, drive the plot, for the defining action of the piece has occurred before the novel begins.  The bombs have dropped, the combatant nations have exterminated themselves.  Now the human beings left alive in the southern hemisphere have only to wait.  The story concerns normal human life and the psychology of average people waiting for a guaranteed untimely death; moreover, for a death that will signal the probable end of all human life on earth.  

As Shute imagines it, and I tend to agree with him, people quietly go on being people.  Some anesthetize themselves with drink and wait pathetically for the radioactive cloud to arrive with its sickness.  Some take up dangerous hobbies and pursue them with abandon, perhaps hoping they go out on their own terms before the sickness overtakes them, and likely also managing to feel truly alive before they die.  Others, the great majority, simply go on.  Not naively, as though assured death were not approaching, but determinedly because what else is one supposed to do?  They plant gardens the issue from which they will never eat.  They take courses to prepare themselves for careers they will never pursue.  They go out to lunch and shop.  They take fishing trips and throw parties.  They live until they die.

For more reviews, visit My Goodreads. 

Book: Flesh and Stone by Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett deftly tackles a topic of considerable breadth in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.  Using primary and secondary sources, fiction and art, Sennett examines six cities at various historical moments in order to explore the development of the relationship between cities and the bodies of their residents.  He identifies attitudes toward the self and the Other, towards comfort and pain, that manifest themselves in western urban culture and spaces and, in turn, which act upon the human body dwelling in such spaces.  Sennett employs theory from a number of disciplines, including history, sociology, urban development, psychology, economics and cultural anthropology.  The latter is used in a way reminiscent of Greg Dening in The Death of William Gooch, where Dening successfully presented western culture as "other" to a western audience; Sennett performs a similar feat by objectifying the stage itself upon which western culture has been enacted - the city.  Urban spaces, and how we feel as bodies living in and moving through them, seem strange and manufactured - which they are.  We are simply used to cities and how we feel in cities and, so, naturalize them to a certain extent.  Sennett erases this naturalization and we see urban space not as an inert backdrop against which we move or as a mere product of human will or design, but as a dynamic organism that has the capability of acting on our bodies even as we act upon it, and of creating our understanding of ourselves in relation to it.  The city makes and is made, just as we make and are made.  The generative power at play in the relationship between a city and its residents flows both ways.

Sennett examines Athens of the Fifth Century B.C., Rome of the Second Century A.D., thirteenth-century Paris, the Jewish Ghetto in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice, revolutionary Paris, nineteenth-century London and modern New York.  Throughout his exploration, Sennett ties developments in western urban life to then contemporary understandings of the body and its processes.  For example, he links William Harvey's seventeenth-century discovery of the circulation of blood through the human body with a new focus in urban planning on motion through the city's veins and arteries and the desire to make human movement easy and unobstructed.  For Sennett, this impulse to free the human body relates directly to other modern conveniences, like television and automobiles, that end up instead imprisoning the body in a non-sensing bubble.

In fact, Sennett identifies this trend toward ease, comfort and lack of obstruction as one of the primary ramifications of how western cities have developed.  For Sennett, ease and comfort pacify the body and desensitize the individual to their connection with others.  The individual becomes a self-contained, disconnected unit moving through the city, claiming her right not to be interfered with and, thereby, isolating herself from society as a whole.  The individual in this scenario loses her sense of sharing a common interest with the individuals around her.  Sennett asserts that western civilization's historical drive toward personal freedom (especially in one's physical life) has actually culminated in passive bodies rather than active ones, in sterile spaces rather than lively ones.  These isolated individuals in the modern western city feel, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "strangers to the destinies of each other".  

Essentially, difference and human social friction constitute, for Sennett, true freedom; the freedom to act, to work out differences, to really experience the Other.  In many ways, Sennett's meditation on the city and bodies is really a plea to reconnect, to tolerate and even invite difference.  He writes:  

Lurking in the civic problems of the multi-cultural city is the moral difficulty of arousing sympathy for those who are Other.  And this can only occur, I believe, by understanding why bodily pain requires a place in which it can be acknowledged, and in which its transcendent origins become visible.  Such pain has a trajectory in human experience.  It disorients and makes incomplete the self, defeats the desire for coherence; the body accepting pain is ready to become a civic body, sensible to the pain of another person, pains present together on the street, at last endurable - even though, in a diverse world, each person cannot explain what he or she is feeling, who he or she is, to the other.  But the body can follow this civic trajectory only if it acknowledges that there is no remedy for its sufferings in the contrivings of society, that its unhappiness has come from elsewhere, that its pain derives from God's command to live together as exiles.

For a different look at Flesh and Stone, see the link to Neil Transpontine's unique and eclectic blog History Is Made At Night.


For more book reviews, see My Goodreads Page.

Of the Relevance of Storytelling or How School Can Suck

As a one-time graduate student of medieval history, I have spent a fair amount of time considering the relevance of historical study to the contemporary world.  This issue of relevance becomes especially, well, relevant for scholars of chronologically or geographically removed time periods.  For example, I studied 12th-century European monasticism while living in early 21st-century Louisiana.  Even had I lived in Europe at the time, I imagine my feeling of irrelevance to the modern age would have been only mildly mitigated.  Complicating my search for relevance was the insular intellectual culture of the university at which I found myself.  And I do not believe Tulane to be wildly different from most other major American universities, public or private, in this respect (although I imagine private universities are the worst culprits). 

I loved my chosen field, but still I looked with envy at the Latin American Studies students, for example, who were immersed in post-colonial theory while living in a post-colonial city.  The issues they tackled daily, theoretical as well as practical, often pertained obviously and immediately to the world they actually inhabited as scholars.  I eventually left academia, one of the few work atmosphere's in which I have ever felt truly comfortable, for a variety of reasons but large among them was the increasing suspicion that my study of history would soon spiral into navel contemplation. 

To be clear, just as I believe in art for art's sake I do believe in history for history's sake.  There need really be no excuse to tell a good story about the past.  However, to spend my entire professional life participating in historical research and writing that would only interest other professionals (or students of said profession) who research and write about history...well, that seemed narrow for a field that touches on every aspect of human existence and, I believe, should be better represented in our daily lived lives.

Since leaving academia, I have started to think about history not merely as a discipline, but as a true epistemological category.  Just as spirituality, say, or science or mathematics constitute ways of knowing and thinking that overarch academic disciplines, I believe that history is more than the study of  past events.  It is a mode of thought and inquiry that leads to what we might call historical knowledge, that is, knowledge of past events, their representations and their historiographical meaning in a variety of contexts.  History is a mode of thought premised on one single question:  What came before? 

Since I can remember, my curiosity about the world has taken shape in relation to that question.  I did not just study history as a student, I thought historically as a person, always looking into the origins of things in order to explain their present.  I have loved classic films since a young age and I recall in middle school checking out biographies and autobiographies of Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney and Charlie Chaplin  because I thought information about their lives might enlighten my experience of watching their art. 

In high school, I loved reading fictional accounts of Arthurian legend.  I quickly grew curious about the factual basis, if any, of these stories and started reading non-fiction works like accounts of English archaeological digs.  Eventually, this exploration from fiction to the facts behind fiction led to my choosing medieval history as my undergrad major and master's field.   Academic study of history certainly brought nuance to my understanding of the limits and purpose of historical knowledge.  For instance, I am now aware of the scholarly debates concerning the relation (or lack thereof) of an artist's life to her art and concerning the relation of primary source documents to "reality" or lived experience.  Academic study has shaded and made subtle my understanding of what it means to think historically, but it certainly did not teach me how to think historically.  

So I mostly intend this long, personal musing to gesture toward more complex questions about history's place outside of academia in our lived, quotidian lives.  Whether we access history through what many scholars snobbishly refer to as "public history" (e.g., museums, tours, films, popular literature) or we do so simply by remembering and telling the stories of our own lives and our family's lives, history should be a living mode of thought rather than an ossified set of theories.  History should speak to our own self-identities in a dynamic way; it should acknowledge ambiguities without resolving them; and we should not forget its most basic form is storytelling

The House that Hitchcock (and a Healthy Dose of Stage Blood) Built

It seems to me that the last decade has seen the unfortunate proliferation of an unfortunate subgenre of horror movie.  I don't have a name for this subgenre...but I will describe it and give some examples.

• Movies of this subgenre rely mostly on gross-out gore for their scares.  (E.g., Hostel, where a completely peripheral character's eye slides out of its socket and down her cheek as her face gets blow torched.  Yeah.)  

•  The protagonists of this kind of film are typically uncompelling, vapid if not outright stupid, and sometimes mean.  You want these fools to get killed.  (E.g., the "hero" in the unapologetically and violently sexist Deadgirl, which asks the important question:  Is gang rape still gang rape if the victim is a zombie?  The Descent, despite its favorable Rotten Tomatoes rating, also gets a thumb down from me and inclusion in this category.  If I had friends like those two-faced spelunking girls, I would hope they got eaten by subterranean naked mole rat people.)  

• The characters behave ways in which people do not behave for psychologically obscure reasons.  I attribute this characteristic largely to laziness and basic bad writing.  (Here I especially think of Ink, a boring movie about the dream lives of people.  It depicts only the tritest of dreams - really facile wish-fulfillment dreams (e.g., a kid hitting a homerun in the majors, a middle-aged lady eating cake and losing weight).  Dreams so completely devoid of symbolism or ambiguous meanings, that I began to wonder if the writer had ever actually had a dream.  The Last Winter, so bad even Ron Perlman couldn't save it, also struck me as particularly poorly written - like a less original, less frightening knockoff of John Carpenter's fantastic The Thing.  )  

• These movies that have so earned my disdain have a special affection for portrayals of brutality uncomplicated by anything as interesting as a plot or suspense; as though depicting cruelty alone constitutes horror.  (Among the offenders: Wolf Creek, High Tension and Hostel gets a second mention because I disliked it so much.)  

Celebratory cruelty in horror movies, while I'm on the subject, enjoyed a special renaissance after the release of Saw; which is brutal, yes, but also well-written, innovative, psychologically taut and truly scary, not to mention possessing that rare gem of horror filmdom: a great surprise ending.  An army of mediocre filmmakers looked at Saw and chose to mimic only its fairly shocking violence, but none of its plot sophistication.  I have come to think of gory brutality in horror films like I think of CG effects in fantasy or action films: they are delightful when well-executed but patently unnecessary.  Cruelty punctuated with buckets of fake blood, like slick computer animation, can satisfyingly add to a film that already has other things going for it - clever writing, good characters, psychological depth - but as a gimmick, they cannot save a film that has none of these aforementioned qualities. Still persists the proliferation of horror movies featuring brutal cruelty, unmitigated by clever dialogue or tightly-wound suspense (or even humor, often used to great effect in some excellent horror films, e.g., any Sam Raimi horror movie, Shaun of the Dead, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) .

So, with this crap parade of recent horror movies, I had been losing my faith in the genre as contemporarily imagined.  In the last month, however, I have seen a handful of really superlative new horror movies.  I plan a 'best of' list for some future post, but for the purposes of this entry I examine the one that most tripped my trigger: The House of the Devil.

As the title suggests, this film is a basic girl-trapped-in-scary-house-with-unknown-evil plot. What elevates this movie to art (really -  I don't throw Hitchcock comparisons around lightly), is its reliance on building suspense through editing, pacing, through what is implied but not shown, and through what is feared but not known.

 Ti West wrote, directed and (excellently vital to the movie's greatness) edited The House of the Devil.  Released in 2009, it is set in a fully-imagined late '70s/early '80s America - feathered hair, taper leg jeans, wall-hanging curly-corded rotary phones, the whole enchilada.  This movie is better than retro, however.  It really recreates the period.  West even shot it using 16 mm film.  I started watching The House of the Devil without knowing the film date and  West rendered the period so authentically, only the naturalistic dialogue tipped me off that I was watching a more recent film.  And since I have mentioned the dialogue...

The House of the Devil is extremely well-written.  The dialogue between the protagonist, Samantha, and her best friend, Megan, particularly impressed me (well played by Jocelin Donahue and Greta Gerwig, respectively).  It felt like I was watching two actual women who behave as actual friends and relate to each other as actual people would.  This makes one care about them.  I do not think I can overstate the importance of sympathizing with one's horror film protagonist.  If she's too stupid or too unbelievable, you just wish she'd get killed already.  That kind of negativity for one's protagonist only works if the film has a self-conscious B-movie cheese factor and thus works as comedy.  In a sincere horror movie, liking the protagonist is vital.  And The House of the Devil is sincere.  It completely lacks the self-referentially jaded and satirical quality of films like Scream or New Nightmare (good horror flicks both, but their scariness relies on breaking rules of the horror genre, not on playing by those rules excellently).

I mentioned West's superior editing.  Many shots have odd angles, slow and tense pans, or unusual points of view.  West has assembled these interesting individual shots in a way that gives the film pacing suggestive of Jaws.  Early(ish) on, we get one violent, schocking and confusing scare.  Then the film reverts to its established pensive yet paranoid tone, which it maintains while slowly increasing the tension right up until the denouement and the breathless, rug-out-from-under-you ending.  

Which brings me to another comparison: the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that grasped how underexposure heightens fear and tension.  When you see only silhouettes and quick glimpses of Freddy's horribly scarred face and terrifying razor claw, when you see a girl getting ripped to shreds and tossed around a room but you can't see the perpetrator, the scare is much more thrilling than one you can look square in the eye.  It reaches you almost primordially, like a Lovecraftian "unspeakable" Cthulhu scare.  Ridley Scott also nailed this means of frightening his audience in Alien.  As the Elm Street franchise proved, the more familiar the monster's countenance, the campier his presence.  (NB:  I exclude here New Nightmare, as that film represents Wes Craven's first adventure into self-referential horror - it is scary because it doesn't take the rest of the franchise seriously, just like Scream is scary because it doesn't take the horror genre, in general, seriously).   

One final note about The House of the Devil: it features two amazing performances by the equally wonderful Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, as the owners of said devil house.  These two are so understated, so polite when Samantha first meets them, and yet so menacing.  You distrust them on a gut level, though for the first portion of the film they also seem strangely kind and reasonable.  Noonan's first scene alone is worth watching the whole movie for. 

In sum, this film is a treat for the horror fan who finds psychological scares harder to shake than visceral ones and Ti West is a thinking viewer's filmmaker.  I can't wait to see his next big thing, and I sure hope it's a horror movie.

 

How Nothing Will Ever Be the Same...Except What Stays the Same

Post-colonial theory has done some fantastic things for western historiography.  It, along with feminist theory in particular, has decentralized the traditional European narrative by focusing on the perspectives of indigenous people, women, religious and other minorities.  Essentially, post-colonial theory examines the realities of those who were subjugated or otherwise affected by the expansion of colonial powers around the globe, and it does so by paying particular attention to power structures, issues of dominance, marginalization, agency, oppression, and resistance.  

Post-colonial theory has problematized the very act of getting at and portraying the perspectives of indigenous people, women and so forth, i.e., the "subaltern".*  European colonialism discouraged, ignored and willfully destroyed many sources that were or would have been created by the people subject to colonial rule, which sources historians use to piece "history" together.**  It is, therefore, practically more difficult to study the sublatern than it is to study white Europeans of the period.  Moreover, there exists the old anthropological problem of studying an "Other" (or subaltern) when one comes from a culturally removed paradigm.  How can a 20th- or 21st-century historian - a product of the western European paradigm perpetuated by colonialism - accurately depict the experience of an individual or individuals who were marginalized and silenced by this same colonialism?  Isn't that very project predicated on the familiar old patriarchal attitude Europeans used to subjugate colonized peoples in the first place?  Post-colonial theory has helped historians deal with these sticky issues of intellectual honesty and cultural sensitivity, as well as the brutal, often horrifying and always upsetting realities crafted by colonialism.

Another consequence of the development of post-colonial thought is to divide much of western historiography into the pre-colonial and post-colonial eras.  I will not aver that this division is an illogical one, unduly constructed by historians or placing unwarranted emphasis on a single event or set of events.  European colonial expansion certainly changed the world forever and established power differentials of which we see the ramifications today.  

However, I do believe that naturalizing the pre-/post-colonial divide obscures continuities that are, perhaps, useful to note.  Additionally, it inhibits the adoption of post-colonial theory by historians of pre-colonial periods.  Historians love to annex historiographical theory from a variety of sources and employ them in novel circumstances, but the premises of post-colonial theory imply the uniqueness of the post-colonial world so much so that historians of pre-colonial time periods seldom venture to use the post-colonial methodological lens to examine their own subject matter.  I think this pre-/post-colonial divide, in emphasizing the exclusivity of each time period, might end up working to the detriment of both.  

In some senses, a narrative of continuity is the same bad old narrative of the oppressor with which post-colonial theory so handily dispensed.  I certainly do not argue for a return to this historical perspective.  Nevertheless, permitting post-colonial theory to speak only about the colonial and post-colonial world underestimates its utility for broader timeframes and topics.  

By the time Europe "discovered" the Americas in the 15th century, it had already established itself as a civilization that liked to insinuate its interests wherever it could, first in Africa, and then in Asia.  I do not propose that European military and commercial projects in Africa and Asia precisely mirror colonial expansion following 1492, but I do suggest that they bear enough resemblances to justify comparing them. 

Just a few thoughts.

A very early consolidation of broad-reaching power occurred in Europe at the hands of the Romans.  First as a republic, and later as an empire, Rome colonized what is now Europe as well as lands all around the Mediterranean and into central Asia.  Roman colonies Like other colonial powers before and since, this development of empire through conquest created an economy reliant on slave labor and the influx of other goods from Roman colonies or, administratively-speaking, provinces.  Rome encouraged the production of and multiplied the consumption of luxury goods, grain, animals and human labor all across its vast territory.  Read here for more specific information on Rome's material exploitation of Africa, here for information regarding the Roman (ab)use of animals in its provinces, and here for a summary of the Roman empire's reliance on slave labor imported from its provinces. 

Certainly Roman colonialism differed from early modern European colonialism in important ways.  Nevertheless, the material relationship between Rome and her provinces, as hinted at above, resembles 15th- and 16th-century colonialism in more than one way.  Additionally, the differences between European colonialism of the early modern period and that of every other period are precisely what have already been most explored by post-colonial historiography.  Surely a comparative study between ancient Roman empire and early modern European colonialism (breaching that pre-/post-colonial divide!) would yield interesting insight into both periods. 

Additionally, after Rome's fall its former territory, still tenuously sharing the Latin language and Christianity, soon became the collection of nations that would eventually identify itself as a cohesive "Europe" (once a healthy dose of Germanic tribal militarism was added to the mix). The nations of Europe, as diverse as they are, share this cultural heritage of the Roman, early medieval (i.e., tribal) and late medieval periods.  And from the medieval world, after all, developed the Europe that would exert itself via colonialism around the globe.

And now I have finally worked my way around to the medieval period, whose projects of expansion I really would like to talk about.  But that for my next post.

* Like any good field of thought, post-colonial theory has built up its own vocabulary where each word has been loaded down with meaning, nuanced differentiation from other concepts, and the general fruit of academic hairsplitting.  I don't say that dismissively, but having been trained in historiographical theory more germane to pre-colonial time periods, I approach post-colonial vocabulary with some trepidation.  I understand that I may not, in every case, employ terms and concepts to the fullest extent of their epistemological baggage.  
** Not to mention the fact that most western historians are trained to look primarily at written sources.  This tendency creates a bias toward literate peoples and their cultural product.  In order to study oral cultures, historians require strategies that help them get, often obliquely, at the lived lives of people who did not leave a written record behind them.  At the very least, it requires historians to approach narratives generated by the dominant, literate powers with a healthy amount of distrust, especially when it comes to their depiction of those at the opposite end of the colonial power structure.

Book: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

I was unfortunate enough to have been introduced to Wide Sargasso Sea by watching the 1993 film version.  In the intervening 17 years, I have forgotten many details and now remember only my overall impression of the film.  It seemed like housewife softcore or something aired on Showtime late at night that my brother and I, in our childhoods, would have giggled over.  Lots of moist skin, dresses perpetually falling off shoulders, trite filmmakers trying desperately to make 1830s Jamaica as exotic and sexy as possible.  With my recent reading of Jean Rhys' 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, upon which this film was based (I use "based" loosely), I have at last realized what an injustice was done to Ms. Rhys and her book. (And an aside 'thank you' to my friend Drue who made this all possible by lending me the book!)

Wide Sargasso Sea is a "parallel novel" - a novel using characters or plotlines from another work, written by a different author.   In this case, Jean Rhys annexes Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in order to refigure the villain of that piece, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, Rochester's insane, dangerous and dissolute wife.  Rhys provides this pathetic and loathsome shadow figure from Jane Eyre with a sympathetic back story that, in the process, rewrites our understanding of Rochester and the plot of Jane Eyre itself. 

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Mason, a white creole (a Jamaican-born member of the slaveholding class) who grew up in 1830s Jamaica, just after the dissolution of slavery in the West Indies.  The action of the book occurs mainly in the West Indies and is told through first person narration: that of Antoinette herself and of Edward Rochester.  Rhys changes few of the details offered by Brontë - Rochester ventures to the West Indies, is taken ill and, before he knows it, finds himself married to Antoinette in a union largely engineered by Antoinette's step-brother and Rochester's father.  

Initially enthralled with the young woman, Rochester quickly begins to harbor suspicion and dread of his new wife.  He hears malicious rumors about the so-called madness of Antoinette's mother and of her young brother, who died years earlier when the family's home was destroyed by fire.  Additionally, the "exotic" quality (for an Englishman) of Jamaica and of Antoinette begins to discomfort Rochester, as does her attachment to Christophine, her childhood nurse and practitioner of obeah.  For Rochester, all of the West Indies seem to harbor some dark "secret"; something unnamed, but dangerous and duplicitous, that he associates with Jamaica, Christophine, Antoinette's servants and, soon, with Antoinette herself.

Rochester's feelings of alienation from Jamaica and its inhabitants, including his new wife, coupled with the gossip he has heard about her family,  contribute to Rochester's ultimate conviction that he is the victim of a malicious plot and that he has married a mad woman who wants only his money.  For Antoinette's part, the "madness" of her mother seems less some inheritable insanity and more a result of grief over her son's death in the fire, as well as an offshoot of her unwillingness to fit the mold her two husbands (Antoinette's father and step-father) had fashioned for her. This both prefigures Antoinette's own end as a lunatic imprisoned in Rochester's English home and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for Rochester.  Antoinette's behavior is culturally unreadable to Rochester, who attributes insanity to it.  He believes that madness runs in her family, and his own subsequent treatment of Antoinette soon drives her, in fact, mad, turning her into the gibbering, murderous "Bertha"* from Jane Eyre. 

Essentially, throughout the novel, Rhys demonstrates how Rochester's presumed cultural superiority and attendant prejudice against West Indian culture instills in him a kind of paranoia that ultimately destroys Antoinette.  By fleshing out Antoinette's story and by portraying Rochester in his attitude of cultural superiority and resulting paranoia, Rhys creates a sympathetic, though not uncritical, depiction of Antoinette and her past that Jane Eyre completely lacks.   

Any sympathy generated by Rhys for Antoinette, however, is instantly problematized given that Antoinette's family once perpetrated and flourished by slavery.   The reader meets Antoinette as a young girl: slavery, the source of her family's wealth, has ended; her father has died; her mother has grown reclusive; and the resentment and distrust of black creoles and former slaves for former slaveholders, like Antoinette's family, is beginning to bubble up. The world into which Rochester enters is already fraught with its own racial and class tensions.  His British imperialist sense of entitlement and superiority only add to this volatile and destructive mix.

I became so smitten with this subtle and complex book that I shamelessly exploited Nick's University of New Orleans online account.  I scoured JSTOR and found dozens of scholarly articles written about Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea.  Unsurprisingly, the majority of articles explore the novel within a post-colonial and feminist methodological framework.  I admit to a strong preference for the post-colonial over the feminist evaluations.  I may be ultimately more offended by colonial attitudes than by sexist ones, though I think the two comprise an insidious symbiotic system of prejudice that Wide Sargasso Sea explores deftly.  The post-colonial articles focus on silence, voice, powerlessness and empowerment and the (in)ability of a white author, albeit a West Indian one, to truly represent that subaltern.  

The spiraling and overlapping complexities of this novel beg such questions and concerns.  Rhys took Jane Eyre, usually considered a sort of proto-feminist work, focused on a character marginal to that novel and created another work in which that character is both your protagonist and antagonist, both innocent and guilty, central and peripheral.  I get the sense that Rhys identified with women characters who usually get short shrift in fiction - sometimes sympathetic, but usually caricatured "fallen" women, who are not all bad, but only sometimes good.  Evidently her earlier novels, which I fully intend on reading, also possess such protagonists.  In any event, Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best novels I have read in some time.  And I will warn everyone I know away of that wretched movie by the same name.

*One of the most overt attempts to erase Antoinette's Jamaican, "exotic" personality and submit it to his own control, is Rochester's insistence on calling her "Bertha".



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Of Roux and the Benefits of Slime

I finally did it.  Nearly ten years of living in New Orleans and I finally tried my hand at making gumbo.  And I didn't embarrass myself!  I found some tender small okra at Hong Kong Market on the Westbank and decided it was time.  I scoured through a number of recipes and read several gumbo-making tips in my favorite southern cookbook, Talk About Good, published by the Junior League of Lafayette.  As an aside, despite this book's heavy reliance on lard and eggs, etc. (it is southern), I have found its recipes easily adaptable to the vegan diet.  That is, it is easy to substitute egg replacer for eggs or vegetable shortening for lard, and these recipes are so solid and contain so many other wholesome ingredients, that they still come out delicious with these minor tweakings.  But back to the gumbo.

I was intimidated by the roux.  I had heard that one's entire gumbo depended on this first simple, but tedious step.  I mixed equal parts canola oil and flour and I stirred this forever, in the heaviest pot I own, over relatively low heat.  I did not get my roux as chocolaty brown as some gumbo devotees require, but I got it a nice deep golden color and managed not to burn even a speck of the flour.  I was pleased.  To cool down this molten concoction, I stirred in a bunch of diced onions and my kitchen instantly smelled like heaven.  In future, I will go ahead and stir all of the vegetables, save the okra, into the lava-hot roux: garlic, celery, green pepper, tomato.  

But for this go around, I added those components after the roux had cooled.  I put everything, including the okra, in a larger pot with a bunch of homemade vegetable broth.  Another thing I learned whilst making this trial gumbo: for my preference, it is utterly unnecessary to "deslime" the okra.  I had read that you should subject your little okras to a hot/cold water bath or sauté the bejeezus out of it to get that slime out.  I began sautéing mine but, after only a minute or so, decided this would precook the okra more than I wanted.  So I turned off the heat and resolved that, slime-be-damned, I would never again do this to my gumbo okra.  I only regret that I added the not-quite-precooked okra to the gumbo too soon.  It fell apart more than I would have liked by the time the gumbo was done and, for an all vegetable gumbo, that left very little texture.  In this case, I ended up adding some fried tofu so my gumbo would have something substantial in it.  However, in future attempts, I will just add the okra later.  Additionally, I have determined that if you do not dig okra slime, you just should not be using it.  Especially in gumbo where, in addition to the roux, the slime helps thicken everything up.

So I cooked the gumbo and cooked it and cooked it and, lo and behold, it started to get that amazing red-brown, vaguely oily quality.  Effing A.

If I remember correctly (this gumbo attempt occurred before the storm of French Quarter Fest, Jazz Fest and, in general, April in New Orleans), I added my seasoning early.  Cayenne and Tony Chachere's, primarily.   I served the gumbo with rice, naturally, and some green onion.  It was freaking wonderful with a rich and complex flavor.  I have read that the only way to achieve superior gumbo is to make it and make it again.  I plan on looking for more okra this very afternoon.

                

Story: "Amrita and the Ifrit"

Part 1

Amrita lived along the banks of the river called Minikwe. Minikwe flowed in eddies of blue and green and brown and supplied the whole land with water and food. Amrita would feed herself with great golden fish that swam in its current. Farmers would irrigate their land with its waters. And everywhere in the valley cut by Minikwe, the river allowed life to flourish.

One afternoon, as Amrita sat on the damp grass and fished for her supper, a new light appeared in the sky alongside the radiant sun. Amrita rose to her feet quickly and stared at the new light, which seemed like a shooting star only impossibly large and vibrant, even in the daylight. Amrita's palms grew slick with sweat.  She clutched her fishing pole more tightly. She caught her breath and wondered what kind of omen was the shooting star.

In two moments, Amrita heard a low laugh behind her. She turned to see an ifrit in the guise of a man. The ifrit looked nervous, but smiled broadly and said, "He comes."

"Who comes?" asked Amrita. "What is the meaning of the shooting star?"

"It means," said the ifrit, "that the serpent Niðhogg comes.  He has been gnawing on the root of the tree, Yggdrasil, since the beginning of time.  At last he has finished his meal and has grown thirsty.  He will come soon and drink the waters of the river Minikwe to slake his thirst.  And I," said the ifrit, "have not eaten in days.  I will make my meal of you."  He gnashed his teeth and pinched the flesh of Amrita's arm between two of his greedy fingers.

Amrita, as clever as the ifrit was guileful, said, "I am afraid I will make a very poor meal for you.  Let me catch you some fish instead.  On the best of days I do not outweigh one fish from the river, and lately I have been sick.  Let me catch you some fish before Niðhogg comes and drinks Minikwe, its fish and everything else all up."

The ifrit eyed Amrita, curled his lips into a snarl and said, "If you catch me seven great golden fish from the river before Niðhogg comes, I will not eat you."  And then to himself he added, "Yet."

But Amrita heard the last word of the duplicitous ifrit and knew he still planned to devour her.  She also knew she had somehow to keep Minikwe safe from Niðhogg.  Without the life-giving waters of Minikwe, the land would become sere and uninhabitable, the animals would die and the people would leave.  She had to do something. 

Amrita sat back down and cast her line into the river.  She caught a first and then a second fish.  The third took a good deal longer and the ifrit paced back and forth, shouting, "Quickly!  Quickly!  I am hungry and Niðhogg is on his way!"  Amrita worried that she would not catch all of the fish in time, but as Niðhogg approached, he drove the frightened fish in front of him, right into Amrita's line.  She hauled one fish after the other from Minikwe and fretted that the very same fortune flowing her way, would soon swallow up the river whole.

In no time, Amrita had piled up seven large golden fish in front of the ifrit.  He licked his lips and his eyes grew large and he would have eaten them there by the banks of the river, and then eaten Amrita too, had she not thought quickly.  "Come," she said, "into my beautiful home.  Drink wine and relax on a cushioned seat and I will cook the fish properly for you.  If you wait too long by the river, Niðhogg might swallow you with it."

The ifrit, whom Niðhogg detested anyway, recognized the wisdom of Amrita's words and followed her into the grand house.  He still planned on eating Amrita, but reasoned that letting her cook his dinner first could certainly bring no harm.  She arranged the softest cushions for him on which to sit.  She brought out a pitcher of her best wine, heavily spiced without being watered down.  She lit a fire and then began scaling and cleaning the fish.  The ifrit sat and drank and belched and snorted and urged her to hurry up with the cooking.

As Amrita tended the roasting fish, the ifrit grew steadily more drunk.  When his eyes had become glazed and his speech had begun to slur, Amrita said, "I will lay your dinner out in my highest tower.  There is a window from which you will be able to watch Niðhogg drinking his fill of our river.  Surely you would like to see such a spectacle."

The ifrit thought, "Niðhogg will never see me hidden away in the tower and I will be safe from him," and so said to Amrita, "I will delight in seeing the valley laid waste and I will pick my teeth with your bones while I watch."

Amrita swallowed her fear and set a feast for the ifrit in her highest tower.  She laid the table with fruit and nuts, the seven fish and even more wine.  The ifrit stumbled up the stairs and into the room.  He sat heavily down at the table and, looking through the window, he fixed his eyes on the river Minikwe, which wound its way below.  The ifrit ate and drank and ate some more.  His eyes did not waver from the window.  Soon he saw Niðhogg himself.  Huge and terrible with a gaping mouth, the dragon began to drink the river.  The ifrit cried a small cry of triumph and, food still clinging to his lips, slipped into a deep wine-addled sleep.

All this while, silently and with desperate purpose, Amrita walled up the doorway of the room at the top of her highest tower in which the ifrit slept.  She could hear the tempest building outside as Niðhogg drank and drank.  Great gasps of his breath sounded like gales of strongest wind.  The running of Minikwe down Niðhogg's gullet sounded like endless waves breaking against the shore.  Amrita could hear birds fleeing loudly in terror.  She could hear people screaming as they watched their livelihood flow into the belly of Niðhogg.  Still Amrita worked, walling up the ifrit.  "One battle at a time," she said to herself, but she knew her time was short.

Finally, Amrita put the last brick in place and ran outside to confront Niðhogg.  She saw with dismay that he had already consumed so much of the river Minikwe that only a narrow stream trickled into the dragon's mouth.  "Good Niðhogg," she called.  "I know you have a great thirst, but I beg you to leave us this meager stream.  In return for your restraint, I will give you the ifrit I have captured.  He is fat on fish and drunk on wine and will make a splendid meal for you."

Niðhogg sputtered on the small rivulet that had been Minikwe and laughingly said to Amrita, "I am tempted by your offer, as I do hate the ifrit.  I would like to crunch his bones and chew his sinews.  But even greater than that desire is my thirst.  And even stuffed with good things, an ifrit tastes like poisonous death.  Much sweeter are Minikwe's waters and I have had nothing to drink since the world began.  I pity you the loss of your river, but I cannot help you.  Keep your ifrit and I will take Minikwe."  And he did.  He drank every drop, leaving only a dry river bed, and then Niðhogg curled up again at the root of Yggdrasil, on which he had gnawed for so long, and he slept a dreamless sleep that would last ten thousand years.

Amrita wept, as did all the people of the valley.  She watched as they packed their belongings and moved away.  She watched as the animals either followed new waters, or died.  She watched as fruit withered and trees atrophied.  She wept and wept and blamed herself for the loss of Minikwe.  She had tried but she had not been clever or fast enough.  She had let Niðhogg devour Minikwe and now the valley was dead...dead save for the ifrit imprisoned in her tower.  Upon awaking and finding himself imprisoned, the ifrit howled and cursed and raged, but he could not get out.  Amrita, tired of his noise, left her house and she too wandered away.  But she did not wish the company of others.  The once happy woman was now inconsolable.  She found a cave in the newly made desert along the old course of Minikwe and there she remained, a hermit, praying forgiveness and a return of the water.

Year after year, Amrita stayed in the cave, mourning the loss of Minikwe.  She forgot completely about the ifrit imprisoned in her tower and remembered only the pain of her failure.  Her hair grew longer and longer as each year passed.  It hung down her back, flowed over the ground and out of the cave.  Its length unfurled on the desert floor and lay in the sun, beautiful and entirely ignored by its owner.

 Part 2

One day, long years after Amrita had retreated into her cave, the goddess Kamui flew in haste across a desert expanse.  As she flew, Kamui looked down on the valley she had created and remembered how, innumerable years before, she had dispatched an ifrit here.  It had been the year of the comet and the year when Niðhogg had done chewing on Yggdrasil and went in search of enough water to kill his thirst.  Kamui had feared for her creation, the Minikwe valley with its great river, and so had ordered the ifrit to deliver a message to Niðhogg bidding the dragon come to Kamui's vineyard.  There she would have slaked his thirst herself, giving him enough wine that he would have spared Minikwe with no second thought.  But ifrit are mean-spirited and unreliable creatures and this one never returned.  Niðhogg had drunk Minikwe and ruined the valley.  Kamui had mourned for her creation and its people.  Being a goddess, however, she did not dwell on the loss.  Like a child, she was quickly distracted from her pain by other brighter baubles than the Minikwe river valley.  However, now, as she flew over the valley, she remembered the Minikwe river and cursed the wretched ifrit under her breath.  Then, a rivulet of muddy but shimmering brown water caught her eye.  Water?  In this desert?   

Curious, Kamui descended from the sky and set her tender feet on the baked earth.  As she approached the stream, she soon realized that it was not water at all, but hair.  Kamui reached down and picked up the tresses in her hands, turning them this way and that to see the strands shimmer in the sun.  Enamored with their beauty, Kamui looked about her and searched for the source.  The hair seemed to be pouring from a fissure in a rock.  She followed the stream of hair up to the rock and then tugged at it, to see if it would give.  Instead, she heard a woman's cry.

Surprised, Kamui walked around the rock until she saw that it was actually the opening of a cave.  Peering into its shadows, she saw the figure of a woman and called to her, "I am sorry to have pulled your hair.  Please come out and let me see you."

Amrita, for it was she in the cave, slowly came forward, squinting in the light to which she had grown unaccustomed.  She saw Kamui, vibrantly beautiful, holding a long tress of hair in her hand.

"How is it," asked Kamui, "that you have lived alone in this unlivable desert and grown such a marvelous length of hair?"

"I have dwelled in this cave since Niðhogg drank the river, a disaster I failed to prevent," answered Amrita.  "I have mourned and cried and lived on my own tears this long time.  They have been the only water in this valley.  To my hair I have paid no attention."

Kamui felt remorse and confusion.  She said, "It is I who failed to prevent Niðhogg from drinking the river.  I intended to slow him with wine such that he would forget Minikwe and leave the valley in peace.  I sent an ifrit for this task, but he never returned.  I curse that ifrit still today, but I do not understand how you could have prevented this calamity."

"I," sighed Amrita, "was more responsible than I knew.  I met your ifrit.  He meant to eat me, but I tricked him and imprisoned him in my tower.  He spoke of no message for Niðhogg and seemed to delight in Minikwe's destruction.  I tried to give the foul wretch to Niðhogg, in exchange for his leaving a stream in the valley.  But Niðhogg would not help me.  His thirst was too great.  He drank the river and the valley died.  I have not since left this cave."

"And the ifrit?" asked Kamui.   

"He is either still in the tower or he has escaped," said Amrita.  "I would not know."

Kamui pondered Amrita's tale and, finally, said, "Come with me to your tower and we will see whether the ifrit has escaped.  It is he who failed to prevent the disaster.  You have mourned in repentance undue to you."

The goddess and the woman returned to Amrita's home and Kamui flew them to the window of its highest tower.  The ifrit sat at the table, where Amrita had left him, but he had grown obese and lethargic.  While the valley withered away, the ifrit had used his powers to multiply the food Amrita had given him.  He had despised his imprisonment, but comforted himself with fruit and nuts, fish and wine.

"But how has he survived so long?" asked Amrita.

"An ifrit cannot make something out of nothing, but you left him some food and he has made much of that.  And now he will pay what he owes to the Minikwe river valley," said Kamui. 

"Ifrit!" she called and the ifrit jumped in fright.  "You know me, and you know this woman, and you know what you have done."  

The ifrit squirmed and puled and his great folds of skin undulated like water.  "Is it my fault this woman imprisoned me that I could not deliver your message to Niðhogg?  She!  She has done this."

"You have done this and she has paid!" raged Kamui.  "You never meant to deliver my message, but only to deliver yourself from Niðhogg's wrath.  I knew he hated you and so I sent you.  If you had fulfilled my orders you might have cured his hatred of you as well as my own.  Instead you let pass a calamity.  You grew fat, while the valley grew barren.  You will return to the valley what you have stolen from it."  And Kamui's eyes grew dark while her skin grew radiant.  Power pulsed from her and engulfed both the ifrit and Amrita.

For several moments Amrita feared that Kamui's wrath would annihilate her along with the ifrit, but soon a different sensation overcame her.  Water, running down her back.  She looked over her shoulder and saw the stream of her hair had become rills of water and it was flowing down into Minikwe's old channel.  Soon, a mighty river flowed again through the valley, but the valley remained brown and baked and barren.  

Amrita looked to the ifrit and gasped.  Her loathing of him became tinged with pity, for she saw the huge mass of him slowly torn into pieces by Kamui's rage.  And his pieces reassembled into the life that the valley had so long missed.  His hands became trees.  His enormous haunches grassy banks.  His toes took to the water and became great golden fish. 

Amrita found herself standing along the river that resembled Minikwe in all ways.  She felt succulent blades of grass beneath her feet and saw the emerald canopy of trees.  She breathed one long breathe and felt her sorrow uncoil and slither away, as though it were Niðhogg himself.  Amrita and Kamui gazed at each other, the former with awe, the latter with affection.  

"You have done this," said Kamui.  "After Minikwe was gone, the ifrit continued to consume life, growing fat while everything else around him perished.  But you returned to the valley the only meager life it could support and you used your own sorrowful tears to do so.  Did you know that I mistook your hair for a stream of water when I saw it from the sky?"

"And now it is the water," wondered Amrita.

"And now it is."  

NB:  I completed this original painting and created the foregoing tale to go along with it.  The story is original, but I have collected in it references to cultures and mythologies from many places.  I list these below:

• Amrita is an Indian name that means "limitless".
• Minikwe is an Ojibwe word that means "drinking" or "he/she is drinking".
• Niðhogg comes straight from Norse mythology.  He is the dragon that gnaws at the root of the world tree Yggdrasil.
• An ifrit is a creature from Arab folklore closely identified with the djinn (or genies).
• Kamui is an Ainu word referring to a spirit. 

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Of Adultery and Unilateral Narrative

The Hebrew bible, a.k.a. the Christian Old Testament, contains a wealth of peculiar and often dark stories.  Until recently, I was woefully unacquainted with one of its darkest - the story of David and Bathsheba.  With my typical gullibility, I have always assumed the story of David and Bathsheba to be a love story.  Well, I guess it is, but it's a love story more in a Greek or even Brontëan sense than anything.  That is, it involves more betrayal, murder and lust than love.  Pretty good reading.

We find the story in 2 Samuel 11.  King David wages war against the Ammonites by besieging their most important city, Rabbah.  He sends his general, Joab, to accomplish this task, however, and David himself remains in Jerusalem.  I quote the next portion of the story from my New Oxford Annotated Bible (1991), which contains so much more than just the biblical texts, you have to check it out.  I'm talking the apocrypha, maps, archaeological information.  It's great.  So anyway, David's kicking around Jerusalem while his cronies do battle for him and:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.  David sent someone to inquire about the woman.  It was reported, 'This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.'  So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.

Okay, so David's army is off fighting and he's lounging around the palace, spying on naked chicks.  In a fashion commensurate with stories of the Greeks, Romans, Vikings and, well, most mythologies of historical peoples, sex only occurs from the male point of view.  David wants, David gets.  There is no mention of what Bathsheba may have wanted or whether, in fact, the "he lay with her" signifies rape or not.  The nastiest portion of the story has yet to occur and already I'm feeling ill at ease.  Isn't this King David?  David and Goliath David?  Isn't he supposed to be Yahweh's favorite?  An all around swell guy?  Exactly.

So Bathsheba sends word to David that she is pregnant.  David's machinating little brain comes up with a perfect plan:  summon Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, back from the war, he will sleep with his wife and assume that any forthcoming child is his own.  David sends for Uriah, who returns to Jerusalem.  However, Uriah apparently has twice the integrity David even thought of having and, so long as his men are at Rabbah fighting and dying, he will not enjoy the comforts of his home, including the loving embrace of his wife.  Instead of fulfilling David's duplicitous goals, Uriah sleeps in the hallway with his servants and then returns to battle.

Foiled by Uriah's admirable conduct, David sends for his general Joab and orders Joab to place Uriah foremost in the battlefield and, upon retreating, to leave Uriah behind.  What a guy.

So Uriah is killed, Bathsheba laments, David marries Bathsheba and she bears his child.  David's court prophet, Nathan, confronts the king, telling him a clever parable about men and sheep, and makes David realize the full villainy of his actions.  David repents.  Finally, Yahweh has the last laugh when David and Bathsheba's son dies of an illness.  David's rule would remain troubled by a variety of woes, including the rebellion of another son, Absalom.

As with most biblical stories (or Greek or Roman stories, etc. - see rant above), I long to know that for which there is no textual evidence:  What did Bathsheba make of this situation?  Was she a victim, forced to comply with a king's wishes?  Or did she commit adultery willingly and covet the attention of a man even more powerful than her husband?  Did she ever find out that David had Uriah killed or did she believe he died in the normal course of battle?  Did she blame David for their son's death?  For me, this story remains half told.

I came upon this horrendous and compelling tale in conjunction with a painting I recently finished.  The original image comes from the thirteenth-century St. Louis Psalter.  It appears as a miniature nestled in the top of a capital letter "B".  I removed the alphabetical context and simply painted the image within a circle.  The frame design, to which I am quite partial, I made up myself.  I made other minor changes to the image - the gold background, the kind of trees portrayed, Bathsheba's face (I think my Bathsheba is prettier). 

You will note David leering from the window of his castle.  The dog.

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