June 25, 2007

  • An iRant Birthday

    Four years ago today, I posted my first blog entry.  Four years.  Huh.  Wasn't really sure it was going to last the remainder of 2003, but what do you know.  While I never got too ranty, or, at least, not too consistently ranty, I've had fun with it.  Be it Carol Channing, memes, random linkage, or food porn, if you're still reading, hey, thanks!

    I think I posted a while back about the scare smear the GOP was trying to paintbrush Nancy Pelosi with.  The scary gay-tastic "San Francisco values."  Although I'm sure I contributed a bit more to the cloud of smug when I heard that, I have to say that it was a pretty dumbass attack line that pandered so transparently to some artificial dyed-in-the-wool-conservative panic, given that the state compares to France in terms of GDP.  Hm, France, eh? Probably another reason to be loathed by American conservatives.

    But, guess what? Other cities with "San Francisco values" tend to be richer as well.  And so now the gay agenda has been exposed:  economic prosperity for all!

    Picked up an old Henry James book I've yet to exhaust, and read one of his shorts called, "The Altar of the Dead" that I'd not read before.  I actually quite like James (and his poetry can be pretty rockin').  He's often cited in terms of possessing unusual insight into people's thought processes and psychology.  "Altar" was very much in the James model, with the protagonist portrayed as some kind of proto-goth who lost a loved one and became fixated in almost an Edgar-Allen-Poe-esque way with the deaths of her (Mary Antrim, she is named) and others in his life.  The whole work has a feel of shadow and darkness about it, with the only thing giving any light is the candle-lit altar of remembrance of the dead.  It is in this place and around this light that the protagonist befriends -- slowly, carefully, seeming to take years -- a woman who, herself, begins to use his altar in the Church chapel, and the relationship they slowly develop leave much unspoken, but they both sense a kindred spirit.  Unfortuntately, that shared spirit is the memory of Acton Hague, one time friend of the protagonist who done him a great wrong (never explicated), and this widowed lady's dead husband.  Hague's is the one candle of the dead the protagonist would never light on the altar, though he tends one for each of the others in his life who passed.  And here, he discoveres that all candles were, for the suddenly-revealed Mrs. Hague, to be "one candle," for her only -- and most poignant -- loss.

    James probes the mind of his protagonist and shines this graveyard candlelight into the dark recesses of his grief, stubbornness, pride, and mourning.  He shows us these things without much mercy, but definitely with some pity.  Death-in-life is a big theme in the story, specifically the kind of death that's self-imposed when some earthly bond of love is severed and the remaining partner is left with what comes after.  But he also shows us the death that is self-imposed when we allow things like grief and pride to dominate our interaction with the world around us.  There's a great scene early on where he meets a friend of his on the street.  The friend is with a woman whom the protagonist does not recognize, and certainly not the friend's wife, who died six months previous to the commencement of the story; it is his friend's new wife, and the protagonist is appalled.  When the protagonist looks at his friend's face, it is temporarily superimposed with the memory he had of his friend's face as it was looking down into his dead wife's casket at the funeral, full of mourning, sorrow, and grief.  It makes it pretty clear to the reader that, for the protagonist, life is over and should contain nothing more than loss and sadness -- and that no joy is right to exist in a world that he lives in, even for others.

    Having the acquaintance of a few young widowers recently, I don't think I'd feel the same way about that interaction prior to my awareness of their experiences.  James does such a good job at illustrating this grief and renunciation of happiness in this life, while at the same time backlighting the protagonist in such a way that does not shy away from calling out his judgementality and his stubborn (and for a reader like me, frustrating) refusal to let the past go to remain alive in the present.  For such a short story, it's surprisingly dense and compelling.

    Next story I'm revisiting is "The Turn of the Screw."