Coffee: What You Care About

Fireworks. Magic. Cosmic battle. Midgets and Giants. Demons and Angels. Ancient mythology. Modern poetry. All this and more greets us at the front door of Milton’s Paradise Lost. For those of you who enjoy modern poetry, you’ll find some of it old-fashioned. For those who enjoy old-fashioned poetry, you’ll find Milton hates rhymey-dimey verse. Any of you fantasy nerds, if you can get past the iambic-ness of the telling, will love this. And, of course, so will those of you who try to follow Jesus or at least appreciate the O.T.

[jump in]

Appetizer: What I Care About

My assignment for the M.I.T. course on PL involves 2,400 words (or more) journaling my experience through the epic and interacting over it.

Milton says, in his introduction, that the form is English Heroic Verse without rime. He claims to be following the intentions of people like Homer (in the Greek), Virgil (in the Latin), Dante (in the Italian) and Beowulf (in Old English). Rime seems to be the last thing of importance concerning good verse, according to Milton, his priorities looking more like [1] Matter, [2] Meter, [3] Metaphor. That’s just good poetry. Period.

Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime not have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a think of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings–a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

[jump in]

From here, I’ll make one more note. Pandaemonium, the place of “all demons,” seems to be Milton’s parallel to the pantheon, the place of “all gods.” Aside from being brilliant, we’ve grown to use the same word for chaos in general, for saying “all hell broke loose.” Apparently, that’s exactly what happens in book four–“came not all hell broke loose.” Of course, I’m not there yet. From here I’ll take quotes, assuming you have your copy of Paradise Lost handy.

“Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song…” Milton calls us upon the muse like the great epic poem writers before him, but he defines the muse as a different one, as the Holy Spirit himself who inspired Moses on Sinai and who wrote the Torah. Brilliant way to begin if you ask me.

“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
That with no middle flight… 

The middle flight certainly evokes imagery of Apollo’s son who would scorch the earth if he flew too low or rouse the monsters of the over world if he flew too high, either way risking death. But the middle way, the way of the sun across the course of the sky, brings life to the world and rhythm to the heavens. I’d also mention Icarus who flew too high and melted his wings. This imagery Milton applies to Torah, to the way, the path of the people of God.

[jump in]

“Assert eternal providence/and justify the ways of God to men.”

“Fall off from their Creator…”

“His doom reserved him for more wrath…”

As in the feeling of torture? I’m reminded of the scene where Captain Malcolm Reynolds is being tortured and the Russian-like villain says, “I don’t like it when you die. If you die, I can’t hurt you anymore and I want at least three days with you.” Eeesh. No thanks.

“No light, but rather darkness visible.”

“Courage to never submit or yield”

“To wage by force or guile eternal war.”

In the excess of joy sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.

Put this one in quote blocks because of how it hit me. Joy as tyranny. It’s the foulest creature that would twist such a thing, that would manipulate it at all. To think of joy in those terms reworks the pecking order of virtue into something wholly vice. Those who would write off Milton’s philosophy and theology must reconcile themselves with their own desire not only to be happy, but to experience the flavor and quality of happiness rooted not in temporal salves of the moment, nor in passing pleasure, but in the infinite depth of something beyond the our very selves, of happiness tethered to another otherworldly source. To take that hope, the hope of unending pleasure, and call it tyranny is to immediately villanize yourself against yourself.

“The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

“To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

“Made them to transform / Oft to the image of a brute, adorned / With gay religions full of pomp and gold, / and devils to adore for deities;”

The concept that pagan deities are really demons in disguise is an idea seen everywhere, and not just everywhere in theology. We get that impression with mythological studies and stories like Sandman, Kingkiller and a Song of Ice and Fire. Of course I would diverge at that point and talk about God as separate, dissecting, non-localized, over all. Several things set the biblical narrative apart from mythology–sepcifically the resurrection texts, but I also think Milton’s onto something here of Devils to adore for deities. I’ve seen the places of barter where Faustian deals go down all over the planet, where people sell their souls for treats and participate in acts they try to pass off as worship. I suppose it is, but their prayers do not lift up as you might expect. They descend to the depths. Of these Milton lists out Moloch, Chemos, Baalim, Ashtaroth, the male & female and transgender forms the demonic take, of Astoreth, Thammur, Dago, Rimmon, Osiris, Isis, Orus, Belial, Ionian gods, gods “yet to be confessed later than heaven and earth,” their boasted parent ‘Titan,’ his firstborn Saturn, Jove, Azazel on Lucifer’s right, Mammon, Belus, Seraps, Mulciber, etc…

“Their glory withered as with heaven’s fire / hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines.”

“A summer’s day and with the setting sun / dropt from the zenith, like a falling star.”

“They but now who seemed / in bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons, / now less than smallest dwarves.”

Main Course: What They Care About

After watching this:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62G9yIN5Wk]

I learned several things from John Rogers and disagreed with him at points. Before I critique, I’d like to say that I’m grateful to Yale for posting these lectures for free online. I’ve never met John so I’ll try to employ the sort of academic courtesy that I expect from my readers here.

Things I learned from the lecture:

• “protestation of delay” – Milton was long-chosing and beginning late. Late because it’s too late in history (and life) for this to be a political epic like Virgil. It’s too late as well for epic poems. Milton defends lateness by going back as far as he can, by pushing a first-ness that breaks his iambic form, his heritage of Beowulf, Dante, Homer and Virgil as well as the record of Scripture itself–of what came before “In the beginning…” John calls this “poetic disobedience,” a strategy of “retrospective anticipation.” In other words, Milton in subject and form forces us to wait for the fall, to wait even for the fall of demons as he unfolds the story.
• introduction of enjambment and double-syntax – Milton broke the forms of his day not only by eliminating rhyme but by forcing the lines to blend into one another. Three out of Five lines are enjambed in Paradise Lost, creating long flowing sentences broken up into several lines. “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree…” Does fruit read like a figurative thing, “the fruit of disobedience,” or like a literal thing, “the fruit of that forbidden tree” ? Both. This double-syntax forces us to resist forward progression in the story. Milton forbids us from thinking the story will turn out the way it did, incorporating free choice into a predestined ending.

Things I disagreed with in the lecture:

• Milton calls God a hermaphrodite – This is anachronistic for one, but it’s just bad literary interp. Milton came from a long tradition of theologians since the inception of the church who held that creators are above their creation. Because God created gender (male and female), he sits above gender. God is not both genders but neither genders and therefore we learn about him through both the motherly and the fatherly, attempting to “get at” God. I would not tether this to but rather contrast this with the Baalim and Ashteroth who have transgender and hermaphroditic tendencies. Because of this, Milton was not promoting radical theology but orthodoxy — that God is not a sex, but above sex because he created it.
• Milton, because of his hermaphroditic view of God, is an animist – Again, this depends on a flawed assumption that depends on a flawed assumption.
• God is portrayed as having sex with himself – Again, I would say that God is not polysexual but asexual in the purist sense–he created sex, why would he need sex to create?

[jump in]

After all of that rambling, I’m exhausted. Doberman–you were right. This will take some time to digest…