Because I could not wait for Death....

Martine Leavitt's meditative and charming YA novel, Keturah and Lord Death, not only takes death as its theme, but features him as a character, a romantic lead at that.

Yep, death's a Romeo in this odd mix of a book. To borrow Australian slang come across in Peter Carey's last novel, this book is a 'bitzer.' It's a bit of this and a bit of that and never any one thing entirely.

While ostensibly marketed to young adults, I wonder if it might not best be appreciated by adults. I can imagine many parents would be worried about their child's reading it. While it verges at times on allegory, it's clearly set in world resembling medieval England at the time of the plague, with numerous historically feasible details. Yet, it is off on many details and would afford a mediocre history lesson. What's more, that history lesson would be interrupted by bursts of romance clothed in prose more likely found in a good bodice-ripper than your standard historical novel. The cover doesn't mislead by any measure.

Quibbles aside, it is compulsively readable. Leavitt is a true craftswoman. Her sentences, her chapters, the novel are all well-crafted and shapely. Her lines often launch into lyrical, romantic sweeps.

Keturah is the teller of her tale. It is a campfire tale in which a 'fictional' Keturah wanders into the woods after a large, mysterious stag. She becomes hopelessly lost in the woods, and after three days in the woods Death, as in Lord Death, comes upon her. Keturah is not ready; waggish, Lord Death responds, "No one is ready." Keturah though actually manages to fend off death, at least for a day, by telling a story about a young girl who wanders into the wood, comes upon death. She begs him for more time so she might find and experience her true love. Lord Death is intrigued and wonders how the fictional Lord Death will respond to this, but Keturah refuse to tell him the end, till the next day. What's more, dubious of the stories notions of true love, Lord Death promises to give Keturah her life if she can find a true love before they meet next evening to conclude the story.

Thus, the Scherezade pattern of this book is established. For two more nights, Keturah manages to weave yet another unfinished thread into the story of and for her life. In the intervening days, she searches her small, backwater of a village in hopes of finding her true love. There is also another subplot where Keturah, acting on information given her by Lord Death [pretty good source] works to convince the local lord to upgrade the town so as to avert the onset of plague. This little subplot kind of just got in the way, but.....

When asked to describe how it feels to die, Lord Death claims, "You experience something similar every day...It is like every morning when you wake up." However, he then adds, "But to know that is never enough." This book is an attempt to know death; to the extent it's cognitively possible, it is an exercise in imaginatively trying it on. According to the afterword, when she was a child, Leavitt's sister died at the age of eleven from Cystic Fibrosis. The book is an adult's imaginative attempt to walk with this child-sister on "the long journey dying must be for a child to make alone."

So, while Lord Death is frightening, Keturah's encounter presents other sides. He provides benefit. Her nightly encounters with him lead Keturah to see the wonder of the everyday and value it more. He drives her to find her own story, to find her own heart. In a weird, paradoxical reversal, at the end, Keturah find her heart is set on Lord Death; he proves to be the true love for whom she yearned when she begged him for more time at the beginning of the book. In explanation,she confesses:

...I could not touch [others'] happinesss, could not hold it. It was a dream and not real. What was real was the sense that in this life I had never quite been satisfied, had never quite been satisfied, had never long been at peace, had never loved or been fully loved as I longed to be.

I'm not sure that I find this reversal, this somewhat sudden awareness, entirely convincing. Keturah hardly seems a gloomy sort. She loses both parents at a young age, but is raised by grand-parents who "drew [her] into their circle of uncommon love and established in her forever a desire to have such a thing for herself someday."

Being a speculative sort myself, I note but am much less troubled by some of the odd little metaphysical conceptions that mark Keturah's thinking. Many of these don't seem to fit the ostensible setting of the story; I honestly wonder if anybody thought like this at the "time" of the book. Granted, Leavitt leaves the time kind of nebulous, but it does certainly seem to be England in the Middle Ages, and some of the characters' thinking struck discordant note.

For instance, Keturah speaks of her "soul's heart" and her "living heart" and implies that if her "living heart" fails to encounter her true love during life, he soul's heart will " long and ache and mourn for eternity." Grandmother offers an equally odd variant on psychological conception when she advises Keturah, "the soul...longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul." However, her world-view has Christian elements to it. At night she offers prayerful petitions to God and between each petition conceeds, "Thy will."
Yet, she's not exactly Christian in the end either, claiming that "One is greater than death...and that is life."

I quibble a bit. Then as now, folks have head and heart beliefs, mix and confuse orthodox religions and canonical, established types of knowledge with heresies and irrational elements. However, it just seems strange that in a story set at some time in the medieval ages, examining the idea of death, not a single character ever speaks of it from a Christian point of view.

Still, read this book. For the writing. For the romance. It attempts something difficult and succeeds to some degree: while slyly entertaining the reader, it forces him to confront death.

Eudora Welty's Virgie Rainie, or cutting off your own head

I lack the mythology background to say for sure, but it seems clear that Virgie Rainie, the central character in Eudora Welty's The Wanderers should be seen figured both by Medusa and Perseus.

She is Medusa in that the sexuality she exudes has caused/compelled the town to turn her into a bogey-man; in their minds, she is a frightening monster and the town folks (excepting some of the men) avoid like the plague. Beyond the sexuality she exudes, Welty never quite spells out the precise sin(s) for which Virgie is being punished. She simply alludes; Virgie is clearly a character with a past.

In the myth, Medusa is punished by a vengeful Athena for trysting with Poseidon. In The Wanderers, it is suggested that Virgie has had a liaison with the town's elusive, protean, mythic King McClain. King is ethereal as water. And, following the outline of the myth, the town (Athena is the patroness of Athens, which in term might be construed as a symbol for the idea of the city, or communal life), punishes Virgie.

The Medusa personae imposed on Virgie freezes. On the one hand, it turns to stone all who return it's gaze. However, the personae freezes Medusa, and Virgie. Her outlaw, outcast, bad-girl personae dominates her self, both in the town's mind and in her own. It ostracise her from the town and ostracised her from a more authentic self. It freezes her into a statue, a confining posture.

There is no Perseus who can come and rescue her. She must sever her own head, or sever the head of the confining, imprisoning Personae the town has imposed on her.

Yet, I think it is safe to say she doesn't view the beheading of her personae as a clear good; it is not a task she readily takes up. There is protection in the mask. While it freezes her into an inauthentic and at times painful stance, the personae protects by freezing people who might come closer, scares away those with ill intent. It keeps those away who might wound her more permanent manner, possibly annihilate her essence entirely.

There is a power in the pose, and while it is imposed, or may originally have been at some moment in the past, Virgie has/does grab it and make it her own at some level. Like Perseus, she uses the Medusa head, lifeless as it is, as a weapon to create space for herself.

Yet, I believe that part of Virgie dreams of slaying the Medusa personae that marks her. She dreams of slaying it and leaving it behind, just as her actions in the story are all bent toward escaping the town as soon as possible. Leaving the town behind, leaving her mother's house, is Virgie's opportunity to assume the heroic mantle of the world-changing Perseus and cut off her Medusa's head. Perseus is not Medusa. He is not a victim. He is not a long suffering, pitiable creature.

The Perseus/Medusa picture on Ms. Eckhardt's wall depicts the Medusa myth in a prophetic, heroic style. This explains some of it's likely appeal for Virgie. Heroic acts, prophecies fulfilled, are one-offs: they occur once in time and permenantly change the course of the world. Such acts stand outside of the repetition and cyclic nature of time, they mark clear breaks.

Virgie can't write herself into such an act. She is a person woven in time. Instead of writing as a mythic act, she writes into time. For her, it takes place in time, and repeats and repeats.

Every Perseus/Medusa moment is double; an act of hope and despair, love and hate. Likewise, it is internal; like Ms. Eckhardt, Virgie is endlessly Medusa and Perseus at once. One moment/personae may dominate for stretches. Yet, even dominant expressions of one moment/personae of the heroic act will never entirely erase the other moment/personae. To some greater or lesser extent, Virgie simply knows and expresses both positions at one and the same time. She is at all times both Perseus endless and Medusa endless. To occupy both position at one and the same time creates the passion and life that mark Virgie as the simultaneous striking of different chords creates harmony, music.

Perfecting the machine that's the world?

Beyond sharing title openings, two books I just read crossed paths, or, conversed with each other.

The one, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick has been a commercial and critical success. Prior to the beginning of 'his story,' the eponymous horologist/magician/thief's life has been a string of mischance and accident leaving him alienated, alone and removed from the everyday world.

For reasons that are initially unexplained, Hugo spends his days tending and winding the twenty-seven clocks in a Parisian train station. Daily, Hugo slips behind the walls of the station, behind the faces and working of its clocks, and makes sure they are all calibrated and in working order. While he exists at the heart of a great machine of modern times, the train station. He is as a central cog in that machine, maintaining it's central, regulating organ, the clock. However, his own life seems to lack any order, structure, or direction.

Indeed, Selznick depicts Hugo as quite literally on the other side of, or outside, time and the world governed by it. He repeatedly shows Hugo behind clock faces, hidden, looking out into the world that looks to the clock face for direction and orientation.

In a similar vein, at the outset of his story, we learn that Hugo is "waiting for his story to begin." So described, Hugo is again placed outside time. A story has a beginning, middle and end linked by some type of logic. Hugo's life at the outset seems to lack these elements. His days are a repeating cycle, without recognizable logic or progress and forward movement. Hugo endlessly circuits the station in the service of its clocks, in the service of its trains, and ultimately in service of the city and the points to which the station connects it. While the station is a locus of connection to the outside world, a beginning and end of journeys, it is Hugo's shell, and he leaves it reluctantly.

Not surprisingly, Hugo finds solace and possibility in machines. He confides to Isabel, a young girl is own age, who helps her grandfather at a toy stand in the station: "I like to imagine the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too." Also, machines can be fixed, made right, restored.

For similar reasons, Hugo finds, or presumably learns to find, comfort in story. At the end of the book, Alcofrisbas, the teller of Hugo's tale, is revealed as Hugo grown up. Furthermore,the adult Hugo, the magician Alcofrisbas, we learn that the story has been told through the mediation of a machine, an automaton. This mediation, this story-telling by machine, further underlines the parallels between machine and story: like machines, stories have an elegance, have shape and purpose. Like machines, they are perfectings of the world.

Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else is an odd and magpie creation that has met with considerably less notice than Hugo. It too speaks to the prospect of fixing and tinkering with the world but takes a less sanguine view of the prospect.

Mixing fact and fiction, Hunt's novel focuses on the life of the inventor/physicist Tesla by imaginatively reconstructing the last week of his life. Its full of love stories, but two non-traditional loves are prominently featured: a platonic one between Tesla and a young cleaning woman, Louisa, and another between Louisa and her wacky father Walter. Walter's attachment to Louisa is poignant, strong, and founded on a tragedy: the love of Walter's life, Louisa's mother, dies giving birth to her. Walter's never quite gotten over the death of his wife, and is kind of stuck in a time warp till he becomes involved in a weird attempt to build a time-machine. Yes, this book is out there, in terms of it's story. At times, it reads like a B science fiction movie from the fifties. Yet, it is sentimental as Dickens, quite sweet and lyrical in spots, and contains a surprising amount of history and fact related to Tesla and Edison.

The book is preoccupied with time-travel. Whereas in Hugo the Parisian trainstation with its clocks serve as a stand-in for modernity, for progress and sciene, time travel serves the same metaphoric purpose in The Invention of Everything Else. Time travel is a fantasy/possibility/invention potentially offering the possibility to go back and fine tune the present by correcting past 'mistakes.'

Late in the story, Louisa imagines going back to an early period in Tesla's tragic life and meeting him. She imagines "standing there with him all the way back at the beginnining" and wonders, "Maybe we can start over...maybe we can go the right way this time."

Louisa's not alone in harboring this impulse. This book is peopled with inventors tinkering with the world in hopes of bringing it closer to some kind of perfection. All seem to think that with a touch here, a tightening of a screw there, possibly an adjustment to this or that.....who knows. Sometimes, the book is a little precious, a little outlandish, but if the reader is laid-back, prone to imagination, it is not that hard to catch the hope and wonder Hunt and her character's bring to the idea of invention.

However, while it plays with this notion/hope that the world might be perfected it questions the very concept at the same time. Although they pursue it or harbor it as a hope, at the same time they are suspicious. When Walter walks through Hell's Kitchen with his true love, the present falls away from him and he's transported back to a time when this area of New York was a verdant forest with a clear stream running through it, and this falling through time causes him to wonder "if time is so porous that a full-grown man can slip inside it while holding fast to the hand of his wife, what then can he rely on at all? The solidity of a hand? He doubted it." Yet, five paragraphs later, despite his fears, Walter is intent on searching out a time-travelling device so as to reconnect to his now deceased wife.

On the other hand, Louisa is equally suspicious of time travel and the way it suggests the present might not really exist. That, it's not a done deal. For time-travel doesn't just suggest that a perfect moment might not last. It suggests that the perfect moment might ultimately be affected by some re-working in the past in cease to exist in the process of time. The event or moment might not just no longer exist, but at some point in the future simply be removed from existence, simply never exist. And, in love in the present, she ultimately eschews time travel. Maybe not entirely. Hunt herself leaves the possibility and benefit of time travel an open question.

On another level, it simply questions whether and what is meant by perfecting the world. Louisa, Tesla, Walter begin by harboring a belief that somewhere along the line they took a wrong turn launching them down the wrong or less than perfect path they presently trod. They feel as if they exist in an imperfect or lacking 'here' and that a 'there' much better than this 'here' is out there if they could just find the path to it. Although he wavers in his faith, Tesla most eloquently rejects this and suggest instead, "People can make beautfiul mistakes...each one is an arrow...pointing out the right way to there."