Powers and priciple-ities

 Powers and principle-ities 
(Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, pt. 2)

Nedum verum, hiemem unamquamque carpe. ^§

Correspondence with the dead continues.*

Dear Trudy,

Trudy’s Tess

Addendum. Still thinking of Angel. His principles. What they’re good for? (Like war: “Absolutely nothing!”) → Do they make sense of his feelings for Tess? Maybe they could, but only if they left Tess herself completely out of it: They can make no sense of her. Actually, they don’t even try to. The sad thing about Angel – at least at this point – is that he is only ever truly interested in Angel. He lives entirely within himself.

     Granted, it’s not good to live completely outside oneself as Alec does when he is Mr. Clare’s evangelist or as Tess tends to, giving all her thought (and all her thinking) over to Angel. Or over to her idealization of him. She doesn’t yet realize what a jackass he is. (And will she ever?)

     So . . . You keep giving me assignments. Here’s one for you: Is there a principle by which we can judge our principles so they don’t run away with our humanity?

Unnerved, Ted

 

 

 Dear Ted,

A principle to govern our principles? Sounds like metaphysical mayonnaise in a baloney sandwich. And, yes, I know that’s not the way you spell the meat, but it is the way you spell the bull-jabber. But don’t mind me: if there is anything I am not, it is a philosopher. But it sounds like, too, that you have met Angel, and he is you. I don’t know why you think so. He will never be able to live with Tess for more than a day or two. Poor ’Liza-Lu! Am I being too harsh? I suspect I am. If so, sorry.
     You have read the book to its bitter end, I take it. If you have not, don’t read on here until you have because I am going to tell you what happens, and I am going to tell you why it happens. And I am going to tell you who makes it happen. – The men in the story: Alec and Angel, and Thomas Hardy in particular. Which is not to say that there aren’t others, especially “Sir” John and Mr. Clare and Farmer Groby of Flintcomb-Ash, EVERY ONE of which is mean, not in the sense of cheap but in the sense of narrow, in the sense of lacking in imagination. And, yes, I include Hardy, who because he can’t think beyond Wessex, so he can’t get Angel and Tess farther north than Stonehenge, where she must be captured and hauled back to face man’s justice.  

     Besides, if they went on, Angel would have to continue living with her and loving her and suffering her love, which would end up scattering his principles like so much chaff in the wind. For the book to come to an end and he escape with his mangled sense of purity: Tess must die! And don’t say, “But ’Liza-Lu is left to carry on,” because she won’t carry on: she’ll become under his tutelage what he wanted Tess to be: pure, doggammit! as the driven snow. You can bet she hasn’t fooled around with any “cousin” smart-Alec! 
     Scribble on, you say, or screed on: I am blaspheming, misspelling, throwing around underlines and exclamation like pick-up sticks. But you see my point, don’t you? I’m not doing these things without a purpose. Hardy’s brain may be on the side of Paganism, but he hasn’t weaned his heart from the prudishest Paulinism: it (heart) remains mean and narrow and dry. The Apostle is passionate, but he doesn’t love flesh and blood, only the Spirit. It’s why, I think, he never writes about Jesus. It’s not that he doesn’t know him but that he doesn’t want to know him but only the crucified Christ, drained of all blood and lymph, wrapped in bandages and laid in a tomb to rise again from the bone-dry dead to float into the Ether.
     But what do I know? I’m only a girl. But one that loved flesh and blood, yours, you poor benighted fool.

Yes, Trudy

 11.29.20

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§ “Seize not only the spring, but everywhich winter.” – Gaudius
* This correspondence with Trudy Monae began with The Return of the Native, starting here. How I got, and how I still have, her copy of Tess I do not know.

from Nemet (and Zayna)

 from Nemet (and Zayna) 
more on Tess of the d’Urbervilles

To Ted (crabbiolio@gmail.com)
From Nemet (NemetN006@Kmail.nat) :

Thank you that you are writing about Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Trudy, but. It is not that you are wrong in what you write to the other, but Zayna and me think you miss the main point. It is that Tess is so beautiful even her young girl friends must see it is so.

The novels of Thomas Hardy are full of women of capturing beauty. There is Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, who has two men in love with her. There is Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, who has three men in love with her. And there are others maybe, but there is none so beautiful as Tess. No man cannot desire her, and no woman cannot understand why the man she want desire Tess first instead. In the book.

You cannot understand the book if you do not know this.

From Nemet (and Zayna)

11.27.20

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Background: Nemet’s previous email is here. Our Kristovia adventure – mine and Roz’s – begins here. We meet Nemet and Zayna, here; and we attend his photography exhibit, here.

Untitled No. 38

Untitled No. 38

Uncle Albert’s Game Boy – cellphone drawing by m ball
(He only plays Tetris.) 

Thanksgiving Day
11.26.20

Calvinist angels

  Calvinist angels
(Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, pt. 1)  

Correspondence with the dead resumes.*
               - non curat cauda insignem esse illam, / Dum pinguis siet. **

 Dear Trudy,

Did I say, “Let’s go on” – meaning to Tess? And did I mean it? Are you having as hard a time getting into it as I am?

Shit! Ted

 

Dear Ted,

No, I am not. Are you going to fink out on me? I sense you are, that you are going off to look for something . . . breezier, let’s say.

     With regard to love-and-marriage, who would know better than Jesus? So, no, we don’t marry; nor are we given in marriage. As for love – or lust, its kissing cousin – we can contemplate but not fall victim to it – to either. At least, so I am told. But nothing is ever quite as it sems, even where everything is True so there should be no seeming.

Or so it seems to me, Trudy

 

Some time later, apparently

Dear Ted,

Are you going to write back? Are you going to tell me where you are in Tess – or that you have abandoned her (as men are wont to do)?

     I am pressing on. Something between love and passion, or maybe the combined force of love and passion have conduced Tess to agree to marry Angel and – so far – not to tell him about her past, that she succumbed to the wicked blandishments of her “coz,” Alec Stoke-d’Urberville and bore his child.

     What do you think of that? She is asking against her better judgment, that is clear: what is also clear: she cannot do otherwise. What did we think of that when we read the novel those many years ago? Did we blame her for being dishonest? Did we blame her for sleeping with her cousin? (You came from a much more conservative background than I did. What would you have done if I’d told you I’d gotten pregnant at 16 when we were living in Lagos – before Dad got demoted to Bamako – and had had an abortion? You’d have been disgusted, I think. That’s not too strong a word. But then you would have forgiven me and even put it out of your mind. Maybe?) (It’s not a rhetorical question. Answer.)

     Here’s another question. One of the maids quotes the old saw, “All’s fair in love and war.” Is it? There are “rules of warfare,” are there not? There Is “just-war theory,” I think it’s called. There is a “Geneva Convention,” and there are other unwritten rules. So not everything is fair in war. There’s also the idea that “love is a game” – and games must have rules, even children’s games where one calls a rule and another explains why it doesn’t apply in this case.
     I don’t know. I don’t know either – I don’t remember – how the story goes on, how the book ends. But this is Hardy, I am thinking: any secret untold will be revealed, and the reader will be convinced that it would have been better told sooner than hidden. I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure I will be proved right.
     In any case, you will write back soon, won’t you? There are rules of correspondence, too. When I go to my mailbox, I find nothing but announcements, (gilt-edged (and guilt-edged) promulgations from the Powers on High.

So? Trudy

 

later still

Dear Trudy,

I want to write you today, but I’m not sure I can: There is too much to say about poor Tess, feckless Angel, and that ill wind that blows no one good (not even himself) Alec d’Urberville: If he never truly (completely) deceives himself (as Angel surely does – and Tess must, too), he may be the most unhappy of all. And is that maybe because he never truly, completely deceives himself? (Does happiness depend on self-deception? Are the happiest among us the least self-aware? Etc.)

     So, not only were you not a virgin when I knew and loved you, you had aborted a child. You had fooled around with some Nigerian boy, gotten in trouble and somehow gotten rid of it? Hypothetically! (So you’re saying.) What would I have thought?  – I don’t know. I did grow up in the sixties in the fifties, and my ethics (if I had such things) came to me from the Swiss and the Scots and were as much like Mr. Clare’s as anyone else’s in the novel, that is, brisk, narrow, foolishly certain and uncompromising. (And how much have I grown from then till now?) On the other hand, I may well have loved you more than God at the time though I’m not sure I could have admitted it.

     Angel can’t admit that he loves Tess more than his principles, especially those he’s inherited from his father and mother and hasn’t been able to modify – purity! Maybe he doesn’t (love her more). “What a jackass!” I say now. But what did I say then? I find these later pandemic days I become more what I was: more forgiving of myself but less of others.

     You see why I can’t write: I can’t get my thoughts, or my feelings, organized. And I don’t know that spending more time with them, pen hovering over the page, is going to help. Still, I am going to try to finish the book today though I still have most of the last two “phases” to go. Then, I’ll try to write more, whether I know more or not, or less.

Okay for now, Ted

 11.24.20

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  * This correspondence with Trudy Monae began with The Return of the Native, starting here.
** “The cook doesn’t care that [the bird] had a brilliant tail, only that it was fat.” – Lucilius
Graphic: “card catalog” - cellphone draing by m ball