_I Am Jane_ at the Covey Center for the Arts, July 22-23.

The Grand Theatre in Salt Lake recently finished their run of Margaret Blair Young’s I Am Jane, but I am very glad that the show is also going to the Covey Center for the Arts in Provo, UT, on July 22-23.  I am glad because I want to shout from the rooftops to everyone who will listen to me, “Hallelujah! Go see this show!” Really, this may be your last chance.  If you’re in driving distance of Provo on those nights, please, do yourself a favor and go see it.  You’ll be a better human being for it.

Now the production isn’t perfect, nor is the script, and I’ll detail why that is later.  But, in the end, my criticisms of the show don’t matter, because there are some productions that are simply important.  Despite any flaws such shows have, the marred parts are overshadowed and outshone by the glory.  And glory, as hyperbolic as that word can be, is the right word to use for this show.  Glorious.

I Am Jane tells the story of a group of African-American Latter-day Saints, most notably the title character Jane Manning James and, to some degree, Elijah Abel.  For those who haven’t brushed up on their Church History, Jane and Elijah, and those associated with them, were important because they were part of the very small group of early Mormon black pioneers.  Jane and her folk joined the Church in Nauvoo, and Elijah joined in 1832.  One of the peculiar things about Elijah Abel, and one of the things I have found that most Mormons simply don’t know, is that he was ordained to the priesthood by Joseph Smith, and became a seventy.  That’s interesting (as most of the readers of A Motley Vision should know, unless they’re completely new to Mormonism) because people of African descent could not receive the LDS priesthood through most of the Church’s history, until President Spencer W. Kimball received the revelation in 1978 that all worthy male members, no matter their racial descent, could receive the priesthood.

This is one of the most fascinating, if not uncomfortably tragic, issues the play brings up. In Nauvoo, under Joseph Smith,  African-Americans seemed not only to have had a better time in the Church, but seemed to have been welcomed with open arms, especially by Joseph Smith.  Jane was asked to be sealed to the Smith family by Emma and Joseph (a temple/priesthood ordinance which would later be denied to African Americans), and Elijah, as previously mentioned, would receive the priesthood office of a Seventy and was considered a good friend of the Prophet. The play also shows Joseph Smith’s views against slavery that can be read in his political platform for president.

But things change drastically after Joseph Smith’s martyrdom… under Brigham Young, temple and priesthood ordinances are denied to African-Americans, and racism runs rampant in Utah, including mob violence, excommunication and blatant racism against African-Americans who don’t accept their “place” and are not “satisfied” with the “blessings already given them.”

So the set up is quite a poignant, painful juxtaposition of what could have been. Under Joseph Smith, we see a tolerant, joyful acceptance of people of all races.  In Utah, things become dark regarding racial progress and we find policies changing and injustices served and we see the prejudices inherited from the American culture of the time seeping in among the Saints and even effecting the leadership of the Church.  I have heard some argue, including Church leaders, that Joseph Smith instituted the racial policy.  I have not found convincing evidence of that. Even Brigham Young had more tolerant views of racial integration within the Church at the beginning.  It doesn’t seem to be until Winters Quarters that the winds shift (for a good, general overview of these issues, I found this Wikipedia article surprisingly helpful, offering pieces of information I had not read or heard before).

Most people will find the information presented uncomfortable, even deeply disturbing, especially if they have not heard it before.   Especially if one takes the view of a Prophet’s infallibility (which I don’t, and neither did Joseph Smith), it will create dissonance.  However, if one believes that even good, powerful men such as Brigham Young and John Taylor can make mistakes and be influenced by the culture of their time, even in regards to Church policy (note that I use the word policy, not “doctrine.” I agree with David O. Mckay who said the priesthood ban was a policy, not a doctrine), then this play should be no obstacle to anyone’s faith (quite the opposite!), despite its tragic nature.  Especially as, throughout the play, we see the powerful faith, endurance, sacrifice and soulful beauty of the title character, Jane Manning James, and those associated with her.

So these have been some of the issues surrounding the story. Let’s dwell a moment on the actual production:

I have mixed feelings about much of the cast and their performances. I found most of the African-American cast very capably portrayed, while much of the Caucasian cast to have had some strange casting choices attached to them. This is the deep irony in Utah where, due to demographics, it should be much easier to cast a white role than a black one. More on the portrayals later.

It took me a moment to warm up to Tamu Smith, who played Jane.  Her performance seemed muted compared to the lively performances of fellow actress La Shanda Hill who plays the smaller role of Jane’s sister Angeline.  However, as the play progressed and I started understanding Jane’s character better, and picking up on the subtleties and nuances of Smith’s portrayal, I became more and more impressed and simply accepted her as Jane.  It would seem to me that Smith would be very well suited to film, where these nuances would be more accentuated.  As the play progressed, her portrayal rolled a deep seated pain, a shyness, an emotional depth.  These could have been projected even more, considering the needs of a large theater as opposed to a small black box or a film screen.  However, that’s a small concern considering what Smith was able to deliver in terms of soulfulness and tragic beauty.

Abe Willis was very capable as Elijah (which will be played by Danor Gerald at the Provo performances), portraying the role with verve, energy, pathos and humor. Keith Hamilton, who also acted as executive producer for the show, also had a strong performance as Jane’s husband Isaac.  However, I would have liked a little more variance in the levels of his character.  What he did, though, he did very well.  Other major supporting roles played by Jenny Rock, Brandon Day, Peggy Matheson and Emmet C. Gill  were all strong.  I was also surprised that many of the actors who impressed the most had some of the smallest roles… Rita Martin, Danor Gerald, La Shanda Hill and Lauren Livingston could have all powerfully carried much larger roles than they were given.

This, however, had as much to do with the script as anything.  Too many roles were brought on, only to be discarded without further development.  I do not mind large casts, despite the problems it causes to a production in filling so many roles with competent actors, especially if you’re paying your actors and what that does to a budget.  Heck, I’ve written a number of large casts myself, with varying degrees of success.  What I was concerned about was how many of those roles were subsequently thrown away in the script.  If you’re going to write a role, find out the reason you’re writing it, and if it’s not an important reason, then find a way to do without that character.

What would constantly happen in the play is that we’d see a character in one scene, and they would be set up with some importance, and then we would never see them again. Three examples I can immediately think of are the characters of Eliza Partridge Lyman, Samuel Smith and the mysteriously named “Orson” (which “Orson”? Orson Hyde? Orson Pratt? A fictional Orson?). This “Orson” appears in one scene, and could have been easily replaced by a character who we have already met. Her serves no real purpose in the play, except to tell Isaac that there are some finally black women in Nauvoo who he can court. And the inclusion of Samuel Smith mystifies me!  He’s there for one very short scene, to declare (somewhat anti-climatically) Joseph Smith’s martyrdom.  If it wasn’t for the program, a person wouldn’t even know it was Samuel Smith, because he isn’t even named in the dialogue. And the scene, which carries very important information, wasn’t developed. It’s sole existence seems to be to tell you that the Prophet is dead, without any of the needed emotion or gravitas that needs to accompany that information.

Eliza Partridge Lyman, on the other hand,  is initially set up as an important character when we meet her, as she is declared as one of Jane’s best friends and Jane gives her some food which prevents Eliza’s family from starving.  First, Eliza Lyman was miscast.  Being one of Joseph’s younger plural wives (not that the point is brought up in the play), she would have been much more youthful than portrayed in the play. However, more important than a small detail like that, Eliza is declared as Jane’s good friend, one of her best. Yet their dialogue together is stilted and uncomfortable, filled with exposition-laden details that the two supposed friends should have already known about each other.  And since she was set up as such an important friend, the audience is left to wonder, where was Eliza before this point in the play?  Where is Eliza when Jane is enduring her hardships later on? If she’s such a good friend where is she? If I had read the script before hand, I would have promptly told Young to either excise the character completely, or to build her up to be a more important character.  As it is, she serves as a minor plot point rather than a developed character, a vehicle to show Jane’s kindness rather than a vital part of the story’s overarching narrative.

These examples point to a deeper problem in the script… Young doesn’t necessarily know how to adapt this story into a theatrical format.  Young, chiefly a novelist (and a talented one at that), doesn’t seem to understand the needs of the stage. In a novel, or even a film, throwing in one scene characters who don’t serve a pointed use to the plot or major characterization can be all right, because you have much more room to play with.  But on stage, you only have a couple of hours to tell the story, and to go on wild goose chases, whether to fulfill minor historical details (and I sense was often the case here), or to provide convenient exposition, is problematic.  You at least have to double cast such characters (which no effort was made to do here), otherwise the amount of actors, costumes and investment placed into the play exponentially increases.  I’ve had to learn this lesson the hard way in some of my plays, a lesson I’ve had to learn especially hard when I’ve also been a producer or a director.

But, for the most part, these roles were ably filled, especially the African-American roles. However, as I said before, some of the casting of the Caucasian roles on a whole gave me pause, especially the roles of Joseph and Emma Smith, small but vital roles in this story. Now with the casting of Joseph and Emma, I couldn’t tell if my issues had to do with the acting, the directing, the writing or the combination thereof.

Benjamin King, who played Joseph Smith, is a very strong actor.  I’ve known him for many years and his performances rarely fail to impress me.  Ironically, I have even cast him as Joseph Smith myself, in my play Friends of God, and thought that he did a fantastic job with the Prophet in that show. But something about this version of King’s “Brother Joseph” seemed off to me. King had a good friendliness, energy and mode of expression.  But this portrayal of the Prophet, in the end, seemed very one dimensional.

Part of the problem had to do with the script, which surprised me, since I enjoyed Young’s presentation of the Prophet in her novel One More River to Cross.  In the novel (which pretty much covers the same ground the play does) Joseph Smith seemed more three dimensional, more rugged, more human and thus, ironically, more likable.  This Joseph seemed simplified, stiff, overly concerned about about fitting someone’s pre-conception, and thus not fitting anyone’s pre-conception.  The Prophet became a talking point, quoting historical passages rather than having real conversations, preaching sermons rather than interacting as a human being would.  Again, I can’t put my finger on where the root of this problem is in the production, but it was a indeed a problem, and became a disappointing distraction from some very important parts of the narrative.

However, Joseph in the end, was at least set up as a symbolic beacon showing the approach the Church should have taken with race. We end up siding with him, and loving what true semblance  there is of him. The portrayal of Emma Smith, on the other hand, seemed to accidentally undermine the good that this approach was trying to do.  Again, I couldn’t tell if this problem came from the script, the director’s instructions, or Valaura Arnold’s portrayal of Emma, but Emma came off as stiff and unlikable.

For example, there is a scene where Emma tells Jane that her and Joseph want to spiritually “adopt” Jane into their family, by sealing her to them.  This could have been a powerful moment, showing Joseph and Emma’s intense love for this beautiful saint.  However, with how it played out in the production, Emma seemed somewhat awkward and even condescending with the scenario, which created a different sort of racism, albeit a more benign one.  I felt no true spark in the relationship, rather Emma set herself up as a superior over Jane, who needed the Smiths’ guiding hand, instead of being perfectly suited to being sealed to her own family.  To understand the views of sealing people to the Prophet in those days is complex, and one has to understand that it happened to many people in early Church History, but no such context is given and instead it comes off as slightly offensive, if not well meaning.  It tasted too much like the Native American placement program in the Church several decades ago, for my comfort, or the similar program of Australian Aboriginal children being adopted into white families, as chronicled in stories like Rabbit Proof Fence. Now, knowing Margaret Young’s impeccable reputation for race relations in the Church, I know this was not her intent.  However, in future drafts and productions of the script, I would recommend something on some level be fixed to avoid that sense in that scene, because it does not support the message of the beautiful story being told.

I think the flaws that mar this otherwise beautiful script are a shame because of how easily they could have been avoided. It is evident that Young is a very good writer, and this script could have benefited from the tightening a trained playwright, dramaturg or a director accustomed to working with new scripts could have given.  These issues could have been addressed and easily fixed.

However, as I mentioned before, these are small concerns when compared to the mighty things done in I Am Jane. Despite the somewhat flat nature of the white folks’ dialogue, the more important African-American characters’ dialects and dialogue is authentic, natural, specific to type and culture and filled with genuine pathos and humor. It was more like hearing the wonderful dialogue of an August Wilson play, rather than the white, culturally Mormon woman that I know that Margaret Blair Young is.  The African-American characters are fully developed, powerful and dynamic, especially Jane. Young seems to “get” this culture, even perhaps more than her own, which I think is very interesting.  She has been working for a long time within the African-American, Mormon community and it really shows by her passionate advocacy for the community’s causes.  Supported by a talented design team (the costumes and set were awesome), a great, dedicated group of actors and a production staff that obviously love the story and have a mission, they’ve helped Margaret Blair Young bring off a story that, though flawed, simply burns away those flaws with the fire of the spiritual Pentecost that the play ignites.

As I said before, this play is important. Too many Mormons do not understand, nor even seem to want to understand, the issues addressed in this play.  As faith promoting and inspirational as this story is, it in the end it comes off to me as a tragedy.  Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, Sylvester James, the beautiful African-American-Mormon minority that surrounded them… these were real people.  And many injustices were heaped upon them.  And people like them still live today, facing the same issues that their forefathers did.

As a people who have historically suffered many injustices ourselves, Mormons should be more sensitive and knowledgeable about these issues.  We should know these stories.  We should not be afraid of analyzing our own souls, and trying to root out the remaining vestiges of racism and discrimination that remain there.  We’ve gone a long way as a Church and as a people.  But subtle intolerance and a lack of true charity are still shadows we need to address.  I’m surprised about the racist attitudes I still encounter among some otherwise good people in the Church.  Many Mormons still have not put away the cultural mythology concerning African-Americans, whether it is the “curse of Cain” or the “less valiant in the pre-existence” excuses.  I think at one point we need to come to grips that we are just as guilty, and just as influenced by the racist inheritance that many others in the world received.  We’re better than we were, but we’re not done yet.  Yet productions like I Am Jane go a long ways in helping us bring that mirror to our souls and force us to have a long, honest look at what we see there.

Tickets for I Am Jane can be purchased through The Covey Center for the Arts.

Sensitivity Rating: I Am Jane frankly addresses many offensive attitudes and actions concerning race, including the use of the “n” word.  Although culturally important to the story, parents should be prepared to have long, honest discussions with their children about what their children see and hear in the story. There is also brief references to rape, polygamy and violence in the play, although in tasteful ways not shown on stage.

Then earlier this year I ran across (and mentioned in a links roundup post) this brief Richard Brody review of the film for The New Yorker. Here was an urban(e) critic who made me rethink my earlier impressions — enough so that last week my wife and I watched Gentlemen Broncos. Brody writes, “…. it’s a work of visionary inspiration that, like many outrageous Hollywood comedies of the classic era (such as those of Frank Tashlin), tackles remarkably serious matters.”

It turns out that he’s right. What I’m less sure about is where he tries to give a Mormon gloss on the film: “In his jejune yet highly moral inspiration, Benjamin is the prophet of a pop-infused Gospel, an updated Book of Mormon, that speaks to a new generation of young people whose coarsened sensibility is paradoxically attuned to Biblical explicitness and ferocity.”

I don’t think that that’s exactly what this film is about, but it’s a nice try, and perhaps there’s something to the coarsened sensibility thing. I hope to give a full accounting over at LDS Cinema Online, but for this revisit let me throw this out there: with Gentlemen Broncos, the Hesses package issues of authenticity, fandom, selling out, provincialism and dreams of stardom in a way that both celebrates and makes fun of and keenly dissects the myths of Hollywood and Big Publishing. In order to appreciate this movie you have to a) really feel the sweetness — not just see that it is there — and b) focus in on the relationship between the protagonist Benjamin and his mom. If Napoleon Dynamite was an awesome takedown of hipsterism and faux-quirkiness in indie/mainstream indie film (and I think it was); Gentlemen Broncos is a masterful takedown of both the haughtiness of artists who have no ideas left and make worshipers of their fans and the pretensions and faux-celebrations of fan fiction. And it actually succeeds. There’s more there than the critics are seeing because they refuse to buy in to the possibility of the sweetness and authenticity and affection in the Hesses writing/filmmaking. They don’t understand that we are meant to love Saltair even though we also laugh at it, and that it’s precisely that double feeling (instead of complete disdain) that gives lie to the way Hollywood usually treats religion, small town America, family relationships and the American dream.

Anyone else actually seen this film?

What is great about this essay (which is titled simply “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov”) is that Smith is very insistent on wanting to be a reader and an author. Moreover she doesn’t dismiss the appeal of Barthes’ postmodern theories on authorial intention while at the same time she keenly illustrates why she can’t read Nabokov in the way that Barthes seems to want her to. But I’m not here to summarize the entire essay — you should read it for yourself (and the other essays as well, particularly the ones on Middlemarch and Kafka and Their Eyes Were Watching God). What I want to highlight is her summary of Nabokov’s theory of the two stages of “Inspiration”:

Nabokov split this old-fashioned word into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is vorstog (initial rapture). Vorstog describe that moment in which the book as a whole is conceived:

A combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner — who is already dancing in the open.

Here the author dies, momentarily; here meaning is indeterminate and free flowing. Vorstog “has no conscious purpose in view”; in vorstog “the entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to exist.” But after this comes the second stage: vdoknovenie (recapture). And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the two had quite different natures. Vorstog was “hot and brief.” Vdoknovenie “cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly, would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the possibility of the reader’s play. (49, italics original)

What I like about this description is this idea of a two-stage inspiration. That’s a word that gets tossed around quite a bit in Mormon culture. Nabokov suggests that for the author, there needs to be the hot and brief rapture, the striking of lightning, the crumbling of barriers, but that is not all there is to it. Then is the “cool and sustained” work of recapturing that feeling and moment. But both need to be their. Art can neither be some hot mess nor some cool construct. The two elements of inspiration should work together. And when crafted, the resulting work should be something that the reader respects. Not that there is no play, no reader response, no multiple interpretations — but that there are set boundaries within which one plays.

Now, the utility of this next part is marginal at best, but: this notion puts me in mind of how revelation works, both personal and prophetic and especially that which can be found in scripture. I think this pattern — of the breaking down of ego (and the work that goes in to that), the flash of insight, and then the (re)construction of how that best applies and can best be conveyed, and then the turning loose of the result to the people for their consumption and reaction — is intentional on God’s part. He wants us to experience insights in to his will and then to turn them in to something useful, something beautiful, something that inspires and instructs others. That doesn’t mean that anything we create is necessarily sanctioned by him. Nor does it mean that everything a prophet says or writes is aesthetically amazing (so much can happen in the construction). Nor does it mean that this process can’t be described solely in secular terms (and validly so). I’m just saying that perhaps this process, if one does buy in to a Father in Heaven, esp. the Mormon one, and the human capacity for it is a big part of the point of this mortal life. The idea given form and shape — given walls — and then turned loose in the world and coming to know and play within those walls.

For the launch, I’ve decided to highlight Eugene England’s response to Orson Scott Card’s novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus ( Amazon ) because it captures well, I think, a specific, fascinating moment in both of these great men of Mormon letters’ careers.

Title: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Orson Scott Card

Author: Eugene England

Publication Info: Mormon Literature Database; text of a paper presented at Life, the Universe, & Everything XV: An Annual Symposium on the Impact of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Provo, Utah, February 28, 1997

Submitted by: Wm Morris

Why?: Wm says, “What fascinates me about this paper is that it represents an attempt by England to convince himself that OSC is back in his corner (so-to-speak). It is as much about the socio-cultural politics of Mormonism as it is about the novel Pastwatch.”

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Across the Ironic Distance: Negotiating the Narrative Gaps

Each of the ten stories in Where Nothing Is Long Ago deals with the protagonist’s (Budge’s) efforts to negotiate her way into this awareness and through or into some aspect of life in a tight-knit, largely orthodox Mormon community and with the narrator’s attempts to bring order to her younger self’s experience and to mediate between this experience, her continuing participation in/observation of this community, and the reader’s world. The title story—the sequence’s opening narrative—centers on a fictionalized murder over water rights as committed by Brother Tolsen, one of the early twentieth century Danish Mormon village’s most respectable and orthodox men. The story opens with the narrator quoting from something her “mother wrote [her] recently”: “You’ll probably remember Brother Tolsen and that awful thing that happened when you were a little girl.” Then the narrator offers this exposition, “Her fat script traveled the whole way around the photograph and obituary she had clipped from our Mormon newspaper,” and another statement from her mother: “The killing wasn’t even mentioned at his funeral. All the speakers just said what a good man he always was” (3) This interaction between the narrator, her community (through her mother’s “script,” which is “fat” with implications), and her past frames not just the story, prompting wonder over who Brother Tolsen is and what awful thing he may have been involved in, but the entire sequence of stories, episodes that ripple outward from this fundamental interface (between narrator, community, and memory) and that embody the semiotic systems of this community, especially its maintenance and perpetuation through the acts of remembering, including story-telling and ritual.

From here the narrator slips into reminiscence, recalling where she was “the morning the Tolsen trouble happened” and her “absolute[. . .] certain[ty] for years” (3) after the event that, in her words, the “two piles of bloody rabbit ears I saw on the courthouse lawn at the time of Brother Tolsen’s trial had something to do with the killing he was being tried for.” “They hadn’t,” she continues, slipping, it seems, into the protagonist’s voice as she tries to convince herself that these “tokens” of the currents of passion and violence flowing beneath humanity’s communal experience were “merely” symbols that “the annual county rabbit hunt had gone off according to schedule” (4). However, her repeated reference to these signs (they come up twice in the story) and the detail with which she lingers on their presence (the second time she mentions them, they are “being counted” “on the courthouse lawn” [13], the center of community justice and activity) suggests that the community’s efforts to rewrite the tale into a more favorable telling have failed.

But that the narrator sees the triumph of voice over silence as a means to community healing is apparent in the story’s final scene: “One other memory [of this experience] remains,” the narrator says. “I recall an evening months after the trial was over, when my parents and I were driving along the road where [Brother Tolsen’s] fields lay and saw [him] working with the little streams [of irrigated water] that were running among his young corn. Dad and Mother waved and called to him,” gesturing their inherent connection to and compassion for the man. “He lifted an arm to answer and I saw that he held a shovel in the other hand. ‘I wonder if he bought a new shovel,’ I said suddenly,” referring to the fact that he had killed the water-thief, another member of this community, with a shovel to the head. Then she offers this: “For a minute, the air seemed to have gone dead about us, in the peculiar way it sometimes can, which is so puzzling to a child. Then Mother,” the representative voice of decorum, “turned to me angrily. ‘Don’t you ever let me hear you say a thing like that again!’ she said. ‘Brother Tolsen is a good, kind man!’” And the narrator rounds the story out with this: “So until this very hour I never have” (14). This short statement, coming as it does from an experienced narrator looking back on the means through which she has gained that experience, implies that the act of remembering is ultimately incomplete without moments of critical reflection—times when we question our community’s weaknesses, the language we use to interrogate and to expose those weaknesses, and the motives underlying those interrogative and expository attempts.

She continues this participant/observer critique through the remaining nine stories of Where Nothing Is Long Ago as she negotiates the ironic distance between her younger and older selves, between narrative past and narrative present, and between her narrative of community and the modern world. In “The Darling Lady” she considers her community’s ostracism of a one-time polygamous wife, a woman “left alone after the [Mormon church’s] 1890 Manifesto ostensibly banned such marriages” (Howe xii), relegating second- and third-wives to community borderlands. Here, the Darling Lady—so-named by Budge and her sister, Helen, because, with her “deliberately oversweet” voice (16), “[s]he called [them] ‘darlings’ in almost every sentence she spoke to [them]” (17)—lives by herself in the backroom of the corner store, though the “small shed perched at the corner of [the] block” (16) can hardly be called either a store or a home. When called upon, the lone woman emerges “through a dark-curtain hanging over a door behind the counter” (17) to ceremoniously trade her wares with customers. “[H]er mysterious existence there troubled us, sometimes,” the narrator comments, “and we asked each other, ‘Where are her folks?” (18), suggesting that they sensed her imposed solitude at the corner of town could be remedied if someone—“her folks,” her people by tradition and ritual—would invite her into this Mormon community’s still vibrant way of life. And the story ends with this subtly reproachful realization—reproachful for both the narrator and for her community—as Budge and Helen pretend to invite the Darling Lady into their room where they watch her “rocking and sipping [hot milk] and getting her feet dry, with her slippers by the stove” (28), an act of compassion and community that can never happen here because the Darling Lady has disappeared, almost unnoticed.

In “The White Horse,” Sorensen’s narrator takes a different tact, negotiating the hard realities of World War I by engaging the tenuous relationship she once had with the white stallion of a soldier who never came home. This “wonderful creature,” “wild as he could be,” “seemed to be forever fighting a war of his own” (29) even as the war raged on the other side of the world, she relates, a negotiation she tried to assuage by “stamp[ing]” the horse for luck: “You wet the forefinger of your right hand on the tip of your tongue and set the spot of wet on your left palm for a second. Then, quickly, you stamp the place [on your hand] with your right fist. It’s rather like wishing on a first star,” she observes, and is meant here to convey the connection between an individual and the interdependent network of persons (human and non-human) of which she is an integral part. To deny this connection, the narrator implies by focusing on the absence created in the community and in the horse’s existence by a soldier’s death (the horse becomes increasingly angry due to a lack of interpersonal bonds and must be sold), is to sow the seeds of violence in increasingly destructive relationships with one another and with the non-human world.

“The Apostate” engages this failure to connect in human terms by exploring the relationship between Budge, her maternal grandmother, and their religion, an imposing and sometimes dogmatic patriarchal system from which Grandmother considers herself apostate and with which Budge must learn to reckon as she matures into increasingly critical reflections on the world. This maturation process is furthered here with her negotiation of her grandmother’s falling away from Mormonism—something that shakes Budge’s naïve and impressionable soul because she sees it as deeply self-contradictory for a deeply spiritual woman to deny her religion—and her grandmother’s death.

“First Love” returns to the ecology of human/non-human interactions stirred up in “The White Horse,” though this narrative deepens the engagement by focusing on Budge’s increasing stewardships at home and in the community. After she gets a cat she calls “Jiggs” (75)—a name representative of the cat’s growing discontent and the dance Budge must learn in her negotiation of community ties and an explicit relationship with the non-human world—she must learn to balance her new responsibilities as pet-owner, sister, daughter, student, and member of community that expects her active engagement in community rituals. Yet, when she’s asked to perform in a community pageant, her balance tips to one side and Jiggs falls victim to the relational failure: he runs away and, as the story ends, we learn of his unfortunate death.

The remaining five stories of the sequence—“The Ghost,” “The Other Lady,” “The Face,” “The Vision of Uncle Lars,” and “The Secret Summer”—continue the engagement deepened in “First Love” as Budge learns to negotiate a place for herself as a participant/observer in her community and in the modern world at large. In “The Ghost” she confronts her community’s racism, exploring the allure of the Other as she longs to bridge the gap between her experience and, first, the life of a black waiter she encounters on a train ride from Manti to Salt Lake, then in the experience of “a black family from Tennessee, directed to Manti by one of the town’s missionaries” (Howe xii). Because this family’s father’s voice brings such resonance to the Mormon choir, Budge senses that their presence could resonate deeply with the come one, come all underpinnings of her faith; but this desire is frustrated when the family leaves town, though not without opening space in Budge—and by extension, the story’s narrator—for the expansive otherness of the world.

“The Other Lady” and “The Face” explore the painful and far-reaching effects of breaching social contracts, the first as Budge’s family learns of “the other lady” in their paternal grandfather’s life, the one he divorces his wife for and marries just before he dies, and the second as Budge deals with the violence of a voyeur who peaks in the bathroom window as she steps out of the bath. Yet, there is even the possibility of redemption here as, in “The Other Lady,” Budge’s mother moves to comfort Grandfather’s new wife, to “s[i]t down and cr[y]” with her after his funeral as the family boards the train that will carry them home (142).

“The Vision of Uncle Lars” takes up the supernatural connections between community members and their origins as the narrator relates, in her Great-Aunt Anegrethe’s words, the “strange story” of how she and Uncle Lars met (161): While in Denmark, as he was approaching a family cottage, he saw a vision of her walking down the front steps. Later, when Lars and Anegrethe met for the first time, Lars understood this vision as a preternatural token of a relationship to come.

To round off the sequence, Sorensen offers “The Secret Summer,” a narrative in which Budge comes of age, negotiating the difficulties of pre-adolescent longing in games played across the neighborhood on summer nights, in secret notes passed between best friends, through participation in a community pageant, in bickering between girls who are chasing the same boy and then between girls and the boy once the boy gives up the chase, and in the longing stirred by her first kiss. Here Sorensen revisits many of the themes carried throughout the book, most significantly by focusing on the semiotic layers of this community and in showing how Budge—and the narrator of the sequence—settles into this system, centering the world within and without this narrative of community through a restorative commitment to community, a redemptive movement reflected in the book’s final words: Having spent the night performing in the town’s pioneer story-focused pageant (a nod to the depth of the town’s collective past) and then playing with her friends in the pageant’s carnival, in the narrator’s words, Kirk, her first crush,

lean[s] toward me and I [feel] the brush of his lips on my cheek. Dozens of times I had been kissed at parties, nobody thought anything about it; everybody watched and laughed and counted the forfeits. Yet this [i]s the first time in my life [I’ve been kissed with feeling] and the moon seem[s] to swell in the sky. (212)

Amidst her family’s smiles, she enters the house and makes her way to her room where, looking out the window, she notices that “even the Lady in the Moon [is] smil[ing at her] through the screen,” “center[ed]” in the “magic cross” of her window’s lattice (213), holding this narrative of community together with her vision of collective life and the restorative gravity of human connection and continuity as manifest through Sorensen’s critical engagement of memory.

* * * * *

Works Cited

Harde, Roxanne. Acknowledgments. Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story Sequences. Ed. Harde. New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. vii-ix. Print.

Howe, Susan Elizabeth. Foreword. Where Nothing is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. By Virginia Sorensen. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1999. v-xiv. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 106-19. Print.

———. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” The Critical Tradition. 3rd ed. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1002-14. Print.

Sorensen, Virginia. Where Nothing is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1999. Print.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre.” Signs 13.3 (1988): 498-527. Print.

Instead of engaging one of the texts we read in class for my paper, I decided to apply myself toward a reading of Virginia Sorensen’s Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, which, as my introduction details, has variously been read as a collection of short stories (though not a short story sequence/cycle, which, among other things, presupposes a greater degree of connection between the cycle’s narratives) and as a collection of personal essays. Rather, I make a case here for the book as what Sandra A. Zagarell calls a narrative of community (sorry for the lack of accessibility to Zagarell’s article; this front-page view is the best I can do with what the web gives me).

So in short, I’m using this venue as a trial run for my critical (re)exploration of Sorensen’s text.

* * * * *

The (Re)Identification of (Collective) Memory: Virginia Sorensen’s Where Nothing Is Long Ago and/as the Narrative of Community

* * * * *

“A Dream Dreamed Out of Memory”

Virginia Sorensen’s 1963 collection of short stories, Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, has been variously categorized as a compilation of personal essays and as a memoir. Eugene England claims the former when he observes that “the myriad judgments of people, acts, choices, etc., which establish a recognizable shape of belief [and community] in Where Nothing Is Long Ago have to do directly with real people, including Sorensen herself.” Sorensen’s “real” presence—the presence of her “realness,” her lived reality—oversees the narratives of the book, England claims, because she inserts herself here as the implied author, as the voice of authority and experience through which each textual movement must be mediated and understood. Thus standing between narrative and flesh and blood reality, England continues, “she [. . .] reveal[s] her present self through the fiction of revealing her past self,” a rhetorical act through which “she also [. . .] creat[es] herself anew before our eyes and hearts” by enacting “the power of the recreated truth of real experience in the past.” In this light, the only fictions at work here are the acts of memory Sorensen claims for herself—and these “recreated truth[s],” as England implies, fall within the acceptable limits of memory and the faults thereof (qtd. in Howe x).

For England, then, the personal essay trumps the short story as a label for the narratives in Where Nothing Is Long Ago because “our ethical response” to the tales is likely to be different “if we believe that at least a major part of the [retold] experience was really real—that it indeed happened in real time and space to people like us” (qtd. in Howe x). In short, we’re more likely to trust Sorensen and to be persuaded of the narrative authenticity of her “memories” if the material she offers is presented in terms we can recognize and acknowledge as true to her childhood experiences. Giving the text the generic designation “collection of personal essays” thus saves us from feeling deceived by Sorensen. If she says these stories are “memories from a Mormon childhood” and if we know they’re offered as personal essays, they must be what they claim to be—memories gathered from actual, lived experience in the real world. Any deviations from reality in these recreated truths must therefore be due to the natural inconsistencies of memory, not to the author’s deliberate attempts to distort and exaggerate her past.

Yet, Sorensen was annoyed with her designation as a personal essayist because, above all, she “considered herself [. . .] a fiction writer” and felt the claim that she was a personal essayist “wrenched her work out of its authentic genre” (Howe xi), disrupting the power of intention and (re)created identity flowing through her fictionalized experiences. As she confessed in a 1980 interview, “All my life I was escaping into poetry and stories and liked to embroider everything even if I told something.” Also: “I am busy with fiction all the time. Nobody must every use my books historically” (qtd. in Howe xi). This confession that she enjoyed embroidering experience and that her narratives should not be read as exactly historical suggests a reexamination of Where Nothing Is Long Ago’s categorization as a collection of personal essays and as a memoir. For while the collection does toy with the notions of autobiography and memory typically associated with the personal essay and the memoir, Sorensen readily admits in the book’s dedication that “so much [of her fictional world] is ‘made up’ it is scarcely memory at all, but a dream dreamed out of memory”—a rich collection of fictions embroidered from the dynamic and interactive threads of the unconscious and the conscious minds.

I submit that this layering of dream upon memory, of memory upon dream, of perception upon an individual’s recollection of and experience with the past and with the world and community of her past, binds Sorensen’s stories together in an episodic sequence of fictions such as Sandra A. Zagarell calls the “narrative of community,” a tradition of texts that “take as their subject the life of a community (life in ‘its everyday aspects’) and [that] portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity” (499). Assuming Sorensen’s text as not just a collection of stories, but as a cycle of stories framed by and arising from the author’s personal community experience allows for a fruitful exploration of the text’s recursive movement in and out of time as the narrator attempts to understand and to come to terms with the community of her childhood. Through this movement and in the ironic distance she maintains between the field of childhood selves and the Mormon community she discovers/(re)creates in her stories and the meaning she finds in those stories, the narrator constructs an “ethically complex and sympathetic” identity (Howe xii) through which she mediates the reader’s experience with the text, inviting us into her community of narratives as she negotiates the gaps, connections, and mythos of memory. And all this to the end of presenting and preserving “the patterns, customs, and activities” through which the community of her childhood is “maintained and perpetuated” and of “nurturing a commitment to community in [her] readers” (Zagarell 500).

Negotiating Minute and Ordinary Processes: The Narrative of Community as Phenomenological Event

In her discussion of women writers’ use of the episodic narrative sequence to represent the feminine experience, Sandra A. Zagarell sets down a theory of a woman’s genre—“a matrix of interpretation,” as Roxanne Harde calls Zagarell’s work (viii)—that focuses on the ethos and subject matter of a text, that privileges community values over the autonomous individual, and that is more concerned with process over the conflict or progress intuited by linear narratives. Zagarell’s coinage, “narrative of community,” aptly describes the ways in which women, as Sarah Orne Jewett and her The Country of Pointed Firs, have “take[n] as their subject the life of a community” and set out to capture the “minute and quite ordinary processes” of community maintenance. These are no grand narratives in which an epic hero—autonomous, alone—leaves his community in search of something greater and returns transformed. Rather, such story structures focus on the self as one part of an “interdependent network” of selves (as each story is part of a network of episodes) and take as their program a response to—even, at times, a critique of—“the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes” brought on “by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism” (499). As such, narratives of community are “built primarily around the continuous small-scale negotiations and daily procedures through which communities sustain themselves” in the face of potential dissolution and rapid social change.

As Zagarell has it, “narratives of community represent [and mediate] th[is] contrast between community life and the modern world directly through participant/observer narrators” who “typically seek to diminish this distance in the process of giving voice to it” (503). Such voiced negotiations of “the patterns, customs, and activities” through which each community is “maintained and perpetuated” (500) are thus meant to raise awareness of the potential of and for communal life as an emancipatory alternative to the fragmented nature of modern societies. Through this increased awareness—facilitated by the presentation and examination of the everyday details of community life, which details are “integral parts of semiotic systems of the community” (503)—readers can gain access to the community’s means to meaning and enter the mythos and enjoy the connections of a shared communal past.

Wolfgang Iser posits a possible theory for this kind of reading event in “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” when he observes that, “[a]s a starting point for phenomenological analysis[,] we might examine the way in which sequent sentences [and by extension, larger textual bodies, as paragraphs or stories] act upon one another” (1003)—that is, the cumulative effect they generate or produce in terms of 1) the unfolding narrative itself and 2) the interaction between the text and the reader. As a means of theorizing the intersection of these relationships, Iser suggests two principles by which the “virtual dimension” of a text—the semantic space in which perception marries language and creates meaning—“may be brought into being”: anticipation and retrospection—or in terms of this essay, the acts of critique and memory. He explores the affect these principles produce in readers by turning to Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, who, Iser comments, “has […] drawn attention to” the regenerative yet halting relationship between the two, “ascrib[ing] a quite remarkable significance to it” in the process (1005). Ingarden writes:

Once we [as readers] are immersed in the flow of Satzdenken (sentence-thought), we are ready, after completing the thought of one sentence, to think out the “continuation,” also in the form of a sentence—and that is, in the form of a sentence that connects up with the sentence we have just thought through. In this way the process of reading goes effortlessly forward. But if by chance the following sentence has no tangible connection whatever with the sentence we have just thought through, there then comes a blockage in the stream of thought. This hiatus is linked with a more or less active surprise, or with indignation. This blockage must be overcome if the reading is to flow once more. (Qtd. in Iser “The Reading Process” 1005)

Iser comments that, from Ingarden’s perspective, this “hiatus that blocks the flow of sentences is […] the product of chance, and is to be regarded as a flaw.” This is so because if a “sentence sequence”—and by extension the movement between paragraphs or narrative scenes—is supposed to be “a continual flow,” the hiatus halts the textual (inter)action by refusing to gratify “the anticipation aroused by one sentence” and that a reader expects “will […] be realized by the next.” Textual gaps thus “arouse feelings of exasperation” in readers that may disintegrate (to a degree) any relationships that have developed through the reader’s engagement with the text (1005).

Iser postulates a more productive view of the textual hiatus, however, when he suggests that this “frustration of [readerly] expectations”—as can happen when a text is between genres, as Where Nothing Is Long Ago, and when a text contains an episodic narrative structure, as narratives of community—these interruptions of the narrative flow, can lead us “in unexpected directions,” giving us the “opportunity […] to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself” (1005). In this view, the disruptions between sentence- and narrative-level relationships encourage readers “to make [their] own decision[s] as to how the gap is to be filled” (1005). By so minding the gaps that occur “in each articulated reading moment,” during which “only segments of textual perspectives are present in the reader’s wandering viewpoint” (“Interaction” 112-3), readers are “ma[d]e […] aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links” between phenomenological events (as ideas, experiences, perceptions, bodies, texts, etc.) (“The Reading Process” 1005-6). In this light, the virtual dimension of the text becomes a dynamic hypertextual space defined by the perceptions and experiences we bring to our reading—and the expansive “‘spectrum’ of connections” made possible through those constantly evolving perceptions (1005)—and in which our humanity is affirmed in the quest to engage in “infinitely richer” readings of the text at hand (1006).

Pres. Uchtdorf said:

True love requires action. We can speak of love all day long—we can write notes or poems that proclaim it, sing songs that praise it, and preach sermons that encourage it—but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

Now that would seem, at first glance, to cast aside the whole notion of expressing love through words. Love without action is dead. Which is why it caught my attention. But notice the verbs used: proclaim, praise, preach. All good methods of discourse, but all intended to drive a didactic response — to provoke action or, in the case of the receiver of the proclamations, reaction.

That’s not how narrative art works. Not exactly. And the more I thought about this talk, the more I wondered why love was important. I feel it is. I know it’s important in my life, that life would be dismal without it, but why?

I’m going to get back to love, but I want to introduce another concept first: progression. Progression is a crucial concept to the Mormon worldview, but it’s also the key point of narrative art. Now that manifests itself in a variety of ways and some works are all about frustrating progression, but even those works don’t exist as literature without the expectation of progression. Or to put it more bluntly: plot is impossible without progression. And narrative art has to have some kind of plot, from the most stereotypical once-again enactment of the hero’s journey to the densest, most absurd fugue of post-modern attempts at stasis, there is always  movement.

Narrative art, especially the best, most durable works of narrative art, helps us understand progression and, more importantly, the barriers to progression. Tragedy does so by exposing the flaws in character and/or the overwhelming forces of nature or society or fate that derail progression. Romance does so by spiraling around the pleasures and frustration of courtship and connection (mainly with others, but also, at times, with nature and with community and with God or ideas). Comedy does so by bursting the barriers and pretenses — personal, social, political, cultural, familial — that we surround ourselves with that too often hinder true progression, that keep us from humility, that bury knowledge and familiarity that we need to have with the other (and other aspects of ourselves that we’ve closed off).

And all of that helps us to love because love is not just some big feeling of warmth, it is a deep investment (and here’s where we get back to the point of Pres. Uchtdorf’s talk) in the progression of others — a deep appreciation of their capacity to progress; an abiding hope that they will progress; a herculean effort to help them progress (but without abridging agency, which is not effective); a mourning with the pain that comes with progression. Love is a bond, but the bonds are created by the experiences that come with progression. If we did not have the capacity to progress, no matter how small and pathetic that progression may be, I don’t think we could love — love is not stasis.

And the beautiful and amazing thing about this mortal condition is that it is clearly set up for conditions of love and progression. The beginning that is birth; the end point that is death. The quick growth and then slow decay of bodies and minds. The passage of time and of the seasons. All these engender a sense of progression (with the added spur of progression in this life not being eternal). Coupling (and all that entails physically and emotionally) and birth and the requirements to survive and grow — the creation of family units and the building of those units in to tribes, communities, societies — all create the conditions of closeness and dependency that lead to love and a deeply felt interest in the progression of others. Yes, there’s also the possibilities for sorrow and pain and, sadly, violence and damnation (or in other words the halting of progression), but it’s supposed to be mainly about love and the rest is so that we don’t all compound in one. There must be struggle.

And this is why the need for narrative art that can truly capture the journey of love and progression is so great — it allows us to step outside our own experience of the conditions of mortality and, if the work of art is good, find windows in to the experience of others. Perhaps we may learn by looking on the vistas revealed. Perhaps we may be entertained. But above all it should cause us to love more and by loving more do more and  have a deeper wisdom on how to go about that doing. To love, truly.

To quote Pres. Uchtdorf again: “Love is what inspired our Heavenly Father to create our spirits; it is what led our Savior to the Garden of Gethsemane to make Himself a ransom for our sins. Love is the grand motive of the plan of salvation; it is the source of happiness, the ever-renewing spring of healing, the precious fountain of hope.”

If love is the grand motive. If love is the source. If love is an ever-renewing spring. Then must we, we who dare to capture this existence in word, love?

• “Telling It Slant: Aiming for Truth in Contemporary Mormon Literature” by William Mulder (6.1.1993) — one of the true classics of Mormon criticism
• “Toward a ‘Marriage Group’ of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories” by B.W. Jorgensen (12.1.2004) — a great, exhaustive round up of Mormon short stories about marriage encapsulated in an excellent framework.
• “Faithful Fiction: ‘Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories’” by Eugene England (12.1.1985) — in this review of one of the seminal Mormon short story anthologies England teases out the whole notion of faithful fiction.
• “Sensational Virtue: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Fiction and American Popular Taste” by Karen Lynn (9.1.1981) — an pre-Viper on the Hearth look at Mormons in American popular fiction with an emphasis on portrayals of Mormon women and polygamy.

This is just a small sampling of the riches available. I’m particularly looking forward to reading some of the original reviews of works that are now considered part of the Mormon canon (such as it is).

One more thought: what do you think of adding work like what I’ve linked to above to AMV’s Friday Feature rotation?

*Of course, now articles and full editions are dumped in to PDF files, but hey, at least the PDFs are searchable (and the search engine is much faster and more intuitive than what was found in the UofU archive solution), and really it’s the best we could hope for considering the limitations involved.

“It is important for a writer to be cognizant of the marginilization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and more visceral narrative forms. You can work in these forms or use them or write about them or through them, but I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum. Culture, like science, moves forward. Art evolves.”

I’m not saying Shields is right* or wrong (nor am, I, contrary to one of the hyperventilated claims by a blurb or review of the book — can’t remember which — either loving or hating the book. It’s got some good points and some effective goading; it’s got some ineffective goading and some silly preoccupations). And to be fair to Shields — there’s also a lot of context (618 different sections) that’s missing if all you see is #78, and the work itself is a pastiche that includes (unattributed except for in the notes section at the end of the book) aphorisms and quips and earnest predictions, etc. from many other writers, so this is an act of cherrypicking.

All that said: does art evolve? Or does it progress? Or does it restore? Or does it preserve? Or does it increase? Or does it roll forth? (to use a series of verbs that have some resonance in Mormon thought).

*I originally had “write” when this was posted. I may trot out the silly postmodern puns from time to time, but “write or wrong” wasn’t intentional at all.

After finishing part 3 with a reading of Timothy Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”—a reading based in and flowing from a nodal model of Mormon culture—I fully intended to move into an extended exploration of Waterman’s suggestions for Mormon criticism: 1) read with an eye toward the plurality of modern identity, focusing particularly on the tensions this multiplicity creates within the text and between the text and the culture it springs from (which opens the way to engage Terryl Givens’ critical taxonomy from People of Paradox) and 2), “[i]nformed by cultural studies/new literary historicism methodologies, [...] place [...] [Mormon literature] in conversation with a number of other contemporary texts to examine ways [...] [this literature] help[s] explain Mormon—and [...] [any other aspect of cultural identity]—experience at a certain historical moment.”

But my intentions have changed, partially because of several Twitter-sations I’ve been involved in lately with MoJo (@MoriahJovan), Theric (@thmazing), and William (@motleyvision) about Mormon lit. In fact, Saturday I came to this realization (in a series of Tweets): after wondering how the Mormon literary community has “been having the same critical conversation for 30 years,” I pursued the thought that part of this may stem from the relative invisibility of the community’s non-prescriptive critical cache—that is, the offline venues through which Mormon literary criticism has developed/been presented and published. Dialogue, Irreantum, and Sunstone contain some of this work, but I sense I’m missing something because I don’t have access to the thirty years worth of proceedings from the AML annual meeting.

As a corollary to this epiphany, I realized that, for some reason, much of the online conversation about Mormon lit centers on drawing boundaries for the enterprise rather than on discussing specific works in a critical way. And, more importantly, that I need to spend more time exploring specific works of Mormon lit. So with this in mind, I’m springboarding into that renewed commitment today by (re)posting a short reading I offered on my own blog of Emma Lou Thayne’s poem, “The Rose Jar,” a text ripe with the tensions of memory and community and that I’ve read against another text of similar ripeness.

And with that: on we go.

* * * *

Disturbing the dust on a bowl on rose leaves…

-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” line 17.

In the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” the poet muses on the interconnections and “unredeemab[ility]” of time (line 5): “What might have been,” he says, “is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in the world of speculation” (6-8), the business of imagination and memory. He opens the door to this possibility when he hears

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. (11-5)

The poet’s job, then, this implies, is to pursue the footfalls of memory into places we’ve never been. “But to what purpose,” he asks, does “[d]isturbing the dust on a[n imagined] bowl of rose-leaves” serve (16-7)? Why pursue these “echoes / [that i]nhabit the garden[?] Shall we [indeed] follow” them “through the […] gate” of meaning; “[i]nto our first world, shall we follow / The deception of the thrush?” (17-8, 20-2). And yet the voyage into and through deception, he suggests, is the end “which is always present” (48). So perhaps, though the past is ultimately “unredeemable,” we can redeem ourselves, our identities, as the poet’s efforts suggest, in the myriad possible passageways of and rhetorical passages written by memory.

Emma Lou Thayne takes this poetic cue in “The Rose Jar” wherein she quite literally (if we can take her at her word) disturbs the dust in her grandma’s jar of rose petals, stirring up the fragrance of rose and memory as she runs her fingers and her mind over the intricate surface of the “four inch cloisonne [jar] on pointed golden legs / fat as a Buddha tummy” (lines 9-10). Finding this jar in the “cedar drawer” of her “Grandma’s standing metal trunk” (1-2), she enters the intersection of several memories, some her own, some others’. The cedar musk reminds her of “some Arabian tale read by Father / in the hall between bedrooms to say goodnight” (5-6); the rose petals call forth “five generations of fragile crinkles” in lives “once supple, fresh,” but now only “fragile” memories (7-8); the jar itself inspires visions of “centuries of Chinese hav[ing] their way” in an intricate culture, their “careful hands [...] pluck[ing] each [intricate] piece in place” (18-9); and the fragrance of it all, of this “holy mash,” becomes “tiny gusts / of history waft[ing]” community rituals—”the gatherings of births, graduations, / weddings, funerals, celebrations”—”into decades collecting / but never filling [the jar] to the top,” instead infusing the space of life, of memory with the “subtle, still surprising breath of God” (20-7).

And that, I think, is one reason we disturb the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves: because doing so draws us together in bonds of imagination, kinship, and shared memory, such that, like Adam and Eve, we are infused with the breath of God and so become living souls, living communities.

And that, I think, is one thing poets and poetry, critics and criticism are for.

Discuss at your leisure.